in Obama’s and the Democratic Party’s coffers.98 The Times reports that the memo is similar, indeed in many respects identical, to one the Kremlin had previously given to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) during an April 2016 trip the congressman made to Russia. Rohrabacher had gone to Moscow with his then-staffer Paul Behrends, a longtime close associate of Erik Prince; in Russia, Behrends and Rohrabacher met with Veselnitskaya, during which meeting she made the same pitch on U.S.-Russia sanctions to the congressman and Prince’s associate that she would later make to the Trump campaign.99
The text of Veselnitskaya’s memo offers some indication of what the Russian attorney may have actually said at the June 9 meeting, a matter that remains in some dispute. The Russian attorney’s memo begins with two paragraphs on the Kremlin’s complaints over U.S. sanctions, and proceeds to accuse Ziff Brothers Investments (headed by American brothers Dirk, Robert, and Daniel Ziff) of participating in an illegal stock-purchase scheme in Russia involving shares of Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned natural gas company.100 Perhaps not coincidentally, at the time Kremlin agent Veselnitskaya makes her accusation, the Trump campaign has two people formerly affiliated with Gazprom—Carter Page and Richard Burt—working on Trump’s foreign policy agenda with respect to Russia (see chapter 2). The memo’s outline of the Ziff brothers’ alleged scheme recites relevant names and dates, identifies purported shell companies, quotes the astronomical dollar figures supposedly involved in the brothers’ plot (at least $80 million), itemizes the federal statutes the Kremlin believes the brothers have violated, refers readers of the document to Rep. Rohrabacher for more information, and implicitly urges the Trump campaign to find out if the Ziff brothers have donated to Clinton as well as the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and both Obama’s election and reelection campaigns—insisting that illegal foreign campaign donations to Clinton “cannot be ruled out.”101
The memo given to Trump Jr., Manafort, and Jared Kushner is not, as Trump Jr. will subsequently say to Congress of Veselnitskaya’s presentation, “vague” and “ambiguous,” nor does it “ma[k]e no sense,” nor is it devoid of “details or supporting information,” nor does it lack “meaningful information.”102 Moreover, the Kremlin’s opposition research document had been represented to Trump Jr. as coming from “the Crown prosecutor [sic] of Russia,” a contention implying that the Kremlin had additional incriminating evidence in its possession, and that the Trump campaign had only received an evidentiary summary of a larger case file alleging suspicious donations to the Democratic National Committee and high-profile Democrats.103 This latter fact will become significant just days after the June 9, 2016, meeting, when the Trump campaign, along with the rest of America, learns that the Kremlin has hacked the Democratic National Committee and is indeed in possession of stolen private documents regarding its operations and transactions (see chapter 4).
When it is released in redacted form in April 2019, the Mueller Report will reveal that, contrary to Trump Jr. and his father’s mid-2017 contention that the Kremlin’s chief purpose in meeting with Trump officials and advisers at Trump Tower in 2016 was to discuss U.S. citizens’ adoptions of Russian children, the Russians’ primary ambition had been as Rob Goldstone first represented it to Trump Jr.: to aid the Trump campaign with valuable opposition research about Clinton and the DNC, an action prohibited by U.S. law. Roman Beniaminov—an assistant to Azerbaijani-Russian pop singer Emin Agalarov, who helped set up the June 9 meeting with Trump Jr. on behalf of his father, Aras, and Yury Chaika, the prosecutor general of Russia—had before the meeting told Aras Agalarov employee Irakli “Ike” Kaveladze, an eventual meeting attendee, that “the purpose of the meeting was for Veselnitskaya to convey ‘negative information on Hillary Clinton’” to the Trump campaign, an aim Kaveladze subsequently disclosed to the special counsel’s office.104 Kaveladze himself wrote in an email to his daughter after the meeting that the meeting was boring because it featured no “bad info on Hilary [sic],” an assessment that at once confirms that the Kremlin’s opposition research stopped just short of implicating Clinton and implies that Kaveladze had gone to the meeting expecting derogatory information about the Democratic candidate to be the chief topic of conversation.105 Beniaminov and Kaveladze’s statements on the purpose of the Trump-Kremlin summit at Trump Tower thus mirror what Goldstone had told Trump Jr. in his initial email seeking the June meeting: “The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his [Emin Agalarov’s] father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official