The Russian lawyer who met with Trump campaign says she is a Kremlin 'informant'

The Russian lawyer who met with members of Donald Trump's presidential campaign in June 2016 contradicted her earlier denials of being a Russian operative, The New York Times reported.
Natalia Veselnitskaya told the Senate Judiciary Committee in November that she worked only as a private lawyer, and she downplayed her ties to the Kremlin.
But according to The Times, Veselnitskaya told NBC News in an interview set to air Friday that she had been "actively communicating with the office of the Russian prosecutor general" since 2013.

A Russian lawyer who met with members of Donald Trump's presidential campaign in Trump Tower in June 2016 on the premise of offering damaging information about the Democratic nominee had closer ties to the Kremlin that she has previously acknowledged, The New York Times reported on Friday.

The Times reported that Natalia Veselnitskaya detailed in an interview with NBC News, set to air Friday, her previously undisclosed relationship with Yuri Chaika, Russia's prosecutor general.

"I am a lawyer, and I am an informant," she said, according to The Times. "Since 2013, I have been actively communicating with the office of the Russian prosecutor general."

Veselnitskaya told the Senate Judiciary Committee in November that she worked exclusively as a private lawyer and said her ties to the Russian government and Chaika were only in a professional capacity.

"I operate independently of any governmental bodies," she told the committee, adding: "I have no relationship with Mr. Chaika, his representatives, and institutions other than those related to my professional functions of a lawyer."

According to The Times, Veselnitskaya also discussed with NBC News emails obtained by an organization founded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former Russian oil tycoon who opposes President Vladimir Putin, that further detailed her relationship to Chaika.

Chaika's foray into American politics began in earnest in April 2016. That is when his office gave Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher and three other US representatives a confidential letter detailing American investor Bill Browder's "illegal scheme of buying up Gazprom shares without permission of the Government of Russia" between 1999 and 2006, one month after Rohrabacher returned from Moscow.

As Business Insiderhas previously reported, Veselnitskaya brought a memo to the Trump Tower meeting that contained many of the same talking points as one written by Chaika's office two months earlier. The document is marked "confidential" but made the rounds on Capitol Hill upon the lawmaker's return to the US and was obtained by Business Insider last year.

Browder was targeted by Chaika's office and by Veselnitskaya because of his role in spearheading the Magnitsky Act — a law passed in 2012 aimed at punishing those suspected of being involved in the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer Browder had hired to examine whether his company, Hermitage, had been the victim of tax fraud.

Magnitsky soon discovered that Hermitage was only a small pawn in a vast, $230 million tax fraud scheme that implicated high-level Kremlin officials and allies of President Vladimir Putin. The scandal, exposed in 2008, quickly snowballed into one of the biggest corruption scandals of Putin's tenure, and Moscow has been working to discredit Browder ever since.

In a brief initial statement, Trump Jr. claimed that the meeting "primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children," but did not make any mention that he knew he was meeting a Kremlin-connected source who had damaging information on Clinton.

In the second statement, Trump Jr. confirmed that in the meeting, the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, said she "had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton," but claimed the information never came to light.

"Her statements were vague, ambiguous, and made no sense," Trump Jr. said. "No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information."

He continued: "She then changed subjects and began discussing the adoption of Russian children and mentioned the Magnitsky Act. It became clear to be that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting. I interrupted and advised her that my father was not an elected official, but rather a private citizen, and that her comments and concerns were better addressed if and when he held public office."

The Times said that the Russian prosecutor general's office did not respond to requests for comment and that Veselnitskaya said she would respond in two weeks.

Read the full New York Times report »