New allegations hit White House
Report: Trump son knew of Russia’s voting interference
WASHINGTON — A new report Monday said the man who set up a meeting last year for a Russian lawyer to give Donald Trump Jr. potentially damaging material about Hillary Clinton indicated in an email to Trump Jr. that the Russian government was the source of the information.
The New York Times report cited three unnamed people with knowledge of the email from music publicist Rob Goldstone.
Goldstone confirmed to The Associated Press that he set up the meeting on behalf of his client, a Russian singer. Goldstone said the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, stated she had information about purported illegal campaign contributions to the Democratic National Committee that she thought Trump Jr. might find helpful.
MOSCOW — The Russian lawyer who has been thrust into the spotlight following reports of her meeting with President Donald Trump’s eldest son was a largely unknown figure until she began to represent the son of a Russian official in a major moneylaundering trial.
Natalia Veselnitskaya’s name has not been linked to government officials, the pro-Kremlin political party or major pro-Kremlin NGOs. The law firm where she is listed as managing partner, Kamerton Consulting, is based in a Moscow suburb and does not have a website. A staff member at Kamerton told The Associated Press that Veselnitskaya was unavailable for comment on Monday.
A New York Times story over the weekend cited advisers to the White House as saying that Donald Trump Jr., Trump’s son-inlaw Jared Kushner and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort had a meeting in June last year with Veselnitskaya, who promised damaging information about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
Trump Jr. said in a statement Sunday that he had agreed to the meeting after he was told the lawyer might have information that would be “helpful” to the Trump campaign.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said Monday that the Kremlin is unaware of a meeting between Trump’s senior staff and Veselnitskaya and “does not know who that is.”
Veselnitskaya does not appear to have handled any major clients in Russia until she got involved in a case defending Denis Katsyv, the son of a vice president of state-owned Russian Railways who was slapped with money-laundering charges in the United States tied to a massive Russian tax-fraud scheme.
The case against Katsyv’s company, Prevezon, was settled in New York in May for some $6 million, three days before it was to go to trial.
Investigators suspected that Prevezon bought upscale New York real estate with some of the proceeds from a $230 million Russian tax-fraud scheme brought to light by a Russian lawyer who later died in prison.