Eric Trump says his family wasn’t ‘smart enough to collude with Russia’ despite numerous unexplained contacts with Moscow

‘We didn’t know what the hell we were doing. We didn’t know what a delegate was’

File: Eric Trump, son of former president Donald Trump, prerecords his address to the Republican National Convention at the Mellon Auditorium on 25 August 2020 in Washington, DC (Getty Images)

Eric Trump has downplayed his family’s possible links with Russia by saying that the Trumps were not “smart enough” to collude with the country when his father was president.

In an interview with former NFL quarterback Jay Cutler on his Uncut podcast on Wednesday, former president Donald Trump’s son said they were worried about how to convince voters to vote for his father over more experienced rivals, reported Business Insider.

“We weren’t smart enough to collude with Russia,” Mr Trump said. “We didn’t know what the hell we were doing. We didn’t know what a delegate was.”

The statements referred to the investigations in which special counsel Robert Mueller found numerous instances of extensive contacts between the Trump campaign and people linked to the Russian government.

But after two years of investigation, not enough evidence could be found to establish any collusion or conspiracy took place between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

At least 14 Trump campaign associates, however, interacted with Russians, according to public records and interviews.

During the interview, Mr Trump joked about his inexperience in politics.

“Jay, I remember walking up to a caucus in Iowa saying, you know, I looked at this young staffer and I go, ‘Hey, can you tell me what a caucus is?’ Because I have no idea what the hell I’m supposed to be doing here.”

Mr Trump, who serves as executive vice president of the Trump Organisation, has so far maintained that he does not want to join politics. His wife Lara Trump had earlier backed out of plans to run for a senate seat in North Carolina next year.

Golf writer James Dodson said Mr Trump had allegedly told him in 2014 that Russia had funded the family’s golf resorts “all the time”.

Mr Dodson told a Boston radio station that he had met the former president and his son three years ago when he was invited to play golf at their Trump National Charlotte course.

“‘Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programmes. We just go there all the time’,” he said about his conversation with Mr Trump.