Senate Intelligence Committee Zeroes in on Trump Tower Meeting

The panel recently completed interviews with key participants.

Richard Drew/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

The Senate intelligence committee, as part of its ongoing investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal, has completed interviews with several key participants in the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting between a Russian lawyer and members of Trump’s inner circle. Yet so far it has not questioned Donald Trump Jr., who organized the gathering, hoping to obtain dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of what he was told was a secret Russian government effort to help Donald Trump win the White House. This suggests the committee’s investigators have been looking to gather as much information as possible before zeroing in on the president’s son. 

Committee staff last week interviewed Ike Kaveladze, one of the meeting’s eight participants, according to sources familiar with the investigation. Kaveladze is a US-based employee of Aras Agalarov, the Russian construction magnate who with his son Emin, an aspiring pop singer, helped arrange the Trump Tower meeting. The Agalarovs partnered with Donald Trump for the 2013 Miss Universe contest held in Moscow and subsequently teamed up with Trump and his company to develop a Trump Tower project in Moscow. (That project ended up stalling.) Intelligence committee aides also recently interviewed Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist based in Washington, DC. Akhmetshin attended the Trump Tower meeting with his colleague Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian attorney with ties to the Kremlin who has been lobbying in the United States against a law imposing sanctions on certain Russians for being involved in human rights abuses. 

Senate intelligence committee chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) suggested at a news conference earlier this month that the panel had nearly completed investigating several aspects of the Russia scandal. Those include the Trump campaignā€™s softening of a Republican Party platform plank related to Russiaā€™s incursion into Ukraine and a April 2016 meeting at Washingtonā€™s Mayflower Hotel where then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) spoke with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. But Burr did not mention the Trump Tower meeting.

The sequencing of the panel’s interviews regarding the Trump Tower meeting is notable and indicates the panel is proceeding differently than the Senate judiciary committee. The judiciary committee nabbed the first interview with Trump Jr. last month, but the panel’s Republican members treated the presidentā€™s eldest son deferentially. The committee’s majority staff allowed Trump to attend the session without being seen or photographed by the media. They also questioned him before speaking to other attendees of the Trump Tower meeting. Investigators typically prefer to interview their main investigative targets last. That makes it easier for the investigators to catch inaccurate claims by the target. 

The presidentā€™s son helped arrange the Trump Tower meeting in a series of emails he made public as the New York Times was preparing to publish them. In those messages, Rob Goldstone, a publicist who represents Emin Agalarov, told Trump Jr. that a Russian lawyerā€”Veselnitskayaā€”was prepared to deliver derogatory information on Clinton. Goldstone suggested the information was provided by at top Russian prosecutor who is an ally of Russian President Vladmir Putin as “part of Russia and its governmentā€™s support for” Trump. The committee has not interviewed Veselnitskaya, who is out of US reach in Russia.

Akhmetshin, a naturalized US citizen, has worked as a Washington lobbyist for clients in former Soviet republics. When he attended the Trump Tower meeting with Veselnitskaya, both were working on behalf of Denis Katsyv, a wealthy Russian whose company, Prevezon Holdings Limited, was accused by the Justice Department of fraud and money laundering in a civil suit. Veselnitskaya served as the companyā€™s lawyer in that case, which was settled this year. She also worked with Akhmetshin to lobby against the Magnitsky Act, a 2012 law sanctioning Russians accused of human rights abuses. In addition, Akhmetshin testified before a Washington D.C. grand jury in August as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Akhmetshin and his attorney, Michael Tremonte, did not respond to requests for comment.

Kaveladze reportedly attended the Trump Tower meeting as a representative of the Agalarovs, for whom he has worked for decades in the United States. In 2000, the Senateā€™s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations investigated Kaveladze for participating in what it called a massive money laundering scheme in which billions of dollars passed through accounts that he opened in Delaware. Kaveladze was never charged with any crime related to the alleged scheme. His lawyer, Scott Balber, who also represents Aras and Emin Agalarov, said Kaveladze ā€œdid not engage in any money laundering.ā€ Balber said Kaveladze was merely connecting ā€œRussian individuals and entities with US financial institutionsā€ for small fees. Balber said that Kaveladze attended the Trump Tower meeting as a translator for Veselnitksaya, who speaks limited English, though she also brought a separate translator with her.

The Senate intelligence committee has also interviewed Jared Kushner, President Trumpā€™s son-in-law, and Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman. Kushner and Manafort attended the meeting with Trump Jr. The committee cut a deal with lawyers for Manafortā€”he has since hired new attorneysā€”under which Manafort agreed to to the interview on the condition he would only answer questions about the Trump Tower meeting, according to people familiar with the arrangement. Manafort also handed over notes he took at the meeting.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate