A U.S.-based employee of a Russian real estate company took part in a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between a Russian lawyer and Donald Trump Jr., bringing to eight the number of known participants at the session that has emerged as a key focus of the investigation of the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russians.
Ike Kaveladze attended the meeting as a representative of Aras and Emin Agalarov, the father-and-son Russian developers who hosted the Trump-owned Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013, according to Scott Balber, an attorney for the Agalarovs who said he also represents Kaveladze.
Balber said on Tuesday that he had received a phone call over the weekend from a representative of special counsel Robert Mueller asking if Kaveladze would agree to be interviewed. Balber said his client would cooperate.
The request is the first public indication that Mueller’s team is investigating the meeting.
The presence of Kaveladze at the Trump Tower meeting introduces a new and intriguing figure into the increasingly complex Trump-Russia drama. A native of the Soviet republic of Georgia who came to the United States in 1991, Kaveladze was the subject nearly two decades ago of a congressional inquiry into Russian money laundering in U.S. banks, although he was never charged with a crime.
The emergence of new information on Tuesday — some 10 days after the Trump Tower meeting was first reported — underscored how details of the session have been slow to emerge amid incomplete and potentially misleading explanations from Trump Jr.
After the New York Times first reported the meeting, Trump Jr. said only that the lawyer had primarily discussed the adoption of Russian children by Americans.
More information about the meeting and its participants has emerged since July 11, when Trump Jr. said he wished to be “transparent” and released emails dating to June 2016 between himself and Rob Goldstone, a music promoter who represented Emin Agalarov, a Russian pop singer, setting up the meeting.
Those emails revealed that Trump Jr. had agreed to meet with the Russian lawyer on the promise that he would be provided damaging information about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help his father’s presidential campaign, according to emails released by Trump Jr. last week.
Trump Jr.’s acknowledgment of the meeting undercut months of denials from top Trump aides that campaign officials had any contact with Russians before the November election.
The meeting brought together then-candidate Donald Trump’s innermost circle, including son-in-law Jared Kushner and top campaign adviser Paul Manafort, as well as a Russian and Russian Americans with deep ties to Trump’s business and the priorities of the Russian government. Goldstone, the music promoter, told The Washington Post that he also attended.
The Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, was leading an effort to get Congress to lift sanctions imposed in 2012 to punish Russia for human rights abuses, a topic of deep importance to the Russian government. Angered over the law, called the Magnitsky Act, Russia had put a hold on adoptions of children by U.S. families.