Why Rob Goldstone lied to Don Jr. about having dirt on Hillary
On CNN Tonight With Don Lemon, Rob Goldstone, the publicist who set up the infamous Trump Tower meeting in 2016 between Donald Trump Jr. and a Kremlin-connected lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, explained why he wrote what he did in his initial email to Don Jr.
At the direction of his client, Emin Agalarov, one of Russia’s biggest pop stars and son of a Russian oligarch, Goldstone reached out to the Trump campaign to set up the meeting. Goldstone explained that he chose to contact Don Jr. because they’d met in the past. In the email, Goldstone promised dirt on Hillary Clinton to which Don Jr. replied, ‘I love it.’” But according to Goldstone, he didn’t actually have dirt on Clinton, he was just embellishing to get the desired response from Don jr.
“I didn’t make up the email, I made the scant details that my client had given me better — or worse depending on which side you’re on,” Goldstone said. He later added, “As publicist, I pitch people all the time. I have done for almost 30 years. If I pitched you on somebody for your show and said, ‘They’re okay. It’s okay. It’s kind of interesting,’ you wouldn’t even read the email. If I puffed it up, you’d probably read it.”
Goldstone also said he has a couple regrets in the situation. The first being that he wrote the email in the first place and didn’t push back harder against doing so. The second is using Clinton’s name at all, because as he explained, she was just an innocent bystander..
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“It really had nothing to do with Hillary,” Goldstone said. “If Joe Biden had been the candidate, if you had been the candidate, it would have been your name that I used.”
CNN Tonight With Don Lemon airs weeknights at 10 p.m. on CNN.
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