(CNN) Michael Caputo, a former top Trump campaign adviser with strong ties to Russia, told CNN in an exclusive interview that he "never once" discussed nor heard anyone else mention Russian involvement in the race to defeat Hillary Clinton. 
 
 "No one ever breathed the word 'Russia' to me," Caputo said in the interview, conducted days before he testified to the House intelligence committee Friday. 
 
 Caputo, who advised the campaign on communications, is one of several former Trump campaign aides who are being questioned as part of a multi-pronged investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. In fact, of all of President Donald Trump's campaign workers, Caputo might be the one with the deepest links to Russia: He lived in Moscow for several years in the 1990s, claims to have worked for the Kremlin and continues to try to do business there. 
 
 A colorful public relations specialist and fill-in radio talk-show host in Buffalo, New York, Caputo agreed to testify behind closed doors, at the insistence of the Republican and Democratic committee leaders. But he said he wanted his story -- his denial of wrongdoing -- to be made public. 
 
 "I heard nothing of the kind," Caputo said, when asked if he ever heard anyone inside the campaign discuss Russian assistance. US intelligence agencies have determined that Russia interfered with the election in order to help Trump win. "In fact, we were so busy just trying to keep up with the sun rising and setting on that campaign that I can't imagine anyone had the time, nor the wherewithal to go out there and even do something like this. 
 
 "Anybody who covered the Trump effort knew this was a pell-mell operation from the moment he woke up in the morning until the moment he went to bed," he said. "The idea that somebody at that campaign would have had the forethought and the treachery ... or the resources to go out and do this is laughable." 
 
 Still loyal to Trump 
 
 Caputo talked to CNN on Monday, the day before Donald Trump Jr. released emails that raised further questions about potential collusion between his father's campaign and the Russian government. According to the emails, Trump's eldest son agreed to meet with a woman described as a "Russian government lawyer" because he was told she had damaging information on Clinton. Jared Kushner, the President's son-in-law and now a senior White House adviser, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort also attended the meeting on June 9, 2016. 
 
 Less than two weeks later, on June 20, Caputo resigned from the campaign after celebrating the dismissal of campaign manager Corey Lewandowski with a tweet that said, "Ding Dong the witch is dead." Manafort, who brought Caputo into the national campaign in April 2016 after his success with the New York primary, replaced Lewandowski as chairman. 
 
 Ding dong the witch is dead! https://t.co/pSqQwmAGz1 pic.twitter.com/5dE7GMeEK6 — That Michael Caputo (@MichaelRCaputo) June 20, 2016 
 
 Still loyal to the President, Caputo defended Trump Jr. 
 
 "You try to find ways to trip up your opponent. And if somebody comes to you and says, 'I've got, you know, the smoking gun on the ... Clinton campaign,' you have that meeting. You definitely have that meeting. ... If that lawyer had contacted me, I would have recommended she meet with somebody else, but I would have passed it up the chain of command." 
 
 Caputo's relationship to Russia 
 
 Caputo's history in Russia dates to 1994, when he says the US government sent him there to help the country's young government design election laws. 
 
 "I was sent there by the Clinton administration to meddle in their elections," he said, flippantly using language that alludes to the current controversy. 
 
 Caputo was forced to resign in 1995 when he bucked the State Department by defending the Russian Election Commission's decision to disqualify a progressive party from an election, according to a Washington Post story at the time. 
 
 After losing his job, Caputo opened a public relations firm in Moscow to help Western companies do business there. He also married a Russian woman (whom he later divorced), helped create a program similar to America's "Rock the Vote" and advised then-President Boris Yeltsin on his re-election campaign. He moved back to the US in 2000 after the Russian economy collapsed and Vladimir Putin was elected president. 
 
 "And ever since then, I've been involved in the former Soviet Union, and I'm not going to stop now," Caputo told CNN. 
 
 Russian links criticized 
 
 Caputo is a protégé of Roger Stone , a Trump adviser who has also agreed to be interviewed by the House intelligence committee. 
 
 Caputo's name arose as part of the investigation in March, when Rep. Jackie Speier, a committee member and Democrat from California, said he was part of a "tarantula web" of links to Russia. Speier referred to Caputo as "Putin's image consultant," an apparent reference to work he did for Gazprom Media, a subsidiary of the Russian state-owned energy company that took over an independent TV station in 2001. When pro-democracy groups blasted Putin and his government for violating press freedoms, Caputo was brought in to help smooth things over. 
 
 "I'm not proud of the work today," Caputo told The Buffalo News in March 2016. "But at the time, Putin wasn't such a bad guy." 
 
 In the CNN interview, Caputo denied that he worked to improve Putin's image. 
 
 "No. That's absolutely false," he said, criticizing Speier's office for faulty research. "I didn't work on Putin's image. I was trying to help Gazprom Media explain why they took over NTV, a television network. If that somehow down the line helped the Kremlin, that wasn't what I was hired for." 
 
 Caputo said he came across Putin twice in the late 1990s, when the future Russian leader was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, but that the two never had a conversation. He said he didn't realize Putin had been at a reception in Caputo's Moscow home until he saw photos afterward. 
 
 Over the years, Caputo has continued to do business with Russians, starting with "business leaders and oligarchs who were trying to come to the United States." In 2004, however, he wrote a column in The Washington Post in which he referred to the oligarchs as "brutal billionaires." Facing death threats, he bought a tugboat and a gun and lived at sea -- with a white parrot -- for most of five years. 
 
 Caputo took a break from the boat in 2007 to consult on a parliamentary campaign in Ukraine, where he met his second wife. He has been particularly critical of Putin for Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014. 
 
 Working with 'both the White House and the Kremlin' 
 
 In 2015, he re-established an old partnership with Sergey "George" Petrushin, founder of the Zeppelin nightclub in Moscow. Their PR agency has offices in New York, Miami and Moscow. 
 
 The firm's website claims that Caputo is "the only executive in history who has worked for both the White House and the Kremlin," a statement that Caputo acknowledged Thursday is not entirely true. In response to a CNN question, Caputo said he worked for then-President George H.W. Bush's losing re-election campaign in 1992, but never for the White House. "I worked on the campaign, not in the building," he said in a text message. "Spent a lot of time in the White House and on the road with the President (Bush) but not WH staff." 
 
 Caputo, who first met Trump in 1988, said he never thought the New York businessman could become president. He said he still supports Trump, and downplayed the ongoing investigations by Senate and House committees and a special counsel -- what he calls the "Russia collusion delusion" -- as a "Democratic strategy" to block the President's agenda. 
 
 "I've had a couple of very significantly in-depth discussions with Donald Trump about America and about patriotism and about the gifts this country has given him," Caputo said. "And he is not the kind of person who would ever do anything like this." 
 
 The testimony 
 
 After testifying for three and a half hours before the House intelligence committee Friday -- an hour and a half longer than expected -- Caputo told reporters that in the hearing he denied having knowledge of any alleged contacts between the campaign and Russia. 
 
 "I spent my time in front of the committee detailing the fact that I had no contact with Russians, that I never heard of anyone with the Trump campaign talking with Russians, that I was never asked questions about my time in Russia, that I never even spoke to anyone about Russia, that I never heard the word 'Russia,' and we did not use Russian dressing," Caputo told reporters in a press conference after the closed-door testimony. "There was absolutely no discussion of Russia on the Trump campaign 'til the day I left." 
 
 Florida Republican Tom Rooney, California Democrat Adam Schiff, California Democrat Eric Swalwell and Washington Democrat Denny Heck attended, Caputo's lawyer, Dennis Vacco, said. 
 
 Heck told CNN's Jim Acosta shortly after the hearing that it was "probably the most fascinating three hours of time I've spent in my nearly five years in the United States House of Representatives." ||||| President Trump's eldest son admitted on July 9 to meeting with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 presidential campaign, after she promised him damaging information about Hillary Clinton. The revelation comes after months of the White House denying campaign contacts with Russians. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post) 
 
 Donald Trump Jr. has made a potentially damaging New York Times report much, much worse. 
 
 The Times on Sunday reported that the president's eldest son was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in New York on June 9, 2016. 
 
 As Times reporters Jo Becker, Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman explained, Trump Jr.’s motivation for agreeing to the meeting “points to the central question in federal investigations of the Kremlin’s meddling in the presidential election: whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians. The accounts of the meeting represent the first public indication that at least some in the campaign were willing to accept Russian help.” 
 
 Paul Manafort, the campaign’s chairman at the time, and Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, also attended. 
 
 Needless to say, the report looks bad for the president, even though his private legal team told the Times that Trump did not participate or even know about the meeting. Trump has a go-to playbook in situations like these: cast doubt on the credibility of unnamed sources (five, in this case) and cry, “Fake news!” 
 
 But Trump Jr. took that strategy off the table with a stunningly compromising first response. Check out this excerpt from the Times report: 
 
 In a statement on Sunday, Donald Trump Jr. said he had met with the Russian lawyer at the request of an acquaintance. “After pleasantries were exchanged,” he said, “the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.” He said she then turned the conversation to adoption of Russian children and the Magnitsky Act, an American law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers. The law so enraged President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that he retaliated by halting American adoptions of Russian children. “It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting,” Mr. Trump said. 
 
 Read that last part again: “the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting.” 
 
 Trump Jr. confirmed that he went into the meeting expecting to receive information from the Russian lawyer that could hurt Clinton. That is a breathtaking admission. 
 
 The rest of Trump Jr.’s statement is an attempt to minimize the value of what the lawyer actually told him. The outcome of the meeting and its effect on the presidential race is important, of course, yet it is kind of beside the point. 
 
 Trump Jr.’s attempt to obtain information from a Russian lawyer that could harm Clinton seems likely to alarm investigators, regardless of whether the effort proved successful. ||||| NEW YORK (Reuters) - Donald Trump Jr. was told in an email before meeting a Russian lawyer who he thought had material damaging to Hillary Clinton that it was part of a Russian government bid to aid his father’s presidential campaign, the New York Times said on Monday. 
 
 Citing three people with knowledge of the email, the paper said publicist Rob Goldstone indicated in the message to U.S. President Donald Trump’s eldest son that the Russian government was the source of the potentially damaging information. 
 
 Trump Jr did not indicate in a statement on Sunday that he had been told the lawyer might be a proxy for the Kremlin. 
 
 The email is likely to be of interest to investigators examining whether any Trump associates colluded with the Russian government to sway last year’s election, the Times said. 
 
 Trump Jr. hired a lawyer on Monday to represent him in the Russia-related investigations as prominent Republicans voiced concern about the meeting between the president’s son and a Russian. 
 
 Allegations of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia have cast a shadow over the Republican president’s first months in office and sparked investigations by congressional committees and a federal special counsel, Robert Mueller, into whether Russia interfered in the election and colluded with the Trump campaign. 
 
 Moscow denies interfering and Trump, who became president on Jan. 20, says there was no collusion. 
 
 “It’s a very serious development,” Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told MSNBC of the Times report. “It all warrants thorough investigation. Everyone who was in that meeting ought to come before our committee.” 
 
 Trump Jr. hired New York lawyer Alan Futerfas, who specializes in criminal defense and whose clients have included alleged organized crime figures, a Russian computer hacker and white-collar criminals. 
 
 “I look forward to assisting Donald Jr. and, quite frankly, there is nothing to all of the media buzz about the June 9th, 2016 meeting,” Futerfas told Reuters. “That will be proven to be the case.” 
 
 FILE PHOTO: Donald Trump Jr. gives a television interview at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio U.S. July 19, 2016. REUTERS/Mark Kauzlarich/File photo 
 
 Futerfas would not say when he was retained or whether he played any part in the statements Trump Jr. made during the weekend about his June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in New York with a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, during the presidential election campaign. 
 
 Trump Jr. said he agreed to meet Veselnitskaya, described by the New York Times as having links to the Kremlin, after being promised damaging information about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. 
 
 Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Trump’s then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, also attended, the Times said. It called the encounter the first confirmed private meeting of members of Donald Trump’s inner circle with a Russian national during the campaign. 
 
 A Republican member of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, Susan Collins, called on Trump Jr. to testify before the panel, which is looking into accusations of Russian meddling in the election. 
 
 “Our intelligence committee needs to interview him and others who attended the meeting,” she told reporters at the U.S. Capitol. 
 
 PANEL MAY SPEAK TO TRUMP JR. 
 
 Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the intelligence panel, said it “absolutely” wanted to speak to Trump Jr. about the meeting. Warner said he and the Republican committee chairman, Richard Burr, would decide later whether to ask Trump Jr. to testify in public or in a classified setting. 
 
 Burr would not say if the committee would talk to Trump Jr., but he told reporters the panel would look into the purpose of the meeting, who set it up and how the process unfolded before making a decision on who to interview. 
 
 “The committee will see everybody we think has value,” Burr said. 
 
 White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said there was nothing inappropriate about the meeting with lawyer Veselnitskaya. “Don Junior took a very short meeting from which there was absolutely no follow-up,” Sanders told reporters. 
 
 Slideshow (4 Images) 
 
 In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday the Kremlin did not know the identity of the Russian lawyer. 
 
 “No, we don’t know who it is and, certainly, we cannot track down all movements of all Russian lawyers both within Russia and abroad,” Peskov said. 
 
 Goldstone said he arranged the meeting at the request of singer and businessman Emin Agalarov, a Moscow-based client of his. He told Trump Jr. the meeting was with a Russian lawyer who apparently claimed to have information regarding illegal campaign contributions to the Democratic National Committee. ||||| Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. 
 
 July 11, 2017, 11:11 AM GMT / Updated July 12, 2017, 12:26 AM GMT By Keir Simmons, Rachel Elbaum and Andrew Rafferty 
 
 MOSCOW — The Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. during the presidential campaign denied in an exclusive interview with NBC News that she had any connection to the Kremlin and insisted she met with President Donald Trump’s son in 2016 to discuss sanctions between Russia and the U.S., not to hand over information about Hillary Clinton’s campaign. 
 
 “I never had any damaging or sensitive information about Hillary Clinton. It was never my intention to have that,” Natalia Veselnitskaya said. 
 
 Her account appeared to contradict that of Trump Jr., who said on Sunday that the premise of the meeting was to discuss damaging information on Clinton that the lawyer was offering. When asked how Trump Jr. seemed to have the impression that she had information about the Democratic National Committee, she responded: 
 
 “It is quite possible that maybe they were longing for such an information. They wanted it so badly that they could only hear the thought that they wanted.” 
 
 Related: Trump Jr. Tweets His Emails That Led To Russia Meeting 
 
 Trump Jr. has confirmed that the meeting occurred, saying in a statement to The New York Times that he attended "a short introductory meeting" with the lawyer, where the topic of conversation was primarily about adoption. 
 
 On Monday, Trump Jr. seemed to confirm that he had been offered information about Clinton or her campaign but insisted that nothing untoward in the meeting had occurred. 
 
 “Obviously I'm the first person on a campaign to ever take a meeting to hear info about an opponent... went nowhere but had to listen,” he tweeted, seemingly sarcastic. 
 
 The New York Times on Monday reported that Trump Jr. was told in an email before the meeting that the information Veselnitskaya had was part of a Russian government effort to help his father’s candidacy. On Tuesday, Trump Jr. tweeted his email chain showing him making plans to meet with her — and confirming the Times report. 
 
 The email exchange shows an acquaintance with ties to Russia, music publicist Rob Goldstone, telling the son of then-candidate Trump last year that the attorney had “information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.” 
 
 But Veselnitskaya, speaking to NBC News prior to Trump Jr. releasing the emails, flatly denied any connection to the Russian government. Kremlin officials said on Monday that they were unfamiliar with the lawyer. 
 
 Veselnitskaya explained she has questioned for many years a story that became the basis for a claim against her client, Russian businessman Denis Katsyv. She sought an investigation by the U.S. Congress into the allegations. 
 
 That claim led to a U.S. law called the Magnitsky Act, which enabled the U.S. to impose sanctions on Russian officials accused of human rights violations. The Magnitsky Act also led the Kremlin to ban the adoption of Russian children by Americans at the end of 2012. 
 
 Part of the information she put together for her client included details about a company run by a former U.S. citizen. She believes this company didn’t pay taxes in either Russia or the U.S. and may also have made donations to the D.N.C. 
 
 These details are what may have sparked the interest of Trump’s campaign, she said. 
 
 Related: Ten Times Trump Denied Collusion With Russia 
 
 She also said that in the meeting, Trump Jr. asked her just one question. 
 
 “The question that I was asked was as follows: whether I had any financial records which might prove that the funds used to sponsor the D.N.C. were coming from inappropriate sources." 
 
 Veselnitskaya had no records and said "it was never my intention to collect any financial records to that end." 
 
 Trump Jr.’s meeting with Veselnitskaya took place on June 9, 2016, two days after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee. 
 
 Veselnitskaya described how she had circulated information on "the real circumstances behind the Magnitsky Act," to friends and friends of friends, seeking meetings with anyone who could help facilitate testimony before Congress. 
 
 "I never asked anybody for a particular meeting with Mr. Donald Trump Jr., or with anybody else," she said. 
 
 In describing how the meeting came about, Veselnitskaya didn’t name the person who set it up over the phone while she was in New York for work. 
 
 She added that she now knows that it was arranged in part by pop-star Emin Agalarov, who appeared in a music video with Trump when the Miss Universe pageant, which Trump owned at the time, was held in Moscow in 2013. She said she has never met Agalarov. 
 
 Related: Trump Campaign Meeting Raises Question: Is Collusion Even a Crime? 
 
 When Veselnitskaya arrived at Trump Tower for the meeting, which she described as banal, she was met by Goldstone, who had also been involved in the pageant. After entering a board room, she was introduced to Trump Jr. 
 
 She described how Trump Jr. ran the meeting, which she said lasted 20-30 minutes. Two other men who she never met by name were also in the room. She said she only realized three days ago who they were after seeing their photos in the news. Those men were Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, and Paul Manafort, who at the time was running the Trump campaign. 
 
 “I could recognize the young gentleman who was only present in the meeting for probably the first seven to 10 minutes, and then he stood up and left the room,” she said. “It was Mr. Jared Kushner. And he never came back, by the way. 
 
 “And the other individual who was in the same meeting, but all the time he was looking at his phone. He was reading something. He never took any active part in the conversation. That was Mr. Manafort." Midway in the interview, she described Manafort as "absent-minded." 
 
 Trump Jr.’s newly appointed lawyer, Alan Futerfas, on Monday said “that Don Jr. had no knowledge as to what specific information, if any, would be discussed” in the meeting. 
 
 He called the reports “much ado about nothing,” and noted that Veselnitskaya was not a government official and had not been a prosecutor since 2001. 
 
 But the email exchange released Tuesday seems to contradict Futerfas' claim that Trump Jr. had no knowledge of what would be discussed in the meeting. 
 
 In response to Goldstone offering information about Hillary Clinton that he said would be incriminating. Trump Jr. responded, “I love it,” the emails show. Later in the exchange, Goldstone wrote, “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump." 
 
 Trump Jr. said he was releasing the exchange “to be totally transparent.” But an editor for The New York Times said the emails were made public by Trump Jr. after he was informed the paper was publishing a story about them. 
 
 Veselnitskaya described how difficult the past few days have been since the story broke. 
 
 “Imagine yourself in my shoes. One morning you wake up and all of a sudden you are the focus of all the high ranking, upstream media of the world,” she said. 
 
 “To summarize, those were not the happiest days of my life, I have to say. I have to break up my holiday. I have to take a trip back to Moscow, because I just wanted to be able to answer the questions myself.” 
 
 CORRECTION (July 11, 2017, 10:45 a.m.): An earlier version of this article misstated the name of Veselnitskaya's client. It is Denis Katsyv, not Kadsyv. 
 
 Keir Simmons reported from Moscow, and Rachel Elbaum from London.
– President Trump was on Twitter Sunday morning defending his eldest son and taking aim at two of his favorite targets: Hillary Clinton and the media. In a series of posts starting around 6am, Trump wrote, "HillaryClinton can illegally get the questions to the Debate & delete 33,000 emails but my son Don is being scorned by the Fake News Media?" And: "With all of its phony unnamed sources & highly slanted & even fraudulent reporting, #Fake News is DISTORTING DEMOCRACY in our country!" Donald Jr. came under scrutiny last week after releasing emails confirming he took a meeting last year with a Russian lawyer promising damaging information about Clinton, Politico reports. That meeting has raised more questions about collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. President Trump also tweeted a "thank you" message to former campaign adviser Michael Caputo "for saying so powerfully that there was no Russian collusion in our winning campaign." On Friday, Caputo told CNN that he "never once" heard anyone in the campaign discuss Russia. "No one ever breathed the word 'Russia' to me," he said. "The idea that somebody at that campaign would have had the forethought and the treachery ... or the resources to go out and do this is laughable." Caputo, who resigned from the Trump campaign last June, has strong ties to Russia, advising then-President Boris Yeltsin's re-election campaign and doing PR work for a media company owned by Vladimir Putin's government. Caputo's interview was conducted before Donald Jr. released his emails.