President Trump’s former White House Communications Director, Hope Hicks, thought that emails sent by Donald Jr. about a meeting with a Russian agent looked ‘really bad’, according the Mueller report which was released on Wednesday.
As detailed in the 448 page dossier, Hicks is said to have made the comments during a June 2017 meeting with the President, his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner.
‘If it’s what you say, I love it’, Don Jr. exclaimed in an email chain with his associate Rob Goldstone, delighted at the thought of gaining potentially incriminating evidence against his father’s political opponent, Hilary Clinton.
The back-and-forth was followed by a meeting between Don Jr. and a Russian source in Trump Tower, where they're alleged to have spoken about the potentially advantageous subject matter in more depth.
President Trump’s former White House Communications Director, Hope Hicks (right) told special council Mueller that she warned the President that his son's emails looked 'really bad' and should be released publicly
‘If it’s what you say, I love it’, Don Jr. exclaimed in an email chain with source Rob Goldstone, in discussion of a meeting about damning information on Hilary Clinton (right)
When learning of the exchange, Hick's urged Trump to release Don Jr's emails to the public.
She believed the messages would inevitably leak anyway and immediate transparency would allow the President to stay one step ahead of the press, enabling him to claim that nothing came from the exchange ahead of time.
Kushner agreed, however when he attempted to tell the president about details of his son's meeting , Trump ‘stopped Kushner and said he did not want to know about it, shutting the conversation down,’ the report said.
Reviewing the full chain of messages a week later in Kushner’s lawyer’s office, Hick’s said she was ‘shocked’ at the exchange because she thought the interaction ‘looked really bad’.
She organised a private meeting with Trump to express her concerns but the president ‘was insistent
