As of the latest count, eight people attended the meeting at Trump Tower on June 9. From the Trump campaign, there were Donald Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort. From the Russian side, so far, two had been identified.
They are Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer, and Rinat Akhmetshin, the Russian-American lobbyist who was a former Soviet counterintelligence officer. There was an unnamed translator and another unnamed person said to be the representative of Aras Agaralov, the Russian real estate billionaire.
Eighth person
Reports identified the eighth person as 52-year-old Ike Kaveladze.
He is a senior vice president at Crocus Group, the real estate company of Agalarov based in the U.S. The New York Daily News reported that Kaveladze – who was accused of being part of a $1-billion laundering scheme – has been asked by special counsel Robert Mueller for an interview, according to Scott Balber, the lawyer of Kaveladze, who is a native of Georgia and immigrated to the U.S.
The latest confirmed participant is Ike Kaveladze, the senior vice president of the Crocus Group. https://t.co/wGgCPGatab
— Mohammad Usman Anwar (@UsmanAnwar78) July 19, 2017
As Agalarov’s representative, Kaveladze attended the meeting to ensure that it would take place, as he is connected to the family who wanted the meeting to happen, Balber explained.
The lawyer said that Kaveladze did not have any direct involvement in the Trump Tower meeting. The meeting apparently covered adoption of Russian children and a dossier on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. The document allegedly came from the prosecutor general of Russia and was thought to potentially help Donald Jr.’s father – the Republican candidate – win the 2016 election.
The lawyer added that Kaveladze could not recall if he spoke at all during the meeting.
Money laundering scheme
Although Kaveladze claimed he had no serious role at the meeting and attended only to make sure the meeting happened, his checkered past could make Mueller’s team probing the Russian meddling dig deeper. According to the New York Daily News, Kaveladze was accused in 2000 by the Government Accountability Office of being the mastermind of a massive money laundering scheme for brokers in Russia.
He allegedly opened over 2,000 shell companies in Delaware and bank accounts on behalf of Russians.
Kaveladze allegedly funneled over $14 billion of eastern Europe and Russian money through the U.S. He denied the charges that he described as a Russian witch hunt in the U.S.
Meanwhile, The New York Daily News reported that even after Donald Jr. admitted to attending the meeting and tweeted copies of the email exchange between him and British publicist Rob Goldberg, a survey found that only 45 percent of people who voted for Republican candidate Donald Trump in 2016 believed Donald Jr. attended the meeting.
The survey, which had 836 respondents, was done mostly by phone, from Friday to Monday. The Russia story was viewed by 72 percent of Trump voters as fake news. Another 64 percent are against Mueller’s probe into the suspected Russian collusion with the Trump campaign staff.
