A Russian lawyer says she was summoned to Trump Tower during last year's presidential campaign to meet with Donald Trump Jr and asked if she had damaging information on Hillary Clinton, according to an interview aired by NBC's Today show.
The lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, told NBC she received a phone call from a man she didn't know and was told to meet with Trump Jr. She says she didn't have information on the Clinton campaign and has never worked for the Russian government.
"All I knew was that Donald Trump Jr was willing to meet with me," she said through a translator.
On Clinton, she said: "It's quite possible that maybe they were looking for information. They wanted it so badly."
The interview is Veselnitskaya's first public comment since Donald Trump Jr acknowledged that he made time for the meeting hoping to get information on Clinton, his father's Democratic presidential opponent.
The president's son has said the meeting was arranged by an acquaintance he knew through the 2013 Miss Universe pageant Trump held in Moscow.
On Monday, Trump Jr tweeted sarcastically, "Obviously I'm the first person on a campaign to ever take a meeting to hear info about an opponent ... went nowhere but had to listen."
According to the NBC interview, Veselnitskaya suggested she didn't initiate the meeting. She says she was lobbying against US sanctions affecting Moscow but wasn't acting on behalf of the Kremlin.
She said Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law, also attended the meeting but left after a few minutes. Paul Manafort, then Trump's campaign chairman, was there too but never participated and spent much of the meeting on his phone, she said.
