http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/341946-trump-jr-pitch-was-part-of-broad-russian-effort
Two months before
Donald Trump Jr.’s encounter with a Russian figure, a key House subcommittee chairman received a similar overture in Moscow offering derogatory information about a U.S. policy that was upsetting Vladimir Putin.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican with a reputation as a Moscow ally in Congress, told The Hill the information he received in April 2016 came from the chief prosecutor in Moscow and painted an alternative picture of the Russian fraud case that led to the passage of anti-Russia legislation in Congress known as the Magnitsky Act.
“I had a meeting with some people, government officials, and they were saying, ‘Would you be willing to accept material on the Magnitsky case from the prosecutors in Moscow? ‘And I said, ‘Sure, I’d be willing to look at it,’” Rohrabacher recalled in an interview.
The congressman’s account provides the latest evidence that the overture to President Trump’s eldest son in June 2016 by a Russian lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya was part of a larger campaign by Moscow that predated the Trump Tower encounter and continued afterwards.
The focus was to sow distrust among American leaders about the Magnitsky Act, and influence far more than Trump’s inner circle. It included lobbying overtures to journalists, State Department officials and lawmakers and congressional staff from both parties, according to interviews with participants and recipients of the campaign.
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Rohrabacher’s account mirrors several aspects of Donald Trump Jr., who said he accepted the June 9, 2016 meeting with Veselnitskaya because he thought he was getting political dirt on his father’s Democratic opponent
Hillary Clinton from a prosecutor in Moscow.
But when the dirt was delivered it was about the Magnitsky law and the adoption dispute, not Clinton, the Trump son said.
The congressman, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and Emerging threats and is openly friendly with Russia, said he was on an official congressional fact-finding trip to Moscow when he was told to expect the delivery of derogatory information important to America and that the source was going to be the chief prosecutor in Moscow.
Rohrabacher said he received a package of documents as he was ending a meeting in the Russian legislative body known as the Duma.
“At the end of the meeting simply as I was walking out, they said this gentleman has some documents for you. And he handed them to me. And that was as far as my meeting with the prosecutors went,” he said. “We got the information, we looked at it and we asked various people about the issue.”
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Rohrabacher’s arguments echo those of the Trump administration, but contrast with officials from Democratic and Republican campaigns who have said it would be very unusual for a U.S. campaign to accept the meeting proposed to Trump Jr.
When Rohrabacher got back to Washington from his official trip from Moscow, he circulated to fellow lawmakers a memo summarizing what the Russians provided, much of it suggesting U.S. officials had the wrong theory about the Magnitsky case.
