Publicist who arranged Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting to testify before Congress: report

The British publicist who arranged a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer during the 2016 presidential election will go before the House and Senate Intelligence committees as soon as next week, CNN reported on Tuesday.

The report comes less than a month after the publicist, Rob Goldstone, said in an interview with The Sunday Times that he was “keen to talk” with special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, which is investigating possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

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“After the story initially broke, it seemed to quiet down for a while. But now it’s back in the news with such force, I feel it’s time for me to explain what happened,” Goldstone told the newspaper in November.

The publicist became a central figure in the Russia probe after it was revealed that he had helped set up a meeting in 2016 between Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer who had promised damaging material on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Goldstone, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort were also present for the meeting, which took place at Trump Tower in New York.

The publicist claimed in his interview with The Sunday Times that the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, pulled a “classic bait-and-switch,” promising information on Clinton when in fact she really wanted to discuss the Magnitsky Act, which punished Moscow with sanctions after the death of a whistleblower in 2009.

The report comes as Trump Jr. is preparing to go before congressional investigators for a second time on Wednesday. 

Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn on Friday pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about the nature of his communications with a Russian official, raising speculation that Mueller was closing in on other members of Trump’s inner circle.