Trump's campaign team met with a Russian lawyer believed to work 'at the behest' of the Kremlin
President Donald Trump's son, son-in-law, and campaign chairman met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya last year, just weeks after Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination, The New York Times reported Saturday.
Veselnitskaya is known for waging a harsh campaign against the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which blacklisted Russians suspected of human-rights abuses, and has strong ties to the Kremlin. She is married to a former deputy transportation minister of the Moscow region, and her clients have included Russian state-owned businesses.
She is also the family lawyer for Denis Katsyv, the son of senior Russian government official Pyotr Katsyv and owner of the Cyprus-incorporated real-estate company Prevezon. Prevezon was under investigation by the Department of Justice at the time of the meeting over whether it laundered millions of dollars into New York City real estate.
The case, which was settled for approximately $6 million in May, garnered high-profile attention given its ties to the $230 million Russian tax-fraud scheme uncovered by Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, whose suspicious death aroused international media attention in November 2009.
Magnitsky uncovered the scheme, which became one of the biggest corruption scandals of Russian President Vladimir Putin's presidency, in 2008 on behalf of the investment advisory firm Hermitage Capital. Magnitsky was later thrown in jail and died in custody, and an independent human-rights commission found he had been illegally arrested and beaten. The Kremlin maintains that Magnitsky died of a heart attack.
