Email correspondence regarding the controversial July 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian attorney at Trump Tower in New York City have contradicted previous reports.
The newly revealed messages suggest that the meeting was not set up to pass on damaging information about Hillary Clinton on behalf of the Russian government, as was previously believed.
According to those messages, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya believed she was meeting then-candidate Donald Trump’s oldest son to discuss the Magnitsky Act, a 2012 sanction law aimed at top Russian officials, and did not have information on behalf of the Kremlin to pass on to the Trump campaign.
Following a New York Times report in July, Trump Jr. was accused of taking the meeting under the pretense that Veselnitskaya had damning information on Clinton coming from the Russian government.
The story bolstered the “Trump-Russia collusion” narrative, and it turns out that Fusion GPS, the group behind the infamous anti-Trump dossier the Clinton campaign helped pay for, had multiple sources inside the meeting.
According to the Federalist Papers, “at least three of the people at the meeting with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in June 2016 were Fusion GPS officials.”
This news comes from Mark Stewart, the General Counsel for the House Committee.
Quoting the court document:
- At least three of the individuals who attended a meeting with Donald Trump, Jr. at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016 – Soviet counterintelligence officer Rinat Akhmetshin, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, and Russian-born interpreter Anatoloy Samochornov – also have ties to Fusion GPS dating to at least 2015.
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The Hillary Clinton campaign and DNC funded Fusion GPS to the tune of at least $6 million for “research” during the 2016 election, which Hillary claims to have had no knowledge of. The Federal Election Commission Act requires campaigns to state a purpose for any money spent over about $200, including an item description for each of those amounts. There isn’t an item description for this law firm for the amount of money that is alleged to have been given to this research firm.
A complaint has since been filed to the FEC as a result of that. The non-profit “Campaign Legal Center” has filed a complaint with the FEC, arguing that Hillary and the DNC keeping these payments a secret was a violation of campaign finance laws.
According to the CLC’s website: “CLC filed a complaint with the FEC alleging the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign committee violated campaign finance law. They failed to accurately disclose the purpose and recipient of payments for the dossier of research alleging connections between then-candidate Donald Trump and Russia, effectively hiding these payments from public scrutiny, contrary to the requirements of federal law.”
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