Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russia lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, appears to have coordinated and cleared her talking points memo with the Kremlin months before bringing it to New York.
The document's language closely mirrored the contents of a memo provided to Republican US Rep. Dana Rohrabacher by the office of Russia's chief federal prosecutor Yuri Chaika while Rohrabacher was in Moscow last April.
NYT:
The coordination between the Trump Tower visitor and the Russian prosecutor general undercuts Ms. Veselnitskaya’s account that she was a purely independent actor when she sat down with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Paul J. Manafort, then the Trump campaign chairman. It also suggests that emails from an intermediary to the younger Mr. Trump promising that Ms. Veselnitskaya would arrive with information from Russian prosecutors were rooted at least partly in fact — not mere “puffery,” as the president’s son later said.
(...)
The matching messages point to a synchronized information campaign. Like some other Russian experts, Stephen Blank, a senior fellow with the nonprofit American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, said they indicate that Ms. Veselnitskaya’s actions “were coordinated from the very top.”
Central to Veselnitskaya's pitch was an effort to discredit human rights activist and Putin critic Bill Browder who lobbies for the Magnitsky Act in honor of his murdered former attorney Sergei Magnitsky:
Browder told Business Insider on Monday that "the Veselnitskaya memo has exactly the same talking points as the Russian government's position on the Magnitsky case."
"That is the strongest indication to date that Veselnitskaya is an agent of the Russian government and not some independent operator as she claims," he said.
Read more: Talking Points Brought to Trump Tower Meeting Were Shared With Kremlin (NYT)
New memo suggests Russian lawyer at Trump Tower meeting was acting 'as an agent' of the Kremlin (Business Insider)