PROOF: Trump Knows Agent Who Set Up Russian Meeting With Trump Jr. (UPDATED)
Donald Trump personally knows the agent and the Russian Oligarchs he represented, who set up a meeting with an unregistered Russian agent, whom the New York Times’ bombshell report uncovered offering a deal for stolen emails during last year’s presidential campaign.
This story’s cover photo proves conclusively that Donald Trump knows Rob Goldstone, the agent to Emin Agalarov who admitted to the Washington Post that he arranged the meeting.
Photos from closing the Miss Universe Moscow deal in 2013 are conclusive.
Donald Trump Jr. denied that his father knew about the secret meeting with a Russian agent offering stolen emails, but changed his story about the meeting from one day to the next.
Then, Donald Trump Jr. shockingly admitted that it was “clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting.”
Furthermore, Trump Jr. said that the unregistered Russian agent brought up sanctions that Putin wants to be dropped, which started in 2012 when Congress adopted the Magnitsky Act.
This story is the first major smoking gun that the Trump Campaign colluded with Russia.
It’s also illegal for a campaign to knowingly solicit anything of value from a foreign agent, person or government under the FEC Act.
Based upon photographic evidence related to the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, we only know that Trump and his lawyer knew the Agalarovs.
Democratic Coalition co-founder Scott Dworkin found the photo of that meeting in late May of this year, and it went viral in an earlier story debunking the blanket alibi proffered by Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael D. Cohen claiming he had no Kremlin connections.
Rob Goldstone is Emin Agalarov’s manager, whose father is a Russian oligarch who arranged Miss Universe Moscow.
Goldstone even posted a selfie on to Facebook publicly on June 17th, 2013, which visually confirms his personal acquaintance with Donald Trump.
UPDATE: July 11th, 2017 — Rob Goldstone took his Facebook account private for a time today, so screen captures have been added to this story. A cropped version of the cover image in this story was found on Mr. Goldstone’s Facebook account. Goldstone removed a check in from his account and a screenshot is in its place inline with the story. It is firm proof of his personal acquaintance with Donald J. Trump. This is a screenshot of that image:
Notably, Donald Trump Jr. was not present for their Las Vegas meeting to close the deal bringing the pageant to Moscow and he’s absent from official photos of that year’s Miss Universe contest as well.
Rob Goldstone was even a Miss USA 2013** pageant judge, according to the Las Vegas Sun, and he worked as a judge for the Miss Universe 2017 preliminaries earlier this year.
Donald Trump met Rob Goldstein, and his client Emin Agalarov — with whom he appeared in a music video (below) — and his oligarch father, Aras Agalarov in Las Vegas and published still photos of themselves working to close the deal to bring Miss Universe 2013 to Moscow along with the event announcement.
The AP reports that Donald Trump was at Trump Tower on the day of the meeting, Thursday, June 9th, 2016.
Trump was joined by 60 supporters, and then-RNC Chair Reince Priebus, to kick off his campaign’s lagging fund raising in the wake of his racial insults hurled at the federal judge presiding over the Trump University fraud and racketeering trial.
He sent this tweet about Hillary Clinton’s email that day.
The Music Agent Admits Setting A Meeting With Trump Campaign And Russian Agent
Emin Agalarov’s father, Aras, is a Russian oligarch real estate developer nicknamed the Trump of Russia, and he’s a pop “star” and social media personality.
Vladimir Putin gave Aras Agalarov an Order of Honor award right before Miss Universe began in Moscow the next month.
The origin of the photo with Trump, Cohen and Goldstone is detailed here:
A complete, unaltered set of the photos is below.
Donald Trump Jr. made a stunning admission/denial statement about his June 9th, 2016 meeting with the Russian spy which forcefully claimed that he was only interested in compromising material about Hillary Clinton.
Goldstone told the Washington Post that he’d arranged the meeting with a Russian lawyer, and he even published a public check in at the Trump Organization onto Facebook on June 9th, 2016.
Even Republican Senator Chuck Grassley is pursuing enforcement the criminal complaint against Natalia Veselnitskaya under America’s spying laws, which was made last summer by the ex-American — who surrendered his citizenship to become a British subject — William Browder.
Browder’s Hermitage investment fund was persecuted extralegally in Russia, touching off the Magnistky affair. Sergio Magnitsky was Browder’s lawyer, uncovered a tax fraud, and was thrown into a Russian prison and mistreated until he died.
Sergio Magnitsky was Browder’s lawyer, uncovered fraud, and was thrown into a Russian prison and mistreated until he died. Putin’s government tried Browder in absentia and in a stunning move, they tried his lawyer Sergey Magnitsky posthumously.
Cyprus-based company Prevezon, run by Denis Katsyv was accused of being the beneficiary of the massive tax fraud and buying up luxury US real estate in Manhattan, linked to Magnitsky’s death and identity theft against his client Hermitage.
The scam caused Russia’s government to disgorge a $230 million dollar tax refund to Hermitage entities that were delivered instead to Prevezon’s owners.
They blamed the fraud on Browder.
This kind of exotic multi-national real estate and money laundering fraud is actually commonplace in the brutal billionaire brawls common to Russian oligarchs, like this murderous dispute over who owned Fischer Island, a refuge island for the ultra-wealthy located off of Miami Beach — basically reserved for the global top 0.01% of earners — and home to America’s highest per capita income.
Fischer Island was once the wealthiest city in the entire world.
RAILROADED: Prevezon Laundered Its Ill Gotten Gains Into New York Luxury Real Estate
It turns out that the Prevezon story is actually closely linked to Russian Railways, a group of whose executives were deeply involved in railroading Browder and stashing the loot.
So is Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.
She’s literally in bed with the public employee railway barons of Russia.
Natalia Veselnitskaya is married to a former-Russian Deputy Transportation Minister in charge of the Moscow region.
A search of New York public records about her client Denis Katsyv — who controls the Prevezon holding companies — yielded numerous, profitable real estate deals. (see results below)
Katsyv’s father Pyotr is the Vice President of Russian Railways, who made his son wealthy and destroyed whistleblowers in his path.
Pyotr Katstv even called the met with the FBI in Rome tried to become an informant, so long as his son got to keep the money. Trump’s former business partner Felix Sater — illegally according to Law360 — obtained a similar deal to keep ill gotten gains in exchange for testimony and cooperation in a secret prosecution. (full article)
The US Attorney’s office nixed the deal when informed of the FBI meeting.
Veselnitskaya was denied a regular entry visa, but gained entry to the US on parole — which is a one time, non-visa entry for humanitarian reasons— solely to defend the criminal case against Denis Katsyv of US vs. Prevezon, which was recently settled in New York’s Southern District after the office spent years pushing to try the case.
Fake NGO Run As An Illegal Lobbying Shop
By February 2016, Veselnitskaya had setup a Delaware non-profit called the Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation (HRAGI) and lobbied Congress in person last May against the “Global Magnitsky Act” in the House, after it had already passed the Senate.
It’s illegal to lobby Congress without registering under the Lobbying Disclosure Act.
But HRAGI did not register.
Its bare bones website says this:
Officially, the Russian law was passed following outrage over the 2008 death of Chase Harrison (original Russian name Dima Yakovlev) — a toddler adopted by a Virginia family, left to die in a car on a sweltering summer day. Unofficially, Russia passed the law in retaliation for the 2012, passage of the US “Magnitsky Act” by the U.S. Congress, which imposed sanctions on Russia and on individuals blamed for the death of the Russian citizen, Sergei Magnitsky.
HRAGI is dedicated to overturning the Russian adoption ban.
Which is revised from last year when TDB said this was on the website:
HRAGIF claims to be “working on analyzing legal and legislative options to help overturn this adoption ban,” according to its site. “We would like to present our findings to the members of U.S. Congress, Administration and U.S. public and is planning to brief them on possible ways of resolution of this stalemate on adoptions.”
That Global Magnitsky Act would enshrined the name of 2012 sanctions against Russia, into a new, global anti-corruption bill.
Rep. Rohrabacher’s aides also told The Daily Beast last May that his office had received documents about the legislation from the Russian government when he led a Congressional Delegation (CODEL) to Russia at the end of April 2016.
Putin’s Favorite House Republican Gets Taken For A Ride In Russia
While in Russia on the CODEL, Rohrabacher met with the former state-owned Russian Railways boss Vladimir Yakunin, who happened to be previous boss Pyotr Katsyv’s boss, who is the man whose son Veselnitskaya was defending from prosecution in New York City.
According to Politico’s reporting after the election, the Republican legislator confirmed his meeting with the sanctioned Russian rail baron and the story of the mysterious documents:
Last April, Rohrabacher traveled to Moscow on an official congressional trip with four other members of Congress and two staffers. Rohrabacher and his senior aide, Paul Behrends, met privately with Vladimir Yakunin, a Putin confidant whom the Treasury Department blacklisted in 2014 to punish Russia for invading Ukraine, according to an itinerary reviewed by POLITICO and confirmed by Rohrabacher.
There was nothing illegal about talking to Yakunin, but the rest of the delegation steered clear. At this meeting, one of the topics Yakunin, Rohrabacher and Behrends discussed, according to Rohrabacher, was the Magnitsky affair.
Later that day, Rohrabacher rejoined the rest of the delegation to meet with Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the International Affairs Committee in the Federation Council (Russia’s counterpart to the Senate). At that meeting, Kosachev urged Rohrabacher to consult with Russian prosecutors about the Magnitsky affair. Rohrabacher did and received a document questioning Magnitsky’s story, Rohrabacher told POLITICO.
“[Kosachev was] the one who asked, would I accept information from the prosecutors and look at what they had to say on this particular case,” he said.
The document, which is marked “Confidential” and was obtained by POLITICO, blamed Magnitsky and his employer, an American-born investor named Bill Browder, for orchestrating the tax fraud. The letter proposed that if more members of Congress followed Rohrabacher’s lead in questioning the Magnitsky story, Russia would reconsider its ban on American adoptions, which Putin imposed in retaliation for the Magnitsky Act in 2012.
Vladimir Yakunin served as a UN Diplomat for the USSR in the 1980s, prompting rumors of having KGB training, and resigned under pressure from his government job running the rails in 2015, after his son was exposed for profiteering on the father’s position, and Andrei Yakunin — the son — applied for British citizenship.
Canadian media noted that their government refused to sanction him because of the relationship he built with train manufacturer Bombardier to supply his railway, serving 1 billion annual trips. Yakunin created a company named Multiserv Overseas Ltd. in Britain that acted as a middleman in the Bombardier deals.
Years earlier, Congressman Rohrabacher was warned by the FBI that Russian agents of influence were recruiting him, but apparently, none of this tipped off the Republican legislator that this activity or his particpation may have been illegitimate.
Natalia Veselnitskaya’s lobbying apparently ‘succeeded’ in convincing Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) — best known as Putin’s favorite Congressman — to offer an amendment to drop the name in a House Foreign Relations Committee meeting on May 18th, 2016 (see video below).
It’s illegal to represent a foreign power in a policy matter without registering under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a federal law mainly used to catch spies.
Natalia Veselnitskaya did not register under FARA.
Ultimately, House Foreign Relations Committee rejected Rohrabacher’s amendment and his extensive arguments, approving the anti-corruption bill over his objections.
As an unregistered agent of the Russian state, Veselnitskaya could have carried out any number of other covert activities during her time in New York and DC.
Veselnitskaya later returned to Washington, D.C. just four days after her June 9th, 2016 meeting with the Trump Campaign.
First, she attended an anti-Magnitsky propaganda film screening at Washington’s Newseum, which had been canceled in a major political flap when EU Parliament members had scheduled a screening in Brussels only six weeks earlier.
The following day, Veselniskaya attended a House Foreign Relations Committee meeting entitled “U.S. Policy Towards Putin’s Russia” (transcript) and was featured that week in a Sputnik News story about the Congressional hearing and the film.
Two days after the House Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Vladimir Yakunin publicly announced his support for Donald Trump’s campaign for President. The Russian billionaire told CNBC:
“It was always Republicans when, in the old days, some of kind of bridges were constructed. If Mr Trump is coming into power, that will be more facilitative to faster establishing new kinds of relations.”
The Global Magnitsky Act was later added to a major defense bill and passed last December.
Last month, Vladimir Yakunin gave a lengthy interview to BBC claiming to be solely a strongly pro-Putin private citizen, and around the 8 minute mark, he reversed course on his CNBC endorsement of Trump.
Meanwhile, the Agalarovs have been crowing very publicly about their access to the President of the United States.
Conclusion
Donald Trump Jr.’s incriminating public statements about the campaign’s meeting with Russian agents present an apparent violation of election laws and pretty clear evidence that the Trump Campaign colluded with Russian agents of influence.
It’s not clear who translated for Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at her Trump Campaign meeting, because none of the participants Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. speak Russian and she told a Federal court that she does not even speak English, according a sworn statement to the court.
What is clear is that the new head of the Trump Organization looks like he will be facing fresh scrutiny by Special Prosecutor Mueller’s probe this week as the President’s painful attempts to normalize Russian interference in America’s elections just failed miserably.
And that his father definitely has a relationship with the middle man who brokered the deal, which should lead the media to ask firmly what the President knew about this meeting and when he knew it.
Donald Trump already admitted on national television that he fired the FBI Director to try and disturb the investigation into his campaign’s Russian ties.
Even worse, these disclosures link the Trump Campaign directly to an ongoing prosecution by a US Attorney who was unexpectedly fired right before a case directly impacting the Russian government was set to go to trial.
Even Russia’s Attorney General admitted that “the judgment undoubtedly would have precedential value in many countries.”
The Prevezon case was instead settled unexpectedly, shortly thereafter, in a major victory for the Russian state.
Now judgement day will have to wait for those fighting public corruption abroad.
But for those seeking to prove that America’s president and his family are not above the law, judgement day seems to be drawing ever closer.
Original photos of June 17th, 2013 meeting in Las Vegas between Trump Organization and Agalarovs
U.S. vs. Prevezon real estate transactions and charts by prosecution:
**Rob Goldstone’s 2013 Miss America page has been wiped out, but publicists used his 2013 photo in this year’s Miss Universe promotional according to a Google Images search.
Special thanks to Bryan Frydenborg for his indispensable report “U.S. Settlement of Prevezon Case Raises More Questions on Trump/Russia Ties; Bharara Led Case Before Trump Fired Him” which provided the background linking former Russian Railways boss Vladimir Yakunin with the Prevezon case and the Katsyv family.
