Sean Spicer contradicts Trump Jr and insists Russian meeting was about adoption

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer has contradicted Donald Trump Jr's own account of his meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer in the lead up to the presidential election.

It was revealed last week that Mr Trump Jr met with lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, after being told she would provide official documents and information that would “incriminate” his father’s campaign opponent Hillary Clinton. Mr Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, the chairman of the Trump campaign at the time, also attended the meeting.

During an off-camera White House briefing, Mr Spicer said “that it is quite often for people who are given information during the heat of a campaign to ask what that is.”

“That's what simply he did,” Mr Spicer added. “And there was nothing, as far as we know, that would lead anyone to believe that there was anything except for a discussion about adoption and the Magnitsky Act.”

However, Mr Spicer's insistence that the June 2016 meeting was about adoptions conflicts with Mr Trump Jr's account of what happened.

Mr Trump's eldest son wrote in a statement last week that at the start of the meeting, Ms Veselnitskaya said she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms Clinton.

“Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense,” Mr Trump Jr said. “No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”

He said Ms Veselnitskaya then began discussing the adoption of Russian children and mentioned the Magnitsky Act, a 2012 law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers. Days after Congress past it, the Russian government retaliated by banning American citizens from adopting Russian orphans.

“It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting,” Mr Trump Jr said.

On Fox News, Mr Trump Jr defended his decision to meet with Ms Veselnitskaya, asserting that for him, “this was opposition research”.

The President has also tweeted that “most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent,” declaring “That's politics!”

But observers – including the President’s pick for FBI Director, Christopher Wray – have said that anyone who is approached by a hostile government for opposition research should contact the FBI rather than take the meeting.

There are multiple federal and congressional investigations into whether Trump campaign advisers colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election.

Some have suggested that the accounts of Mr Trump Jr’s meeting are the first public indication that at least some in the campaign were willing to accept Russian help.