I think we already knew this, but now it's official.
Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, the so-called "Russian lawyer" who coordinated the meeting with Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort at Trump Tower during the 2016 election, has decided to stop pretending for some reason.
Emails show she has worked with Russia's equivalent of an attorney general to obstruct cases against Russian firms and she has spilled the truth to NBC News by saying "I am an informant."
But newly released emails show that in at least one instance two years earlier, the lawyer, Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, worked hand in glove with Russia’s chief legal office to thwart a Justice Department civil fraud case against a well-connected Russian firm.
Ms. Veselnitskaya also appears to have recanted her earlier denials of Russian government ties. During an interview to be broadcast Friday by NBC News, she acknowledged that she was not merely a private lawyer but a source of information for a top Kremlin official, Yuri Y. Chaika, the prosecutor general.
“I am a lawyer, and I am an informant,” she said. “Since 2013, I have been actively communicating with the office of the Russian prosecutor general.”
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes released a report this morning that says they found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow but, as you know, the Intelligence Committee shut down their investigation earlier this year and didn't even interview or subpoena a number of key witnesses.
The Washington Post reported this afternoon that Donald Trump Jr. placed a private call before the meeting at Trump Tower with Veselnitskaya. Democrats on the Intelligence Committee believe the call was for his father, but Devin Nunes refused to examine the records.
“We sought to determine whether that number belonged to the president, because we also ascertained that then-candidate Trump used a blocked number,” Rep. Schiff said in an interview. “That would tell us whether Don Jr. sought his father’s permission to take the meeting, and [whether] that was the purpose of that call.”
“The simple thing to do to find out whether Don Jr. called his father would be to subpoena the phone records to determine whether that phone number belonged to his father,” Schiff continued. “We asked Republicans to subpoena the records and they refused. They didn’t want to know whether he had informed his father and sought his permission to take that meeting with the Russians.”
Ranking Democratic committee member Adam Schiff has speculated that although Nunes refused to examine the records in their investigation, special prosecutor Robert Mueller probably has those records.
If Democrats retake control of the House in November, Adam Schiff will become the Intelligence Committee chairman and we can finally have a full investigation.
Tell everyone you know to vote when the time comes.