the curious rise of Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met Team Trump
Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met Team Trump
Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was a key participant at the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and campaign aides
Michael Weiss: How a young provincial attorney with a modest income was able to afford seven figures worth of property is a very Russian mystery -- as is her journey to the Trump Tower meeting
(CNN)She's been called a "Russian government attorney," a "trusted insider" of the Kremlin, the "go-to lawyer for the Moscow regional government" and an acquaintance of Russia's powerful prosecutor general. Natalia Veselnitskaya, 42, rose from obscurity to international notoriety following the disclosure of her June 9, 2016, meeting with Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort. She also appears to have amassed considerable wealth in a very short period of time, 14 years ago, when her legal career in the Moscow region (not to be confused with the city of Moscow) was in its infancy and she was just transitioning from being a government employee to a private practitioner. According to two different privately run databases, which draw on personal financial and employment information from Russian state records, Veselnitskaya went from a lowly state salary of $1,559 a year to a much more comfortable $53,645, between 1999 and 2003.
But here's the curious thing: In August 2003, before the lion's share of that $53,645 was earned, the Russian land registry shows that Veselnitskaya was somehow able to buy two large plots of land in an elite residential community in the Moscow suburbs -- properties that cannot have been sold for less than $500,000 apiece at the time, according to two Russian brokers with extensive experience selling in that area. Veselnitskaya would not respond to multiple interview requests for this story to confirm her employment details and her income.
How a 28-year-old provincial attorney raking in, at most, five figures was able to afford seven figures worth of property is a very Russian mystery, no less intriguing than her extraordinary and unlikely journey to the meeting at the center of the far-reaching investigation into how Moscow might have had a hand in influencing the American presidential election.
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She is, Macintyre said, "straight out of one of our books, a character that is possibly connected to the Russian state. Who knows? They exist somewhere in that foggy, deniable hinterland. It's called maskirovka -- little masquerade -- where you create so much confusion and uncertainty and mystery that no one knows what the truth is."
http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/16/opinions/curious-rise-of-russian-lawyer-veselnitskaya-opinion-weiss/index.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
certain "aroma" to it doesn't it?
