White House Offers Opaque Response After Promising Transparency on Trump Jr.'s Meeting

“Our goal is to be as transparent as humanly possible, and to put every bit of information that we have at the forefront, and willing to cooperate with anybody that is looking into the matter,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy White House press secretary, at the Wednesday

So, to that end: When did Donald Trump learn about the infamous meeting his son Don Jr. had with a Russian lawyer with the promise of damaging information about Hillary Clinton? Sanders had told reporters on Monday the president found out about the meeting—which his son-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort also attended—in “the last couple of days.” So could the White House provide a more precise day when Trump learned about this meeting?

“I don't have anything more to add than what I've said the last few days,” Sanders said in a follow-up email to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Trump’s outside counsel could also not answer the question with any specificity. Both the White House and Trump’s counsel were non-responsive to questions about how Trump found out. Was it via inquiries from the New York Times, which first reported on the meeting on Saturday? Did Don Jr. tell him? Or Kushner?

When and how Trump learned about the meeting is important for a couple of reasons. First, the Timesreported Tuesday that White House staff helped draft Trump Jr.’s initial statement to the paper for its first story on the meeting, and that the president himself “signed off” on it. Sanders did not confirm or deny the Times’s reporting on this when asked at the Wednesday briefing, though she promised to “check.” Trump Jr.’s first statement was misleading—he said his meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Kremlin-linked lawyer, was primarily about Russian adoption policy. If President Trump signed off on the statement, was he aware of the true reason his son and his campaign officials attended the meeting? If so, why sign off on a statement that was incomplete at best and untrue at worse?

Secondly, a firm, on-the-record answer on when Trump became aware of the meeting would answer a nagging and important question: Did Trump actually have knowledge of the meeting contemporaneously? And if so, was the future president aware that Trump Jr. had agreed to the meeting under the pretext that he would be receiving helpful campaign information from a Russian government source? An answer from the White House would be clarifying.