Trump’s Lawyer Blames Secret Service For Allowing Trump Jr. Meeting With Russians
Jay Sekulow, Trump’s personal lawyer. Image by YouTube
By Ari Feldman July 17, 2017
Jay Sekulow, a Messianic Jewish lawyer with a history of promoting Christian right causes in the U.S. and around the world, blamed the Secret Service for allowing the meeting between Donald Trump, Jr., and a Russian lawyer to take place on news programs on Sunday. Sekulow is working on Donald Trump’s private legal team, and often appears on TV as a defender of Trump.
There’s just one problem: the Secret Service never signed off on the meeting. Nor could they have — Donald Trump, Jr., did not have Secret Service protection at the time of the meeting, in June 2016. The only person in the Trump campaign who had such protection was Donald Trump himself.
“I wonder why the Secret Service — if this was nefarious — why the Secret Service allowed these people in?” Sekulow told ABC’s This Morning. “The president had Secret Service protection at that point, and that raised a question with me.”
Rinat Akhmetshin, one of the two Russians in the meeting and a former Soviet counterintelligence officer, told Yahoo News, “No one checked our IDs” when he and Natalia Veselnitskaya, a lawyer, walked into Trump Tower for the meeting.
“We literally walked in,” Akhmetshin said.
Contact Ari Feldman at [email protected] or on Twitter @aefeldman.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
