Former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon said there was “zero” chance that President Trump was not aware of a controversial 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between one of his sons and a Russian lawyer, according to a new book.
According to MSNBC, which tweeted an excerpt from Michael Wolff’s upcoming book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” Bannon said that it was likely Donald Trump Jr. took lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and others up to his father’s office during the meeting.
“The chance that Don. Jr did not walk these Jumos up to his father’s office on the 26th floor is zero,” the excerpt reads.
{mosads}Bannon, who joined Trump’s campaign as chairman a couple months after the June 2016 meeting, was fired from the White House in August 2017. He’s since retaken his post at the head of Breitbart News.
The suggestion that Trump was aware of the meeting that his son and other campaign officials fielded with Veselnitskaya, who reportedly has ties to the Russian government, contradicts statements from White House officials, who have claimed that the president was not told about the meeting.
Trump Jr. agreed to attend the meeting after an intermediary told him that Veselnitskaya had promised damaging information on then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. He has said that, instead, the lawyer discussed American adoptions of Russian children.
Former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner also attended the June 2016 meeting.
Possible ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government are the subject of a criminal investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, who is also looking into wider Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
So far, Manafort and one of his associates, Richard Gates, have been indicted as a result of that investigation. They are facing charges of money laundering and tax evasion, among other allegations.
Former national security adviser Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos, a former foreign policy adviser to Trump’s campaign, have pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about their contacts with Russian representatives.