Jay Sekulow, Trump’s personal lawyer. Image by YouTube

By Ari Feldman July 17, 2017

Jay Sekulow, a Messianic Jewish lawyer with a history of promoting Christian right causes in the U.S. and around the world, blamed the Secret Service for allowing the meeting between Donald Trump, Jr., and a Russian lawyer to take place on news programs on Sunday. Sekulow is working on Donald Trump’s private legal team, and often appears on TV as a defender of Trump.

There’s just one problem: the Secret Service never signed off on the meeting. Nor could they have — Donald Trump, Jr., did not have Secret Service protection at the time of the meeting, in June 2016. The only person in the Trump campaign who had such protection was Donald Trump himself.

“I wonder why the Secret Service — if this was nefarious — why the Secret Service allowed these people in?” Sekulow told ABC’s This Morning. “The president had Secret Service protection at that point, and that raised a question with me.”

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Rinat Akhmetshin, one of the two Russians in the meeting and a former Soviet counterintelligence officer, told Yahoo News, “No one checked our IDs” when he and Natalia Veselnitskaya, a lawyer, walked into Trump Tower for the meeting.

“We literally walked in,” Akhmetshin said.

Contact Ari Feldman at feldman@forward.com or on Twitter @aefeldman.

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