Rob Goldstone wishes he'd never set up that Trump Tower meeting with the Russians
Goldstone, who arranged the Trump Tower meeting at the request of a pop star, says Mueller's team wanted to know about links between Trump and Russia.
by Sarah Fitzpatrick, Cynthia McFadden and Ken Dilanian / Sep.24.2018 / 4:33 AM EDT / Updated 8:06 AM EDT
The British-born music publicist who helped arrange that infamous meeting between senior Trump campaign officials and a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Democrats now believes the meeting could have been a set-up by Russian intelligence, he told NBC News in an exclusive television interview.
"I'm willing to believe that I don't know who wanted this meeting," Rob Goldstone told NBC's Cynthia McFadden in a wide-ranging interview, in which he also discussed Trump's behavior in Moscow during the 2013 Miss Universe pageant.
Asked if he had conveyed a "dirty offer" to the Trump team in brokering the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, Goldstone said, "Yes. That is true."
"That [dirt] didn't materialize," said Goldstone, but he believes the apparent willingness of campaign officials to accept dirt is what drew the scrutiny of congressional investigators and special counsel Robert Mueller.
Goldstone's account of the meeting, which he says he relayed in detail to Mueller's grand jury in March, is largely consistent with how it's been described by other participants. He says Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya talked in a meandering fashion about U.S. sanctions against Russians — and the financier who lobbied for those sanctions, Bill Browder — but didn't offer any information about Trump's foe in the 2016 presidential race, Hillary Clinton. He considered the Russian's presentation "complete and utter nonsense," he said.
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https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/rob-goldstone-wishes-he-d-never-set-trump-tower-meeting-n911851
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