In a report from the New York Times, Donald Trump's son met with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign.

Citing advisers briefed on the meeting, the Times reported that Donald Trump Jr. attended the meeting in June 2016 after being promised "damaging information" about his father's Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

Trump's eldest son was reportedly joined in the meeting by the president's son-in-law Jared Kushner and then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

The younger Trump said in a statement to the Times that the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, "stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Mrs Clinton."

"It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information," he said, adding that the lawyer then began discussing the adoption of Russian children by American couples under a program Putin had suspended.

The president's son said he gathered that the adoption issue was "the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting."