The roughly 2,500 pages of newly released Senate interviews provide the most detailed look to date into what happened at the June 9, 2016 meeting in the offices of Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr. Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, decided earlier this year he would permit the release the 2,500 pages of transcripts, a decision welcomed by Democrats. The release of the Trump Tower transcripts and hundreds of pages of related materials provides the most comprehensive view yet into the circumstances surrounding the controversial meeting and the details of the roughly 20-minute encounter, in which Trump Jr., Trump son-in-law Jared Kusher and then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort were expecting dirt on Hillary Clinton from Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. The meeting — and whether President Donald Trump’s knew about it — has become a central focus of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, as well as the congressional Russia investigations. If investigators could establish that Trump Jr. and his father talked in June 2016 about the meeting, it would undercut President Trump's denials that he knew at the time about the delegation of Russians who visited New York and their offers of help to the campaign. Scott Balber, a New York lawyer who represents the Agalarovs and one of the meeting’s participants, Ike Kaveladze, told ABC News “the meeting itself was a big nothing.”

Of Goldstone’s promise of dirt, Balber said: “I think he has said publicly that he quote ‘goosed the story’ for the purpose of getting the folks in the Trump campaign to agree to the meeting.”

The first reports about the meeting, initially in the New York Times on July 8, 2017, sent off shock waves, as it was the first known private meeting between Russian nationals and Trump officials during the campaign. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has released congressional testimony transcripts and other material related to the committee's inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower between Trump campaign officials and a Russian lawyer.
The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee releases 2,500 pages of documents related to a June 9, 2016 meeting between Donald Trump campaign officials and Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya.