Interesting.
I’ve spoken about the investigatory dream team put together by special counsel Robert Mueller, as we trudge through the ever-widening probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The latest hot question surrounds the unnamed 8th person present in the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting Donald Trump Jr. arranged with a Russian lawyer, hoping to get dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Mueller’s team has the answer.
From the Washington Examiner:
“The eighth person has been identified by prosecutors and we are cooperating fully with prosecutors as a result of the investigation. To preserve the integrity of the investigation we are declining to identify him at this time,” the unnamed person’s attorney, Scott Balber, told CNN.
Balber is also representing Emin and Aras Agalarov, and the eighth person at the meeting was reported to be an employee and U.S. representative for the Agalarovs. The former Agalarov is a pop star who has worked with Trump, while the latter, the father, is a real estate billionaire in Russia.
The unnamed eighth person has yet to be interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, Balber added.
Trump Jr. initially stated the meeting was only between himself, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, Jared Kushner, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and a translator.
It has since turned into a meeting with not five, but eight people.
Besides Trump, Kushner, Manafort, Veselnitskaya, and the translator (now named as Anatoli Samachornov), there was Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin (an ex-Soviet counter-intelligence officer), publicist Rob Goldstone (who arranged the meeting through the emails with Trump Jr.), and the 8th person.
So all we know about the 8th person is that this was a male. They’re sitting on any further details, as they work through this latest twist to an already complicated investigation.
Trump Jr. maintains that the meeting resulted in no useful information to use against Clinton, and turned, instead, to a meeting about the Magnitsky Act, a 2012 law that punished Russian human rights abusers, and was named after another Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who was beaten to death in a Moscow prison in 2009.
Veselnitskaya has fought against the law and even sought to sully the reputation of Magnitsky in the process.
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