Donald Trump Jr.'s controversial meeting with a Russian lawyer tied to the Kremlin is a flash in the pan that will soon be forgotten, former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz, told Newsmax TV.
"I think in a month or two, no one's going to be talking about this," Fleitz, a senior vice president for the Center for Security Policy, told Monday's "Newsmax Now" host Bill Tucker. "My view is this is a very minor incident. I think a couple people may have made a mistake by not mentioning it.
"But, frankly, it's not illegal to meet with Russians, and I imagine that these Trump sons meet with a lot of people from different countries.
"If you're a business man who's running a corporation worth millions of billions of dollars, you're going to meet with lawyers, some of them are going to have ties to the Russians. There's nothing wrong with it."
See "Newsmax Now" on Newsmax TV: Tune in beginning at 5 p.m. ET on DirecTV 349, U-verse 1220, FiOS 615, YouTube Livestream, Newsmax TV App from any smartphone, NewsmaxTV.com, Roku, Amazon Fire — More Systems Here
Over the weekend, following a report in The New York Times, President Donald Trump's son revealed he met with Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya on June 9, 2016, who was said to be offering information about Hillary Clinton that would help his father's campaign.
The meeting, taking place at Trump Tower, also included Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
"I'm more concerned that this particular individual, this lawyer, may have had ties to Democrat hit men, including the person who put together this dossier of damaged information against Donald Trump," Fleitz told Tucker.
"And there are some people talking today that this may have been the set up by the Democratic Party to hurt Mr. Trump. That's what the media should be looking at . . . It's just such hypocrisy by the media to play up this minor, brief, one-time meeting as some kind of a scandal. It's ridiculous."
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.