Follow the Money Laundering

The Trump - Russia story had three separate phases:
1) Cultivation of Trump as an asset. Started in the 1980's(?). Gained head of steam circa 2008 after legitimate bankers stopped lending to the serial bankuptcist. Casinos and real estate offer two great opportunities for money laundering. Of course, that does not prove anything. Maybe they were all just friends.
2) Cultivation of Trump as a candidate for president and agent of influence in the Republican party.
3) Cultivation of President Trump as an agent of influence - revolutionizing American foreign policy, destruction of NATO, elimination of sanctions against Russians, create political upheaval in the U.S. by dismantling the American system insofar as possible, and provide U.S. intelligence to Moscow.

How does Natalia Veselnitskaya fit into this?

Veselnitskaya become known in the U.S. as an attendee at the famous June 2016 Trump tower meeting about which Don Jr. claimed he expected "dirt on Hillary Clinton", but Veselnitskaya "only"wanted to talk about "Russian adoptions".

Yesterday's news on Veselnitskaya : Russian lawyer at Trump Tower meeting charged in separate case:

"A Russian lawyer whose role in a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower has come under scrutiny from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was charged Tuesday with obstructing justice in a separate money-laundering investigation."

But how separate are the two cases? Isn't it an odd coincidence that a Russian lawyer, who was in NYC June 16, 2016 for a scheduled court appearance in the Prevezon Holdings Case that relates to money laundering happened to appear at a Trump Tower meeting regarding "dirt on Hillary Clinton"?

Team Trump lies all the time about everything. So do Putin, his oligarchs, and their representatives. But they tell us where to seek the truth with their denials and deflections. If Don Jr. (aka Individual-1 Jr. ) invokes "adoptions" as a deflection, what does that tell us? Well, Veselnitskaya represents the interests of the Katsyvs in the Prevezon money laundering case. Publicly, Veselnitskaya has registered a non-profit to work Russian adoptions in the U.S. that would presumably resume if and when sanctions are lifted. But sanctions against Russia are targeted at the oligarchs. The oligarchs who desperately want to move their wealth out of Russia to places like the U.S. and the U.K. No, this wasn't a meeting about adoptions and not just about dirt on Clinton. Topic 1 was money laundering through real estate - removing sanctions to ease restrictions on money laundering -and possibly other types of  transactions. That meant that Jared Kushner's attendance was important - hence the necessity to deny that Kushner was even there or spent much time at the meeting.

As to the dirt on Hillary Clinton, the original stories omitted the attendance of Rinat Akhmetshin.
As reported,
"Mr. Akhmetshin, a Washington resident, has told reporters that he just happened to be lunching with Ms. Veselnitskaya in Manhattan that day when she spontaneously invited him to the meeting with the president’s son, son-in-law Jared Kushner and Mr. Manafort. He did not explain why she wanted him there."

That's a clear case of deflection - tells us Akhmetshin's participation was critical. My guess is that Akhmetshin (the Russian-American lobbyist and former Soviet intelligence officer per Wikipedia) was there with the news of "dirt on Hillary Clinton". Why would Jr. claim it was Veselnitskaya? To distract attention from the money laundering that would resume when sanctions were lifted on the oligarchs.And that money laundering would include handsome payoffs  - not just for money laundering services, but for the president who, by the way,  has been extremely reluctant to impose sanctions on the oligarchs and anxious to remove those sanctions as quickly as possible. The Treasury Dept. announced just before Christmas, the lifting of sanctions on Oleg Deripaska's Rusal and EN+Group while allegedly keeping sanctions in place on Deripaska, Paul Manafort's boss for many years.