Deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Tuesday said President Donald Trump stands by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who attended a meeting with a Russian lawyer who promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of a state effort to aid Trump’s campaign.
“The President has confidence in Jared,” Sanders said at an off-camera, audio-only White House briefing. “I don’t know of any changes that would be made.”
White House spokespeople and staffers have previously expressed confidence in Trump flunkies only for the President to contradict them hours later. Trump in May said he had “total confidence” in Kushner, only to later knock his son-in-law for becoming “much more famous” than him.
Kushner was one of eight people present at Trump Jr.’s meeting in June 2016 with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. The Washington Post on Tuesday identified Ike Kaveladze, a U.S.-based official at a Russian real estate company, as the last unnamed attendee.
The other people present at the meeting were Trump family acquaintance Rob Goldstone, then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former Soviet counterintelligence officer Rinat Akhmetshin, and Veselnitskaya’s translator Anatoli Samochornov.
