RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
- Start date
:ALERTRED::ALERTRED::ALERTRED:
The curious rise of Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met Team Trump
Editor's Note: (Michael Weiss is a national security analyst for CNN and author of "ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror." The views expressed are his own.)
(CNN) She's been called a "Russian government attorney," a "trusted insider" of the Kremlin, the "go-to lawyer for the Moscow regional government" and an acquaintance of Russia's powerful prosecutor general.
Natalia Veselnitskaya, 42, rose from obscurity to international notoriety following the disclosure of her June 9, 2016, meeting with Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort. She also appears to have amassed considerable wealth in a very short period of time, 14 years ago, when her legal career in the Moscow region (not to be confused with the city of Moscow) was in its infancy and she was just transitioning from being a government employee to a private practitioner.
According to two different privately run databases, which draw on personal financial and employment information from Russian state records, Veselnitskaya went from a lowly state salary of $1,559 a year to a much more comfortable $53,645, between 1999 and 2003.
But here's the curious thing: In August 2003, before the lion's share of that $53,645 was earned, the Russian land registry shows that Veselnitskaya was somehow able to buy two large plots of land in an elite residential community in the Moscow suburbs -- properties that cannot have been sold for less than $500,000 apiece at the time, according to two Russian brokers with extensive experience selling in that area.
Veselnitskaya would not respond to multiple interview requests for this story to confirm her employment details and her income.
How a 28-year-old provincial attorney raking in, at most, five figures was able to afford seven figures worth of property is a very Russian mystery, no less intriguing than her extraordinary and unlikely journey to the meeting at the center of the far-reaching investigation into how Moscow might have had a hand in influencing the American presidential election.
If special counsel Robert Mueller is interested in determining just how well-connected Veselnitskaya is in Russia and on whose behalf she may have been acting when she entered Trump Tower a year ago, he should start by asking a simple question: Where did she get all her money?
The Prevezon case
Veselnitskaya was best known in the US for defending Prevezon Holdings Ltd., a Cypriot company accused by the US Justice Department, in a civil forfeiture action, of being a front for washing ill-gotten cash in the Manhattan property market. The case was settled out of court in May, with the offshore company agreeing to pay $5.9 million while not admitting to any wrongdoing.
Concurrent with her legal work, she also lobbied in Washington against the very foundation upon which the US government's case against Prevezon was constructed.
In February 2016, a few months before her meeting with Team Trump, this Moscow resident co-founded a Delaware-registered NGO called the Human Rights Global Accountability Initiative Foundation, purporting to seek the revocation of a controversial ban on American adoption of Russian children. In actuality, the ban itself and the dangled prospect of its repeal was cleverly conceived of by the Russian government as leverage with Washington to negotiate away a piece of American legislation acutely painful to the Kremlin.
The Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act is a US sanctions law targeting Russian government officials and mobsters said to have defrauded Russian taxpayers a decade ago to the tune of $230 million, some of which, the US government alleges, wound up in Prevezon's coffers and from there in pricey apartments in Manhattan.
The law was named for Sergei Magnitsky, the whistleblowing Russian attorney who a decade ago uncovered what the US Justice Department, State Department and Congress all allege was a vast criminal conspiracy aided and abetted by a corrupt Russian government. Magnitsky, they contend, was framed on tax charges by the same government and arrested; he died under suspicious circumstances in pretrial detention.
The $230 million tax heist that allegedly enriched Prevezon and others was perpetrated by what Sen. John McCain has called a "dangerous transnational crime organization" known as the Klyuev Group and consisting of Russian government officials in the Interior Ministry and tax agencies, according to US authorities.
They maintain that the Klyuev Group used corporate documents stolen from Hermitage Capital Management, once the largest Moscow-based foreign investment fund, to reregister the ownership of three companies, which they then initiated dummy civil litigation against, seeking enormous damages. On the basis of those damages, they applied for and received -- courtesy of their accomplices in the tax agencies -- the $230 million as a "refund." The whole sum was processed in a single day, Christmas Eve 2007.
Veselnitskaya has frequently argued in the Russian media that the entire story of what Magnitsky uncovered and the plight he endured is a fabrication accepted by a gullible US government from Magnitsky's former client, William Browder, the CEO of Hermitage and Magnitsky's posthumous flame tender.
In 2014, she told RBK-TV, "Sergei Magnitsky did not uncover any theft referred in the Magnitsky Act," and, "Many events and data stated in the Magnitsky Act did not exist."
Prevezon is owned by Denis Katsyv, the son of Pyotr Katsyv, now vice president of Russian Railways, the state-owned rail monopoly and before that the transport minister for the Moscow region. That put him in the same regional government where Veselnitskaya was then working as a prosecutor.
As with most other jurisdictions in Russia in the late 1990s, the Moscow region was run as a Tammany-style racket, as Russian expat journalist Leonid Bershidsky has observed, drawing from his own experience publishing an investigative book on that place and era. The regional government, Bershidsky wrote, was "a mess of corrupt schemes that ultimately led it to de facto bankruptcy."
Bankruptcy for some is opportunity for others. Veselnitskaya's tenure in that local administration led to lasting personal and professional relationships, upon which she continues to capitalize to this day. One of Pyotr Katsyv's employees at the time was Alexander Mitusov, who had been deputy prosecutor in the Moscow region and therefore Veselnitskaya's superior.
Mitusov and Veselnitskaya later married, then divorced. But they developed a close friendship with the Katsyvs, whom Veselnitskaya has represented in several legal cases in Russia before counseling them in the Prevezon one.
"Natalia Veselnitskaya has been well-known as a 'family fixer' for the Katsyvs for years but had never been mentioned in any connection with Magnitsky case before the claim to Katsyv's family was filed in New York," Vladimir Pastoukhov, a lawyer for Hermitage, told me.
A thriving practice
Veselnitskaya said in a declaration filed in US federal court, that she has "argued and won more than 300 cases [in Russia] on corporate tax and property law." Today, she runs Kamerton Consulting, a Moscow-based law firm, which she says employs 30 people, including five attorneys, with "large state-owned and private corporations" as clients.
One of these, Reuters has reported, was Russia's Federal Security Service, or FSB, successor of the Soviet KGB. While working as counsel for a government agency, even an intelligence-gathering one, is not dispositive of one's level of influence, Veselnitskaya does have one close associate whose ties to the Russian security services have been better established.
Her partner in counter-Magnitsky agitating is Rinat Akhmetshin, a Washington, D.C.-based lobbyist who, The New York Times has reported, maintains an "association"with Viktor Ivanov, the former deputy head of Russia's domestic spy agency, the FSB. Akhmetshin was an officer in a Soviet military intelligence unit, according to the Times. He, too, attended the meeting with the Trump camp in New York in June 2016.
The windfall
It's not clear why, according to Russian financial databases, Veselnitskaya's income increased at around the same time as she purchased the two land parcels in 2003.
While there is no way of determining whether these financial disclosures are entirely accurate or comprehensive, the two databases from which I requested them are frequently used by Russian journalists researching Moscow government officials.
One of them, Larix, is run by the Moscow Center for Economic Security, a private intelligence firm, which has previously come under scrutiny for selling the passport information of millions of current and former residents of the Russian capital. The other database, Cronos, says it draws financial information from the Russian Pension Fund, the country's version of Social Security, which applies to all tax-paying citizens.
Both sets of financial records for Veselnitskaya's income between the years 1999 and 2003 match exactly. The employers listed in either are indeed those for which she is known to have worked, according to international press reports and her own declarations in US court.
These records show that in 2003, she made around $54,000, the vast majority of it after she purchased the aforementioned property, considered to be worth more than $1 million. At that price, she clearly wouldn't have had enough collateral for a mortgage, so where did the money come from?
Anya Levitov, a Russian broker formerly with Evans Property Services, laughed when I asked if such modest incomes were typical for the average landowner in DSK Riita, the tony forested community where Veselnitskaya invested in 2003.
@DonKnock @SJUGrad13 @88m3 @Cali_livin @Menelik II @wire28 @smitty22 @Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @dtownreppin214 @The Taxman @JKFrazier @tmonster @blotter @BigMoneyGrip @Soymuscle Mike
I won't lie, that Rocket Man shyt had me dying laughing right before I saw that Hillary golf-swing tweetTrump is vicious with the nicknames.
Rocket man.
Pathetically funny.
Trump is vicious with the nicknames.
He just does not know how to spell KJU's name
CreepyMcCreeperson
Veteran
Trump fans don't care about this, but let a black child get a free processed food lunch at school, and all hell breaks loose.
PlayerNinety_Nine
Produced, Arranged, Composed and Performed by....
Rocket man.
Pathetically funny.
Also not his
From 2006 about Kim Jong Il. This administrtion is incapable of any original thought.
