Vice President Mike Pence is putting careful distance between himself and revelations of a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Kremlin-linked lawyer in June 2016, which took place just a little more than a month before he joined President Donald Trump’s campaign. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort — Trump’s campaign manager at the time — also sat in on the meeting.
“The Vice President is working every day to advance the President’s agenda, which is what the American people sent us here to do. The Vice President was not aware of the meeting. He is not focused on stories about the campaign, particularly stories about the time before he joined the ticket,” Pence’s press secretary Marc Lotter said in an email to TPM.
The usually vocal-on-Twitter President has also been closed-lipped about news that his son met with a Russian lawyer under the premise that he would receive incriminating information about Hillary Clinton’s that would help Trump’s campaign. He hasn’t tweeted anything about the meeting since it was revealed over the weekend.
On Tuesday morning Trump Jr. released the emails between himself and family friend Rob Goldstone that led to the meeting, which confirm that the President’s son took the meeting to get information about Clinton and that the Russian government wanted to help the Trump campaign.
