Documents on Trump Tower meeting released
WASHINGTON — Six months after the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Trump campaign officials and a self-described Kremlin informant, an intermediary contacted Donald Trump’s office asking for a follow-up, according to documents released Wednesday by a Senate committee.
The intermediary, Rob Goldstone, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he proposed a second meeting between Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and members of Trump’s team in November 2016. He said he contacted Trump’s longtime executive assistant at the behest of Aras Agalarov, a Russia-based billionaire who knows Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The follow-up overture is one of the kernels of new information contained in more than 2,000 pages of testimony and exhibits released by the committee, which has been conducting one of the investigations into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russians.
The initial meeting was organized on the premise that Veselnitskaya would deliver incriminating information on Hillary Clinton to support Trump’s campaign.
The second session never took place. But the invitation shows the determination of Russians with close Kremlin connections to convince the Trump team that the Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions on a host of Russian officials for human rights abuses, was a mistake. The 2012 law, which froze the bank accounts of some Russian officials and barred them from entering the United States, infuriated Putin.
In a late November 2016 email to Trump’s assistant, Goldstone attached a threepage document marked “confidential” that called for “the launch of a congressional investigation into the circumstances of passing the Magnitsky Act.” He wrote that Agalarov hoped the document would be delivered to “the appropriate team.” Veselnitskaya also attacked the law in the June meeting The bulk of records released are transcripts of the committee’s interviews with that meeting’s participants, including the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr.; his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner; and members of the Russian contingent led by Veselnitskaya.
Nonetheless, the records reveal some new details about the players involved and what happened after the meeting was reported by The New York Times last summer. The transcripts highlight how lawyers for the Trump Organization tried to manage the fallout by coordinating the statement of Goldstone and others.
Donald Trump Jr. acknowledged that his father may have helped draft the statement that he put out to the press after the meeting became public.
But on a number of other questions, he drew a blank, including whether his father uses a blocked phone number. Phone records show that Donald Trump Jr. called a blocked number before and after calls with Agalarov arranging the meeting and again on the night of the meeting.
“I don’t,” Trump said when asked if he remembered who was on the other end of the calls. “I don’t know,” he said, when asked whether his father used a blocked number.