When Donald Trump Jr. was first confronted over his Trump Tower meeting with a team of Russians bearing political gifts, his response was that the conversation was “mostly about adoption.” It’s a story that was still being pushed by White House press secretary Sean Spicer less than a day ago.
“It is quite often for people who are given information during the heat of a campaign to ask what that is, that’s what simply he did,” Spicer said. “The president’s made it clear through his tweet. And there was nothing, as far as we know, that would lead anyone to believe that there was anything except for a discussion about adoption and the Magnitsky Act.”
Well, it seems reasonable to think that “anyone” might have been tipped off by the email sent to Trump Jr. to organize the meeting. The one that said the meeting’s purpose was:
… to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and could be very useful to your father.
… part of Russia and it’s government’s support for Mr. Trump
Why does adoption keep coming up when the meeting is mentioned? Because it’s the cover story. Not just for this meeting, but for the whole Russian effort to roll back sanctions connected to human rights abuses. Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who took center stage during that meeting in Trump Tower, also has an excuse for her front row seat in the Senate hearing pictured above: her connection to HRAGI, the Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative. What’s that? A group as fake as its cause.
This it the website for HRAGI. At first glance, it looks like what you’d expect from a group designed to work on the issue of American adoption of Russian orphans.
What’s wrong with it? This is a foundation where the donate button doesn’t work. Neither does anything else. Click any link except the front page and you get a blank page. It’s just a shell, a pretense for action—just like the adoption issue itself.
Vladimir Putin instituted a ban on U.S. adoption of Russian orphans after the U.S. passed the Magnitsky Act, sanctioning Russian oligarchs for their involvement in human rights abuses. That act interferes with the easy flow of capital for guys like Natalia Veselnitskaya’s boss.
“The United States Of America vs. Prevezon Holdings Ltd” has at times resembled the Showtime series Billions as guest-scripted by Ian Fleming.
Prevezon was on trial for money laundering. The Magnitsky Act was just one of the things they were accused of violating. But that trial was abruptly cut short after Donald Trump booted U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara and put Jefferson Sessions in charge of the Justice Department.
The Prevezon case garnered high-profile attention, given its ties to a $230 million Russian tax-fraud scheme and the Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, whose suspicious death aroused international media attention and spurred the passage of the Magnitsky Act in 2012. Denis Katsyv and Veselnitskaya have become the face of Moscow's lobbying efforts against the Magnitsky Act in recent years.
When Trump or Spicer or Sarah Huckabee Sanders or any other Republican passes off the Trump Tower conspiracy meeting as being “about adoption,” what they really mean is it was about relaxing sanctions imposed by the Magnitsky Act.
And the reason that matters to Trump is because the money from these oligarchs comes into the country, often through shell companies in Cyprus, and is cleaned by passing it though real estate deals. Those deals are often at prices far above the market value, representing a fat payday for the “developers” on the receiving end of the transaction. That’s what Trump Jr. meant when he made his famous statement:
Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.
Trump and Trump Jr. are aware that Americans are anxious for overseas adoptions. So are the Russians. That’s what makes this such a nice blanket to throw over an effort that’s really about oligarchs moving billions of dollars around the globe—with the help of guys like Donald Trump.