zte, the large chinese phone company buy as big percentage of individual parts from u.s. companies. this is also reflective of the larger trade deal we are gesh yating with china. and my personal relationship with president xi. on sunday, the president pledged to work with the chi he s president to help zte, saying too many jobs in china had been lost. zte shut its main operations after the commerce department banned the u.s. to selling components to the government. it was accused of too much information. you want me to get to the second part. come on, it the set-up. meanwhile a 40-minute set-up. so hold on, wait. to donald trump on sunday, let me get this straight. on sunday donald trump said he was trying to save jobs in china. huh. that is interesting.
fall s election. sunday donald trump, jr. clarified his original response about why he talked to a russian attorney with supposed ties to the kremlin. white house aides say nothing came from the meeting and the uproar is an overreaction. the president s critics say it s part of a continuing pattern of members of the campaign or transition forgetting about meetings with various russians and recanting and re-characterizing why they were meeting. kevin corke has the latest from the white house. this story doesn t seem to go away. either the most direct simply a matter of a meeting that was set up under false pretenses that had nothing to do with the campaign itself. our position is known within the term campaign colluded in order to influence the election. donald trump, jr. took to twitter firing back at suggestions that by taking a
committee editor-in-chief of lifezette, lauren green. mara liasson. charles krauthammer. laura. it s never good to start on monday with another story about a russian meeting and the trump folks. this is june of last year and this was just as they were getting ready for the convention. doesn t surprise me someone connected to the campaign would take a meeting with a friend of a friend who was trying to get some mojo and some juice with donald trump, jr. for this kind of stuff happens a lot. now we are focused on russia so this woman is a lawyer in russia. as someone who has two adopted russian kids, this ultimately ended up being a meeting about adoption. i ve seen so many times sources in russia trying to get the word out about this act which they
like bill clinton, seems to have an approximate approach to the truth as if saying it is a last resort. donald trump, jr. gave three explanations for what happened. the last one is the one that s most obvious and the most believable. they get a call. there is someone with oppo research, why not. the only answer to why not is it s a foreign power, a hostile foreign power. ukraine is a foreign power. a lot of countries try to influence american elections. we tried to influence elections among democracies, israel is a prime example. but russia is an adversary working against us. putin is not a friend of the united states. they could say these were amateurs. the trump people weren t aware of the fact. not a great defense. it s not something you want to do to get together with an adversary in the middle of an american election.
when you step back a little bit and look at it, it looks kind of farcical in which donald trump, jr. was conned into holding a meeting with this russian lawyer who had cause to promote that, because of american adoptions of russian children which has been frozen since a dispute between the earlier administration and the russian government. to get him to have such a meeting, she hinted or indicate she had some information on hillary clinton, possibly involving hillary clinton campaign connections to the russians that she wanted to spill. they get in the meeting and she didn t have any information. from what we know. presently it turns out she wanted to talk about this issue of adoption which mr. trump pointed out that neither he nor his father were in any position to do anything about it. they were both still private citizens. the meeting probably went