Michael Schmidt: Trump’s ‘Clearly Irritated’ About the Stories About Don Jr.

EXCERPT:

SCHMIDT: "The adoption issue was interesting because it wasn’t clear like if whether this was a coincidence or how did they make sense of it? And we sort of tried to press him as much as he could about what he talked to Putin about. And that was really all that he said, acknowledging that, oh, this was the thing that had come up with Don Jr. And in the conversation as it often goes with him, just starts veering in different direction, and all of a sudden we're off, we tried to move it back. And, you know, there is only -- there's only so much we can do there. So we sort of left there, not having a full total understanding of what the meeting with -- with Putin was about. So that -- that was a bit frustrating. But we -- as we went from there the conversation went in different directions. What he is clearly irritated about are the stories about Don Jr. And he was trying to use his meeting with the Republican senators that afternoon to show that it wasn’t a big deal, that this was just simply an information-gathering meeting that any politician would have taken, including his colleagues that he had had lunch with, the senators, and that this is just politics as normal and anyone would have taken it. As if -- if he had known, he said he did not know at the time which he has said before, he did not know about the meeting, but that if he had known, he probably would have said, go ahead and do it."