NATION & WORLD, A4 WHAT TRUMP ACCOMPLISHED IN DEBUT AT G-20 SUMMIT

Donald Trump Jr. says talk focused on adoption program.

Two weeks after Donald Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination last year, his eldest son arranged a meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan with a Russian lawyer who has connections to the Kremlin, according to confidential government records described to the New York Times.

The previously undisclosed meeting was also attended by Trump’s campaign chairman at the time, Paul Manafort, as well as the president’s son-inlaw, Jared Kushner, according to interviews and the documents, which were outlined by people familiar with them.

While Trump has been dogged by revelations of undisclosed meetings between his associates and Russians, this episode at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, is the first confirmed private meeting between a Russian national and members of Trump’s inner circle during the campaign. It is also the first time that his son Donald Trump Jr. is known to have been involved in such a meeting.

Representatives of the younger Trump and Kushner confirmed the meeting after the Times approached them with information about it. In a statement, Donald Trump Jr. described the meeting as primarily about an adoption program.

The Russian lawyer invited to the Trump Tower meeting, Natalia Veselnitskaya, is best known for mounting a multipronged attack against the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers. The law so enraged Russian President Vladimir Putin that he retaliated by halting American adoptions of Russian children.

The adoption impasse is a frequently used talking point for opponents of the Magnitsky Act. Veselnitskaya’s campaign against the law has also included attempts to discredit its namesake, Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer and auditor who died in a Russian prison in 2009 after exposing one of the biggest corruption scandals during Putin’s rule.

Veselnitskaya is married to a former deputy transportation minister, and her clients include state-owned businesses. Her activities and associations had previously drawn the attention of the FBI, according to a former senior law enforcement official.

In his statement, Donald Trump Jr. said: “It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up.”

The Trump Tower meeting was not disclosed to government officials until recently, when Kushner, who is also a senior White House aide, filed a revised version of a form required to obtain a security clearance. Kushner filed the new form after a report in April that he had failed to disclose foreign contacts; his advisers said that the omissions were an error.

Manafort, the former campaign chairman, also recently disclosed the meeting to congressional investigators who had questions about his foreign contacts, according to people familiar with the events.