Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, questioned Wednesday how the Russian attorney who met with Donald Trump Jr. last year entered the United States after being denied a visa previously.
"She shouldn't have been in the country," Grassley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on Fox News' "Fox & Friends" Wednesday morning.
Natalia Veselnitskaya met with Trump Jr., then-chairman of the Trump campaign Paul Manafort and senior aide and President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.
"I think the lady Russian lawyer that was there in that meeting, I've written to [the State Department and Department of Homeland Security] to find out what she was doing in the country when presumably either her visa or parole expired," he added.
Grassley said that he informed the departments that Veselnitskaya had been allowed to enter the U.S. in 2015, but that permission had expired by January 2016, months before the meeting.
"And if there'd been enforcement of the immigration laws she wouldn't have been in the country," he said. "The other thing, if she was representing a foreign government … she wasn't registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act as well."
He continued, "We do have a responsibility to congressional oversight to get to the bottom of it."
When asked if the meeting could have been a setup by Trump's opponents, Grassley said, "There's no way I know that and I shouldn't comment on things you don't know."
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