WASHINGTON — A new report Monday said the man who set up a meeting last year for a Russian lawyer to give Donald Trump Jr. potentially damaging material about Hillary Clinton indicated in an email to Trump Jr. that the Russian government was the source of the information.

The New York Times report cited three unnamed people with knowledge of the email from music publicist Rob Goldstone.

Goldstone confirmed to The Associated Press that he set up the meeting on behalf of his client, a Russian singer. Goldstone said the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, stated she had information about purported illegal campaign contributions to the Democratic National Committee that she thought Trump Jr. might find helpful.

Trump Jr. has acknowledged taking the meeting to learn damaging information about Clinton. But this would be the first public word that he had been made aware that the material could have been from the Kremlin.

In a statement to The Associated Press, Trump Jr. attorney Alan Futerfas said Goldstone contacted Trump Jr. last spring and “suggested that people had information concerning alleged wrongdoing” by Clinton. Futerfas said nothing came of the meeting and Trump’s father knew nothing about it.

Futerfas called the Times report “much ado about nothing,” though he acknowledged his client had received an email from Goldstone to set up a meeting. His statement did not dispute the Times report on the email. “The bottom line is that Don, Jr. did nothing wrong,” Futerfas said in the statement, noting that the younger Trump hasn't been contacted by any congressional committees or Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office.

The White House referred questions to the president’s son.

The news presents another example of the ways in which President Trump’s immediate family and closest advisers repeatedly have made it harder for him to dismiss questions about his campaign’s contacts with Moscow. Again and again, after denying dealings with Russia, they have been forced to alter their stories.

The example involving Trump Jr. increased the political peril for the White House, drawing yet another family member into the public debate over Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election.

Trump Jr. had disavowed any campaign interactions with Russians but acknowledged Sunday that he met in June 2016 with Veselnitskaya, who, he said, had promised information “helpful to the campaign.”

The shifting stories about Russia contacts have frustrated the president’s attempts to move beyond questions about Russia and the election. The latest disclosures also provide potential new avenues for the investigation being run by Mueller, the special counsel who is looking at whether the campaign’s contacts with Russians — or the failure of Trump’s aides to disclose them — violated any U.S. laws.

Trump Jr. recently hired Futerfas, a well-known Manhattan criminal defense lawyer. Although the hiring was publicly acknowledged Monday, neither Trump Jr. nor Futerfas said how long ago he was engaged.

On Monday, Deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders denied that any Trump campaign officials colluded with the Russian government to influence the election, insisting that the Veselnitskaya meeting had come to light only because Jared Kushner, the president’s adviser and son-in-law, and former campaign manager Paul Manafort had amended their federal disclosure forms to mention it.

“The only thing I see inappropriate about the meeting was the people that leaked the information on the meeting after it was voluntarily disclosed,” she said.

Trump Jr.’s account of his meeting suggests that well-connected Russians were reaching out to the campaign beginning at least as early as Trump’s winning of the GOP nomination, using the offer of damaging information against the Democrats to gain access to the top levels of the campaign.

In his statement, Trump Jr. denied wrongdoing. He described the half-hour encounter with Veselnitskaya, which Kushner and Manafort also attended, as brief and unproductive. And he suggested that her objective had been to enlist Trump’s help in overturning a U.S. law that targets Russian officials.

Rather than talk more about Russia, the White House sought to draw attention to a report that was featured on a segment of “Fox & Friends” involving former FBI Director James Comey.

Trump, in a tweet Monday morning, incorrectly asserted that the report, first published in a Capitol Hill newspaper, showed that Comey had leaked classified information.

The report concerned seven memos that Comey wrote about his conversations with Trump.

In testimony to Congress, Comey said some of the memos had been classified and others had been nonclassified. The new report said at least four of the seven were classified.

The one memo that Comey made public, acting through a friend, was not classified, he testified.

Washington Bureau’s David S. Cloud and Michael A. Memoli contributed.