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In a letter dated July 15, 2016, Chairman Charles Grassley of the Senate Judiciary Committee (cc. Senator Diane Feinstein) urged the Justice Department's Chief of the FARA Registration Unit to commence an investigation into the lobbying activities of entities and individuals engaged in the campaign to repeal the Magnitsky Act.
Grassley writes: "They are being controlled/directed/influenced by the Russian Government in respect of the lobbying activity." Among the more than dozen unregistered Foreign Agents of Russia named in the Grassley letter are Natalia Veselnitskya and Rinat Akhmetshin. Both attended a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and Trump campaign team members on June 9 in Trump Tower.
The Magnitsky Act, which passed Congress in 2012, sanctioned Russian individuals responsible for the death of Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, in a Moscow prison. Magnitsky's death was caused by the withholding of medical assistance. Magnitsky had represented Hermitage Capital, headed by William Browder, once the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia. Magnitsky was investigating a Russian money laundering scheme when he was imprisoned.
Browder had campaigned against corrupt business practices in Russia and was a thorn in Vladimir Putin's side. The irate Putin retaliated against the Magnitsky sanctions by stopping U.S. adoptions of Russian children. Russia went on to convict Magnitsky of fraud and tax evasion in a bizarre posthumous court proceeding.
The anti-Magnitsky lobbying campaign conducted by Veselnitskaya, Akhmetshin et al. has included charges of fraud against Magnitsky, claims that Browder and Magnitsky were guilty of tax evasion and other criminal activities in Russia, and producing an anti-Magnitsky/Browder documentary for U.S. viewers. In their lobbying activities, Veselnitskaya, Akhmetshin et al. have promoted the Russian state prosecutor's finding on May 19, 2016 that Browder (and a business associate) evaded $16 million in Russian taxes and possibly violated U.S. tax laws as well.
Browder's claimed Russian tax evasion (the Kremlin's indictment of choice against political enemies) is the source of "bad money" ready to be used for "bad" political purposes in U.S. politics. Note that Browder's first conviction in Russian tax courts dates back four years, well before the start of the U.S. presidential campaign.
The "smoking gun" of Clinton campaign improprieties that Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin promised Trump Jr. for the June 9 Trump Tower meeting was apparently information that Browder had contributed to the Clinton Global Initiative fund. (Browder contributed $10,000-$20,000 to attend a CGI event).
This contribution, I presume, was "Russian money" insofar as Browder stole it from the Russian government via tax evasion. Per the Trump attendees of the June 9 meeting, the Russian side offered nothing tangible about Russian contributions to the Democratic party; the meeting purportedly turned to adoptions, and ended after 30 minutes.
Some speculate that a plastic folder of documents, which may or may not have been left by the Russians with the Trump campaign, was really a secret exchange of "sinister" documents rather than a Russian effort to smear Browder as part of their anti-Magnitsky lobbying campaign.
In sum, the notorious meeting appears to have been set up as part of the Veselnitskaya, Akhmetshin et al. lobbying campaign against the Magnitsky sanctions and to besmear Putin's enemy, Bill Browder. The Russian participants offered no useful opposition research. The media frenzy has turned a ham-handed (on both sides) lobbying effort by unregistered Russian lobbyists into a dark cloak-and-dagger conspiracy involving the exchange of top secret information.
Who cares whether Browder contributed a small amount to attend a Clinton Foundation event? In the meantime, the media ignores the fact that the same Russian agents were heavily involved in the one activity that almost made a difference in the 2016 election: the creation of the infamous Steele anti-Trump dossier.
Previously:
• 07/25/17 Russia Didn't Interfere In U.S. Election To Help Trump, But To Destabilize America
• 06/13/17 Three Overlooked Statements By Comey That Blow Apart The Russian Collusion Narrative
• 06/21/17 Is Russiagate Really Hillarygate?
Paul Roderick Gregory is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford, and energy fellow and Cullen Professor of Economics at the University of Houston. I am also a research professor at the German Institute for Economic Research Berlin. My specialties are Russia and Comparative Economics, and I am adding China to my portfolio. I have written more than 20 books on economics, Russia and comparative economics.