Former US prosecutor on Trump-Russia investigation: 'People will be going to jail'

The various Congressional and FBI investigations into the apparent Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election to help Trump, and any possible ties to Trump's campaign team, have been rumbling for months. But they have been thrown back into sharp focus by the release of emails showing Trump's oldest son, Donald Jr, agreeing to a meeting with a Kremlin-connected attorney who claimed to have damaging information on Hillary Clinton.

"It's a really serious investigation, and there are people that are going to go to jail," Harry Litman, who used to work at the Department of Justice in the 1990s, told The Independent. "The whole atmosphere in the White House has to be paranoid."

Trump Jr was joined at the meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya and a Russian-American lobbyist named Rinat Akhmetshin, by President Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort during that meeting. Akhmetshin is said to have possible to Russian military intelligence, something he denies.

Trump Jr says the meeting was "a nothing," while Ms Veselnitskaya has denied that she was at the meeting working for the Russian government and says she had no information on Clinton to give Trump Jr The White House has repeatedly denied allegations of collusion with Russia.

Litman said that even without the drip-drip of information over members of his team's contact with Russia, the President's relationship with the Department of Justice and FBI — and the Washington apparatus that has granted members of those institutions power to push back against the White House historically — is unique.