Donald Trump Jr. tells Sean Hannity his shady meeting with Russian lawyer "was nothing"

Donald Trump Jr. insisted on telling the whole world Tuesday that his meeting with a Russian lawyer during 2016 presidential campaign was innocuous, so he turned to a friendly platform to get the word out. Trump appeared on Fox News' "Hannity" Tuesday night to say, in so many words, that "it was nothing."

"This is the first time we have done any of this. I am still way in the learning curve on all of this," he explained to Sean Hannity, referring to his young career in politics. "If there was something that came from this that was shady, if it was a danger to national security, I would obviously bring it right to someone. But I didn't know what anything was, and it turns out it was nothing."

News that Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer shocked the country on Monday. But it wasn't until the son of the president leaked emails pertaining to the meeting when everyone began to realize just how brazen he was to find dirt on political rival Hillary Clinton.

Hannity asked Trump Jr. about the timeline of the meeting, noting that it occurred before Wikileaks dumped any emails from Democratic officials.

"This is pre-Russia fever. This is pre-Russia mania . . . I don't even think my sirens went up," Trump Jr. said. "Because it wasn't the issue it has made out to be in the last 9 months, 10 months. At the time, it wasn't this big news story."

Trump Jr. would later admit, however, that he would have probably handled things differently in hindsight.

"In retrospect, I probably would have done things a little differently," he said. "Again, this is before the pre-Russia mania. For me, this was opposition research. They had something, maybe concrete evidence to all stories that I had been hearing about but they had been underreported for years, not just during the campaign."

As far as meeting other Russians during the campaign, the oldest Trump son could not rule it out.

"I don't even know. I probably met with other people from Russia," he said. "Certainly not in the context of an actual formalized meeting or anything like that because why would I?"