A week ago Natalia Veselnitskaya was just a Russian lawyer with a really difficult last name to pronounce. Now, Veselnitskaya is at the center of a Russian/White House scandal, and it still doesn’t make her last name any easier to say aloud.
Depending on who you believe; the lie, trapped inside the fib, which is trapped inside the whopper, which is trapped inside the tall-tale that is the Trump administration, or the Russian lawyer with last name from hell with nothing to gain depends on where you land with this story.
Here is what we know to be fact: On June 9, 2016, just two days after Trump won the Republican nomination for president, Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and then campaign manager Paul Manafort met with Veselnitskaya in Trump Tower. The meeting was arraigned by music manager Rob Goldstone who is a friend of the Trumps. Everything beyond that is a rousing game of he said/she said.
According to a statement released by Trump Jr., the less talented offspring of the Trump brood, claims that he took the meeting believing that Veselnitskaya was going to provide intel that then Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton were being financed by the Russians. Trump Jr. also claims that the meeting didn’t provide any information about Clinton and turned into a diatribe on Russian adoptions.
Now in an interview with NBC News, Veselnitskaya claims that she never said she would provide dirt on the then democratic nominee for president, and only planned to discuss U.S. sanctions on Russian officials. Â Â
“I never had any damaging or sensitive information about Hillary Clinton,” Veselnitskaya told NBC News in an interview in Moscow. “It was never my intention to have that.”
“It is quite possible that maybe they were longing for such an information. They wanted it so badly that they could only hear the thought that they wanted.”
Veselnitskaya also denied that she had any connection to the Kremlin.
Here is how the international game of telephone may have taken a turn. Veselnitskaya, who is a noted advocate against human rights violationsin Russia, explained to NBC News that she’d worked for “years to question the case that prompted the U.S. to impose sanctions on Russian officials accused of human rights violations, known as the Magnitsky Act. These sanctions led the Kremlin to ban the adoption of Russian children by Americans at the end of 2012.”
Part of the information she’d collected noted that a company run by a former U.S. citizen didn’t pay taxes in the U.S. or Russia and may have also donated to the DNC.
It is this portion that Veselnitskaya believes peaked Trump Jr. interests. In fact, she notes that he only asked one question during their meeting.
“The question that I was asked was as follows: whether I had any financial records which might prove that the funds used to sponsor the DNC were coming from inappropriate sources,” NBC News reports. Â
Veselnitskaya claims that she never asked for a meeting with Trump Jr., and only sought to spread word on “the real circumstances behind the Magnitsky Act,” NBC News reports.
Veselnitskaya also added that the past few days since the story broke haven’t been the best days of her life.
“Imagine yourself in my shoes. One morning you wake up and all of a sudden you are the focus of all the high ranking, upstream media of the world,” she said.
“To summarize, those were not the happiest days of my life, I have to say. I have to break up my holiday. I have to take a trip back to Moscow, because I just wanted to be able to answer the questions myself.”
Read more at NBC News.
