While leading a congressional delegation to Moscow in April 2016, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), nicknamed "Putin's favorite Congressman" for his longstanding sympathy towards Russia, met with Natalia Veselnitskaya, the same Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. in Trump Tower on June 9, 2016.
Foreign Policy reports Veselnitskaya disclosed the meeting during an October 3rd interview with a pro-Russian Crimean news service. She says she met with Rohrabacher to discuss issues related to the Magnitsky Act.
Rohrabacher's spokesman says the congressman does not recall speaking with Veselnitskaya specifically but that she likely was one of many people he encountered during his trip.
The following is what we knew about Congressman Rohrabacher's trip prior to Veselnitskaya's saying she participated:
In April 2016, on an official congressional trip to Moscow, Rohrabacher accepted confidential information from Russian government officials trying to blame the $230 million tax fraud that ultimately led to the passage of the 2012 Magnitsky Act on Sergei Magnitsky, the lawyer murdered for uncovering it, and Bill Browder, the businessman who hired him. Russian officials suggested Rohrabacher use their information to convince Congress to lift the Magnitsky Act sanctions and Russia would consider reversing its punitive ban on adoptions. The Russians also pointed him to a New York court case involving Denis Katsyv whose company, Prevezon, was charged with laundering $14 million of the tax fraud money. Katsyv’s lawyer in New York was Natalia Veselnitskaya.
Katsyv had set up a nonprofit in Delaware allegedly working to restart Russian adoptions and was working with lobbyist and former Soviet counterintelligence officer Rinat Akhmetshin. Akhmetshin visited Rohrabacher on the Hill and was escorted by Rohrabacher’s aide to meet other lawmakers, a highly unusual occurrence.
Rohrabacher carried Russian water during debate over the Global Magnitsky Act, an expansion of U.S. authority to sanction foreign individuals who commit human rights abuses and acts of corruption, but his efforts to curtail the act were unsuccessful.
Then on June 13, 2016, after a D.C. screening of a film parroting the anti-Magnitsky Kremlin line, Rohrabacher had dinner with Akhmetshin, Veselnitskaya, and the film’s director. The next day, Rohrabacher submitted testimony from the director into the official record during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on U.S.-Russian relations claiming Magnitsky was not a whistleblower. Veselnitskaya sat in the front row at that hearing.
Four days before the screening, dinner, and hearing, both Akhmetshin and Veselnitskaya had been in Manhattan visiting with Donald Trump, Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner at Trump Tower.
GOP Congressman Met in Moscow With Kremlin-Linked Lawyer at Center of Russia Investigation (Foreign Policy)