Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn) offered his thoughts on Donald Trump’s claim that he didn’t know about Donald Trump Jr.’s controversial meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in June 2016.
On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Thursday, Murphy said that “it strains credibility to believe that Donald Trump didn’t know about this meeting.”
Murphy concluded that Trump must be lying “given the fact that some of his closest advisors and family members were inside that meeting.”
Murphy’s comments followed a Reuters interview with President Trump where the president said that he had no knowledge of the Russian meeting.
“No, that I didn’t know until a couple of days ago when I heard about this,” Trump said.
However, the Connecticut senator doesn’t buy Trump’s story. He argued that there is no reason that Americans should believe the story that Donald Trump Jr. is telling, either.
“He lied openly and repeatedly about his contacts with the Russian government,” said Murphy.
Donald Trump Jr. said in a 2016 interview with CNN that Russia had not been behind a hack at the Democratic National Committee in an effort to help Trump. The Intelligence Community later confirmed that Putin had, in fact, ordered an influence campaign aimed at aiding Trump’s presidential win.
“If he’s been lying about it for months and months beforehand, why do we believe all of sudden that he’s telling the truth today?” Murphy concluded.