Is this the indictment that could land Trump Jr. and Jared in jail?
Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who in 2016 met with Trump campaign officials in Trump Tower, was charged on Tuesday in a separate case that showed her close ties to the Kremlin.
Ms. Veselnitskaya was charged by federal prosecutors in New York with seeking to thwart a Justice Department civil fraud investigation into money laundering that involved an influential Russian businessman and his investment firm.
The case was not directly related to the Trump Tower meeting. But a federal indictment returned in Manhattan seemed to confirm that Ms. Veselnitskaya had deep ties to senior Russian government officials.
More:
The U.S. government alleges that while representing the defendants in a federal money-laundering case involving corrupt Russian officials, Veselnitskaya intentionally misled the feds by presenting supposedly independent exculpatory evidence about her clients without disclosing that she had participated in drafting that information “in secret cooperation with a senior Russian prosecutor.”
Note that this indictment did not come from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s shop but from the Southern District of New York.
Also note that the lovely Miss Natalia shows up in the most interesting places:
The two Russian lobbyists who met with then-candidate Donald Trump’s top campaign officials at Trump Tower in June 2016 also attended the inaugural festivities when he was sworn in as president seven months later, The Washington Post reported.
One of the lobbyists, Natalia Veselnitskaya, is a Kremlin-connected lawyer who lobbies aggressively against the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which blacklisted powerful Russians suspected of human-rights abuses. The other lobbyist, Rinat Akhmetshin, is a former Soviet military intelligence officer and an ally of Veselnitskaya who also advocates against the Magnitsky Act.
If it crosses your mind that this indictment may be used to put the squeeze on Natalia concerning the substance of the Trump Tower meeting, we believe you would be 100% correct.
After all, as former university owner Donald J. Trump would say, there was “no collusion” — the evidence instead strongly suggests a conspiracy to both tamper with American elections and lift Russian sanctions in exchange for favors.
Meanwhile, there is a new twist in court watchers’ favorite guessing game, “Who’s Been Subpoenaed?”
The Supreme Court has received a new request in a dispute over a mystery federal grand jury subpoena.
The request asks the court for permission to file an appeal under seal and redacted copies on the public record, meaning the public may soon get more information about this subpoena thought to be tied to special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
The motion was filed on Jan. 7, according to the court’s docket, but announced Tuesday.
The federal grand jury subpoena, which is being kept under seal along with related court filings, seeks information from a corporation owned by a foreign government, known in court filings only as “Country A.”
To top it all off with a Magnitzky cherry, there’s this news:
Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, has been accused by special counsel Robert Mueller of sharing polling data on the 2016 election with a Russian man linked to Moscow’s intelligence agencies.
Attorneys for Manafort inadvertently disclosed the allegation in a court filing on Tuesday. Sections of the filing were meant to be redacted, but the text underneath several blacked-out lines could be copied and viewed.
The allegation relates to Manafort’s association with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian political consultant who worked for Manafort on campaigns in eastern Europe.
Mueller, who is investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, said in a court filing in March last year that the FBI assesses that Kilimnik “has ties to a Russian intelligence service and had such ties in 2016”.
What is not revealed is WHOSE polling data. The RNC? The Trump campaign’s internal polling?
Or maybe an affiliate of Cambridge Analytica?
Grab the popcorn. DEVELOPING…