Another nothing burger. Update to this previous story.
Via Circa:
Shortly before his father was formally nominated for president last summer, Donald Trump Jr. was approached by a Russian lawyer who set up a meeting to discuss a Russian policy, according to interviews with Trump family lawyers.
President Trump’s eldest son briefly gathered others for the meeting, including his brother-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as then-presidential campaign manager Paul Manafort for the meeting at Trump Tower in New York City with the lawyer, identified by Trump family lawyers as Natalia Veselnitskaya.
Veselnitskaya used the meeting in June 2016 to have a conversation about a U.S. law called the Magnitsky Act that Russia leader Vladimir Putin reviles and has retaliated against by blocking U.S. adoptions of Russian children.
The encounter was short and the Trump team had no further contact with the woman or the policy issue, lawyers said.
The meeting was recently disclosed to congressional investigators by one of the attendees, according to sources directly familiar with the disclosure.
President Trump was not aware of the meeting and did not attend it, according to the lawyers. A translator and an American businessman working for a pro-Russian business lobby also attended the meeting, which lasted about 20 minutes, according to the interviews.
The president’s legal team said Saturday they believe the entire meeting may have been part of a larger election-year opposition effort aimed at creating the appearance of improper connections between Trump family members and Russia that also included a now-discredited intelligence dossier produced by a former British intelligence agent named Christopher Steele who worked for a U.S. political firm known as Fusion GPS.[…]
The connection drawn by the president’s lawyers between Veselnitskaya and Fusion GPS comes from a letter this spring by the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley, who disclosed that Fusion GPS also provided litigation support in the Prevezon case.
Prevezon also apparently lobbied against the Magnitsky Act, according to Grassley’s letter.
“Prevezon’s lobbying efforts were reportedly commissioned by Mr. Katsyv, who organized them through a Delaware non-profit he formed and through the law firm then representing Prevezon in the asset forfeiture case, Baker Hostetler. Among others, the efforts involved lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin and Fusion GPS, a political research firm led by Glenn Simpson,” the letter said.
Grassley has asked the Justice Department to look at all the connections and is seeking information from Fusion GPS on whether opponents of Trump funded the creation of a salacious intelligence dossier to hurt his presidential bid. The FBI has said it has been unable to corroborate many of the allegations in the dossier that involved Trump.