Lobbyist savvy on dark arts met Trump Jr.

Russian-American boasted of work with Red Army.

MOSCOW — Rinat Akhmetshin, the Russian-American lobbyist who met with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in June 2016, had one consistent message for the journalists who met him over the years at the luxury hotels where he stayed in Moscow, London and Paris, or at his home on a leafy street in Washington: Never use email to convey information that needs to be kept secret.

While not an expert in the technical aspects of hacking nor, he insisted, a spy, Akhmetshin talked openly about how he had worked with a counterintelligence unit while serving with the Red Army after its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and how easy it was to find tech-savvy professionals ready and able to plunder just about any email account.

A journalist who visited his home was given a thumb drive containing emails that had apparently been stolen by hackers working for one of his clients.

On another occasion, at a meeting with a reporter at the Ararat Park Hyatt hotel in Moscow, Akhmetshin, by then a U.S. citizen, informed the journalist he had recently been reading one of his emails: a note sent by the reporter to a Russian-American defense lawyer who had once worked for anti-Kremlin oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

In that instance, the reporter’s email had become public as part of a lawsuit. But the episode suggests Akhmetshin’s professional focus in the decades since he emigrated to the United States and the experience that he brought to a meeting last June in New York with President Donald Trump’s oldest son, Trump Jr., his sonin-law, Jared Kushner, and the then-head of the Trump presidential campaign, Paul Manafort.

The meeting was arranged on the claim that a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, would provide dirt on Hillary Clinton, though in the end, Trump and his son have insisted, neither Akhmetshin nor Veselnitskaya provided anything of value.

But Akhmetshin, a gregarious, fast-talking man with a sharp sense of humor, was a skilled practitioner in the muscular Russian version of what in U.S. politics is known as opposition research. From his base in Washington, Akhmetshin has been hired by an ever-changing roster of Russian clients to burnish their image — and blacken that of their rivals. Some clients were close to the Kremlin. Others involved its bitter foes.

Akhmetshin often warned his friends and contacts that “nothing is secure.” It was a conviction that emerged from the chaotic and often violent corporate battles that convulsed Russia in the 1990s, when “chyorny PR” or “black public relations” based on stolen or fabricated documents became a powerful weapon for businessmen seeking to damage their rivals without resorting to physical threats.

The practice was rooted in Soviet techniques of “kompromat,” the collection of compromising information by the KGB against foes of the Communist Party, but reached its full flowering after the 1991 collapse of communism and the privatization of the dark arts formerly dominated by the KGB.

Instead of simply examining old media reports, court records and other public documents to try to dig up dirt or embarrassing gossip, Russian-style “chyorny PR” has often focused on pilfering private information through hacking and physical intrusion into offices and filing cabinets.

Akhmetshin has acquired a reputation for obtaining email records, information from spyware and other data that appeared to be drawn from Russian hackers, something he has denied.

There is no evidence his efforts were illegal or that he engaged in the technical aspects of hacking himself. His emphasis on unearthing emails in Russian-related matters also clearly served the interests of his clients, irrespective of whether they had close or hostile relations with the Kremlin.