Things continue to heat up due to reports of a June 2016 meeting between President Donald Trump's eldest son and a lawyer connected to the Russian government.
A congressional source informed CBS News that federal investigators are interested in obtaining the phone records and cell phone records pertaining to the June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr., former campaign manager Paul Manafort, son-in-law Jared Kushner and a Russian lawyer connected to the Kremlin. They are similarly interested in looking at all email accounts of that meeting.
The meeting is controversial because, in an email exchange preemptively published by Trump Jr. before it could be released by The New York Times, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya offered to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Hillary Clinton in advance of the presidential election. She also made it clear that the Russian government wanted Trump to win the election, which undercuts the campaign's repeated insistence that Russia was not trying to tip the scales in their favor.
This news comes out in the same week that it was revealed that President Trump had dictated his son's statement about the meeting with Russia. While not conclusively proving that the president knew about and/or directed collusion between his campaign and the Russian government, this news increases that possibility and raises important questions about what the president knew and how he acted — and, most significantly, why.
"I guarantee you there were phone calls in addition to those emails, and I want to hear all of it before I answer the question you put to me," said Republican Senator James Risch of Idaho, who has usually supported Trump, when asked by CBS News for his thoughts on the federal investigators' requests.
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