Donald Trump Jr. admitted to Sean Hannity on Tuesday night that he "probably would have done things a little differently" if he had known his meeting with a Russian lawyer claiming to have information on Hillary Clinton would cause such an uproar. It was "pre-Russia fever," the president's son told the Fox News host, adding that nothing about the meeting set his "sirens" off. He added that the meeting was a "nothing" and he didn't bother telling his father about the "wasted 20 minutes" because there was "nothing to tell." Earlier Tuesday, Trump Jr. released emails with music publicist Rob Goldstone setting up the June 2016 meeting with Kremlin-linked lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.
Trump Jr. said for him, the meeting "was opposition research, they had something, you know, maybe concrete evidence to all the stories I’d been hearing about." He told Hannity that if the meeting had produced compromising information on Clinton, "100% I would bring it to the proper authorities." "There’s nothing that I would do to ever endanger this country," he said, though the Guardian notes that Hannity did not ask why he failed to report the meeting in the first place. President Trump promoted the interview in a tweet, calling his son a "great person who loves our country." (He earlier described Trump Jr. as a "high-quality person.)