REPORT: Trump’s son met with pro-Russia diplomats in Paris to discuss Syria

Donald Trump Jr. in October attended a roundtable conference on ending the Syrian civil war that was hosted by a French think tank favoring closer cooperation with Russia and Syrian President Bashar Assad, The Wall Street Journal’s Jay Solomon reported on Wednesday.

The conference, held at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Paris, centered on urging the US and Russia to “reach accord on the issue of the Syrian crisis,” according to Randa Kassis, a leader of a Syrian opposition group and wife of the think tank’s founder. The countries’ cooperation is more likely under President-elect Donald Trump, Kassis wrote on Facebook earlier this month.

Kassis apparently told the state-sponsored Russian news agency Sputnik earlier this month that “Trump’s team had realized that it was impossible to reach an agreement between Moscow and Washington” if the US continued to consider Russia an enemy.

Trump Jr.’s presence at the meeting was not reported by Sputnik, but Kassis wrote in the Facebook post that she “succeeded to pass Trump, through the talks with his son, the idea of how we can cooperate together to reach the agreement between Russia and the United States on Syria.”

Trump Jr.’s attendance at a roundtable meeting with pro-Russian, Syrian-opposition elements was confirmed by Kellyanne Conway, one of Trump’s senior advisers.