During a private conversation with President Donald Trump at a dinner during the G20 summit, Russian president Vladimir Putin discussed one of his pet issues: the ban on U.S. adoption of Russian children put in place in retaliation for U.S. sanctions against Russian officials believed to have committed grotesque human rights violations.
In a wide-ranging Wednesday interview with the New York Times, Trump expressed surprise that the Russian president wanted to talk to him about the same issue that Russian operatives had discussed in a meeting with his eldest son at Trump Tower in the middle of the 2016 campaign.
“[We exchanged] really, pleasantries more than anything else,” Trump told the Times at first, brushing off the meeting as a casual chat. “It was not a long conversation, but it was, you know, could be 15 minutes. Just talked about — things.”
“Actually, it was very interesting, we talked about adoption,” he pivoted.
“You did?” Times reporter Maggie Haberman pressed.
“We talked about Russian adoption. Yeah,” Trump confirmed. “I always found that interesting. Because, you know, he ended that years ago. And I actually talked about Russian adoption with him, which is interesting because it was a part of the conversation that Don [Jr.] had in that meeting.”
Trump Jr. recently landed in hot water after the Times revealed he attended a June 2016 meeting with a person described to him as a “Russian government lawyer” who had “ultra sensitive” information about Hillary Clinton. Trump’s eldest son has told the press he was disappointed to find that the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, did not have the damaging information promised and instead wanted to talk about the adoption of Russian children.
Veselnitskaya has waged a high-profile lobbying campaign against the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. sanctions law that has been a thorn in Putin’s side.
Lawmakers and foreign policy experts have said it was a terrible idea for Trump to hold a private discussion with Putin at the G20 summit without a translator present, and that it was very unusual for his administration not to reveal the additional meeting until it came out in the press this week.
