The story behind Donald Trump Jr.’s controversial meeting with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 presidential campaign has turned out to be a complicated one linking adoptions, sanctions, and frozen assets.
The story behind Donald Trump Jr.’s controversial meeting with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 presidential campaign has turned out to be a complicated one linking adoptions, sanctions, and frozen assets.
The president’s son had initially said the discussion was set up to talk about adoptions, but he later admitted that he had attended in the hopes of learning potentially damaging information about Hillary Clinton.
However, a former major investor in Russia, Bill Browder, told Senate lawmakers in a recent hearing, “It's clear the interest and goal in that meeting was to repeal the Magnitsky Act. It's the one thing we can agree with certainty that happened in that meeting.”
According to CNN, “The 2012 law was named for Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who worked in the 2000s to uncover a $230 million tax fraud scheme in Russia, was jailed and later died in a Moscow prison under suspicious circumstances. US lawmakers passed the Magnitsky Act in 2012 to punish the Russians they saw as responsible for his death.”
The act resulted in the freezing of some Russian assets and barred suspected human rights abusers from entering the U.S, reports the Atlantic.
In apparent retaliation, Russia moved to prohibit Americans from adopting Russian kids, and the two issues have been linked ever since.
In fact, Browder has said, “Russian adoptions was really code for Russian sanctions.”
Since then, the financier has claimed that Putin and his associates have spent millions of dollars--including hiring the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya--to try and get the act repealed.
Browder speculates that it is an effort to protect human rights abusers as well as free up frozen assets including money belonging to Putin himself.
For his part, Trump Jr. has said that nothing substantive came out of the meeting.
