Russian Lawyer At Trump Tower Meeting Took On New American Client This Spring

Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya met Donald Trump, Jr. in July 2016 promising damaging information about Hillary Clinton
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Natalia Veselnitskaya took another American client on this spring, she said—but she won’t say who.

In Trump-connected Russian lawyer Veselnistkaya’s 52-page response to a list of questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee, she told the committee a number of strange things, among them that she’d had another American client earlier this year, whose case she took all the way to the Russia’s prosecutor general, Yury Chaika, the “master of kompromat” and Veselnitskaya’s former employer.

Veselnitskaya’s testimony ought to be taken with heaping piles of salt, especially considering her work representing Russian security service the FSB in court in her home country. But through her extended complaints about American sanctions levied in response to the jailhouse murder of a whistleblowing Russian accountant Sergei Magnitsky, she appeared to shed partial light on her own legal practice.

Veselnitskaya was ordered to answer the questions after being barred from entering the country to represent her client Denys Katsyv, who has been ordered to pay a $6m settlement, by a US judge. Her immigration status is “squarely within the purview of the executive branch,” the judge who denied her entry is reported to have said. In July, news that she had met with Donald Trump, Jr and other members of the Trump campaign broke.

She wouldn’t identify her other client to the committee, though she did say she took on at his parents’ request when she was in New York earlier this year—likely a visit in May for a hearing in the Katsyv case. She described the client to the committee as “an American citizen and a member of the US Jewish community who had been arrested in Moscow in the spring of this year for importing forbidden items” and said her advocacy got him off with a small fine rather than the four years in prison he might otherwise have faced.

[T]his summer, I was granted an audience with the RF Prosecutor General, Yu. Ya. Chaika, to deliver an official statement in connection with my defending an American citizen and a member of the US Jewish community who had been arrested in Moscow in the spring of this year for importing forbidden items. The young man was facing up to four years in prison. I accepted him as a client on his family’s request when I was still in New York. And despite the fact that the US Embassy refused to participate in the fate of the American citizen (I spoke with the US Consul in Moscow several times asking the embassy to submit a petition to the RF Prosecutor General’s Office which the embassy never bothered to do), thanks to the well-coordinated cooperation with US lawyers and experts, members of the Moscow and US Jewish communities, once Mr. Chaika had heard out the arguments of the defense and instructed that they be verified, the case was closed; my client was ordered to pay a small court penalty and allowed to return home to his family. I have no right to identify the client but the case is well known to the US Embassy in Moscow.

The US Embassy in Moscow declined to identify the American in question, though at first the operator appeared to have Veselnitskaya’s story confused with a more recent story of an American detained by Russian authorities. TPM contacted other Russian and U.S. government sources; all said they were unaware of the case.

Veselnitskaya’s official responses were taken up principally with complaining about the various players in the Magnistky Act, especially William Browder, who was Sergei Magnitsky’s employer when the latter discovered a vast alleged money-laundering scheme from which Veselnitskaya’s client, Katsyv, is said to have benefited. She also confirmed having hired former Soviet soldier and longtime Washington lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin as far back as 2015 as part of “a team of hired consultants,” on what case she did not specify, though the Katsyv case seems a likely candidate.

Veselnitskaya also confirmed the April 2 and 3 meetings with Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), first reported from a Russian-language interview with Veselnitskaya, translated by Foreign Policy.

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