By John Sexton November 7, 2017
Fox News’ Catherine Herridge reports that two strains of the Russia story collided or, at least, crossed paths on the day Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya met with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower:
The co-founder of Fusion GPS, the firm behind the unverified Trump dossier, met with a Russian lawyer before and after a key meeting she had last year with Trump’s son, Fox News has learned. The contacts shed new light on how closely tied the firm was to Russian interests, at a time when it was financing research to discredit then-candidate Donald Trump…
Hours before the Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016, Fusion co-founder and ex-Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson was with Veselnitskaya in a Manhattan federal courtroom, a confidential source told Fox News. Court records reviewed by Fox News, email correspondence and published reports corroborate the pair’s presence together. The source told Fox News they also were together after the Trump Tower meeting…
NBC News first reported that Veselnitskaya and Simpson were both at a hearing centered around another Fusion client, Russian oligarch Denis Katsyv. His company, Prevezon Holdings, was sanctioned against doing business in the U.S. for its alleged role in laundering more than $230 million.
The story of Russian influence on the election now has so many moving parts that it’s getting hard to keep them all straight. But it all connects back to lawyer Sergei Magnitsky who died in a Russian prison in 2009. According to his employer, businessman Bill Browder, Magnitsky was arrested after he uncovered millions of dollars in fraud involving Russian companies.
Up until Magnitsky’s death, Browder had been a huge fan of Vladimir Putin. But after his death, Browder became an outspoken critic of Putin and gathered information which he claimed proved that Magnitsky had been arrested and eventually beaten to death in prison to silence him.
Browder was so successful at stoking outrage over Magnitsky’s death that in 2012 the U.S. passed a law called the Magnitsky Act which sanctioned Russian oligarchs and officials who were believed to be responsible for his death and to have benefited from the fraud he uncovered. These sanctions cost various Russians millions of dollars so they have been fighting the Magnitsky Act for years. Russia also cut off adoptions from America in response to the passage of the Act. From NBC News:
In 2013, the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office sued a Russian company, accusing it of laundering some of the proceeds of the fraud Magnitsky allegedly uncovered. The complaint incorporated Browder’s account about what happened to Magnitsky.
That lawsuit set in motion a process through which that version of events would come under challenge.
The defendant, a company called Prevezon, is owned by Denis Katsyv, who became wealthy while his father was vice governor and transport minister for the Moscow region, according to published reports. The father, Pyotr Katsyv, is now vice president of the state-run Russian Railways. Veselnitskaya has long represented the family.
Prevezon hired a law firm, BakerHostetler, and a team that included a longtime New York prosecutor, John Moscow. Also working on Prevezon’s behalf were Simpson, Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin.
According to lawyers for Prevezon, Browder’s story of what happened to Sergei Magnitsky was a lie, one he concocted to cover up his own company’s tax fraud! In 2016, Browder responded to these claims by filing a lawsuit against Prevezon and Glenn Simpson, claiming they were “in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.” In other words, he claimed they were foreign agents who were lobbying illegally.
So Glenn Simpson and Natalia Veselnitskaya were in court together because they’ve been involved in representing Russian oligarchs for some time. That happened on the same day that Veselnitskaya met with Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner with the promise of dirt on Hillary Clinton. What Veselnitskaya actually presented, according to the NY Times, was the contents of a memo about some American DNC donors who had allegedly failed to pay taxes in Russia:
The memo that Ms. Veselnitskaya brought to the Trump Tower meeting alleged that Ziff Brothers Investments, an American firm, had illegally purchased shares in a Russian company and evaded tens of millions of dollars of Russian taxes. The company was the financial vehicle of three billionaire brothers, two of them major donors to Democratic candidates including Mrs. Clinton. By implication, Ms. Veselnitskaya, said, those political contributions were tainted by “stolen” money.
Kremlin officials viewed the charges as extremely significant. The Ziff brothers had invested in funds managed by William F. Browder, an American-born financier and fierce Kremlin foe.
Are some of the puzzle pieces starting to fall into place? Veselnitskaya was working against the Magnitisky Act on behalf of Russian oligarchs with the help of Glenn Simpson. That act was largely supported by claims about Magnitsky’s death in prison which were made and circulated by Kremlin foe William Browder. Simpson was apparently engaged to help undercut the story Browder was telling.
Veselnitskaya, with the help of Russian prosecutor general Yuri Y. Chaika, apparently decided that the Ziff brothers (alleged) failure to pay taxes on investments to Browder’s funds could be spun as “dirt” on Hillary. Why? Because those same investors were big DNC donors. Maybe the plan was to get Trump or his people to make a stink about this, but it seems Donald Trump Jr. just didn’t get how Americans not paying taxes in Russia constituted dirt. Describing the Trump Tower meeting with Veselnitskaya Trump Jr. told Sean Hannity, “It was this ‘Hey, some DNC donors may have done something in Russia and they didn’t pay taxes…I was like, what does this have to do with anything?” Trump Jr. said the meeting broke up when Veselnitskaya started talking about adoptions.
There was perhaps another motivation for trying to get Trump Jr. to bite on the “dirt” about the Ziff brothers. It would be another avenue to attack William Browder, the person most responsible for the Magnitsky Act. Getting the Trump campaign on board with the attack involving Browder’s funds could have been a coup for Veselnitskaya and the Russian oligarchs she was representing. But again, it seems Trump Jr. didn’t think not paying Russian taxes was a big deal.
The fact that Veselnitskaya and Simpson were working together on behalf of Russian oligarchs at the same time Simpson’s company, Fusion GPS, was gathering memos full of Russian dirt on Trump for Hillary’s campaign and the DNC seems worthy of further investigation.
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Russian Lawyer From Trump Tower ‘Collusion’ Meeting Also Met With Fusion GPS Founder on Same Day
Regular readers are aware that Democratic opposition research firm Fusion GPS has cropped up several times in my work over recent weeks, as the country seeks answers on Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election (over which federal authorities may soon file charges against six Russian officials responsible for the DNC hack, the investigation of which was…strange, and possibly tainted by none other than Fusion GPS). Recall that the firm in question hired ex-British spy Christopher Steele who compiled a controversial, unverified, and at least partially discredited anti-Trump dossier that purportedly relied on information from high-level Russian sources(and whom the FBI continued to pay until that highly questionable decision was publicly reported).
We learned last month that the Clinton campaign and DNC contributed funds for the file, destroying previous denials. Fusion GPS also represented the Russian government’s interests on projects they say were unrelated to election meddling, though the periods of their involvement with Steele’s dossier and with the Russian government overlapped. Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel has also written compellingly about Congressional Democrats’ efforts to shield Fusion GPS from scrutiny. All of which is a prelude to this new reporting from Fox News correspondent Catherine Herridge:
The co-founder of Fusion GPS, the firm behind the unverified Trump dossier, met with a Russian lawyer before and after a key meeting she had last year with Trump’s son, Fox News has learned. The contacts shed new light on how closely tied the firm was to Russian interests, at a time when it was financing research to discredit then-candidate Donald Trump. The opposition research firm has faced renewed scrutiny after litigation revealed that the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid for that research. Congressional Republicans have since questioned whether that politically financed research contributed to the FBI’s investigation of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign – making Fusion’s 2016 contacts with Russian interests all the more relevant. The June 2016 Trump Tower meeting involving Donald Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya occurred during a critical period. At that time, Fox News has learned that bank records show Fusion GPS was paid by a law firm for work on behalf of a Kremlin-linked oligarch while paying a former British spy Christopher Steele to dig up dirt on Trump through his Russian contacts.
But hours before the Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016, Fusion co-founder and ex-Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson was with Veselnitskaya in a Manhattan federal courtroom, a confidential source told Fox News. Court records reviewed by Fox News, email correspondence and published reports corroborate the pair’s presence together. The source told Fox News they also were together after the Trump Tower meeting…NBC News first reported that Veselnitskaya and Simpson were both at a hearing centered around another Fusion client, Russian oligarch Denis Katsyv. His company, Prevezon Holdings, was sanctioned against doing business in the U.S. for its alleged role in laundering more than $230 million…Fusion’s Simpson is believed to have been working with Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin, a former Soviet counter-intelligence officer turned Russian-American lobbyist, to overturn [unrelated] sanctions. Akhmetshin also attended the June 9 Trump Tower meeting, along with about a half-dozen others including Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, publicist Rob Goldstone, Natalia’s Russian translator Anatoli Samochornov and Ike Kaveladze from a Russian-American real estate agency.
This is another bizarre twist to a complex and confusing story, which is clarified quite well by John Sexton here. Fusion GPS (which has resisted efforts by House investigators to access its bank records and other documents) wasn’t merely working for Russians while it was also paying Steele to dredge up damaging information on Trump. Fox has now revealed that one of the central figures in the “Trump collusion” narrative actually met with the founder of the firm before and after (that same day!) the infamous Trump Tower meeting at which Donald Trump, Jr. and two other senior campaign officials evidently attempted to collaborate with Russians against Hillary Clinton. The firm will say that this timing was a pure coincidence, and Ms. Veselnitskaya was connected to the anti-Magnitsky Act lobbying push, so it would follow that Simpson and her paths would cross. Less credulous observers may find this “coincidence” too curious to simply accept as innocent.
Predictably, some Republicans are citing this development as more “proof” that it was Democrats who colluded with the Kremlin last year, but that’s still an overstatement. We don’t have a complete picture of what happened, but this newly-exposed detail should be probed. Once again, thoroughly resolving the Russia matter and preventing future subterfuge requires turning over every stone, including ones that aren’t likely to lead to Donald Trump’s door. Fortunately, Robert Mueller seems to be pursuing such a path.
Quasi-relatedly, Katie wrote about this story on Monday, but I want to flag it again — if only to renew my call for James Comey to testify under oath again about his handling of the Clinton email scandal:
The relevant portion of the applicable statute states that grossly negligent handling of classified material is a crime. Now we know he used that phrase in an initial draft of his (damning) exoneration statement. I’ll repeat that the “gross negligence” standard set out in the Espionage Act does not require proof of intent, the fig leaf by which Comey cleared Hillary of potential charges. Of course, he was wrong about her supposed lack of intent, too.
Little error from my computer. Discard the 2nd “not”.
I would not be surprised if the Republicans Trump-haters did not recommend GPS to Hillary!