RUSSIA 'DIRT' EMAILS ROW
'Open, transparent, innocent'
Trump defends eldest son; FBI nominee pledges independence
US President Donald Trump yesterday defended his eldest son as "innocent" following emails that showed Donald Trump Jr welcomed Russian help against his father's rival in the 2016 presidential election, deepening the controversy over purported Russian meddling.
Trump Jr released a series of emails on Tuesday that revealed he had eagerly agreed to meet a 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.
Trump Jr, in a Fox News television interview later Tuesday, said: "In retrospect, I probably would have done things a little differently."
The president, after initially releasing a statement on Tuesday calling his son "high-quality," yesterday praised the TV appearance and repeated his condemnation of investigations and media coverage of the Russia investigations.
"He was open, transparent and innocent. This is the greatest Witch Hunt in political history. Sad!" Trump wrote on Twitter.
The emails offered the most concrete evidence to date that Trump campaign officials embraced Russian help to win the election, a subject that has cast a cloud over Trump's presidency and spurred multiple investigations.
The Justice Department and Congress are both investigating alleged Russian interference in the November election and any possible collusion with Trump's campaign.
Moscow has denied meddling. Yesterday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov again hit back against the accusations and questioned why Trump's son was being blamed over the meeting.
Trump Jr, on Fox, pledged to cooperate with investigators, and said he did not tell his father about the meeting.
Trump Jr told Fox News that Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager at the time, and son-in-law Jared Kushner, now a top White House adviser, also attended the meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who denied having Kremlin ties.
Meanwhile, Trump's nominee to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation Christopher Wray told a Senate panel that he will "never allow the FBI's work to be driven by anything other than the facts."
Wray, a former Justice Department lawyer under George W Bush, was nominated by Trump to replace James Comey, who Trump fired in May amid a probe into potential ties between Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and Russia.