Trump Jr. meeting was attended by lobbyist who favored Russia
WASHINGTON — The RussianAmerican lobbyist who attended a meeting at Trump Tower last year is a former military officer who has attracted congressional scrutiny over his political activities and has been shadowed by allegations of connections to Russian intelligence that he denies.
Rinat Akhmetshin confirmed his participation in the meeting to The Associated Press on Friday, providing new details of a June 2016 sit-down that included a Russian lawyer and President Donald Trump’s oldest son, son-in-law and campaign chairman.
His attendance at the meeting and his lobbying background created a new wrinkle to a story that has hounded the White House for days and added to questions about potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign.
Mr. Akhmetshin is well-known in Washington for his advocacy efforts. He’s been outspoken in recent years about a U.S. law levying sanctions on Russians and has worked to undermine the public narrative used to justify the bill.
And his name has also surfaced in multiple American lawsuits, including one involving the hacking of a company’s computer systems.
Emails released this week by Donald Trump Jr. show the president’s son agreed to the Trump Tower meeting with the idea that he would receive damaging information on Hillary Clinton from someone described to him as a “Russian government attorney.” Mr. Akhmetshin began working with that attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya, in 2015, after a public relations person he declined to nameintroduced them.
The Russian government has denied any involvement or knowledge of the meeting. Asked Friday about Mr. Akhmetshin, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters: “We don’t know anythingabout this person.”
In an interview, Mr. Akhmetshin denied suggestions made in media reports, congressional letters and litigation that he is a former officer in Russia’s military intelligence service known as the GRU, dismissing the allegationsas a “smear campaign.”
He told the AP that he served in the Soviet Army from 1986 to 1988 after he was drafted but was not trained in spy tradecraft. He said his unit operated in the Baltics and was “loosely part of counterintelligence.”
Mr. Akhmetshin, a naturalized American citizen who has lived in Washington since the early 1990s, and Ms. Veselnitskaya are known for lobbying efforts involving the Magnitsky Act, a brace of economic sanctions targeting Russian officials and individuals.
The act passed by Congress was named for Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Russian prison in 2009 after accusing Russian governmentofficials and takeover raiders of a $230 million tax fraud scheme in the seizureof an investment firm.
The original Magnitsky Act leveled U.S. financial sanctions on 18 Russian officials and individuals suspected of complicity in Mr. Magnitsky’s prosecution, imprisonment and death.
A Global Magnitsky Act that passed in December 2016 gives the president power to impose visa bans and freeze U.S. assets of anyone who suppresses basic human rights or targets whistleblowersexposing corruption.
Early in 2016, Mr. Akhmetshin said, he helped set up a nonprofit foundation based in Delaware to lobby U.S. officials in an effort to strip Mr. Magnitsky’s name from the law, though he maintains that he was not attempting to undercut it.
As an adjunct to the foundation’s lobbying, Ms. Veselnitskaya also organized and attended a screening of an anti-Magnitsky documentary film that played at the Newseum in Washington four days after she met with Mr. Trump Jr. in New York. Mr. Akhmetshin acknowledged he was also involved in promoting the film.