The Russian lawyer who set up the meeting with Donald Trump Jr. that is now dogging his father's presidency likely made multiple attempts to contact the Trump campaign — and probably tried to speak to Democrat Hillary Clinton's campaign officials, too, says businessman Bill Browder, who believes he is a target of the Russian government.
Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, told Fox News Channel's "The Story with Martha McCallum" on Wednesday that Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya is closely connected with the Kremlin despite her denials.
Veselnitskaya, Browder said, has long been part of Russian President Vladimir Putin's efforts to overturn the Magnitsky Act. The act punishes Russian officials and oligarchs the United States believes are linked to the death of Browder's Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, whom he and the U.S. government maintain was murdered while awaiting fabricated tax-evasion charges in Moscow.
Browder, who was tried in absentia, believes the Kremlin would like to harm him as well since he has been successful in his efforts to punish those he believes responsible for Magnitsky's death.
The meeting with Trump Jr. in June 2016 was merely one such attempt by Veselnitskaya to have the Magnitsky Act reversed, Browder said. Trump Jr. himself stated that Veselnitskaya brought up Russian adoptions in the meeting rather than the dirt she had promised on Clinton. He also said her information was incoherent.
Russian adoptions are tied to the Magnitsky Act because Putin shut down the program that allowed Americans to adopt Russian orphans in retaliation of the act's passage.
"I think they probably made a dozen different attempts to get to Trump, and I think they probably made a dozen different attempts to get to Hillary Clinton," Browder said. "They were looking for anybody who was going to be in power to hear them out and hope that that person would be sympathetic to them."
People such as Veselnitskaya may appear under another guise, in her case a lawyer, but are also well-trained in KGB tactics, he said.
"These people aren't stupid," he told McCallum. "They look and study their targets carefully."
They understand that if they ask for something big such as the repeal of a major human rights bill they have to offer something in return, he said, and in Trump's case they offered information on Clinton as stories swirled that Democratic Party servers had been hacked by Russia.
"Obviously what they came up with didn't make a lot of sense, and it all fizzled out," Browder said. "But that's how these guys operate. They go to KGB school to learn this kind of stuff."
Veselnitskaya and her team have been trying for three years to overturn the Magnitsky Act, he said, approaching various members of Congress.
"Basically, these people have been going around knocking on every door," he said. Trump's team "are not the only people that thought she was a waste of time because she hasn't achieved any of her objectives, but it hasn't been for lack of trying."
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