Lawyer at Trump Tower meeting has new problem
A Russian lawyer whose role at a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower has come under scrutiny from special counsel Robert Mueller was charged Tuesday in a separate case with obstructing justice in a money-laundering investigation.
Natalia Veselnitskaya became a central figure in the Mueller probe when it was revealed that in June 2016, she met with Donald Trump Jr. and other senior Trump campaign advisers after an intermediary indicated she had dirt on Hillary Clinton.
The indictment unsealed Tuesday relates to a different legal fight involving the Russian and U.S. governments, and charges Veselnitskaya made a “misleading declaration” to the court in 2015, as part of a civil case arising from an investigation by federal prosecutors in Manhattan into suspected Russian money laundering and tax fraud.
Her work on that case attracted little attention at the time, but her role in the Trump Tower meeting made her the subject of intense investigative interest in the United States, as Mueller’s team has sought to determine whether that meeting was part of any broader conspiracy by Trump associates to seek the Kremlin’s help in defeating Clinton.
Veselnitskaya did not respond to a request for comment.
The charges against her were filed under seal last year. They stem from a longrunning feud between the Russian government and Bill Browder, an Americanborn businessman who ran Hermitage Capital Management and was once one of Russia’s biggest foreign investors until he had a falling out with the country’s leaders in 2005.
According to U.S. authorities, lawyers whom Browder hired discovered a criminal scheme that
had targeted Hermitage affiliated companies, in which sham lawsuits were filed against those companies. In the lawsuits, members of a criminal organization posed as both plaintiffs and defendants in the cases, admitting wrongdoing so they could win large money judgments which could then be declared as losses in order to collect large Russian tax refunds, U.S. authorities concluded.
The lawyers Browder hired included Russian attorney Sergei Magnitsky, who played a key role in uncovering the alleged fraud scheme, U.S. prosecutors say.
Magnitsky was arrested in Russia and died in custody in 2009. On the day he died, U.S. prosecutors said, he was beaten by guards with a rubber baton, and an ambulance crew called to treat him was deliberately kept outside of his cell until he was dead.
The incident sparked the United States to pass the Magnitsky Act, which allowed the U.S. government to sanction Russian officials found to have committed human rights violations there. The Russian government has spent years trying to end those sanctions and have Browder arrested.
In 2014, U.S. authorities were investigating whether Prevezon Holdings, a Cyprus-based real estate corporation, orchestrated the lawsuit and tax scheme that targeted Browder’s companies. Veselnitskaya represented Prevezon Holdings in that civil case, which led the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan to seek millions of dollars in forfeiture from the company and others connected to the taxrefund scheme.
As U.S. officials in New York pursued the financial investigation, they asked Russian prosecutors for assistance. In response, Russian prosecutors provided what they called “the results of the investigation carried out in its territory” and accused Browder of fraud, according to the new indictment. But they refused to provide the requested records.
In November 2015, Veselnitskaya submitted a declaration to the judge overseeing the Prevezon case, asserting that she had gone to great lengths to acquire the Russian government’s response to the U.S. records request. In 2017, the U.S. attorney’s office settled its civil case against Prevezon for more than $5.8 million.
According to the indictment, Veselnitskaya’s 2015 filing to the court in the Prevezon case amounted to obstruction of justice because she “made to the court a false and misleading declaration implying that she had not participated in the drafting” of the Russian government’s response to the U.S. request for records.
The indictment charges that, contrary to those claims, U.S. investigators obtained emails between Veselnitskaya and a Russian prosecutor in which, together, they worked on the language of the Russian government’s response.