‘STARTLING TWIST’

‘STARTLING TWIST’

This Is Why Natalia Veselnitskaya Was in New York

She came to Trump Tower straight from a hearing at an American appeals court, reported on here for the first time—and she was at both of them for the same reason.

Just before her now-infamous meeting on June 9 of last year with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower, Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya was in court as a former U.S. attorney general tried to pull off an audacious legal maneuver against the U.S. government.

The meeting, arranged after Trump Jr. was offered information to “incriminate Hillary” as part “of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” had originally been scheduled for 3 p.m., but was moved back an hour because “the Russian government attorney” had to be in court that afternoon, according to the email thread arranging it.

That was the same day that Michael Mukasey, who served as attorney general under George W. Bush, appeared before a panel of three judges on the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to argue that Prevezon—the Kremlin-tied company then charged with hiding a fraction of a $230 million Russian tax scheme in Manhattan luxury real estate—should be allowed to keep a lawyer it had effectively poached from the other side.

Veselnitskaya, who represented the company’s owner as it prepared to defend itself at trial, did not register an official appearance with the appeals court, and the SDNY declined to comment on her presence there. A recording of the proceeding, obtained by The Daily Beast, makes clear that both of her stops in Manhattan that day—in court and then in Trump Tower—were part of the same aggressive Kremlin campaign to try and overturn the Magnitsky Act, which infuriated President Vladimir Putin by imposing sanctions on 44 prominent Russians.

Ultimately the panel ruled against Prevezon, deeming the circumstances were “truly are extraordinary” and removing the lawyer, saying his presence would “taint” the trial.

Their unanimous judgment wasn’t handed down until October 2016, but Veselnitskaya may well have realized from the probing nature of the judges’ questions that the hearing had not gone well by the time she left the court building at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge and made her way uptown to Trump Tower.

At the meeting there, where Clinton dirt had been promised, Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin reportedly asked Trump’s son, son-in-law, and campaign manager to soften U.S. sanctions on Russia in exchange for an end to the ban on American adoptions of Russian orphans passed in retaliation for those sanctions.


READ MORE IN POSTED ARTICLE

http://www.thedailybeast.com/this-is-why-natalia-veselnitskaya-was-in-new-york
http://www.thedailybeast.com/this-is-why-natalia-veselnitskaya-was-in-new-york