A new piece of the Russia investigation puzzle has emerged that interestingly connects attendees of the June 9, 2016 meeting at Trump Tower to high-level Russian officials and, possibly, Putin himself.
Bloomberg tells the story today of a woman named Sara Peterson who was looking for help in her four-year journey to adopt two Russian orphans. She found a foundation called The Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation (HRAGI) and set up a meeting. HRAGI calls itself "a non-governmental organization established in Washington, DC to help restart American adoption of Russian children."
Peterson's meeting in D.C. in August 2016 happened to be with Rinat Akhmetshin, the same lobbyist who, along with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, had sat down with Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner at Trump Tower two months earlier.
He wanted to know which members of Congress he should approach, she said. At that meeting and later ones, he said “things would change” after the upcoming elections.
...It didn’t take long for her to realize that the foundation wasn’t all it seemed. As she put it, “I don’t think adoptions were their primary agenda.”
Now Special Counsel Robert Mueller is looking into the foundation.
(...)
Peterson said she also met with Veselnitskaya on Jan. 21, 2017 in Washington.
HRAGI is not what is claims to be. The website is mostly under construction and has been since 2016. The organization likely set up as a nonprofit with a Washington address to hide funding.
It was financed by $500,000 in donations, mostly from wealthy Russians with ties to Petr Katsyv, deputy director of Russian Railways and a longtime acquaintance of Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika. Rather than a nonprofit helping unite Americans with Russian adoptees, the foundation was a lobbying vehicle against sanctions.
(...)
By setting up a U.S. nonprofit, the foundation effectively concealed its sources of financing, which may have required registering as a foreign agent.
(...)
Most of the Russians financing the foundation said in interviews that they knew nothing about U.S. adoptions of Russian children, contradicting the foundation’s U.S. disclosure forms.
Bloomberg notes "Russian President Vladimir Putin, who ordered the adoption ban, and Chaika have made repealing the U.S. sanctions law a priority."
There's more:
The idea for the foundation dates to December 2015, when Denis Katsyv, Petr’s son and a Moscow businessman, was fighting charges issued by the U.S. Justice Department that his company, Prevezon Holdings Ltd., helped launder money connected to the fraud Magnitsky said he had uncovered. His U.S. lawyers at Baker & Hostetler LLP introduced him to Akhmetshin...
Veselnitskaya is Katsyv's lawyer. She also reportedly cleared her Trump Tower talking points with Chaika.
Rob Goldstone's first email to Trump Jr. mentioned the "Crown prosecutor of Russia," who, although the title is wrong, is presumed to be Chaika.
Yet the Kremlin has insisted on separate occasions it has never heard of Veselnitskaya or Akhmetshin.
On July 27, 2017, Bill Browder, financier and head of the Global Magnitsky Justice campaign, told Senators he had no doubt Putin was behind the June 9, 2016 meeting between Donald Trump, Jr. and Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya and Russian lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin.
Full story: Mueller Is Looking Into a U.S. Foundation Backed by Russian Money (Bloomberg)
Full text of the emails between Donald Trump Jr and Rob Goldstone (The Guardian)