Talking Points Brought to Trump Tower Meeting Were Shared With Kremlin

[DonViejo]

Source: New York Times




By SHARON LaFRANIERE and ANDREW E. KRAMEROCT. 27, 2017

Natalia V. Veselnitskaya arrived at a meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 hoping to interest top Trump campaign officials in the contents of a memo she believed contained information damaging to the Democratic Party and, by extension, Hillary Clinton. The material was the fruit of her research as a private lawyer, she has repeatedly said, and any suggestion that she was acting at the Kremlin’s behest that day is anti-Russia “hysteria.”

But interviews and records show that in the months before the meeting, Ms. Veselnitskaya had discussed the allegations with one of Russia’s most powerful officials, the prosecutor general, Yuri Y. Chaika. And the memo she brought with her closely followed a document that Mr. Chaika’s office had given to an American congressman two months earlier, incorporating some paragraphs verbatim.

The coordination between the Trump Tower visitor and the Russian prosecutor general undercuts Ms. Veselnitskaya’s account that she was a purely independent actor when she sat down with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Paul J. Manafort, then the Trump campaign chairman. It also suggests that emails from an intermediary to the younger Mr. Trump promising that Ms. Veselnitskaya would arrive with information from Russian prosecutors were rooted at least partly in fact — not mere “puffery,” as the president’s son later said.

In the past week, Ms. Veselnitskaya’s allegations — that major Democratic donors were guilty of financial fraud and tax evasion — have been embraced at the highest levels of the Russian government. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia repeated her charges at length last week at an annual conference of Western academics. A state-run television network recently made them the subject of two special reports, featuring interviews with Ms. Veselnitskaya and Mr. Chaika.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/us/politics/trump-tower-veselnitskaya-russia.html

[MGKrebs]

1. Veselnitskaya also tried to discedit Magnitsky and

his partner Browder, presumably to undermine the reason for the Magnitsky Act sanctions. Who did she think she was working for on that?
And as a bizarre connection, she partnered with Fusion GPS for that work.

[displacedtexan]

2. This is the biggest trump/russia story yet.

Everyone involved with that meeting conspired to commit and benefit from crimes. And Dana R. & the guy from Arkansas need to be charged, as well.