Kremlin reviewed talking points taken to Trump tower
Natalia Veselnitskaya arrived at a meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 hoping to interest top Trump campaign officials in the contents of a memo she believed contained information damaging to the Democratic Party and, by extension, Hillary Clinton. The material was the fruit of her research as a private lawyer, she has repeatedly said, and any suggestion that she was acting at the Kremlin’s behest that day is anti-Russia “hysteria.”
But interviews and records show that in the months before the meeting, Veselnitskaya had discussed the allegations with one of Russia’s most powerful officials, the prosecutor general, Yuri Y. Chaika. And the memo she brought with her closely followed a document that Chaika’s office had given to a U.S. congressman two months earlier, incorporating some paragraphs verbatim.
The coordination between the Trump Tower visitor and the Russian prosecutor general undercuts Veselnitskaya’s account that she was a purely independent actor when she sat down with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Paul Manafort, then the Trump campaign chairman. It also suggests that emails from an intermediary to the younger Trump promising that Veselnitskaya would arrive with information from Russian prosecutors were rooted at least partly in fact — not mere “puffery,” as the president’s son later said.
Allegations in memo
In the past week, Veselnitskaya’s allegations — that major Democratic donors were guilty of financial fraud and tax evasion — have been embraced at the highest levels of the Russian government. President Vladimir Putin of Russia repeated her charges at length last week at an annual conference of Western academics.
The Trump Tower meeting is of keen interest to the special counsel, Robert Mueller, as he investigates Russian efforts to help Trump’s campaign.
Veselnitskaya declined to be interviewed, saying in an email that The New York Times had published “lies and false claims.”
The memo that Veselnitskaya brought to the Trump Tower meeting alleged that Ziff Brothers Investments, a U.S. firm, had illegally purchased shares in a Russian company and evaded tens of millions of dollars of Russian taxes. The company was the financial vehicle of three billionaire brothers, two of them major donors to Democratic candidates including Clinton. By implication, Veselnitskaya, said, those political contributions were tainted by “stolen” money.
Kremlin officials viewed the charges as extremely significant. The Ziff brothers had invested in funds managed by William Browder, an Americanborn financier and fierce Kremlin foe. Browder was the driving force behind a 2012 law passed by Congress imposing sanctions on Russian officials for human rights abuses.
Resembled document
The law, known as the Magnitsky Act, froze Western bank accounts of officials on the sanctions list — including Chaika’s deputy — and banned them from entering the U.S. It was named after Sergei Magnitsky, a tax lawyer who had worked for Browder and who died in a Moscow jail after exposing a massive fraud scheme involving Russian officials.
How Veselnitskaya’s allegations made their way to the upper reaches of the Russian government, and then to the Trump campaign, is a tangled tale. A former prosecutor for the Moscow regional government, Veselnitskaya was also the lead defense lawyer in a civil fraud lawsuit brought by the Justice Department against a Russian firm in New York.
The firm, which settled the case for $6 million without admitting fault, was accused of using real estate purchases to launder a portion of the profits from the tax fraud that Magnitsky had uncovered. Browder provided much of the prosecution’s evidence.
While investigating Browder and his investors, Veselnitskaya unearthed what she considered evidence of a financial and tax fraud scheme. In October 2015, she took her findings about Browder and the Ziff brothers directly to Chaika, Russia’s top prosecutor.
In April 2016, Veselnitskaya teamed with Chaika’s office to pass the accusations to a U.S. congressional delegation visiting Moscow. An official with the Russian prosecutor general’s office gave a memo detailing the charges — stamped “confidential”— to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., who is considered to be one of the most pro-Russia lawmakers in Congress and who heads a subcommittee that helps oversee U.S. policy toward Russia.
Veselnitskaya came to Trump Tower with a memo that closely resembled the document that prosecutors had given to Rohrabacher in Moscow two months earlier. Some paragraphs were incorporated verbatim, according to a comparison of both documents, which were provided to the Times.