Trump Jr. pitch was part of broad Russian effort

[Ubiquitous]

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.

Congress passed the law and President Barack Obama signed it in
2012, punishing Russia with sanctions for alleged human rights
violations in connection with the prison death of a lawyer named
Sergei Magnitsky who claimed to have uncovered a massive money
laundering scheme based in Moscow.

U.S. officials argued the fraud was perpetrated by Russian
government leaders and hurt American companies. But Russians have
countered the fraud was actually committed by Magnitsky and his
clients. Prosecutors in Russia eventually won a posthumous
conviction against the dead lawyer, and retaliated against the U.S.
for passing the law by suspending Americans’ ability to adopt
Russian children.

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.”

Rohrabacher, a former Ronald Reagan speechwriter who has held his
seat in Orange County since 1988, said he shared the derogatory
information with members of the Foreign Affairs Committee and the
U.S. Treasury Department.

He said he believed both he and Trump’s son did the right thing by
accepting the meetings and the Russian information,

“I always had a policy that we should listen to everybody who wants
to talk to you, especially if they think they have something that is
important and determine if it is important and if it is, to follow
up on it,” the 70-year-old lawmaker said.

“I think it would be a dereliction of duty not to give it an honest
look,” he added. “And for anybody on Trump’s team to turn it down,
and wouldn’t even look at information provided them that they said
would be important for our country. That would have been the wrong
thing to do. It was the right thing for him (Trump Jr.) to see if
there was some important information.”

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.

“There is not a jot of truth” to the Magnitsky story circulating in
America, the Russian document argued, and the 2012 passage of the
law “caused the most severe damage to the US-Russian relations in
recent years.”

“Changing attitudes to the Magnitsky story in the Congress,
obtaining reliable knowledge about real events and personal motives
of those behind the lobbying of this destructive Act, taking into
account the pre-election political situation may change the current
climate in the interstate relations,” the document added. “Such a
situation could have a very favorable response from the Russian
side.”

Rohrabacher said the document changed some of his perceptions of the
Magnitsky Act, opening his mind to the possibility that Russians
were victims instead of perpetrators in the whole case.

“I have not decided whether or not the Magnitsky Act itself is
wrong,” he said. “After looking at all the evidence I think there
are two sides to the argument as to whether or not the Russian
officials involved with the Magnitsky case were the villains or the
victims. I think that could be decided either way.”

The Magnitsky Act had broad support in Congress. Paired with
legislation granting Russia and Moldova most favored nation trade
status, it was approved in the Senate by a vote of 92-4. The House
vote was 365-43. Rohrabacher voted in favor of it.

Rohrabacher did take one action favorable to Russia after the trip,
proposing an amendment to 2016 global human rights legislation
working its way through Congress that would strip Magnitsky’s name
from the bill.

Rohrabacher said he took that action not because he was picking
sides in the Russia matter but rather because the legislation was
designed to be far larger than Russia and using the Russian lawyer’s
name sent the wrong signal that the bill was more narrowly focused
on Moscow.

In the end, he recalled several instances in 2016 in which he was
lobbied by Russian figures or their American counterparts on
Magnitsky, including once in Berlin by a Russian-American
businessman and another time at a dinner in Washington that
Veselnetskaya attended.

The former Democratic congressman Ron Dellums also pitched him on
the subject last year, and Rohrabacher believes other lawmakers got
similar pitches.

“They (the Russians) are going to want to have their say if they can
find anyone who will listen,” he said.

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Dems & the media want Trump to be more like Obama, but then he'd
have to audit liberals & wire tap reporters' phones.