(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 Donald Trump often uses Twitter to rail against the media. | AP Photo Trump slams 'fake news' for treating son unfairly and 'distorting democracy' 
 
 President Donald Trump on Sunday morning tweeted that “fake news” is treating his son unfairly for meeting with a Russian lawyer, adding that the media are “distorting democracy” in America. 
 
 “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?” the president said in a series of posts. “With all of its phony unnamed sources & highly slanted & even fraudulent reporting, #Fake News is DISTORTING DEMOCRACY in our country!” 
 
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 Also on Twitter, the president thanked former adviser Michael Caputo for defending the administration against accusations of colluding with Russia. In the same vein, he thanked attendees of the U.S. Women’s Open golf tournament “who far out-numbered the protesters.” Trump attended the tournament on his golf course at Bedminster in New Jersey, on Friday. The event continues through Sunday. 
 
 Trump often uses Twitter to rail against the media. The president in particular has criticized the media for what he calls unfair and biased coverage. 
 
 His son Donald Trump Jr. has come under intense scrutiny since The New York Times last weekend published a story detailing his meeting, along with then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort and adviser Jared Kushner, with a Russian lawyer. ||||| The other shoe has finally fallen, and the Trump presidency may fall with it. 
 
 For months, as evidence has piled up of undisclosed and unexplained meetings between senior Trump campaign aides and Russians, the embattled Trump administration has relied on a simple, if implausible, defense. The White House has insisted the mysterious meetings were about sanctions, better cooperation in the ISIS fight, and a general desire to build closer ties between Washington and Moscow — and not about colluding with the Kremlin to help defeat Hillary Clinton and put Donald Trump in the White House. 
 
 That defense now lies in tatters, shredded by newly released emails showing that Donald Trump Jr. took a meeting with a Kremlin-linked envoy who explicitly promised information that “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.” 
 
 In case that message somehow wasn’t clear enough, the emails, first obtained by the New York Times, went on to say the information is “obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” 
 
 Trump Jr.’s response? “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” 
 
 It’s worth pausing for a moment and rereading both the email to Trump Jr. and his response. The president’s son was offered damaging information about Hillary Clinton that he had been explicitly told was coming from Russia, a hostile foreign power. He didn’t rebuff the offer. He didn’t alert the FBI. Instead, he made clear that he wanted the information — and even pulled Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort into the meeting where it was supposedly going to be provided. 
 
 There’s a second clear takeaway, one that raises new questions about the president himself. 
 
 Trump has repeatedly stunned lawmakers from both parties by publicly rejecting the US intelligence community’s unanimous belief that Russia interfered in the election with the explicit goal of helping him win the White House. Instead, Trump used a high-profile meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin late last week to say that he accepted Putin’s denials of any meddling. 
 
 For good measure, Trump said he’d work with Putin on a new joint effort to combat election hacking, a comment that would be laughable if its implications weren’t so dire. As I wrote at the time, that meant Trump — who has since tried to distance himself from the proposal — would have been trying to stop election hacking by working with the man who had weaponized election hacking against the United States. 
 
 And that’s where these emails come back in. Trump and his surrogates can no longer say that accusations of collusion are fake news ginned up by Obama administration holdovers and members of a “deep state” of disgruntled US spies. The evidence that his campaign had shady and very likely illegal election-related dealings with Moscow is now on the internet for all to see. 
 
 That has enormous legal and political implications for Trump’s top aides, and for the president himself. Former FBI Director Robert Mueller and an array of congressional committees have been looking into whether there was evidence of collusion between team Trump and the Kremlin. Donald Trump Jr. may have done their work for them. 
 
 Trump’s Russia connections are looking shadier than ever before 
 
 Comparing political scandals to Watergate is normally a very dangerous thing to do. Richard Nixon’s crimes plunged the nation into political chaos, sparked a genuine constitutional crisis, and set the stage for what would have been the first successful impeachment of an American president in history. 
 
 We’re not there yet, but we’re getting much closer. 
 
 Think of what we already knew even before the release of the new emails. An array of Trump campaign and White House aides like Manafort, Kushner, then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and current Attorney General Jeff Sessions had undisclosed meetings with either actual Russian officials or purportedly private citizens with close ties to Putin. The Trump aides lied about them, again and again and again. Mueller is now looking into whether those dealings broke the law. 
 
 The president himself has publicly disparaged the US intelligence community, continually praised Putin as a strong leader, talked of lifting the sanctions imposed on Russia for its misdeeds in Russia and Syria, weakened Washington’s historic commitment to NATO, and made clear that Putin would pay no real price for his election interference. 
 
 To top it off, Trump fired then-FBI Director James Comey in May after Comey refused to drop the FBI investigation into Flynn. That move prompted Mueller’s appointment as special counsel and led to an ongoing criminal investigation into whether the president himself obstructed justice. Trump has since mused about firing Mueller too, and some legal scholars believe he could preemptively pardon Flynn, Kushner, or other aides before charges were even brought, let alone after potential convictions. 
 
 Russia, in other words, has been the dark cloud hanging over Trump since the campaign, when his pro-Putin rhetoric first began attracting public notice. That cloud has just gotten much darker. 
 
 It’s hard to imagine clearer evidence of collusion 
 
 Donald Trump Jr. was in serious legal trouble even before the New York Times obtained his emails. 
 
 As my colleague Zack Beauchamp has explained, his very decision to meet with Kremlin-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya to see what dirt she had on Clinton may well have violated campaign finance law. That’s because you don’t have to actually get anything of value from a foreigner; simply sitting down with a Russian national to see whether she had information that could help Trump and damage his rival could be enough to constitute a federal crime. 
 
 “The most important legal issue raised by these revelations actually goes to the question where collusion might be criminal under campaign finance law,” Ryan Goodman, a former Defense Department special counsel and current editor of the legal site Just Security, told Beauchamp. “Even if the meeting didn’t produce anything ... solicitation itself is the offense.” 
 
 That was before we learned that Trump Jr. had taken the meeting after being explicitly told that the Russian government wanted to funnel him anti-Clinton information as part of an effort to boost Trump’s chances of winning the presidency. 
 
 It was also before we learned that Kushner and Manafort — already facing criminal investigations for their own potential ties to Moscow — were copied on the email chain. It will now be exponentially harder for them to claim they didn’t know Russia was trying to help Trump’s campaign and weren’t aware that the campaign itself was receptive to the offer. 
 
 The White House has tried to distance Trump from the new scandal surrounding his son by saying the president didn’t know about the meeting and didn’t participate in it. His aides may have broken the law, in other words, but he himself did not. 
 
 It’s quite possible that’s true, and that Trump himself won’t prove to be directly culpable in the collusion with Moscow that his own son seemed eager to carry out. 
 
 But it’s also possible that new evidence will emerge showing that Trump knew about his campaign’s dealings with the Kremlin and was supportive of them. If so, the comparison to Watergate wouldn’t overstate the severity of the Trump-Russia scandal; it would understate it. ||||| It’s far from clear whether Donald Trump Jr. will end up facing any charges related to his meeting, but several lawyers said there is plenty of fodder for investigators to now look at. | AP Photo Donald Trump Jr. in legal danger for Russia meeting about Clinton dirt GOP and Democratic campaign operatives also refute idea that such a meeting was normal practice during an election. 
 
 Donald Trump Jr. is in a legal danger zone following his acknowledgment that he met during the heat of the 2016 presidential campaign with a Russian lawyer with Kremlin ties who offered to deliver damaging information about Hillary Clinton. 
 
 Democratic and Republican lawyers and political operatives alike say explanations about the June 2016 meeting from President Donald Trump’s oldest son are way out of step with common campaign practices when dealing with offers for opposition research. 
 
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 But perhaps far more important, his statements put him potentially in legal cross hairs for violating federal criminal statutes prohibiting solicitation or acceptance of anything of value from a foreign national, as well as a conspiracy to defraud the United States. 
 
 Politically, by discussing such a sensitive topic that could prove embarrassing if revealed, Trump Jr. and the other Trump campaign officials in the room for the meeting with Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, including Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, may have also exposed themselves to future blackmail threats, the legal experts said. 
 
 Those potential troubles deepened Monday night with a fresh New York Times report alleging that Trump Jr. was sent an email before his meeting with Veselnitskaya indicating the information she had was part of a Russian plan to boost his father in the race against Clinton. 
 
 Trump Jr. first described the Veselnitskaya meeting in a Saturday statement to The New York Times, framing it as a discussion about a program for adoption of Russian children that the Kremlin canceled to retaliate for a U.S. law targeting Russian human rights abusers. But Trump Jr. expanded on his explanation on Sunday, saying the Trump Tower meeting was initially presented to him as a chance to obtain opposition materials about Clinton. 
 
 In his Sunday statement, Trump Jr. said Veselnitskaya gave only “vague, ambiguous” statements during their 20- to 30-minute meeting and that she didn’t have any “meaningful information” about Clinton. Trump Jr. also said he didn’t know the name of the Russian lawyer before their meeting. 
 
 Trump Jr. has hired New York criminal defense attorney Alan Futerfas as his personal attorney for Russia-related matters, Futerfas told POLITICO. On Monday, the president’s son sought to quell the political firestorm by criticizing media coverage about it and insisting that what he did was not unusual for someone in the midst of a presidential campaign. He also emphasized that the meeting “went nowhere.” 
 
 On Monday night, Futerfas responded to the most recent report saying it was "much ado about nothing" and adding that "the bottom line" is that Trump Jr. did "nothing wrong." 
 
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 But legal experts of both political parties say his explanations may not fly if he’s questioned under oath by Congress or Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating potential Trump campaign collusion with Russia — and where perjury and making false statements carry legal consequences that don’t exist when engaging with reporters or on social media. 
 
 “I don't think that is an out,” said Robert Bauer, a former White House counsel under President Barack Obama and the Democrat’s 2008 campaign attorney. “If they accept the meeting on the understanding that they will be offered something of value — the opposition research — they are sending a clear signal that they would like to have it.” 
 
 Bauer added that accepting a meeting where there’s an understanding of purpose “raises a question under the federal campaign finance law” for which Trump Jr. could be held accountable. 
 
 Maine GOP Sen. Susan Collins, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and California Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, have both said their panels should interview Trump Jr. On Monday afternoon, Trump Jr. said he plans to cooperate with the investigations. "Happy to work with the committee to pass on what I know," he tweeted. 
 
 A spokesman for Mueller declined comment about whether he would investigate the meeting. 
 
 Legally, Trump Jr. now finds himself in the same boat as a number of other Trump campaign aides already facing scrutiny for their connections to Russia, from former campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s work on behalf of pro-Kremlin officials in Ukraine to former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn, who is under scrutiny on multiple fronts, including for lobbying on behalf of a Turkish businessman with ties to Russia. The president himself is also reportedly the subject of an obstruction of justice probe by Mueller for firing FBI Director James Comey. 
 
 It’s far from clear whether Trump Jr. will end up facing any charges related to his meeting, but several lawyers said there is plenty of fodder for investigators to look at. 
 
 “This is treason,” Richard Painter, a former George W. Bush White House ethics lawyer, wrote Sunday night on Twitter. “He must have known that the only way Russia would get such information was by spying.” 
 
 Painter added in another message: “In the Bush administration we could have had him in custody for questioning by now.” 
 
 Jennifer Taub, a white-collar attorney and Vermont Law School professor, posted on Twitter a 20-part message Monday that cited a specific section of the U.S. criminal code that Trump Jr. may have crossed concerning prohibitions on conspiracy to defraud the U.S. “Potential indictments are coming into clear focus,” she wrote. 
 
 Former Bill Clinton White House counsel Jack Quinn said Trump Jr.’s meeting to discuss opposition research during a campaign “is not in and of itself illegal.” But Quinn nonetheless said it “will be a subject of exploration by Mr. Mueller.” 
 
 Norm Eisen, a former chief White House ethics attorney, called the Trump Jr. meeting with the Russian lawyer “very unusual” and cited several parts of federal criminal statute that may have been breached, including the Logan Act, a 1799 law barring private citizens from interfering with diplomatic relations between the U.S. and foreign governments. The law has been enforced only once — more than 200 years ago — but still remains a potent political cudgel. 
 
 “In decades of working on campaigns and as an election lawyer, I have never personally witnessed or authorized anything like this,” Eisen said. “In a normal campaign, this would be the most crimson of red flags and would not be undertaken without counsel and candidate consent, which raises the question of whether Trump himself had any indication of this.” 
 
 Eisen also said the Trump Jr.- Veselnitskaya meeting raises questions about whether “the Trump campaign welcomed Russian help in the form of dirty tricks; if so, that could confer conspiracy liability for any Russian cyber or other crimes that followed.” 
 
 GOP and Democratic campaign operatives said Trump Jr. wasn’t practicing the typical behavior one does when dealing with potential opposition research. 
 
 “Running @marcorubio camp lots of random people asked to meet to share "secret oppo" I was just never dumb enough to meet w/ them #ButWeLost,” Terry Sullivan, the former campaign manager for Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 GOP primary campaign, posted Monday on Twitter. 
 
 Republican strategist Stuart Stevens also posted Sunday night on Twitter about the unusual nature of the Trump Jr. meeting. “When Gore campaign was sent Bush debate brief book, they called FBI. If foreign interests offer you info on former SOS, you call the FBI,” he wrote. 
 
 In an email, former Clinton 2016 campaign manager Robby Mook questioned why the Trump campaign officials would take a meeting “with an associate of a hostile nation state regarding the campaign without knowing the name or identity of that person, just they were Russian and that person had damaging information about Hillary.” 
 
 “The danger of that speaks for itself,” he added. “It gets us one step further to collusion, but also raises serious questions about whether Kushner and others in the Trump administration should be conducting our foreign policy. Staff who have lied about, or concealed meetings with Russians or who have hidden financial ties to Russian oligarchs should be barred from seeing classified information or participating in policymaking until Congress can determine whether they will act in the public interest." 
 
 Jennifer Psaki, the former Obama White House communications director and State Department spokeswoman, also used a previous presidential campaign as an example for pointing out the unusual nature of the meeting. “Imagine if @davidplouffe met with Chinese lawyers with dirt on @SenJohnMcCain. NOT standard for either party to get oppo from foreign agents,” she wrote on Twitter. 
 
 Trump Jr. responded to the latest chapter in the evolving Russia scandal with a series of Twitter posts Monday morning criticizing the news media for their coverage of the story. He shared a New York Post article that called the original New York Times coverage a “big yawn.” He argued that his explanations to the media had not changed. “No inconsistency in statements, meeting ended up being primarily about adoptions. In response to further Q’s I simply provided more details,” he wrote. 
 
 And Trump Jr. — whose representatives did not respond to a request for comment for this story — insisted he hadn’t done anything different concerning opposition research compared to other political candidates. 
 
 “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,” Trump Jr. wrote. 
 
 Gabriel Debenedetti contributed to this report.
– 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.