July 20, 2017•Update: July 20, 2017
By Michael Hernandez
WASHINGTON
President Donald Trump's eldest son and the former chairman of Trump's presidential campaign will testify before the Congress next Wednesday.
The Senate Judiciary Committee said Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort will provide testimony in a session addressing a U.S. law that oversees foreign agents, and Russia's alleged attempts to influence the 2016 White House race.
Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, who played a key role in the campaign before becoming the president’s special advisor, will also reportedly testify Monday behind closed doors to the Senate Intelligence Committee .
Kushner, Manafort and Trump Jr. will likely be probed about their attendance at a meeting with a Russian lawyer who offered to provide the campaign with damaging information regarding Trump's Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton.
Trump Jr. published the June 2016 email chain that led to the meeting, disclosing that Natalia Veselnitskaya offered to provide the allegedly incriminating information to the campaign.
The disclosure came amid three separate investigations -- two congressional, and one led by the FBI -- into the Trump campaign's possible ties to what U.S. intelligence officials have called a Russian "influence campaign".
Russian President Vladimir Putin steadfastly denies any role Moscow played in shaping the presidential race's outcome.
Veselnitskaya told Russia's state-funded television channel, RT, she was prepared to "clarify the situation", but only through lawyers or Senate testimony.
In a jarring development for Trump's top lawyer, the president told the New York Times he would not have appointed Jeff Sessions to lead the Justice Department if he knew the former senator would have recused himself from the department's Russia investigation.
Sessions, who was one of Trump's earliest supporters, recused himself in March, shortly after he took office.
Trump called the decision, “very unfair to the president”, and said the decision led to the appointment of a special counsel.
“Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” Trump said.
