Weeks ago, many Trump surrogates switched their play from “there was no collusion” to “collusion is not a crime.” When five different sources have come forward to say that Donald Trump Jr. arranged a meeting in which Trump’s senior campaign staff sat down to eagerly await what they had been promised—dirt fresh from Moscow—it’s easy to see why knocking collusion down to ‘no big deal’ was a Republican priority.
In interviews on Tuesday, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya denied that she had Kremlin connections or Hillary info.
The Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. during the presidential campaign denied in an exclusive interview with NBC News that she had any connection to the Kremlin and insists she met with President Donald Trump’s son to press her client’s interest in the Magnitsky Act — not to hand over information about Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
The no-Russian-government-here claim seems about as credible as Trump Jr.’s initial insistence that there was no meeting.
Veselnitskaya has a history of advocating for the Russian government. ...
Veselnitskaya is a Russian lawyer, who, like many involved in the Trump and Russia saga, isn't directly employed by the Russian government but has a number of deeper government ties. The Russian government often operates by using not only its own employees but those with informal or personal relationships to its key leaders.
And while Veselnitskaya is a bit behind and still leaning on Trump excuse No. 2 (“the meeting was about adoption”), she doesn’t deny that the Trump campaign team was hungry for Clinton information.
On Clinton, she says through a translator: “It’s quite possible they were looking for information. They wanted it so badly.”
Veselnitskaya’s claims that the meeting was not intended to be about providing information on Clinton runs counter to the statement from publicist Rob Goldstone who set up the meeting for a specific purpose.
The public relations specialist who arranged a meeting last year between President Donald Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., and a Russian attorney said on Monday he did so at the request of singer-songwriter-businessman Emin Agalarov, a Moscow-based client of his.
Public relations specialist Rob Goldstone said in a statement that Agalarov asked him to help facilitate a meeting between Trump's son and Russian lawyer Natalya Veselnitskaya, who he said had apparently claimed to have information regarding illegal campaign contributions to the Democratic National Committee.
Veselnitskaya claimed at the time that the information came from the Russian government, and that the information was part of a Russian government program to help Donald Trump win the presidency. That claim didn’t become public until Monday, but Donald Trump Jr. knew about it before scheduling the meeting, because all that information was part of the email that Goldstone sent him in arranging the meeting.
Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.
Which makes Veselnitskaya’s denial that the meeting was not about compromising information on Hillary Clinton, and that she didn’t have any connections to the Russian government seem more than a little shaky.