Rep. Dana Rohrabacher said Thursday that he was approached by a Russian operative while in Moscow last year about negative information about a U.S. law that angered President Vladimir Putin.
The foray proved Moscow's overture to Donald Trump Jr. two months later was part of a broader disinformation, The Hill reports.
"I had a meeting with some people, government officials," Rohrabacher, a California Republican who was in Moscow in April 2016, said in an interview.
"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,'" he said.
Rohrabacher, 70, chairs the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and Emerging threats and is friendly towards Russia.
He was first elected to the House in 1988.
Rohrabacher told the Hill that the Kremlin operative said the information came from the chief prosecutor in Moscow.
It sought to create "an alternative picture" of the Russian fraud case that led Congress to pass the so-called Magnitsky Act in 2012.
"At the end of the meeting simply as I was walking out, they said this gentleman has some documents for you," he told the Hill. "And he handed them to me.
"That was as far as my meeting with the prosecutors went.
"We got the information, we looked at it and we asked various people about the issue."
Rohrabacher said he shared the data with members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Treasury Department.
Trump Jr., the eldest son of President Donald Trump, met in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, under the guise of obtaining negative information on Democrat Hillary Clinton.
But Veselnitskaya instead gave up information not about Clinton, Trump Jr. told Fox News Tuesday.
It was about the Magnitsky law and a Putin-inspired dispute involving American adoptions of Russian children, he told Fox host Sean Hannity.
According to the Hill, Moscow's objective in approaching Rohrabacher was to create distrust within Congress about the Magnitsky legislation – and to "influence far more than Trump's inner circle.
The Kremlin's tactics have also included "lobbying overtures to journalists, State Department officials and lawmakers and congressional staff from both parties."
The Hill said it based its report on "interviews with participants and recipients of the campaign."
The Magnitsky Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama, slapped Russia with sanctions for alleged human rights violations following the death in prison of Sergei Magnitsky.
He was a lawyer who claimed to have uncovered a huge money-laundering scheme based in Moscow, the Hill reports.
In light of his experience, Rohrabacher said that both he and Trump Jr. acted appropriately.
"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," he said.