President Trump said he doesn’t “remember much” about meeting with a campaign adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents.
Speaking to reporters on the White House lawn before leaving for a 12-day trip to Asia, Trump downplayed a meeting his campaign had which featured foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos in March of 2016. Trump posted an image of the meeting on Instagram and Twitter at the time, noting that he was “meeting with my national security team.”
But speaking Friday, Trump downplayed the meeting.
“It was a very unimportant meeting,” he said, according to pool reports. “It took place a long time ago. Don’t remember much about it.”
In recent days, Trump has dismissed Papadopoulos as a “low-level volunteer” and a “liar,” while White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders has argued that the one-time adviser’s contacts with Russians, which got him in trouble when he lied about them to investigators with special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, were “outside the scope of the campaign.”
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