Trump defends son over meeting with Russian lawyer

WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump, in a White House interview Wednesday, said he did not fault his son Donald Trump Jr. for meeting with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 presidential race - a meeting he described as taken in the heat of trying to run a non-traditional campaign.

Asked if he knew that his son was meeting with lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in June last year, the president told Reuters: 'No, that I didn't know until a couple of days ago when I heard about this.”

Trump Jr. eagerly agreed to meet the woman he was told was a Russian government lawyer who might have damaging information about Democratic rival Hillary Clinton as part of Moscow's official support for his father's campaign, according to emails the son released Tuesday before they were published by the New York Times.

Seated at his Oval Office desk, Trump said he did not blame his son, writing it off as a harried decision made in the upstart campaign.

'I think many people would have held that meeting,” Trump said.

The emails were the most concrete evidence so far that Trump campaign officials might have been willing to accept Russian help to win the Nov. 8, 2016, election, a subject that has cast a cloud over Trump's presidency and prompted criminal and congressional investigations.

While U.S. intelligence agencies and even members of Trump's Cabinet have said Russia meddled in the election, Trump himself has wavered on the subject.

And on Wednesday, in a separate interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network's Pat Robertson, the elder Trump doubled down on his doubts - even going so far as to suggest it was Clinton that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to win.

'It's something that you don't like talking about, but again we are the most powerful country in the world, and we are getting more and more powerful because I'm a big military person,” he told Robertson. 'As an example, if Hillary had won, our military would be decimated. Our energy would be much more expensive. That's what Putin doesn't like about me. And that's why I say, Why would he want me? Because from Day One I wanted a strong military; he doesn't want to see that.

'And from Day One I want fracking and everything else to get energy prices low and to create tremendous energy. We're going to be self-supporting - we just about are now. We're going to be exporting energy. He doesn't want that. He would like Hillary where she wants to have windmills. He would much rather have that because energy prices would go up and Russia, as you know, relies very much on energy.

'So there are many things that I do that are the exact opposite of what he would want. So what I keep hearing about that he would have rather had Trump, I think probably not because when I want a strong military - you know she wouldn't have spent the money on military, when I want a strong military, when I want tremendous energy, we're opening up coal, we're opening up natural gas, we're opening up fracking - all the things that he would hate, but nobody ever mentions that.”

In the White House interview with Reuters, the president said he asked Putin last Friday if he was involved in what U.S. intelligence says was Russian meddling in the campaign, and Putin had insisted he was not.

Trump said he spent the first 20 or 25 minutes of his more than two-hours with Putin in Germany on the subject.

'I said, ‘Did you do it?' And he said, ‘No, I did not. Absolutely not.' I then asked him a second time in a totally different way. He said ‘absolutely not,'” Trump said.

Asked if he believed Putin's denial, Trump paused. 'Look. Something happened and we have to find out what it is, because we can't allow a thing like that to happen to our election process. So something happened and we have to find out what it is.”

As in the past, Trump said there was no collusion between his campaign and Russia.

'There was zero coordination. It's the dumbest thing I've ever heard,” he said.

Reuters and the Washington Post contributed to this report.