On June 9, 2016, after Trump had sewn up enough delegates for the GOP nomination, but prior to the GOP convention, a meeting took place at Trump Tower between top members of the Trump campaign and a Russian delegation with ties to the Kremlin. There were at least eight participants.
- Donald Trump Jr.
- Jared Kushner
- Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s campaign manager.
- Natalya Veselnitskaya, a Moscow attorney with high-level Kremlin connections who had previously attempted to recruit a Swiss federal investigator as a mole inside a Swiss investigation of Russian mafia and financial crimes in Switzerland.
- Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian/American lobbyist and former Soviet counterintelligence officer.
- Rob Goldstone, publicist for Russian businessman Emin Agalarov, son of oligarch Aras Agalarov.
- Anatoli Samochornov, translator for Veselnitskaya
- Ike Kaveladze, a Georgian-American executive at Crucus Group, a real estate development company run by Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov.
Donald Trump Jr initially lied and said the meeting was about Russian adoptions. Later he was forced to admit that the purpose of the meeting was opposition research on Hillary Clinton. He said none was presented and that the conversation focused on the Magnitsky Act.
Jared Kushner did not report the meeting on his security clearance forms, and was forced to amend them on April 6, 2017.
The Trump Files 