By Lucy Komisar
July 13, 2019 –
On Wednesday July 10th, I was interviewed by John Batchelor for his radio program. Here are the key points. There are a few corrections and edits. And here is the link to the audio. The John Batchelor Show.
John Batchelor: Russiagate, spygate, Natalia Vladimirovna Vestselniskaya a Russian attorney born in February of 1975 was in a room in the Trump Tower in June of 2016. That room is much spoken of in the Mueller Report.
The Mueller Report presents Vestselniskaya as an agent of the Kremlin. You can interpret it in many ways but this is part of the allegation against candidate trump who is now president trump that he was a stooge, a hireling, a lackey of Vladimir Putin himself and that the Putin effort using Trump was to undermine the American democracy.
That is the allegation presented in the floor of Congress in 2017 and followed upon by the Mueller investigation that lasted more than two years.
Lucy meets with Veselnitskaya
Helping me to tell another version of Lucy Komisar, of Vestselniskaya is Lucy Komisar, who keeps the Komisar Scoop. She published at the Consortium News an interpretation of events in that Trump Tower meeting. But we’re going to another meeting Lucy enjoyed in November 2016, within days of election of Donald trump
The Obama administration is in power in Washington; Donald Trump is being feted in New York
And Lucy has a meeting, two meetings, at a law firm with Veselnitskaya. These meetings, you kept notes.
These meetings were in the context of Veselnitskaya‘s concern in America for a lawsuit
What was her general concern that day that she spoke at great length about through a translator
William Browder and the Magnitsky Act
Lucy Komisar: She was talking about William Browder and the Magnitsky Act, that was what she was talking about at the Trump Tower. When she was talking to me in November 2016 it was about the same issue. That is what she was concerned about. The lawsuit was still going on
The Justice Department had sued her client Prevezon, a real estate holding company, and its owner Denis Katsyv and accused them of receiving money laundered from a fraud against the Russian Treasury
They didn‘t have any real evidence, but they had deep pockets because the Justice Department can keep on with a case as long as it wants and people who are sued have to worry about paying lawyers‘
We were talking about the details of corruption by William Browder, an American who had a hedge fund in Russia, didn‘t pay all taxes on the profits of his hedge fund. At this point they say he owed about $100 million in taxes.
Browder invents a story about the murder of his accountant
In order to prevent the Russians from going after him he invented a story about his accountant killed by the Russians.
JB: Is this what Veselnitskaya was talking about, she told the whole story of Browder in detail.
LK: Absolutely
JB: You had two meetings with her, both meetings when she talked about Browder and the allegation from the Russians that he had concocted this enormous persecution of himself and Magnitsky. She talked about that in detail.
LK: In great detail
One of the others things we talked about which is interesting and that connects to idea there was some dirt about Hillary. That really was not the case, Robert Goldstone who was the publicist promoted this story supposedly get the meeting.
The Ziff Brothers list their investments as loans
She explained the same story to me about the Ziff brothers. She said the Ziff brothers who were clients of Browder had bought share of Gazprom instead of listing them as investments, listed them as loans. That‘s in the Manafort notes.
JB: She was going into great detail. Within days of the election. Let‘s strike off what she didn‘t talk about. Did she mention Donald Trump?
LK: Never.
JB: Did she talk about Paul Manafort?
LK: Never
JB: Mention of Fusion GPS?
LK: Never
JB: Did she talk about Glen Simpson, the principal of GPS whom we know she met with before and after the Trump Tower meeting?
LK: Never.
The translator who was doing this for you…
LK: It was Anatoli Samochornov, he was at the meeting. He was at the meeting and the one translating for me.
She says the Ziffs didn’t pay US taxes on Russian profits
The reason she was interested in the Ziffs, she said the profits should have been reported in the US, she found no evidence of a declared dividends in SEC filings.
She said therefore that money was dirty. When she said dirt on Hillary, she meant had discovered on the websites of who gives money to what party, what candidates, that they donated to the Democrats, she said they were donating dirty money because they didn‘t pay taxes on it.
JB: So Veselnitskaya is focused on the Browder case, she‘s focused on Browder himself, she‘s focused on the lawsuit she‘s representing in America, and she‘s telling you this story not once but twice in November 2016.
How did you find her, soft-spoken aggressive, polite?
LK: She is very dynamic, she‘s very passionate about what she believes, she‘d been working on that case — I saw her in 2016 — working on that since it was filed in 2013. She‘s had Lots of difficulties.
Browder intervenes in Prevezon case which is not about him
I saw her in the offices of Baker-Hostetler, her first lawyers. Browder who supposedly had nothing to do with the government case against her client went to court to get Baker-Hostetler thrown out. It delayed the proceedings for a year. This was going on when I met her in their offices. She was under a lot of pressure.
JL: Does she act organized, is she a person of scattered papers, does she speak in a crisp lawyerly fashion?
LK: She had an amazing memory, we were talking of things of great detail, when she was telling me of things that happened some years ago, giving me specifics about: this was said in this document, something else was in that document, this bank was involved, HSBC was involved.
In a case like this there are voluminous papers, hundreds of papers just filed in the court. And then your own papers. She had a great command of what had gone down and she could remember a lot. It was very impressive.
She‘s telling me this in Russian, getting a translation. She knows a few words of English; sometimes if it wasn‘t totally translated correctly, she would break in.
I found her very smart, very tough and very good at what she was doing. But passionate, she wasn‘t just sitting there as if I have this client and I have ten other clients and they‘re all paying me a lot of money.
She was angry the US press didn’t tell truth about conman Browder
She was very angry at the corrupt William Browder, because he‘s very corrupt, he‘s a liar, he‘s a conman. She was angry that the American media was buying his story and that the US government appeared to buy his story too.
It was her client, but it more than her client. That‘s why she wanted the meeting at Trump Tower.
JB: Natalia Vladimirovna Veselnitskaya. We‘ve not heard the last of that. Lucy Komisar at the Komisar Scoop and published in the Consortium News.