Russian attorney shared plans for Trump Jr. meeting with Kremlin: report

The Russian attorney who met with Donald Trump Jr. and two other top Trump campaign officials during the 2016 presidential race first shared the information she planned to provide the campaign with the Russian government, according to a news report.

The New York Times reported Friday that Natalia Veselnitskaya arrived at Trump Tower with a memo detailing information she believed was damaging to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign, a memo which Veselnitskaya shared months before with Russia’s prosecutor general, Yuri Chaika.

The memo reportedly contained information accusing a company linked to two major Clinton donors of a scheme to illegally purchase shares in a Russian company and avoid tens of thousands of dollars in Russian taxes.

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Paragraphs from that memo were lifted verbatim, according to the newspaper, from a document that Chaika’s office had given to a U.S. congressman two months earlier.

Additionally, the report claims that Veselnitskaya partnered with Chaika’s office in April of 2016 in order to pass the accusations on to a congressional delegation that included Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), often described as the most pro-Russia lawmaker in Congress.

Rohrabacher made headlines last month when he met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange over his claim that he could provide evidence disproving the notion that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election. 

The Trump Tower meeting between Veselnitskaya, Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and former campaign manager Paul Manafort has become a central part of Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller investigation into possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia.

If true, the report would confirm Veselnitskaya’s long-rumored ties to the Kremlin.

Veselnitskaya denied The New York Times’s report in an email statement slamming the paper for publishing “lies and false claims.”

This report was updated 1:55 p.m.