‘What is the threat?’ Russia’s Lavrov hits back attack on Donald Trump Jr for lawyer meet

It has been reported that Donald Trump Junior and Mr Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, alongside the campaign manager Paul Manafort, met with Natalia Veselnitskaya on June 9, 2016, after learning she had damaging information on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. 

Trump Jr has had to release emails that show he embraced what the Russian government told him to damage Mrs Clinton’s election campaign. 

Mr Lavrov said: “I was amazed to find out that Trump’s son is accused of talking to Natalia Veselnitskaya. 

“For me it’s basically wild, because when a person talks to a lawyer, what is the threat to anyone?

“When I turned on the TV in the morning, all the Western channels were talking about it.

“It is amazing how serious people are making an elephant out of a fly.”

The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said that Moscow “is not aware of this whole story, has never had contacts with this lawyer; that’s why we have nothing to say about this story: it has nothing to dow with us.”

The recent disclosure has raised questions about whether campaign laws were broken. 

Trump Jr has denied that he told his father about the meeting, claiming “it was just a nothing”.

He said: “There was nothing to tell. I mean, I wouldn’t have even remembered it until you started scoring through this stuff. It was literally just a wasted 20 minutes, which was a shame.” 

On Wednesday, Donald Trump tweeted to support his son as he called the scandal “the greatest Witch Hunt in political history”. 

The meeting took place at a critical time in President Trump’s campaign, shortly after he had received the Republican nomination to lead the party to the presidency.