Few witnesses in the Russia probe have been as eagerly anticipated by
the press and congressional investigators as Donald Trump, Jr., the
President’s oldest son. Trump, Jr., was whisked into a Capitol Hill
hearing room Thursday morning undetected, depriving a crowd of media
onlookers a glimpse. So great was the anticipation of his testimony,
which was conducted in a closed session, that when a photographer
thought he saw the President’s son entering a bathroom door hidden by a
wooden panel, the photographer strained to snap a shot.

Over the course of five hours of private testimony and in a nearly
eighteen-hundred-word public statement,
Trump, Jr., tried to offer a more definitive account of the June, 2016, meeting held at Trump Tower between senior members of his father’s
Presidential campaign and a group of Russians promising opposition
research about Hillary Clinton. In the statement, Trump, Jr., denied
that any collusion occurred, and painted himself as distracted by the
“maelstrom” of the campaign and by running the family business. He
played down his interest and understanding of an associate’s offer of
information from the Russian government. “I did not quite know what to
make of his email,” Trump, Jr., said. “I had no way to
gauge the reliability, credibility or accuracy of any of the things he
was saying.”

Trump, Jr., is now the third person who has testified to Congress about
the meeting. Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman, and Jared Kushner,
the President’s son-in-law and in many ways the de-facto campaign
manager, both testified before congressional committees in July. All of
the testimony occurred behind closed doors. Manafort, who turned over
notes about the Trump Tower meeting to the Senate Intelligence
Committee, has been silent about what he told Congress, while Kushner
publicly released the opening statement he made to the committee.

One of the questions raised by the three men’s testimonies is the extent
to which their accounts of the meeting are consistent. Kushner’s July
statement to congressional investigators was notable for how much he
assigned responsibility for the meeting to his brother-in-law. “In June
2016, my brother-in-law, Donald Trump Jr. asked if I was free to stop by
a meeting,” Kushner said in his statement. He insisted that the meeting
was “a waste of our time” and that he had forgotten about it until it
was raised in the press this year.

As the organizer of the meeting, Don, Jr.,’s account was more highly
anticipated. He had already made it clear that he had fairly close
business and personal connections to the Russians offering their assistance. In November, 2013, the Trump Organization held the Miss
Universe pageant, which it co-owned, at a Moscow concert venue that was
owned by Aras Agalarov, a Russian real-estate mogul whom the Trump
Organization also worked with to find a development project in Russia.
Trump, Jr., said that the project never materialized, but the two
families stayed in touch. A few months after the pageant, Agalarov’s
son, Emin, a Russian musician, performed at a tournament at a Trump golf
course in Florida. Trump, Jr., said that he met Emin, and his manager, Robert Goldstone, at the tournament for the first time.

The three men stayed in touch. “Rob would intermittently contact me,”
Trump, Jr., noted in his statement to congressional investigators. “For
example, when Emin would perform in the New York area, Rob would
graciously invite me to attend. Similarly, after my father announced his
candidacy, Rob was among the many individuals who would reach out from
time to time to congratulate us on winning a primary or to show their
support.”

A little more than three years after they met in Florida, on June 3,
2016, with Donald Trump then the presumptive Republican nominee,
Goldstone sent Trump, Jr., a now infamous
e-mail offering to help take down Hillary Clinton.

“The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning,”
Goldstone wrote, referring to the pop singer’s father, Aras Agalarov,
“and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some
official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and
her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. This
is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of
Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump—helped along by Aras
and Emin.”

Some intelligence officials have said that this outreach may have been
part of a Russian intelligence operation to gauge how susceptible the
Trump team was to Russian assistance. Michael Hayden, the former head of
the C.I.A., told me earlier this year that this looked like “traditional
tradecraft.”

To Trump, Jr., according to his statement on Thursday, it was nothing
more than an opportunity to find out if his friends “had information
concerning the fitness, character or qualifications of a presidential
candidate.” While other campaign professionals have said that they would
have immediately notified the F.B.I., Don, Jr., said that he felt he “should at least hear them out,” and then, if they had
any relevant information, consult a lawyer.

Trump, Jr.,’s statement also disclosed new details about the extent of
his communications with Goldstone and Emin. He said that his phone
records indicate that there were three calls between him and Emin,
though Trump, Jr., insists that he doesn’t remember talking to Emin,
suggesting that perhaps they left each other voice mails. “I simply do not
remember,” Trump, Jr., said.

Trump, Jr., downplayed the importance of the widely reported e-mail he
sent in response to Goldstone’s offer of information, in which he told
the manager, “I love it.” “As much as some have made of my using the
phrase ‘I love it,’ it was simply a colloquial way of saying that I
appreciated Rob’s gesture,” Trump, Jr., said in his statement.

Trump, Jr., said that he scheduled the meeting with Goldstone for June
9th, and insisted that Goldstone never told him who precisely
would be there, except that one of the attendees would be a lawyer.
There has long been a mystery surrounding the fact that all of the
meeting participants were able to get to Trump, Jr.,’s office without
giving their names to anyone in the Trump Organization. Don, Jr., sought
to clarify that Thursday. “Because Rob was able to bring the entire
group up by only giving his name to the security guard in the lobby, I
had no advance warning regarding who or how many people would be
attending,” he said in his statement. “There is no attendance log to
refer back to and I did not take notes.”

Trump, Jr., also claimed that the Russian lawyer present, Natalia
Veselnitskaya, vaguely discussed “something about individuals connected
to Russia supporting or funding Democratic Presidential Candidate
Hillary Clinton or the Democratic National Committee,” but when she was
pressed for details she switched the topic to the Magnitsky Act, a 2012
law that sanctioned senior Russian officials and prompted an enraged
Putin to ban American adoptions of Russian children. Trump, Jr., said
that the topic was completely new to him: “Until that day, I had never
heard of the Magnitsky Act and had no familiarity with this issue.”

He said that he ended the meeting and doesn’t recall ever discussing it
again. “As we walked out, I recall Rob coming over to me to apologize,”
Trump said in his statement. “I have no recollection of any documents
being offered or left for us. The meeting lasted 20-30 minutes and Rob,
Emin and I never discussed the meeting again. I do not recall ever
discussing it with Jared, Paul or anyone else. In short, I gave it no
further thought.”

When the meeting was disclosed, in July, by the Times, Don, Jr.,
rather than give the full account he delivered today, drafted a
misleading statement with the help of his father that said the Russians
and the Trump campaign “primarily discussed a program about the adoption
of Russian children.” The question that was not answered today is why,
when first confronted with questions about the meeting—which Don, Jr.,
and Jared Kushner have now both presented as harmless and uneventful—did
the President and his son lie?