A Crime, Counterintelligence Trap, or Nothing Burger? — The June 9th Trump Tower Meeting
This article covers the meeting Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Trump’s top campaign leadership had on June 9th, 2016 with a delegation of Russians who promised to deliver compromising information on Hillary Clinton.
It is the second and final article in the series “Kremlin Influence Campaigns and the June 9th Trump Tower Meeting.”
The first article covers the origins of the June 9th Trump Tower Meeting and its role in the context of a wider Kremlin influence campaign.
Reading the first article is highly recommended, as it contains critically important contextual information.
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
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Setting Up the June 9th Trump Tower Meeting
On June 3rd, 2016, the Azerbaijani oligarch, Putin-associate, and Trump business partner Aras Agalarov’s son Emin got into contact with his British publicist Rob Goldstone, who subsequently reached out and suggested to Donald Trump Jr. that the “Crown prosecutor of Russia” was willing to provide the Trump campaign with information that would “incriminate Hillary.”
Read my description of the Donald Trump’s personal and business connections to the Agalarov family, and the Agalarov family’s links to the Kremlin and Eurasian organized crime, here.
Goldstone’s outreach prompted Don Jr.’s infamous reply, “if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”
Following his exchange with Don Jr., Goldstone contacted Emin Agalarov and explained that Don Jr. wanted to speak with him personally over the phone the next week.
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, whose testimony cannot be fully trusted, later claimed that sometime between June 3rd and 6th, Don Jr. informed him that individuals from “Azerbaijan” (The Agalarov’s homeland) who had worked with the Trump Organization on the Miss Universe Pageant wanted to provide information that could help the campaign.
Given the explicit mention of the “Crown prosecutor of Russia” in Goldstone’s email, Manafort’s description of events looks like an effort to sanitize the purpose of the meeting. Manafort further claimed to have cautioned that such individuals “usually have an agenda of their own when they’re coming from that part of the world.”
On June 6th, Emin Agalarov followed up with Goldstone, asking if there was any news regarding the meeting.
Goldstone explained that Don Jr. was likely traveling in preparations for “final elections,” by which he presumably meant the Republican National Convention, “where [T]rump will be ‘crowned’ the official nominee.”
Goldstone then reached out to Don Jr. via email and asked if he was “free to talk with Emin about this Hillary info.”
Over the course of June 6th and 7th, Don Jr. and Emin held several brief phone conversations. While the contents of these discussions are not known, it is safe to assume the meeting was discussed.
Also on the 6th, Aras Agalarov contacted his employee Irakli Kaveladze and instructed him to attend what he described as an “important meeting” at Trump Tower. While Kaveladze claimed that Agalarov informed him that the meeting would be with “Trump people,” he claimed that he wasn’t provided with a description of what the meeting was to be about.
Agalarov further told Kaveladze to get in touch with Veselnitskaya and arrange to get together before the meeting to review what would be discussed. Kaveladze called the Kremlin-connected Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya following his conversation with Agalarov and coordinated a time and date to meet.
Read about Irakli Kaveladze’s alleged money laundering activities, and Natalia Veselnitskaya’s connections to Russian intelligence and her involvement in Kremlin influence operations, in part one of this series here.
For reasons that remain unclear, three days earlier on June 3rd, the day Goldstone reached out to Trump Jr. on behalf of Emin, the first payments of what would ultimately reach $3.3 million began moving between Aras Agalarov and Kaveladze. The cash ended up in a Kaveladze-controlled company called Corsy International.
Also on June 3rd, Kaveladze cashed $397,000 from five separate checks into his JP Morgan Chase Platinum checking account using three separate branches of the bank near his home in California.
The purpose of the payment from Agalarov was listed as “compensation amex expenses,” which didn’t prevent the bank from issuing a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) regarding the deposit.
On June 6th, the day he was instructed by Aras Agalarov to get in touch with Veselnitskaya, Kaveladze’s company Corsey International received an additional $971,000. Kaveladze later provided different explanations to the various banks he used as to what services Corsy International was providing to Agalarov.
While it is entirely possible that these were legitimate business-related payments by Aras Agalarov to an employee, their previous involvement in money laundering activities, the timing of the transactions which conspicuously overlap with the planning of the Trump Tower meeting and the fact that the financial institutions issues SARs related to the payments make them worth mentioning.
“Emin asked that I schedule a meeting with you and [t]he Russian government attorney who is flying over from Moscow,” Rob Goldstone wrote to Don Jr. on June 7th. After a brief back and forth, the meeting was scheduled for 3pm on Thursday, June 9th at Trump Tower.
Don Jr. informed Goldstone that he, Paul Manafort (whom he referred to as the “campaign boss”) and Jared Kushner would all likely attend the meeting. Goldstone was surprised that so many Trump campaign heavyweights would be in attendance.
Kaveladze, who claimed to be “puzzled” upon learning that Manafort and Kushner would be there, contacted Emin Agalarov’s assistant Roman Beniaminov and asked what the purpose of the meeting was, to which Beniaminov replied that it was to convey “negative information on Hillary Clinton.”
The Kushner-Katsyv-Leviev Connection
The presence of Jared Kushner at a meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya at a sensitive moment of the Prevezon case, a contemporaneous Russian money laundering case being prosecuted by the Southern District of New York that Veselnitskaya was involved in described in the previous article in this series, raises interesting questions.
The Prevezon case involved the Russian-Israeli businessman Denis Kastyv. Veselnitskaya had close links to both Denis and his father, Pyotr Katsyv.
Jared Kushner had conducted real estate deals with a business partner of Denis and Pyotr Katsvy: the Uzbek-born, billionaire Israeli diamond tycoon, and noted Putin supporter, Lev Leviev.
Leviev had at one time engaged in discussions with Donald Trump regarding the construction of a potential Trump Tower Moscow.
Read my description of Lev Leviev’s connections to Vladimir Putin and his discussions with Trump regarding a potential Trump Tower Moscow here.
In 1996, Leviev, already a successful diamond merchant, purchased the Africa Israel Investments (AFI Group) holding company for $400 million and expanded into real estate and construction. By 2007, the company was worth over $7 billion.
Rotem Rosen, the former CEO of AFI USA, the company’s American branch, attended the Miss America Pageant in Moscow where he was photographed with Trump.
Pyotr and Denis Katsyv began doing business with Leviev as early as 2003, when Denis Katsyv was made the CEO of an offshore Cypriot shell company owned by Leviev.
In 2008, a Netherlands-based, Leviev-owned company called AFI Europe NV sold 30% of four of its subsidiary companies to Prevezon for $3 million.
The assets sold to Prevezon appear to have consisted of approximately $20 million worth of property in Germany. As it was sold for a fraction of that price, it raises suspicions that the Katstyv-Leviev business relationship may not be legitimate and may itself be involved with money laundering.
When Prevezon attempted to sell the shell company-owned assets back to Leviev the transaction was frozen by Dutch financial authorities.
It was a Leviev-owned company, AFI USA, that sold Prevezon the Manhattan luxury real estate that formed the core of the SDNY money laundering case.
In 2015, Kushner Companies purchased several floors of retail space in the old New York Times building located on 43rd Street in Manhattan from Leviev’s Africa Israel Investments and its partner Five Mile Capital for $295 million. At the time Kushner took over, the floors were 25% occupied.
The Kushner Company went about recruiting tenants, offering in some cases a full year rent free to secure contracts.
During the height of the 2016 election, Kushner approached Deutsche Bank for refinancing. A subsequent appraisal valued the building at $470 million, a remarkable 59% increase in the space of a year.
In October, 2016, Kushner Companies took out a $370 million loan, consisting of $285 million from Deutsche Bank and $85 million from SL Green Realty, $74 million more than the purchasing price.
Shortly after the loan, Deutsche Bank paid a series of settlements to U.S. authorities, including $425 million to New York authorities for failing to properly track money laundering out of their Moscow branch.
Deutsche Bank also loaned Prevezon $90 million.
The extent of Kushner’s knowledge regarding Veselnitskaya’s representation of Prevezon, and the relationship between Prevezon and their mutual business partner Lev Leviev, is unclear.
Run-up to the June 9th Trump Tower Meeting: What Did Donald Trump Know?
At some point in the days before June 9th, possibly on June 6th, records and testimony indicate that a “Family Meeting” took place, which consisted of a regular morning meeting between the Trump children and top campaign staff. Conflicting testimony regarding this critical period adds to the difficulty of reconstructing it.
Trump Campaign Deputy Chairman Rick Gates testified that he was present at the family meeting along with Don Jr., Eric Trump, Paul Manafort and Hope Hicks with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump arriving late.
According to Gates, Don Jr. explained that a friend had connected him to a group from Kyrgyzstan that would be providing the campaign with damaging information about the Clinton Foundation.
While Aras Agalarov’s company the Crocus Group had been contracted to provide services between Russia and Kyrgyzstan, it is unclear exactly why Don Jr. would have referred to them in this fashion.
Gates recalled that Manafort cautioned that the meeting would not likely yield important information and that they should proceed with caution.
While the testimony of the parties involved in the meeting varies, and there is no documentary evidence that Donald Trump knew about the meeting in advance, it seems likely that he did.
Unsurprisingly, Don Jr. claims that he never mentioned the meeting to his father.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, however, later issued the Department of Justice a criminal referral arguing that Don Jr. provided misleading testimony under oath.
On either June 6th or 7th, Michael Cohen recalled being present in Donald Trump’s office when Don Jr. entered, approached his father’s desk and leaned over and whispered, “The meeting, it’s all set.”
“Okay. Keep me posted,” Trump replied, according to Cohen’s recollection.
As described in the Special Counsel’s Report, the interaction led Cohen to believe that Trump and his son had already discussed the meeting, though he had not personally witnessed them do so.
In the Senate Intelligence Counterintelligence report Cohen is more explicit.
“Trump Jr. said to Trump that he was setting up a meeting in order to get dirt on Hillary Clinton,” Cohen told the Senate Intelligence Committee. He further claimed that upon learning this news, Trump replied, “That’s great. Let me know.”
On June 7th, Donald Trump made a public statement to the media that could indicate foreknowledge of the meeting and its purpose. “I’m going to give a major speech on probably Monday [June 13th] of next week and we’re going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons. I think you’re going to find it very informative and very, very interesting.”
The speech was ultimately postponed.
Stephen Miller later claimed the postponement may have been due to the Pulse Nightclub in Florida, and that the speech would have been based upon information from the book Clinton Cash. However, it is also possible that the speech was changed because, as we shall see, the meeting with Veselnitskaya didn’t yield the kind of damaging information on the Clinton’s that the Trump campaign had hoped for.
On the morning of June 8th, Jared Kushner emailed his assistant and asked to discuss a 3pm meeting he was scheduled to have with Don Jr. the next day. Kushner, who was also the subject of a criminal referral by the Senate Intelligence Committee for providing misleading testimony under oath, later claimed that he couldn’t recall discussing the June 9th meeting with his assistant.
That same morning, Rob Goldstone emailed Don Jr. and asked that the meeting be pushed back to 4pm the next day as Veselnitskaya had an appointment in court that morning.
Don Jr. agreed and then forwarded his entire email correspondence with Rob Goldstone, which had the subject line “FW: Russia — Clinton — private and confidential” and included Goldstone’s description of the “Crown prosecutor of Russia” providing information that would “incriminate Hillary,” to both Kushner and Paul Manafort.
June 9th, 2016 — The Trump Tower Meeting
On the morning of June 9th, Natalia Veselnitskaya met in the lobby of her Manhattan hotel with her translator Anatoly Samochornov.
During their drive to a Prevezon-related court proceeding down town, Samochornov first learned that they would be attending a meeting later that day at Trump Tower.
Around this time, Veselnitskaya contacted Rinat Akhmetshin, who, in a remarkable coincidence, claims he was in New York at the time for reasons unrelated to the Trump Tower meeting, but rather to watch a relative perform on Broadway that evening.
Read my description of the former Soviet counterintelligence officer Rinat Akhmetshin in part one of this series here.
Stranger still, Akhmetshin had traveled over on the Acela from Washington, DC that morning with Edward Lieberman, the Washington insider who had been instrumental in getting Akhmetshin his start in lobbying and who had worked with BakerHostetler to establish Katsyv-funded Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative (HRAGI) in the effort to undermine the Magnitsky Act sanctions.
Upon learning that he was in New York, Veselnitskaya invited Akhmetshin to join her for lunch.
Akhmetshin later recalled that Veselnitskaya told him that she wanted to discuss something important, and the fact that she didn’t mention it over the phone struck him as odd. He agreed to meet with her.
That morning at Trump Tower, both Donald Trump’s and Paul Manafort’s calendars indicated they were scheduled to hold a meeting together at 10:30am.
In subsequent testimony, Manafort dubiously claimed that he didn’t mention the meeting to Trump.
Trump himself claimed that he couldn’t remember his June 9th meeting with Manafort at all.
Don Jr. and Kushner later suggested that they never treated the meeting as being potentially significant, downplaying the fact that a major part of the campaign leadership attended the meeting by suggesting that they all happened to be in the building at the time.
Michael Cohen, on the other hand, had an alternative explanation.
“The reason why Jared and Manafort were in that meeting is because Mr. Trump would never have allowed Junior to be in that meeting by himself,” Cohen testified.
“Mr. Trump was very quick to tell everybody that he thinks Don Jr. has the worst judgement of anyone he’s ever met in the world. And I can assure you that when that meeting, conversation, took place, that Mr. Trump turned around and said: Make sure that Jared and Paul are part of the meeting. Because he would never let Don Jr. handle that meeting by himself.”
Following the morning courtroom proceeding, Veselnitskaya and Samochornov ate lunch in Manhattan at Nello, a restaurant near Trump Tower, where they were joined late by Akhmetshin.
Irakli Kaveladze, the previously mentioned employee of Aras Agalarov, had arrived from California that morning and was also present.
Conflicting recollections and testimony make the accurate reconstruction of the events that took place on and surrounding June 9th challenging.
Whereas Akhmetshin claimed to have attended the lunch late, Kaveladze recalls only meeting him afterward as they made their way to Trump Tower. Kaveladze also believed that he was going to serve as Veselnitskaya’s translator, and was surprised to find that she had brought her own.
For his part, Samochornov believed that Kaveladze was meeting Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin for the first time.
Over the course of the lunch, Veselnitskaya provided Kaveladze with documents that he assumed would be distributed at the meeting.
After allegedly first learning from Emin Agalarov’s assistant Roman Beniaminov that the Trump Tower meeting was to be used to transmit damaging information about Hillary Clinton, which he claims made him nervous, Kaveladze later suggested that upon reviewing the documents provided he was relieved to see that they contained no new information about Clinton.
Rather, they appeared to be focused on the charges related to the prominent Putin critic William Browder that Veselnitskaya had been peddling to discredit the Magnitsky Act.
According to Rinat Akhmetshin’s testimony, he only learned about Veselnitskaya’s imminent meeting with Donald Trump Jr. upon joining them at Nello’s.
Akhmetshin further claimed that Veselnitskaya asked him what he thought she should mention to Don Jr., to which he responded that Russian-American relations had been a major part of the campaign so far and a place where Clinton and Trump clearly diverged.
Akhmetshin suggested that making the Magnitsky Act sanction regime, which Clinton obviously supported, a campaign issue and linking it to the Russian adoption ban would be a good idea as it had only taken him a few hours of research to discover that the Bill Browder and Sergei Magnitsky tax fraud story was itself a fraud.
Rinat Akhmetshin’s suggestion that it was he who originally suggested linking Clinton with the supposed fraud behind the Magnitsky Act is not credible, and is belied by the fact that the materials Veselnitskaya had prepared for the meeting already mentioned Hillary Clinton and were put together on May 31st.
Furthermore, given the remarkable efforts put together by high level Russian officials and Veselnitskaya herself less than two months earlier to place similar materials in the possession of Dana Rohrabacher, a member of the House of Representatives, it is unthinkable that the opportunity to provide them to the family and campaign leadership of the pro-Russian Republican candidate for President of the United States wouldn’t be treated with the same level of seriousness and preparation.
This is but one of the many discrepancies and mysteries surrounding the events of June 9th.
After they finished lunch the group departed and walked to Trump Tower where they were greeted in the lobby by Rob Goldstone.
After brief introductions, Goldstone led them through security and up to the 25th floor. After providing introductions of the Russian entourage to Don Jr., Goldstone prepared to leave but Don Jr. invited him to stay for the meeting and show everybody out upon its completion.
The respective groups were seated around a conference table, with Don Jr. and Manafort at the head of the table while Kushner sat across from Veselnitskaya, Akhmetshin, Kaveladze, Samochornov and Goldstone.
“So, what brings you here?” Don Jr. asked, officially opening the meeting. “We hear you have some important information for the campaign.”
At this point Veselnitskaya took the floor and launched into a three to four minute speech in Russian which Samochornov simultaneously translated.
In the her somewhat rambling and disjointed presentation, which Samorchornov later said he found “completely unconvincing,” Veselnitskaya claimed that through her research into Bill Browder, she had discovered that investors into Hermitage Capital, the Ziff brothers, had laundered money and failed to pay taxes in both the United States and Russia. She then said that the Ziff Brothers had been donors to either the Democratic National Committee or to Hillary Clinton herself.
While loosely wedded to certain facts, Veselnitskaya’s accusations against the Ziff brothers appear to have been largely irrelevant.
According to public records, Hermitage Capital Management had donated between $10,000-$25,000 to the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) a decade before the June 9th meeting took place because Bill Browder had been an attendee at a CGI conference.
Of the three Ziff brothers, only one, Daniel Ziff, appears to have donated between $50,000-$100,000 to CGI.
Both of these donations were dwarfed by the $250,000-$500,000 that was donated to CGI at one point by Charles Kushner, Jared Kushner’s father.
‘That’s very interesting,” Akhmetshin later recalled Don Jr. interjecting, “but so could you show how money goes to Hillary’s campaign? Do you think it goes to Hillary’s campaign or just DNC?”
Don Jr. asked again, “Could you show us how the money goes to Hillary’s campaign?”
Veselnitskaya responded by saying that was all the information she had and suggested that the campaign pursue its own research on the project. At that moment, Akhmetshin later recalled, the light went out of the Trump team’s eyes and they checked out from the meeting.
“Why are we here?” Jared Kushner reportedly asked, evidencing a growing frustration. “Why are we listening to this Magnitsky Act story?”
After Veselnitskaya again mentioned the Ziff brothers, Kushner interjected again. “I have no idea what you ‘re talking about.”
Kushner then asked, “What are you saying? Can you be more specific? I don’t understand.”
Veselnitskaya responded by rehashing the presentation she had just delivered. Again, varying recollections and testimony complicates the reconstruction of events.
According to Samochornov, her focus throughout the meeting was on disparaging the Magnitsky Act. Manafort later claimed that Veselnitskaya suggested that candidate Trump call for the repeal of the Magnitsky act and suggested that in return Russia would be willing to lift the adoption ban.
“This is nothing,” Manafort reportedly said of Veselnitskaya’s allegations regarding the Ziff brothers, “people give money to all kinds of people.”
Put off balance by Manafort’s disparaging remarks, Veselnitskaya switched subjects to focus on the adoption ban for roughly five minutes. As she did so, the Trump campaign attendees became visibly more disinterested, appearing restless and regularly checking and typing things into their phones.
Akhmetshin, sensing the meeting was coming off the rails, took the floor and addressed the group in English. He mentioned his role representing HRAGI and continued to focus more specifically on the issue of Russian adoptions.
“Waste of time,” Kushner texted Manafort at 4:26pm.
A minute later, Kushner emailed two separate assistants asking them to call him on his cell so he would have an excuse to leave the meeting. Little more than halfway through, Kushner left the meeting to take a call and never returned.
The meeting lasted only a few more minutes.
“Look, we’re at the electoral stage; we’re not there yet,” Don Jr. interrupted, referencing any suggestion to change policy presumably related to the Magnitsky Act and Russian adoptions.
“[W]e don’t know if we’ll ever win this campaign; if we win the campaign, we could get back to the topic and continue this topic, continue discussion; but at this point we ‘re busy with other things, we’re in the electoral campaign.”
The meeting appears to have lasted between 20–30 minutes, with both sides leaving feeling like it had not met expectations.
As they left the conference room, the meeting participants ran into Ivanka Trump and said a brief hello on their way to the elevator.
Goldstone, embarrassed that the meeting did not yield a bit of smoking gun information against Hillary Clinton as he had promised, apologized to Don Jr. as they left the meeting.
He then called Emin Agalarov and told him the meeting had been an embarrassment, which surprised Emin.
Goldstone also described the meeting to Kaveladze as an embarrassment, but both recognized that the meeting had been strongly sought by their mutual boss Aras Agalarov.
After the meeting Veselnitskaya, Akhmetshin, Kaveladze and Samochornov retreated to the Trump Tower bar. After Veselnitskaya expressed disappointment in how the meeting went, Akhmetshin and Kaveladze suggested that it was worth it simply to have introduced the Trump team to the topics of the Magnitsky Act and Russian adoptions that she had wanted to get across.
As they drank, Aras Agalarov called Kaveladze and asked how the meeting went. Claiming to feel unable to speak freely in Veslnitskaya’s presence, Kaveladze said it went well. Veselnitskaya asked to be placed on the phone and thanked Agalarov for setting up the meeting.
After they left the bar and parted ways, Kaveladze said he spoke with Agalarov again after he was alone and explained that the meeting was a disaster and a waste of time.
Aftermath, Conclusion, and Analysis
What is to be made of this bizarre sequence of events?
First, it must be emphasized, inconsistent and conflicting testimony and limited documentary evidence make it difficult to piece together exactly what took place and was said during the meeting.
It is a violation of Federal law for a foreign national to provide anything of value to a campaign in a U.S. election. Upon being offered the information, instead of informing the FBI, Donald Trump Jr. took the meeting.
While it is conceivable, if not excusable, that Don Jr. and Jared Kushner, as relative political novices, might not be aware of Federal election law, Paul Manafort as a seasoned campaign certainly would have.
As evidenced by the explicit mention of information provided by a Russian prosecutor that would incriminate Hillary, the rapidity with which Don Jr. accepted the meeting, and the fact that the tip tier campaign leadership sat in on it, there can be no doubt that the Trump campaign expected to receive something of value.
Veselnitskaya’s connections to the Russian prosecutor’s office, her known links to the Russian intelligence services and the amount of attention paid to the Prevezon matter, as a proxy for attacking the Magnitsky sanctions, by the highest levels of Russian government and Putin’s personal associates, as evidenced by the numerous meetings arranged for Dana Rohrabacher in Moscow to discuss the matter with high ranking, KGB-linked individuals such as Vladimir Yakunin and Konstantin Kosachev, all suggest that Russian intelligence would have known of the June 9th meeting, if not had a hand in arranging it via Aras Agalarov, whose own links to Russian intelligence and organized crime have been explored at length in a previous article.
Former CIA director Michael Hayden has described the June 9th Trump Tower meeting as having “the classic outlines of a Russian intelligence soft approach.”
Simply by agreeing to take a meeting at which illegal information was explicitly being offered, the Trump team could have provided Russian intelligence with valuable insights.
The meeting makes even more sense if, like the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations, it is seen in the context of a Russian intelligence operation as much targeting the Trump campaign as it was intending to help it.
By creating an incriminating situation that was only known by the Trump team and the Russians, Russian intelligence may very well have lured Don Jr. and by extension his father into a counterintelligence and potential blackmail trap.
Several events took place immediately following the meeting that are of note.
On June 10th, Goldstone emailed Rhona Graff informing her that Aras and Emin Agalarov would be sending Trump a “sizable” gift for his upcoming birthday on the 14th.
Over the coming days, the Agalarov’s staff arranged for a large painting, the first part of a triptych, to be delivered to Trump Tower.
The other two paintings in the series were to be delivered on Trump’s subsequent birthdays. According to Goldstone, the value of the three paintings was $100,000.
On June 14th, Trump’s birthday, The Washington Post broke the story that the DNC had been hacked. Goldstone first became aware of the news while watching CNN.
Later that morning, Goldstone emailed Emin Agalarov and Irakli Kaveladze with a CNN article attached that reported the cybersecurity firm FireEye attributed the cyberattack to hackers linked to the Russian government. “Top story right now,” Goldstone wrote, “seems eerily weird based on our Trump meeting last week with the Russian lawyers etc.”
“Very interesting,” Kaveladze replied 13-minutes later.
The day before, on the 13th, Paula Shugart, the President of the Miss Universe Organization who had worked with Trump on the 2013 Moscow pageant, met with Rob Goldstone and later recalled what he told her. “He did say that he saw Don at a ridiculous meeting, where he went and they supposedly had emails from the Democrats and dirt on Hillary and then it turned out to be something about adoptions; and it was just ridiculous and it was just stupid,” Shugart later told the Senate Intelligence Committee about her conversation with Goldstone.
By testifying that Goldstone explicitly mentioned “emails from the democrats” only days after the meeting and a day before the Post story, Shugart contradicts the testimony of the attendees of the June 9th meeting, none of whom ever claimed that emails related to Hillary or the Democrats had been mentioned during the meeting.
Whether Shugart’s testimony and recollection can be relied upon against the word of those at the meeting cannot be satisfactorily determined. However, when specifically asked again whether Goldstone had used the word emails, she replied in the affirmative. “He said ‘emails.’ I don’t know if he identified them as ‘Democrat’ emails. The word ‘Democrat’ was in there, because there was something about Russian donors to Hillary, and I believe that was where the word ‘Democrat’ came… But it was basically that was the dirt, was going to be Russian donors to Hillary’s campaign that they had through emails.”
“After I saw the news report,” Shugart said, referring to the June 14th report, “I called Rob in 2016 and said: This sounds like what you were talking about. At which point he said: Oh, no; that meeting about the adoption, it was all-that’s what it was; it was a stupid meeting. So at that point, I was led [by Rob] to believe that I didn’t hear what I thought I heard.”
Associated Kremlin Influence Operations Targeting the US Congress
Read the about the origins of the anti-Magnitsky Act Kremlin influence campaign targeting the US Congress, and involving Representative Dana Rohrabacher, in the previous article.
Following the Trump Tower meeting, Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin continued to pursue the anti-Magnitsky Act influence campaign, taking it to the nation’s capital.
Upon returning from his April trip to Moscow, Republican Congressional Representative Dana Rohrabacher held up the passage of the Global Magnitsky Act, a law designed to expand the sanctions regime established by the first Magnitsky Act in 2012 to deal with human rights abusers the world over.
Using information that had been gleaned from the documents provided to him by the Russian Prosecutor’s Office, Rohrabacher attempted to have Magnitsky’s name removed from the legislation.
With the help of Rinat Akhmetshin, Rohrabacher and Paul Behrends then attempted to arrange for a subcommittee hearing that would screen an anti-Browder documentary Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes, a copy of which had been provided to Rohrabacher in Moscow.
Following the screening, Veselnitskaya was to be a witness. The hearing was only cancelled when the committee chairman Ed Royce (R-CA) caught wind of it and shut it down to avoid an embarrassing debacle for the Republican Party. He ultimately rescheduled it as a general committee hearing on relations with Russia which was to take place on June 14th.
The groundwork for the Capitol Hill lobbying campaign had been laid shortly after Rohrabacher and Behrends had returned from Moscow.
In mid-May, Paul Behrends communicated with BakerHostetler attorney Mark Cymrot, who briefed him on anti-Browder and Magnitsky talking points.
Behrends had for some time acted as Veselnitskaya’s and Akhmetshin’s chief contact in the U.S. Capitol.
Akmetshin visited Rohrabacher’s Congressional office on May 17th, with the former Democratic Congressman from California and lobbyist Ron Dellums in tow.
Behrends, in an unusual act for a Congressional staffer, led Akhmetshin and Dellums around the Congress to meet with top committee Democrats.
According to Politico, Congressional staffers and his fellow Foreign Affairs Committee repeatedly pointed out the holes and evasions in the talking points the Kremlin Rohrabacher had provided him, but he remained unconvinced.
Akhmetshin’s appearance in the halls of Congress did not go unnoticed, either. Upon seeing him, House Foreign Affairs Committee staffer Kyle Parker sent an email around to his colleagues warning that Akhmetshin had spied for the Soviets and that he “specializes in active measures campaigns.”
The day before the hearing, June 13th, Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes was screened at the Newseum in Washington, DC. The controversial screening was organized on behalf of Denis Katsyv by a reporter-turned-lobbyist named Chris Cooper.
Natalia Veselnitskaya handled the worldwide promotion of the film, while an intern from Dana Rohrabacher’s Congressional office handled official invitations, with emails that promised that watching the film would leave viewers convinced Magnitsky was no hero.
On the day of the hearing itself, which took place on the day the Post broke the Russian involvement in the DNC hacking story, Rohrabacher compared Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin as though it were a compliment and submitted into the congressional record testimony that suggested the Russian security services were not behind the assassination of Alexander Litvenenko by means of radioactive polonium.
The hearing was attended by Veselnitskaya, who sat next to a Republican consultant named Lanny Wiles, a mutual acquaintance of Rinat Akhmetshin and Paul Manafort, who had reserved her seat at the hearing.
Wiles’ wife Susie was chair of the Trump campaign in Florida at the time.
Later that evening, Rohrabacher, Behrends, Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin dined together at the Capitol Hill Club. Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin had much to celebrate, it had been a busy few days between meeting the top leadership of the Trump campaign in New York and gallivanting around the United States Congress flogging Kremlin talking points.
Rohrabacher and Behrends’ seemingly pro-Kremlin activities hadn’t gone unnoticed by their Republican colleagues. The next day, June 15th, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy was recorded as saying: “There are two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.”
McCarthy’s fellow Republican Congressmen laughed.