Despite the constant news stories last week that Donald Trump Jr. took a meeting with Russian representatives in order to get damaging information on Hillary Clinton, President Donald Trump has defended his son, calling him a “high-quality person.”
Early Sunday morning, the president took to his favorite outlet, Twitter, to vigorously counter the accusation that his son might have been colluding with a foreign state to harm Trump’s presidential election opponent and, going back to an old standby of his, to talk about Clinton’s missing emails.
HillaryClinton can illegally get the questions to the Debate & delete 33,000 emails but my son Don is being scorned by the Fake News Media?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 16, 2017
Thank you to former campaign adviser Michael Caputo for saying so powerfully that there was no Russian collusion in our winning campaign.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 16, 2017
With all of its phony unnamed sources & highly slanted & even fraudulent reporting, #Fake News is DISTORTING DEMOCRACY in our country!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 16, 2017
Who’s Michael Caputo?
This would be the Michael Caputo who used to live in Russia and had a contract to promote Putin's image in the USA? Well, I'm convinced then https://t.co/2LuQZkJPgD
— Arieh Kovler (@ariehkovler) July 16, 2017
According to CBS News, Caputo worked for the U.S. government and lived in Russia in the 1990s, but by 2000, he returned to the U.S. while working in public relations for a Russian conglomerate, Gazprom, that was owned by the state.
“I’m not proud of the work today, but at the time, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin wasn’t such a bad guy,” Caputo told the Buffalo News last year.
As for how serious to take Trump’s latest Twitter rant? Considering Donald Trump Jr. was the one to release all of his incriminating emails minutes before the New York Times could do so—and, therefore, is the source—this is less a case of #fakenews and more a case of self-inflicted wounds.