Kremlin Influence Campaigns and the Origins of the June 9th Trump Tower Meeting
This article covers the complex origins of the infamous June 9th, 2016 Trump Tower meeting, and describes how it was but one part of a multifaceted, multi-year Kremlin influence campaign that targeted multiple branches of the US Government.
It is part one of the series “Kremlin Influence Campaigns and the June 9th Trump Tower Meeting.”
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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The June 9th meeting at Trump Tower held between senior figures in the Trump campaign and Russians promising compromising material on Hillary Clinton can only be understood as but one part of a larger influence campaign pursued by the Russian government to overturn the 2012 Magnitsky Act.
Read my description of the events that led to the passage of the Magnitsky Act, including the death of Sergei Magnitsky and the activities of investor, activist and Putin-critic Bill Browder, here.
While the Trump team was looking no further than the upcoming election, the Kremlin was playing a longer game. The meeting on June 9th amounted to a self-inflicted counterintelligence nightmare, both for the Trump campaign and the later Trump presidency.
The Magnitsky Act sanction regime was inspired by a 2007 scheme to defraud Russian tax payers of $230 million dollars. The case involved predatory actions taken by members of the Russian state and organized crime against Hermitage Capital Management, at that time the largest foreign investment fund in Russia.
Fund manager Bill Browder had his tax advisor Sergei Magnitsky look into the case. Magnitsky discovered a vast tax fraud perpetrated by members of the Russian government allied with organized crime. He was later imprisoned by Russian authorities, deprived of medical care and, according to Browder beaten to death.
In large part due to Browder’s personal advocacy, in 2012 the United States passed the Magnitsky Act. While the original act targeted Russian officials involved in Magnitsky’s death with sanctions, it has been built upon overtime to target those in the power structure around Putin.
Infuriated by the law, Putin responded by banning Americans from adopting Russian children, depriving tens of thousands of Russian orphans of a chance for a better life.
With the emergence of the Trump candidacy, the Russians saw an opportunity to have the act overturned. As we shall see, the Trump Campaign was more than willing to play ball.
Aras Agalarov and Origins of the June 9th Trump Tower Meeting
“Good morning,” British publicist Rob Goldstone wrote to Donald Trump Jr. on June 3rd, 2016. “Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting.”
Goldstone had been contacted earlier that morning by Emin Agalarov, who asked if he would contact the Trump’s and explain that his father Aras Agalarov had met with a well-connected Russian lawyer who claimed to have access to information showing that illicit Russian funding may have made its way into the coffers of the Democratic Party and its nominee for president, Hillary Clinton.
“Could you articulate,” Goldstone asked. “[W]hat does that mean? Who is this person?”
“It doesn’t matter; all you need to do is get the meeting,” Emin replied. “Ike [Kaveladze] will coordinate it. You don ‘t have to attend. And you don’t have to report back on it to me. You just have to get a meeting.”
Following several more entreaties by Goldstone, who claimed to feel uncomfortable with the request, Emin emphasized that the lawyer was well-connected. “There’s information, it’s potentially damaging to the Democrats and Hillary, and I think you should contact the Trumps; my dad would really like this meeting to take place.”
Crocus employee Irakli “Ike” Kaveladze, who years earlier had been implicated in suspected money laundering in the United States and had months earlier had gone back and forth on a potential Trump Tower Moscow project, learned of his boss’s request for Emin to reach out to the Trump’s shortly after it was made.
Read my description of Donald Trump’s business and personal connections to the Kremlin, Russian intelligence, and organized crime-linked Agalarov family, as well as Irakli Kaveladze’s alleged involvement in money laundering, here.
Kaveladze understood that Aras Agalarov was “directly and personally involved” in the effort and knew that the potential meeting between the Trump team and the Russian lawyer was Agalarov’s “initiative and project.”
He suspected it was being done as a favor, but to whom and for what reason he couldn’t say.
Goldstone had been in regular contact with the Trump’s throughout the presidential campaign.
Roughly six months earlier, on January 19th, Goldstone put Don Jr. and Trump’s personal assistant Rhona Graff in contact with Konstantin Sidorkov, the Partner Relations Manager at VKontakte (VK), Russia’s largest social media site.
Sidorkov had reached out to Goldstone and explained that VK had 2.7 million profiles created by Russian-Americans living in the United States, in other words potential voters.
“We want to invite Donald Trump to set up an official page on VK, which will have the latest updates from Donald and maybe Russian translation,” Sidorkov wrote to Goldstone, who forwarded the message to Don Jr.
“Also we will make a huge promotion for it with our marketing instruments and put this page to user’s recommendation [including] targeting to all of our audience.”
“Thank you for bringing this terrific opportunity to our attention,” Graff replied. She subsequently put Dan Scavino, the head of social media for the Trump campaign, in touch with Goldstone and Sidorkov.
Scavino and Goldstone engaged in a back and forth over a period of months with Sidorkov, who continued to reach out to the campaign as late as November 5th, 2016. Despite these communications, there is no evidence that the Trump team ever went beyond initial discussions on the proposed partnership with VK.
There are strong reasons to believe that VK is under the influence of the Russian intelligence services. The platform had been used extensively by the Internet Research Agency, and Sidorkov’s proposal to promote Trump was broadly in keeping with overall Russian efforts to assist his campaign.
Two years earlier the original founder of VK told The Moscow Times that he was forced to sell his shares of the company due to the pressure from the FSB. The shares were sold to Alisher Usmanov, an Uzbek-born Russian oligarch with links to the Solntsevskaya Bratva.
In a partnership with the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, Usmanov later purchased a considerable stake in Facebook.
While there is no evidence that Trump campaign was aware of these facts, they had been published in both the Russian and Western press and would have been available to anyone who looked into the matter.
Between January and early June, Goldstone reached out to Don Jr. and the Trump campaign periodically, offering congratulations on primary victories and facilitating the exchange of similar messages between Trump and Aras Agalarov.
Thus, when Aras wanted to put Trump in touch with the “well-connected” Russian lawyer, he had his son Emin do so through Goldstone.
“The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning,” Goldstone wrote to Donald Trump Jr. on June 3rd, despite the fact that no such position existed in Russia.
Goldstone was actually referring to the Russian Prosecutor-General, similar to the Attorney General position in the United States.
Goldstone continued, “and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump — helped along by Aras and Emin.”
“Thanks Rob I appreciate that,” Don Jr. replied. “I am on the road at the moment but perhaps I just speak to Emin first. Seems we have some time and if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer. Could we do a call first thing next week when I am back?”
Natalia Veselnitskaya’s Connections to Russia’s Government and Intelligence Services
The lawyer Aras Agalarov connected to Donald Trump Jr. via his son and Goldstone was named Natalia Veselnitskaya. She was assessed by the Senate Intelligence Committee to have “significant connections” to the Russian government and intelligence services.
Veselnitskaya served as a prosecutor for the Central Administrative District of the Russian Prosecutor’s Office from 1998 to 2001.
In 2003, she established her own law firm, Kamerton Consulting. Veselnitskaya further cemented her connection to the Russian Prosecutor’s Office through her marriage to Alexander Mitusov, the former deputy prosecutor for the Moscow Region.
Moscow Region, where Veselnitskaya operated, included the administrative district surrounding Moscow but not the city itself and was famous for its corruption. It contained valuable land where the previous Soviet nomenklatura kept country residences.
In the post-Soviet period, land that once consisted of collective farms was purchased for pennies on the dollar. Ruthless battles took place between corporate raiders to seize control of the land in a practice known in Russian as reiderstvo. The disputes that arose, often between members of the Russian government or between the oligarchs, is where Veselnitskaya made her mark.
She earned a fierce reputation and claimed to have won over 300 cases, often threatening her foes with aggressive action by the Russian government.
Through her husband, who left the Russian Prosecutor’s Office to become the deputy transport minister, Veselnitskaya met and began to legally represent the powerful Russian Transport Minister Pyotr Katsyv.
According to Atlantic Council Resident Senior Fellow Damir Marusic and Russian reporter Karina Orlova, “Katsyv was born in Khmelnitsky Oblast in Ukraine, in a small Jewish town, in 1953. He may have been recruited by the KGB to watch over his community (the Fifth Directorate had a special Jewish Department for keeping an eye on Jewish dissidents), and gained his earliest connections that way.”
Veselnitskaya represented Katsyv in a number of cases, and in a 2012 article published in Novaya Gazeta she was accused of participating in the land raiding schemes with Kastyv and her husband.
In one instance, a Russian anti-corruption nonprofit called Spravedlivost released a series of articles accusing Veselnitskaya’s husband Alexander Mitusov and his boss Pyotr Katsyv of using their government positions to corruptly seize valuable land.
Speaking to Michael Isikoff and David Corn for their book Russian Roulette, Andrei Stolbunov, the attorney who ran Spravedlivost, claimed that Veselnitskaya told him that she was working with the FSB and the Russian Prosecutors Office and threatened him with prison.
Stolbunov was threatened with extortion charges and fled to the US where he was granted political asylum.
Between 2005 and 2013, Veselnitskaya successfully represented “military unit 55002” of the FSB in a property dispute in which they hoped to evict private companies from an office building and seize control of the land.
At the time, it was widely understood that elements of the FSB, which were supposed to be investigating and prosecuting economic crimes, were themselves involved in the illegal land raiding. Oftentimes government officials ordered the FSB to confiscate the land in the first place.
In addition to representing the FSB in land disputes, starting in 2013 or 2014 Veselnitskaya performed the same kind of work for Aras Agalarov and his real estate and development company Crocus.
Agalarov was also a close associate of Pyotr Katsyv, who in 2014 was made the Vice President of Russian Railways, the gargantuan Russian state rail company with annual revenues comprising nearly 2% of the Russian GDP.
Years earlier, in 2006, Putin elevated his close ally and a fellow senior KGB officer Vladimir Yakunin as the President of Russian Railways. It was part of a process that came to be known as “Kremlin Inc,” in which Putin placed his fellow KGB officials in charge of strategic sectors of the Russian economy.
Veselnitskaya, Yury Chaika and the Prevezon Money Laundering Case
While Veselnitskaya’s connection to Agalarov partially explains how she ended up with an invitation to meet Donald Trump Jr., it is only half the story. Veselnitskaya was in New York in early June 2016 working on a complex case involving Russian money laundering into the United States.
In September of 2013, United States Attorney Preet Bharara launched a civil forfeiture complaint against Prevezon Holdings, a Cyprus-based company with real estate holdings in Manhattan owned by Denis Katsyv, Pyotr Katsyv’s son.
Bharara accused Prevezon of laundering money that was part of the alleged $230 million tax fraud discovered by Sergei Magnitsky. To help with their legal defense, the Kastyv’s turned to Natalia Veselnitskaya.
In 2012, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), Novaya Gazeta, Barron’s jointly revealed that a portion of the money stolen in the $230 million tax fraud had been diverted to Prevezon Holdings.
In December of 2015, Denis Katsyv, Pytotr Katsyv’s son, was made the beneficial owner of Prevezon.
An Israeli citizen, in 2005 Katsyv was forced to pay a 35 million shekel settlement payment to Israeli authorities after being indicted for laundering money from a company called Martash Investment Holdings through the Tel Aviv branch of Bank Hapoalim.
While Denis Katsyv became the official beneficiary of Prevezon months after the Magnitsky fraud money sloshed through its accounts, the previous beneficiary owner was a Russian citizen named Alexander Litvak.
Katskyv and Litvak were partners in Martash Investment Holdings, which also was a minority shareholder in Prevezon.
The legal action brought against Prevezon drew the attention of the highest levels of the Russian government and judiciary. While US prosecutors only attempted to seize $14 million worth of Manhattan real estate from Prevezon, up to $40 million was spent on its defense.
The Kremlin’s efforts to prevent a full-scale investigation into the Magnitsky tax fraud appear not only designed to protect the Katsyv’s personal interests and attack the American sanctions regime, but also to cover up the funding of an illegal Russian chemical weapons program.
Prevezon was just one node in a corrupt network of companies that received part of the $230 million stolen from Russian taxpayers.
According to French authorities, two shell companies registered in New Zealand also received a portion of the stolen money, which then turned around and wired $1 million in black cash to Roil-Chemie, a German chemical company sanctioned in 2021 for its role in the Russian chemical weapons program.
Another recipient of the Magnitsky cash sent $1.5 million to a now defunct company which conducted business with Roil-Chemie and was discovered by the State Department to be guilty of hundreds of International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) violations.
While advising Prevezon, Veselnitskaya represented to the American court overseeing the case that she was acting in a private capacity. Her interactions with the Russian Prosecutor’s Office, however, reveal that she was in fact illegally working on behalf of the Russian government.
In March of 2014, the US government sent a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) request to the Russian government for information regarding Prevezon.
Veselnitskaya helped the Russian Prosecutor’s Office draft their response. She then colluded with the Russian Prosecutor’s Office to conceal the role she had played in devising the MLAT response, which she later used in court as a supposed third party in her defense of Prevezon.
Veselnitskaya was a former Russian prosecutor and a close associate of the Prosecutor General of Russia, Yury Chaika.
Chaika, who is close to Aras Agalarov, played a pivotal role in Vladimir Putin’s rise to power. He also, in his role on Putin’s powerful Security Council, is deeply enmeshed in Russia’s security and intelligence establishment. Sitting alongside Chaika on the Security Council are former FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev and current FSB head Alexander Bortnikov.
Throughout the Prevezon case, Veselnitskaya regularly took calls from Chaika and briefed him on legal developments emanating from New York.
The earliest records we have of Chaika date back to 1979 when he investigated the deaths of five inmates who were killed during a riot at Tulun Central prison. Coincidentally, one of the inmates at the time was the infamous vor and future Trump Tower occupant, Vyacheslav Ivankov.
According to The New Times, Chaika was accused of bringing narcotics to prisoners’ cells in order to exchange for confessions.
Between 1986 and 1990, Chaika went back and forth between the prosecutors office and the Communist Party before finally becoming the top prosecutor for Irkutsk Province, in Siberia.
While his job was to combat organized crime, accusations dogged Chaika that he was friends with alleged Russian corporate raiders who years later were accused by Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation of being involved in illegal business practices with Chaika’s son, Artem Chaika.
A close friend and former partner of Chaika’s at the office established what came to be known as the “prosecutor’s gang” consisting of former security officers and was involved with several ethnically-motivated gangland murders.
In addition to these criminal associations, Chaika was also accused of accepting a bribe in the form of a gold Longines watch and of cooking the accounting books and having nearly a million dollars vanish during the construction of a law institute in Irkutsk.
Chaika was later hired by Russian Prosecutor General Yuri Skuratov, who served from 1995–1999, as his first deputy. Skuratov played a central role in the events that led to Boris Yeltsin’s designation of Vladimir Putin as his heir apparent.
In order to unseat Skuratov, who was investigating Yeltsin and Putin, a tape of a man who looked like Skuratov cavorting with prostitutes was released on Russian state television and later “authenticated” by Putin, who was at that time the head of the FSB.
After Skuratov was forced out, Chaika became the acting Prosecutor General and confirmed the legality of the proceedings against Skuratov.
Once Putin became President, he moved Chaika to the Justice Ministry where he busied himself with rubber stamping Putin’s swift centralization of power. He further consistently rejected attempts by opposition groups to register as official political parties, as well as led an attack against NGO’s working to foster civil society and democracy within Russia.
By 2006, he was officially re-elevated to Skuratov’s old position as Prosecutor General. In this capacity, he acted as Putin’s loyal servant.
In 2011, he went out of his way to publicly declare that the protests against Putin’s accession to a third term in office were paid for with foreign money.
Given Veselnitskaya’s close relationship with Yury Chaika, and Chaika’s position within Putin’s power structure, which was the ultimate target of the Magnitsky Act sanctions, we can see a direct line linking her and the Prevezon case to the highest levels of the Russian government.
All these actors, working in concert, believed that the Prevezon case could be used to discredit Bill Browder, the man whose activism was responsible for the passage of the Magnitsky Act sanctions.
Browder himself was indeed largely responsible for the launching of the SDNY case against Prevezon. In December of 2012, he personally delivered a letter outlining the detailed allegations against Prevezon to the New York District Attorney.
In October of 2015, Veselnitskaya provided Chaika with a report that turned the Prevezon allegations on their head and accused Bill Browder of committing tax fraud against the Russian Federation.
She accused Browder’s Hermitage Capital Management and its American investors, the billionaire Ziff Brothers, of illegally purchasing shares in Gazprom and then evading $16 million in Russian taxes.
This report was later not only used in the June 9th Trump Tower meeting, as we shall see, but was the centerpiece of a highly coordinated, Kremlin-led influence campaign to undermine the American sanctions regime.
Prevezon, BakerHostetler and Rinat Akhmetshin: Agents of Influence
While Veselnitskaya was a key intermediary between Prevezon and the Russian government, she spoke little English and was unable to practice law in American courts. As a result, Prevezon hired high profile American law firms to lead its defense, most notably BakerHostetler.
The firm also assisted in the development of a sophisticated lobbying campaign, an offshoot of which culminated in the Trump Tower Meeting, and another which reached into the hallways of Congress.
An unusual circumstance, however, complicated matters.
In 2008, John Moscow, a BakerHostetler attorney who formerly worked at the New York County District Attorney’s Office, had been hired by Browder to represent Hermitage and look into the Magnitsky tax fraud case. In December of that year, Moscow, who was retained for $200,000, met with prosecutors from SDNY and convinced them to take on the case.
For reasons that remain mysterious, John Moscow and BakerHostetler switched sides. In October of 2013, less than a month after the SDNY initiated legal action against Prevezon, John Moscow appeared in court on the company’s behalf.
Shocked and appalled, Browder and his lawyers filed to have Moscow and BakerHostetler disqualified from representing Prevezon. Their request, however, took almost three years to wind its way through the courts.
In the meantime, BakerHostetler worked diligently on Prevezon’s behalf.
In September of 2015, the firm retained the services of the Russian-born American citizen and Washington lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin. As an attendee of the Trump Tower meeting, a bit of background on Akhmetshin is in order.
Rinat Akhmetshin: Former Soviet Counterintelligence Agent Turned Black PR and Leak Artist
A former Soviet counterintelligence officer, in the late 1980s Akhmetshin worked for the kommandant service, a branch of the Soviet military that provided protection and support to a KGB unit attached to the Soviet military designed to ferret out foreign spies.
While Akhmetshin has described his role as little more than ferrying around documents and a brief stint serving in Afghanistan, little is known about his actual duties.
In 1994, Akhmetshin immigrated to the United States to attend graduate school. Four years later, he entered into the world of Washington lobbying after answering an ad to run the International Eurasian Institute for Economic and Political Research, which claimed it existed to “help expand democracy and the rule of law in Eurasia.”
The position was arranged by Edward Lieberman, a DC-based lawyer with extensive professional ties to Russia.
Lieberman’s wife, Evelyn S. Lieberman, served as Bill Clinton’s deputy chief of staff from 1996–1997 and had known Hillary Clinton as far back as the 1980s. Through this connection, Akhmetshin met Hillary Clinton in passing during several parties at the Lieberman’s.
While at the International Eurasia Institute, Akhmetshin lobbied on behalf of Akezhan Kazhegeldin. After attending Moscow’s KGB academy, where he was kicked out in 1989 for involvement in the black market scrap metal trade, Kazhegeldin eventually became Prime Minister under Kazakhstan’s authoritarian leader Nursultan Nazarbayev.
After making a fortune in the privatization of Kazakhstan’s major industries, Kazhegeldin rebranded himself as a democracy activist and took on Nazarbayev without much success.
In 1998, while in Kazakhstan lobbying on Kazhegeldin’s behalf, Akhmetshin met and befriended a New York Times reporter named Steven Levin, to whom he ultimately leaked a trove of documents linking millions of dollars in payments from international oil companies to Nazabayev’s Swiss bank accounts. The leak led to a Times story and an investigation by the American Department of Justice.
It also established what would later become an Akhmetshin modus operandi of leaking materials to the press on behalf of his clients.
In 2005 Akhmetshin popped up in Kyrgyzstan, where he was hired by the government to look into allegations that the United States had bribed the country’s former President to keep open an American military base that was essential to the ongoing American operations in Afghanistan. At the time, the base was at the center of a conflict between the US and Russia.
Akmetshin arranged for the New York Times reporter David S. Cloud to interview the Kyrgyz Ambassador at the time and the article that followed alleged potential bribery and malfeasance and the American military’s awarding of contracts that ultimately launched a Congressional investigation and complicated American interests in the region.
Between 2009 and 2014, Akhmetshin worked closely with Viktor Ivanov, a former KGB agent who later served as the deputy head of the FSB.
At the time, Ivanov was traveling regularly to Washington, DC to promote a joint Russian and American endeavor to combat the narcotics trade coming out of Afghanistan.
In October of 2010, Akhmetshin guided Ivanov throughout Washington, making arrangements relating to the trip with an Ivanov aid whom he had served with in the Red Army. The anti-narcotics initiative was shelved after the Russian annexation of Crimea.
Akhmetshin later testified that he been in email contact with Ivanov on matters ranging “from narco-trafficking and terrorism in Afghanistan to surveillance of undercover agents, suspected undercover agents and their identities.”
In an eerie parallel to the GRU’s 2016 election activities, Akhmetshin has been linked to at least two alleged hack and leak operations.
In 2011, he gained the former Russian Finance Minister Andrey Vavilov as a client. Vavilov had made a fortune during the early Putin years in an insider deal that was accused of being rife with kickbacks.
A portion of Vavilov’s fortune was funneled into Manhattan real estate, where in 2009 he purchased a $37.5 million penthouse at the Time Warner Center.
Among the numerous wealthy Russians in the building that Vavilov could now count as neighbors was his close associate and the former Russian representative to the IMF, Konstantin Kagalovsky, whose wife Natasha Gurfinkel had been ensnared in the 1999 multi-billion dollar Bank of New York money launder scandal which the FBI had linked to Semyon Mogilevich.
Read my article covering Semyon Mogilevich and the Bank of New York money laundering scandal here.
The Time Warner Center was also where the think tank the Center for the National Interest hosted its luncheon featuring Henry Kissinger, where Jared Kushner first met Dimitri Simes.
Read my article about the Kushner and the Trump Campaign’s relationship with Dimitri Simes here.
In 2011, Andrey Vavilov and an alliance of Russian businessmen that included Suleiman Kerimov, who in 2017 was arrested in France on suspicions of money laundering and tax fraud, hired Akhmetshin to derail the US visa application of a Russian businessman named Ashot Egiazaryan.
Egiazaryan later accused Akhmetshin of coordinating a black PR campaign slandering him in the media as being antisemetic.
In 2011, Egiazaryan’s lawyers received emails containing sophisticated malware that allowed computers later traced back to an office belonging to a Kerimov company to open sensitive documents. While Akhmetshin later said that he was only paid by Vavilov, he did admit to being in contact with people working for Kerimov.
What, if any, role Akhmetshin played in the hack is unclear.
Shortly after the Egiazaryan episode, Akhmetshin was accused in an American court of overseeing a hack and leak operation in what appears to have been a bitter internecine turf battle between powerful forces within the Russian power structure, both with ties to organized crime and the Russian security services.
In 2015, International Mining Resources (IMR), a private LLC registered in the Netherlands and owned by the Kazakh trio of oligarchs Alexander Mashkevich, Patokh Chodiev and Alijan Ibragimov, sued Akhmetshin and the clients he represented.
Akhmetshin had been retained by a law firm representing an IMR competitor named Eurochem.
Eurochem’s owner, yet another billionaire Russian oligarch named Andrey Melnichenko, had made his fortune through the establishment of MDM Bank, which later allowed him to diversify into other areas and establish the mineral and chemical company Eurochem.
MDM Bank, among others, was suspected of being involved in the Bank of New York money laundering scandal.
IMR accused Akhmetshin of orchestrating a hacking campaign against it and personally providing the stolen data via a thumb drive to his clients as well as to the press.
IMR dropped the lawsuit without explanation in early 2016.
At one point prior to the Maidan Revolution, Akhmetshin attempted to gain business representing Viktor Yanukovych and the Party of Regions.
According to Sam Patten, a lobbyist who had worked in Ukraine with Paul Manafort and had been friends with Akhmetshin for 15 to 20 years, Akhmetshin at one point managed to arrange a meeting with Serhiy Lyovochkin while Yanukovych was visiting New York to attend a meeting of the UN General Assembly.
Lyovochkin, who was serving as Yanukovych’s chief of staff at the time, was later one of the recipients of private data from the Trump campaign.
Read my description of Paul Manafort’s relationship with Serhiy Lyovochkin here, and Manafort’s provision of internal Trump Campaign polling data to Lyovochkin here.
According to Patten, the meeting was interrupted by Manafort and Kilimnik, who acted to defend their business.
Patten later told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Akhmetshin and Kilimnik may have met outside of his presence more than once.
According to The New York Times, Akhmetshin has described himself to journalists as a longtime acquaintance of Manafort.
Akhmetshin, however, told the House and Senate Intelligence Committee’s that he had never met Manafort prior to June 9th.
While the nature and extent of their relationship is unclear, what is clear is the remarkable similarities between the two men’s professional lives. Both have engaged in black PR campaigns on behalf of wealthy Russian clients with close links to Vladimir Putin and the power structure he undergirds.
Veselnitskaya, Akhmetshin, Fake NGO’s and an Anti-Magnitsky Act Influence Operation
In October of 2015 Akhmetshin met with Natalia Veselnitskaya and her translator, Anatoli Samochornov, at BakerHostetler’s offices in New York to strategize about the Prevezon case and the broader lobbying campaign against the Magnitsky Act.
In November, Veselnitskaya filed the Russian Prosecutor’s Office report into Bill Browder and Hermitage with the US Court, illegally failing to disclose her role in its drafting.
According to Bloomberg, by December Akhmetshin’s longtime friend and business partner Ed Lieberman suggested that in order to more effectively lobby against the Magnitsky sanctions they should establish a Foundation for American families impacted by Russia’s adoption ban.
As described earlier, in retaliation for the passage of the Magnitsky Act, Putin banned American families from adopting Russian children in a decree that impacted thousands of Russian orphans and their potential American parents. Thus it is important to note that any mention of Russian adoptions is, in fact, coded language referring to the Magnitsky sanctions.
In February of 2016, Ed Lieberman and lawyers from BakerHostetler established the Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation (HRAGI), registering it in Delaware.
A man named Robert Araklian was listed as HRAGI’s president, treasurer, secretary and director. Despite his titles, Araklian, who would later tell investigators that he had been hired personally by Denis Katsyv in a meeting attended by Veselnitskaya, Akhmetshin and Lieberman, did not have any real authority to make decisions or hire anyone.
Despite ostensibly being an American Foundation, funding for HRAGI came from wealthy Russians with connections to Pyotr Katsyv.
Denis Katsyv “donated” $150,000 to the organization.
His Russian business partners Mikhail Ponomarev and Albert Nasibulin gave $100,000 each.
Vladimir Lelyukh, the deputy general director of a subsidiary owned by the Russian state-owned Sberbank, Sberbank Capital LLC, donated $50,000.
Lastly, a company with unknown ownership called Berryle Trading sent HRAGI $50,000 from an account in Germany.
The presence of Lelyukh on the small list of HRAGI funders, as well as his role at Sberbank, raises a few interesting connections to Donald Trump.
During the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, Trump enjoyed at two-hour private dinner with Sberbank CEO Herman Gref and the Agalarov’s.
Read my description of Donald Trump’s interactions with Herman Gref during the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow here.
Sberbank’s CEO, Ashot Khachaturyants, is a former high ranking official at the FSB. In 2016, Gref, Khachaturyants and Sberbank Capital were sued for seizing control of a Russian granite company.
The lawyer they brought on to defend them against the charges was Marc Kasowitz, who also served as Donald Trump’s personal attorney and later defended him during the various Russia investigations that took place during his presidency.
Bill Browder later testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that HRAGI was established to help Akhmetshin and BakerHostetler avoid having to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA).
In addition to sidestepping FARA, leaked emails show that lawyers at BakerHostetler looked into ways of cloaking Russian donations to the Foundation.
On March 17th, 2016, Mark Cymrot, a BakerHostetler attorney working alongside John Moscow on behalf of Prevezon, wrote the following in reference to HRAGI. “Is it possible to open a Fund account here in Russia, so we can collect money in donations and then pay them into an account anonymously in the U.S.?”
Nor was the establishment of HRAGI the only Prevezon-related anti-Magnitsky Act activity that took place in this time frame.
In early 2016, the Russian billionaire oligarch Vasily Anisimov sought to hire the former Director of the FBI-turned Washington lobbyist Louis Freeh to work with Natalia Veselnitskaya on the Prevezon case.
Through his ownership stake in the Russian mining and metallurgy company Metalloinvest, Anisimov is business partners with Alisher Usmanov and Andrei Skoch, both of whom have links to the Moscow-based Solntsevskaya Bratva criminal syndicate.
Anisimov was connected to Freeh by Imre Pakh, a yet another Russian with connections to organized crime whose business partner, Alexander Rovt, was part owner of a financial house that lent Paul Manafort’s LLC Summerbreeze $3.5 million immediately after he was fired from the campaign in August of 2016.
Read my description of Rovt, and Paul Manafort’s mysterious real estate and finacial transactions during the 2016 election, here.
Freeh was not the first FBI director to work on behalf of Russian organized criminals, in 2007 it was reported that former Director of the FBI William Sessions was acting as a lawyer for the Eurasian Crime lord Semyon Mogilevich.
In 2016, Freeh attended numerous meetings in Moscow, at least one of which was attended by senior Russian government officials and another that was attended by Veselnitskaya.
His first meeting in Moscow was attended by Pyotr Kastsyv, Yury Chaika and an Associate Managing Director of Freeh’s lobbying firm.
Topics discussed during the meeting included the need to resolve the Prevezon issue as well as the need to once-and-for-all figure out a solution to the problem of the Magnitsky Act.
The meeting ended with either Chaika or his deputy suggesting that Freeh meet with Veselnitskaya to discuss the matter further. Freeh subsequently met with Veselnitskaya at an undisclosed location before returning to the United States.
Freeh later went on to help Prevezon negotiate a settlement with the SDNY following Trump’s victory in the election.
From Cold Warrior to Putin’s Favorite Congressman: Dana Rohrabacher and Kremlin Influence Campaigns
After the establishment of the HRAGI Foundation and the high level Russian outreach to Louis Freeh, there was a concerted effort to make inroads into the US Congress.
This effort was centered around a Republican member Dana Rohrabacher and his close aide Paul Behrends.
In April of 2016, Rohrabacher and Behrends traveled to Moscow as part of a Congressional delegation. While there they held meetings outside of the officially sanctioned itinerary with Veselnitskaya, Akhmetshin and a host of high level officials.
Rohrabacher had been warned of the interest Russia’s intelligence service had in him before. During a 2012 meeting in a secure room in the United States Capitol, an FBI agent told Congressman Rohrabacher that Russian intelligence was attempting to recruit him as an “agent of influence.”
The agent even warned Rohrabacher that the Kremlin had provided him with a code name. The news didn’t seem to make much of an impression on Rohrabacher.
“I remember them telling me, ‘You have been targeted to be recruited as an agent,’” Rohrabacher later recalled of the incident to The New York Times. “How stupid is that?”
The path Rohrbacher took from his beginnings in politics to being told by the FBI he was being cultivated by Russian intelligence is a tale of dramatic transformation.
During his youth in California, Rohrabacher was known more for body surfing, drinking tequila, writing screenplays and writing folk songs than politics. After coming across the radical libertarian Richard LeFevre, however, Rohabacher dedicated himself to right wing politics.
As a member of the Young Republicans, Rohrabacher became an early admirer of Ronald Reagan’s, which ultimately led him to serve as Reagan’s assistant press secretary from 1976 to 1980.
While Reagan was in office, Rohrabacher served as his special assistant and speechwriter. During this time, Rohrabacher became actively involved in the American policy to support the Afghan Mujahideen in their war against the Soviet Union.
It was in this capacity that, through one of the architects of the Reagan era hardline stance against the Soviets, John Lenczowski, Rohrabacher met and befriended a young man serving in the Marines named Paul Behrends.
Behrends, a devout Catholic, joined the Marines out of college. Working together, he and Rohrabacher assisted in the effort to provide weapons to the Afghan mujahideen to help them in their holy war against the Red Army. To this day, Behrends’ friends are unsure exactly how, or in what capacity, Behrends was involved in the effort.
In addition to his activities in Afghanistan, Behrends traveled to Poland during the period of Communist martial law pretending to be an American student. According to on of Behrends friends, J. Michael Waller, there were unconfirmed rumors that he even “ran secret reconnaissance missions inside the Soviet Union.”
Interestingly, J. Michael Waller worked with Michael Caputo, a Republican political consultant who later was hired by Paul Manafort to work on the Trump Campaign, supporting the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s. Caputo, who had his own connections to the Afghan Mujahideen, has described himself and Roger Stone’s “best friend.”
Read my description of Michael Caputo, his relationship with Trump and Roger Stone, and his shadowy connections to global intelligence agencies, here.
In 1988, Rohrabacher, bearded and dressed in Afghan attire, hiked from Pakistan into Afghanistan to see the front lines for himself.
Later that same year, Rohrabacher ran for a newly opened California seat in the House of Representatives and, with the support of Oliver North of Iran-Contra infamy, won. Behrends went on to serve as a foreign policy advisor for Congressman Rohrabacher.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Rohrabacher and those in his immediate orbit seemed to lose interest in committing themselves to anti-Communist crusades and gained interest in several other endeavors, such as making money, normalizing and institutionalizing expensive lobbying and bending, or in some cases outright breaking, election laws.
In 1995, Rohrabacher’s campaign director Rhonda Carmony illegally arranged to place a decoy candidate to split the Democratic vote to ensure that Rohrabacher’s friend Scott Baugh won a seat in the California State assembly.
Two years later, Carmony pled guilty to two felony charges, which were reduced to misdemeanors. She was sentenced to three years probation and 300 hours of community service.
Rohrabacher went on to marry his campaign manager and the newly named Rhonda Rohrabacher eventually gave birth to triplets.
Another friend and political ally of Rohrabacher’s who fell afoul of the was the infamous, disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Read my description of Abramoff’s lobbying activities in Russia here (scroll down to the end of the article).
In short, Abramoff, who as later convicted of multiple felonies for his corrupt lobbying activities, raised a million dollars for the conservative 501(c)(4) the U.S. Family Network, passed through a law firm, from a Russian oil company called Naftasib.
The U.S. Family Network had been founded by Ed Buckham, the former Chief of Staff to the Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.
DeLay, a close political ally of Abramoff’s, was later indicted on money laundering charges.
While in Russia Abramoff interacted extensively with a Naftasib executive named Marina Nevskaya.
Years later in 2019, someone who knew her told the press that Nevskaya had described herself as a “colonel-lieutenant in the GRU.”
Interestingly, both Rohrabacher and Abramoff started out there careers as fierce Reagan-era cold warriors, and then after the fall of the Soviet Union, cultivated corrupt relationships in post-Soviet Russia.
Rohrabacher was close friends with Abramoff, whom he had known since the latter had served as the chairman of the Young Republicans.
In 2000, Abramoff listed Rohrabacher in bank documents as a personal reference when he purchased a casino-boat.
Three years later, Abramoff helped raise money ostensibly to help Rohrabacher pay for raising his triplets.
In 2004, Paul Behrends became the chief lobbyist for the Alexander Strategy Group, a lobbying firm founded by the aforementioned Ed Buckham.
Alexander Strategy Group shared the same offices as the U.S. Family Network, also founded by Buckham. Also in the same office was the political action committee Americans for a Republican Majority, founded by Buckham’s old boss, Tom DeLay.
Most of the $3.2 million raised for the U.S. Family Network came from Jack Abramoff’s clients, including $1 million from Naftasib.
Over a five year period between 1997 and 2001, the U.S. Family Network then paid Buckham and his wife $1,022,729 via payments made to the Alexander Strategy Group.
In 2005, Rohrabacher appears to have no longer wished to be the only person without a snout in the trough. According to OC Weekly, the Rohrabacher’s at the time were a cash squeeze, with Rhonda going on shopping sprees and bouncing checks.
Rohrabacher started hitting up relatives for money, explaining that he had come across potential entrepreneurial opportunities.
One of his relatives sent Rohrabacher a letter warning that he should stick to politics. It doesn’t appear to have been very convincing.
By May of 2005, Dana and Rhonda Rohrabacher were in discussions with a biodiesel fuel company with ties to Moscow about potential business opportunities.
“We hereby confirm that we give Rhonda full support for USA and Canada [rights], and we will not sell through any other sales channel for the time being,” the biodiesel fuel company wrote to Rohrabacher in emails seen by his local paper the OC Weekly.
“We are right now making the final test of the new evaporation unit, and we hope to have everything ready in about one month time [sic].”
Rhonda Rorhabacher, the Congressman’s wife and former campaign manager, had no experience in the biodiesel fuel industry. Her resume, however, did list experience in the early 2000s helping “Russian manufacturers on how to market their products in the United States — [those] products included nutritional supplements and home electronics.”
On September 18th, 2005, Rohrabacher emailed Marina Nevskaya, the Naftasib executive and alleged GRU officer, not using any of his six personal and professional email addresses, but rather Rhonda’s email address.
Rohrabacher wrote to Nevskaya offering to work behind-the-scenes to assist Naftasib with its “major investment” in a Ukrainian shipping port. Rohrabacher further claimed that he had spoken with Kateryna Yushchenko, the American born wife of the then Ukrainian President and Orange Revolution leader Viktor Yushchenko.
“I may be able to lead a congressional delegation to Berlin on the first four days of October,” Rohrabacher continued in his note to Nevskaya. “Is there a chance that we could meet the contact you had in mind at that time and place? All the best, Dana.”
“Dear Dana,” Nevskaya replied. “Thank you so much for [contacting Kateryna]. . . . Please, let me know your schedule when you know. Kisses for Rhonda and the kids. Marina.”
Who the contact Marina Nevskaya suggested Rohrabacher meet with, and whether he ever did so in Berlin or anywhere else, and for what purpose, are all questions without answers.
In 2006, the Abramoff scandal exploded across the headlines and he was eventually convicted and served time in prison.
While the extensive reporting on the matter did mention Abramoff’s activities in Russia, vastly more attention was paid to his ripping off of various Native American tribes in the United States.
It is likely that after having Nevskaya’s name featured in the press, Rohrabacher would have chosen not to pursue future business dealings.
In the years that followed, Dana Rohrabacher became what Politico referred to as “Putin’s favorite Congressman.” His views increasingly aligned with those of Putin’s.
In 2013, Rohrabacher told a bizarre, almost certainly fabricated story, that he had actually met Putin in Washington, DC just after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
Rohrabacher claimed that a group of Russians, which included Putin, who was then the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, were visiting the capital and wanted to meet him as he had been a speechwriter for Reagan. Rohrabacher then claimed that they all went to an Irish pub where they got into an argument about who had won the Cold War. To settle the matter, Rohrabacher claimed that he and Putin had an arm wrestling match, which Putin won.
Prior to meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya in Moscow in April of 2016, Rohrabacher had made several other trips to the Russian capital.
In 2013, shortly after the Boston Marathon bombings which were committed by two Chechen-Americans, Rohrabacher traveled to Moscow alongside five other members of congress.
Seperating from the official congressional delegation, Rohrabacher bizarrely connected with the B movie actor Steven Seagal, whose action star persona was being cultivated by the Kremlin to compliment Putin’s own “leading man” persona in Russia.
Russia’s then-deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin had been attempting to use Seagal to help Russian companies break into the American gun market.
Rohrabacher, who had known Seagal for years, had the actor join him during several meetings with Russians, which included Rogozin and, to the discomfort of State Department diplomats, several high-level FSB officials.
Seagal attempted to arrange for Rohrabacher to meet with Ramzan Kadyrov, the murderous dictator of Chechnya whose father had been installed by Putin.
It took a call from House Majority Leader John Boehner to dissuade Rohrabacher from taking the meeting.
In September of 2014, Rohrabacher returned to Moscow, this time with Paul Behrends by his side. Two months earlier, Behrends had surprised colleagues after taking a major pay cut by leaving his independent lobbying gig to return to his job on the Hill with Rohrabacher.
After traveling through Europe and Asia alongside Representative Gregory Meeks, Rohrabacher and Behrends took a private side trip to Russia, where they spent three days and met with Mikhail Margelov, then-Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the upper house of Russia’s Parliament.
Margelov, a confidant of Putin’s with a background in the Russian intelligence services, once taught Arabic at the Higher School of the KGB.
In addition to being the Vice President of the Russian oil company Transneft, where he worked beneath the company’s President Nikolay Tokarev, a former KGB officer who served alongside Putin in East Germany, Margelov also worked at the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), where multiple individuals entangled in this story are affiliated.
Read my article about Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos’s interactions with RIAC here.
The purpose of Rohrabacher and Behrend’s 2014 meeting with Margelov is unclear.
Rorhabacher and Behrends Travel to Moscow, Meet Yakunin and Veselnitskaya
When Rohrabacher and Behrends traveled to Moscow in April of 2016 alongside yet another Congressional Delegation, they not only had ample experience in Russia, but had met on multiple occasions with individuals who were either members of, or had links to, Russian intelligence.
As they had on previous trips, Rohrabacher and Behrends ignored the concerns of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and once again broke away from the official delegation and met with the powerful Russian oligarch Vladimir Yakunin at Café Pushkin.
At the time of the meeting, Yakunin was under U.S. sanctions.
Yakunin sits at the heart of the power structure that rules Putin’s Russia. A former senior officer in the KGB, similar to the SVR agents who later cultivated Carter Page, he had previously been posted as an undercover operative at the United Nations in New York.
Yakunin later became a close ally of Putin’s while the latter was the deputy Mayor in St. Petersburg, becoming a member of the Ozero Cooperative and playing a key role in the takeover of Bank Rossiya, the financial institution most associated with Putin and his cronies personal wealth.
In 2000, shortly after Putin ascended to the Presidency, Yakunin was made the Deputy Transport Minister of Russia.
Five years later, as part of a broader move by Putin to place his former colleagues at the KGB in positions to control the Russian economy, Yakunin became the President of the state-owned Russian Railways, where Pyotr Katsyv, father of Prevezon-owner and Veselnitskaya client Denis Katsyv, worked beneath him as Vice President.
During his term as President, vast sums of cash stolen from Russian Railways was washed through a complex money laundering scheme operating out of the former Soviet Republic of Moldova that came to be known by OCCRP as the Moldovan Laundromat.
Between 2010 and 2014, over $3 billion dollars was siphoned away from the state transport company by Russian Railway contractors with links to Yakunin. In total, the Moldovan Laundromat washed over $20 billion, much of which came from Russian businessmen evading taxes and customs duties.
Moldovan prosecutors came to believe that a portion of the money was being used to fund Russian intelligence influence operations abroad and went towards funding foreign far right and far left political parties.
Yakunin has been actively involved in a wide variety of Kremlin-backed influence operations. Known as an “Orthodox Chekist,” a seemingly contradictory reference to both his Russian Orthodox religion and his past in the KGB, Yakunin has been part of, and provided funding for, a number of culturally conservative organizations that also promote the Kremlin’s foreign and domestic policy goals.
Yakunin and his wife are the directors of the Foundation of St. Andrew the First-Called, which associates cultural and Orthodox conservatism with patriotic support for the Russian state under Putin.
In 2002, Yakunin founded the “Dialogue of Civilizations” annual forum in Rhodes, which not only promoted traditional family values but also political orthodoxy in support of Putin’s government in Moscow.
Fourteen years later in 2016, Yakunin established the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute in Berlin, the goal of which is according to European watchdogs is to coordinate the activities of Russian NGOs around the world to counter American influence and soft power abroad.
In 2014, following the passage of Russia’s infamous “anti-gay propaganda” law, Yakunin planned to sponsor the anti-gay marriage 8th World Congress of Families (WCF), which was scheduled to take place in Moscow in September of 2014 until the Russian invasion of Crimea caused the event to be cancelled.
Konstantin Malofyev, an Orthodox, conservative Russian oligarchs with close links the the Neo-Fascist, Eurasianist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, was key participant in various Kremlin-backed influence operations, was also involved in planning the event.
The WCF was established in Moscow in 1995 by Russian and visiting American conservatives who believed that feminism and homosexuality were leading to demographic decline.
In addition to receiving cash from Russian oligarchs, WCF affiliated groups such as the Family Research Council came out against the Global Magnitsky Act, claiming that it would lead to the spread of LGBT rights overseas.
WCF officials have lavished praise on Putin, its managing director Larry Jacobs writing in 2012 that Vladimir Putin “is the one defending laws and morality consistent with the freedom in the U.S. constitution.”
Rohrabacher told later investigators that his April 2016 meeting with Yakunin may have been arranged by then-Russian Ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak.
Over the course of their discussion, Yakunin invited Rohrabacher to participate in the annual Dialogue of Civilizations event in Rhodes. He also brought up the Magnitsky Act sanctions.
“Look,” Rohrabacher claimed Yakunin said to him, “our prosecutors have done an investigation into this Magnitsky thing and would you — were you willing to look at the material, their report?”
“”I’ll look at any report,” Rohrabacher replied. “I’ll talk to anybody and I’ll read anything.”
“Well, they’ll try to get it to you at that meeting you ‘re going to have tomorrow with the Duma foreign affairs committee,” Yakunin told Rohrabacher.
Rohrabacher and Behrends next met with the Chairman of the Council of Federation Committee of Foreign Affairs, Konstantin Kosachev. Like Yakunin, Kosachev has a long history of involvement in Russian influence operations.
In the late 1990s he served as an advisor to three Russian Prime Ministers, two of whom, Yevgeny Primakov and Sergei Stepashin, had been former heads of the Russian security services.
Kosachev sits on the boards of numerous Kremlin-linked “NGOs” which are used to clandestinely promote Kremlin priorities abroad, occasionally referred to as “Government Organized Non-Governmental Organizations,” or GONGOS.
Kosachev is a member of the following GONGOS: Foundation for Supporting and Protecting the Rights of Compatriots Living Abroad, The Gorchakov Fund, The World Russian Press Foundation and, of course, the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC).
Numerous high level associates of the Kremlin sit beside Kosachev on these organizations, including Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
In 2012, Kosachev was promoted to head Rossotrudnichestvo, an organization that was investigated by the FBI a year later for using its cultural exchange programs to cultivate Americans as intelligence assets.
As his meeting with Rohrabacher was wrapping up, Kosachev slid Rohrabacher a note that contained the message: “Would you be willing to accept sensitive documents?”
After showing the note to Behrends, Rohrabacher said that he would.
At that point Viktor Grin, a top deputy working under at the Russian Prosecutors Office under Yury Chaika, provided Rohrabacher with a dossier that contained some of the very same material Natalia Vesenitskaya had secretly written in cooperation with Chaika’s office and illegally provided to U.S. courts while representing herself as a third party in the course of her defense of Prevezon.
The dossier was labeled “Confidential” and suggested that “the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee of the House of Representatives” should investigate William Browder. It also contained a link to a documentary by the Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, who had turned from a Putin critic to a supporter of the Kremlin’s critical line on Browder and the Magnitsky Act.
After rehashing Veselnitskaya’s claims that Browder and Hermitage Capital Management had engaged in tax fraud, the dossier suggested that by reconsidering the Magnitsky Act sanctions, the US stood to benefit from a better relationship with Russia.
“Such a situation could have a very favorable response from the Russian side on many key controversial issues and disagreements with the United States,” the document concludes, “including matters concerning the adoption procedure.”
Rinat Akhmetshin, who had known and worked with Rohrabacher in his capacity as a lobbyist, was in Moscow at the same time as Rohrabacher and Behrends. During the trip, he introduced Rohrabacher to Natalia Veselnitskaya in the lobby of the Ritz Carlton near Red Square, the hotel where the Congressman was staying.
While it was the first time they met to discuss the Magnitsky sanctions, it would not be the last. They met again two months later to discuss the matter again in Washington, DC, mere days after Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin had attended a fateful meeting to discuss similar matters with Donald Trump Jr.
Linkages Between Trump Tower Moscow and the June 9th Trump Tower Meeting
In May of 2016, events transpired that led directly to Natalia Veselnitskaya’s meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and the Trump campaign’s senior leadership. That month, she held a meeting with her former client Aras Agalarov. After Veselnitskaya described her role in the Prevezon case, Agalarov suggested that she should meet with Donald Trump Jr.
The Senate Intelligence Committee later determined that Agalarov likely pushed for the meeting on behalf of individuals affiliated with the Russian Government.
As Agalarov and Veselnitskaya knew, Trump’s emissaries Michael Cohen and Felix Sater had been in negotiations with a variety of Russians links to organized crime and money laundering operations, to build a Trump Tower Moscow.
Read my indepth desciption of the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations that took place during the 2016 election here.
Numerous linkages existed between the parties involved in both endeavors.
In addition to being Veselnitskaya’s former client, Agalarov is a close associate of her former boss, the Russian Prosecutor General Yury Chaika.
Like Prevezon, Agalarov and his employee at Crocus, Irakli Kaveladze, who later attended the Trump Tower meeting alongside Veselnitskaya, have been implicated in money laundering activities.
Agalarov and Prevezon used the same New York-based accountant, Ilya Bykov. Several of the Prevezon companies alleged to have been used in money laundering activities were registered to Bykov’s office.
Bykov worked for Felix Sater and Andrey Rozov, the owner of I.C. Expert, the Russian real estate developer that Cohen and Sater were negotiating with to build a potential Trump Tower Moscow at roughly the same time Veselnitskaya met with Aras Agalarov.
In 2015, in the thick of the Sater-Cohen Trump Tower negotiations with Rozov, Sater and Bykov simultaneously worked with Rozov on the sale and purchase of a building in Manhattan, which ultimately netted Rozov $8 million dollars in profit.
Curiously, in the same month Agalarov met with Veselnitskaya, May of 2016, Bykov established a Delaware-based company on Agalarov’s behalf, Silver Valley Consulting, at the same time Agalarov was preparing to send $19.5 million into the United States.
Though the Delaware company was ultimately never used, on June 20th, eleven days after the Trump Tower meeting and the same day Paul Manafort was elevated to chairman of the Trump Campaign, an Agalarov-linked shell company of the same name registered in the British Virgin Islands, Silver Valley Consulting BVI, moved $19.5 million from its account at Societe Generale Suisse to Agalarov’s American bank account at Morgan Stanley. The purpose of the transfer remains unknown, though Agalarov’s lawyers suggested they were for real estate transactions.