More pressure on Trump
The special counsel investigating possible collusion between Trump's 2016 campaign and Russia has asked White House officials to preserve any records of a meeting last year between the president's eldest son and a Russian lawyer, according to a source with knowledge of the request.
Special counsel Robert Mueller sent a document preservation request to the White House, saying the June 2016 meeting that Donald Trump Jr had at Trump Tower in New York is relevant to his investigation, the source said on Friday.
News earlier this month of the meeting between Trump Jr and a Russian lawyer whom he was told had damaging information about his father's presidential rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton, fueled questions about the campaign's dealings with Moscow. The Republican president has defended his son's meeting as simple politics.
Trump's son-in-law and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort also attended the meeting.
The Senate Judiciary Committee has called for Trump Jr and Manafort to testify next Wednesday at a public hearing in its Russia probe. The House of Representatives Intelligence Committee said it would interview Kushner on Tuesday.
Mueller, appointed by the Justice Department in May, is probing allegations of Russian interference in the election and potential collusion by Trump's campaign, an issue that has engulfed the six-month-old administration.
Trump has long expressed frustration with a probe that he has called a political witch hunt, and he has denied any collusion. Moscow has denied it interfered in the election campaign to try to tilt the November 2016 vote in Trump's favour.
Russia's ambassador to Washington was overheard by US spy agencies telling his bosses that he had discussed campaign-related matters with Trump adviser Jeff Sessions last year, the Washington Post reported on Friday, citing current and former US officials.
Sessions, who was a US senator at the time and is now the attorney general, initially failed to disclose the contacts with Ambassador Sergei Kislyak and then said they were not about the campaign.
Under pressure over having not disclosed the meetings with Kislyak, Sessions recused himself from the Russia probe in March. The recusal angered Trump, who said in a New York Times interview this week that he would not have chosen Sessions for attorney general if he had known Sessions would recuse himself.
Newspaper reports said Trump's lawyers are reviewing ways to limit or undermine the special counsel.
According to the Post, Trump has asked his advisers about his power to pardon aides, family members and even himself in connection with the Russia probe. Trump's lawyers have been discussing the president's pardoning powers, a second person told the newspaper.
Dowd dismissed the pardon report as nonsense. "It's just not true," he said.
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