Trump Team Met Russian Accused of International Hacking Conspiracy
Rinat Akhmetshin allegedly stole sensitive documents from a corporation years before he joined Natalia Veselnitskaya to meet Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner.
KEVIN POULSEN
NICO HINES
KATIE ZAVADSKI
07.14.17 10:49 AM ET
The alleged former Soviet intelligence officer who attended the now-infamous meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and other top campaign officials last June was previously accused in federal and state courts of orchestrating an international hacking conspiracy.
Rinat Akhmetshin told the Associated Press on Friday he accompanied Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya to the June 9, 2016 meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort. Trumps attorney confirmed Akhmetshins attendance in a statement.
Akhmetshins presence at Trump Tower that day adds another layer of controversy to an episode that already provides the clearest indication of collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. In the run-up to that rendezvous, Donald Trump Jr. was promised very high level and sensitive information on Hillary Clinton as part of Russia and its governments support for Mr. Trump.
In court papers filed with New York Supreme Court in November 2015, Akhmetshin was described as a former Soviet military counterintelligence officer by lawyers for International Mineral Resources (IMR), a Russian mining company who alleged that they had been hacked.
Those documents accuse Akhmetshin of hacking into two computer systems and stolen sensitive and confidential materials as part of an alleged black ops smear campaign against IMR. The allegations were later withdrawn.
The U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. was told in July 2015 that Akhmetshin had arranged the hacking of a mining companys private recordsstealing internal documents and then disseminating them. The corporate espionage case was brought by IMR, who alleged that Akhmetshin was hired by Russian oligarch Andrey Melinchenko, an industrialist worth around $12 billion.
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