Ex-Soviet counter-intelligence officer says he attended Trump Jr meeting

Donald Trump’s denial of collusion with Russia suffered yet another blow on Friday when it emerged that his son failed to disclose the presence of a former Soviet military officer at the now notorious meeting.

Rinat Akhmetshin – who claims he served in a counter-intelligence unit but never formally trained as a spy – told the Associated Press that he attended the meeting with Donald Trump Jr, which was billed as part of a Russian government effort to boost Trump’s election campaign.

The latest revelation came as news reports suggested there were at least eight attendees at the meeting, which occurred at Trump’s eponymous New York tower shortly after he effectively clinched the Republican presidential nomination. The presence of additional participants contradicted Trump Jr’s assertion this week to the Fox News host Sean Hannity that all of the information about the meeting had been publicly disclosed.

Late Friday, the identity of a seventh person in the room was revealed to be Anatoli Samochornov, a Russian-born American translator who was working with Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer initially at the center of the meeting. Veselnitskaya had previously informed the New York Times she was accompanied by a translator but would not provide his name. Ken Vogel, a reporter at the New York Times, revealed Samochornov’s identity during an appearance on MSNBC.

But it was the presence of Akhmetshin, now a pro-Moscow lobbyist, that raised new questions about the controversial meeting and its purpose. Akhmetshin dismissed reports that he has ties to Russian intelligence agencies as a “smear campaign”, but was described by the chairman of the Senate judiciary committee as an expert in “subversive political influence operations often involving disinformation and propaganda” this year.

In an interview with the AP, Akhmetshin said he had accompanied Veselnitskaya to Trump Tower in New York, where they met an interpreter who also participated in the meeting in June 2016. He told the news agency he had learned about the meeting only that day, when Veselnitskaya asked him to attend, and turned up in jeans and a T-shirt.

The AP reported: “During the meeting, Akhmetshin said Veselnitskaya brought with her a plastic folder with printed-out documents that detailed what she believed was the flow of illicit funds to the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Veselnitskaya presented the contents of the documents to the Trump associates and suggested that making the information public could help the Trump campaign, he said.

‘This could be a good issue to expose how the DNC is accepting bad money,’ Akhmetshin recalled her saying.”

According to Akhmetshin, Trump Jr asked Veselnitskaya if she had all the necessary evidence to supporting her claims. But when Veselnitskaya replied that the Trump campaign would need do further research, Trump Jr lost interest.

“They couldn’t wait for the meeting to end,” Akhmetshin told the AP, adding that he did not know if Veselnitskaya’s documents were provided by the Russian government.

The meeting was also attended by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Paul Manafort, then chairman of the Trump campaign. Akhmetshin said he recognised Manafort because they worked in “adjacent political circles” but never together.

He told the AP that the meeting was “not substantive” and he “actually expected more serious” discussion. “I never thought this would be such a big deal, to be honest.”

The meeting had been brokered by Rob Goldstone, a British music publicist whose clients include the Russian singer Emin Agalarov, an acquaintance of the Trump family.

Profile

Donald Trump Jr

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Born

31 December 1977 in Manhattan

Career

After brief stint bartending in Aspen, he moved back to New York to join the Trump Organization, supervising Trump Park Avenue and other projects. He took an interest in other family enterprises in later years, appearing as a guest adviser on his father’s reality television show The Apprentice and as a judge of various Miss USA pageants.

High point

Just before the news of his meeting with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, he was riding high as executive director of The Trump Organization and one of the president’s closest confidants.

Low point

On Tuesday 11 July 2017, he produced the most damning evidence yet in the FBI’s investigation of Russian meddling in the US election, catapulting himself on to the international stage with emails showing he knowingly met with a Russian lawyer claiming to have “dirt” on his father’s rival.

He says

“I think I probably got a lot of my father’s natural security, or ego, or whatever … I can be my own person and not have to live under his shadow. I definitely look up to him in many ways – I’d like to be more like him when it comes to business – but I think I’m such a different person, it’s hard to even compare us. His work persona is kind of what he is. I have a work face, and then there’s my private life,” – Trump Jr to New York magazine, 2004.

They say

“It’s a do-anything-you-can-to-win world that he’s part of, and his eagerness to meet with this lawyer, who was very explicitly described as having information that came from Russian government sources – there’s no mystery there. There’s no veil. There’s not even one veil. Her name wasn’t mentioned but everything else was very explicit and he leaps at it. That’s all part of this all-that-matters-is-winning, there’s winning and there’s losing, that’s it. That’s the value system and in that way, he very much echoes his father.” – Gwenda Blair, Trump biographer, to the Guardian, 12 July 2017.

Asked about Akhmetshin’s presence, Trump Jr’s lawyer, Alan Futerfas, told NBC News: “The person was described as a friend of Emin’s and maybe as a friend of Natalia’s ... He is a US citizen. He told me specifically he was not working for the Russian government, and in fact laughed when I asked him that question.”

Futerfas added: “I have absolutely no concerns about what was said in that meeting.”

Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for Russian president Vladimir Putin, told reporters on Friday: “We don’t know anything about this person.”

Trump Jr and Veselnitskaya have claimed that the 20-minute meeting was dominated by the Magnitsky Act, a 2012 US law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers. In retaliation, Putin halted American adoptions of Russian children.

Q&A

What is the Magnitsky Act?

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Sergei Magnitsky was a Russian lawyer who investigated a massive $230m tax fraud in 2007. 

After he revealed the scam, Magnitsky was arrested by the same officials whom he had accused of covering up the racket and was imprisoned. He died in jail after being denied medical treatment. Russia accused him of committing the fraud himself and even put him on trial posthumously.

After a long campaign by his associates, the Magnitsky Act was passed by Congress in 2012, banning entry to the US and freezing assets of officials believed to have been involved in Magnitsky's persecution and death. Russia responded by banning a list of US citizens it deemed hostile to Russia, and blocking the adoption of Russian children by US citizens – a controversial move that led critics to suggest the Kremlin was punishing Russia’s most vulnerable children. 

In March, Akhmetshin was named by Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, as lobbying against the Magnitsky Act along with the firm Fusion GPS, “which was also involved in the creation of the unsubstantiated dossier alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians”.

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Grassley wrote in a letter to the justice department: “It is particularly disturbing that Mr Akhmetshin and Fusion GPS were working together on this pro-Russia lobbying effort in 2016 in light of Mr Akhmetshin’s history and reputation. Mr Akhmetshin is a Russian immigrant to the US who has admitted having been a ‘Soviet counterintelligence officer’.

“In fact, it has been reported that he worked for the GRU [military intelligence] and allegedly specializes in ‘active measures campaigns’, ie, subversive political influence operations often involving disinformation and propaganda. According to press accounts, Mr Akhmetshin ‘is known in foreign policy circles as a key pro-Russian operator’, and Radio Free Europe described him as a ‘Russian “gun-for-hire” [who] lurks in the shadows of Washington’s lobbying world’.

Grassley complained that both Akhmetshin and Fusion GPS had failed to register as foreign agents.

Akhmetshin “was even accused in a lawsuit of organizing a scheme to hack the computers of one his client’s adversaries”, Grassley wrote.

According to court documents filed with the New York supreme court in November 2015, which were first reported by the Daily Beast, a Russian mining company alleged that Akhmetshin hacked into its computer systems and stole private documents as part of an effort to target them in a smear campaign. The allegations were eventually withdrawn.

Samochornov, the translator, portrayed himself as largely a bystander to the meeting. Although the interpreter would not confirm his attendance, citing nondisclosure agreements, he told the website HuffPost: “I’m a professional freelance interpreter and I can’t talk about any of my clients.”

“This is my livelihood and I hope you can be sympathetic to the predicament I find myself in,” Samochornov added.

Samochornov has served as a translator for US government agencies, including the state department. His views on social media painted a picture of a progressive, who has been supportive of single-payer healthcare and stricter gun laws. Samochornov has indicated an apparent distaste for Republicans, posting video clips critical of conservatives.

Friday’s revelations deepen the crisis at the White House after a tumultuous week. Emails released by Trump Jr show that he was told by Goldstone that the meeting was part of a Russian government attempt to interfere in the election, and that Trump Jr responded gleefully instead of alerting authorities.

Goldstone had told Trump Jr that the lawyer had damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Trump Jr, whose version of events has shifted multiple times, says this failed to materialise and he wrapped up the conversation quickly. Trump Jr failed to mention Akhmetshin’s presence in a series of statements and an interview this week in which he insisted he was being fully transparent.

Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said the report about an alleged former Russian counter-intelligence officer being present, “if accurate, adds another deeply disturbing fact about this secret meeting”.

He added: “Donald Trump Jr’s denial of any such meetings, his misleading initial representation that it dealt only with adoptions – a statement evidently approved by the White House – and his later admission that the whole purpose of taking the meeting was to receive the support of the Russian government in the form of damaging information about Hillary Clinton paint a portrait of consistent dissembling and deceit when it comes to the campaign’s meetings with Russian officials and intermediaries.”

Joel Benenson, a former senior adviser to the Clinton campaign, told the MSNBC channel: “We are, in real time, living through a case study of crisis mismanagement. The fact that every day we are learning something that is appalling is shameful. From the time this started unfolding, even before he spoke out, he was changing his story.”