Eighth attendee at Trump Jr.'s meeting identified
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E-mail Xinhua, July 19, 2017
The eighth person who reportedly attended a controversial meeting with Donald Trump Jr., eldest son of U.S. President Donald Trump, and a Russian lawyer last year has been identified as a senior executive at a Russian real estate developer.
CNN said Tuesday it has learned that Ike Kaveladze was the previously unnamed eighth attendee at Trump Jr.'s meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya on June 9, 2016 in New York, an occasion where then campaign team to Trump reportedly anticipated damaging information on Democratic Presidential Candidate Hilary Clinton.
Kaveladze, a U.S. citizen, is a senior vice president of Crocus Group, a real estate development company run by Azerbaijan-Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov.
Agalarov's son, Emin, is a businessman and pop star represented by British music publicist Rob Goldstone who proposed the meeting early June and then arranged it via emails with Trump Jr.
Those emails were disclosed by Trump Jr. last week with what he called total transparency after the meeting was uncovered by U.S. media, but he was accused of illegally soliciting a contribution from a foreign national during the presidential campaign.
The chain of emails indicated that attendees of the meeting were Goldstone, Trump Jr., Veselnitskaya, Trump's son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, and his then-campaign manager Paul Manafort. It is revealed later Russian-born American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin working with Veselnitskaya, and an interpreter employed by her was also there before Kaveladze was identified.
Kaveladze attended the meeting as a representative for the Agalarovs, Scott Balber, an attorney for the family, was quoted by CNN as saying.
Balber said that Kaveladze who speaks fluent Russian has "never had any engagement with the Russian government in any capacity," a similar denial made by Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin.
According to Kaveladze's website, he studied at the Moscow Academy of Finance and received an MBA from the University of New Haven in Connecticut. Kaveladze has worked for the Crocus Group since 2004. He was implicated in a billion-U.S.-dollar money laundering scheme involving Russian brokers in 2000.
Other public records show Kaveladze, whose full name is Irakly Kaveladze, was born in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia in 1965 and immigrated to the United States in 1991.
Balber said he received a call from investigators led by Robert Mueller, a special counsel appointed by the Justice Department to probe an alleged collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.
The attorney said they are "fully cooperating with prosecutors as a result of the investigation," but the Agalarovs, whom Balber also represents, have not been reached out by Mueller's investigators.
Kaveladze was told to act as an interpreter for the meeting because Veselnitskaya did not speak English but later he found the lawyer had already brought her own interpreter, Balber said.
The interpreter was a former State Department employee who refused to comment because of a non-disclosure agreement.
Balber quoted Kaveladze as saying the 30-minute talk surrounded a U.S. act that imposes sanctions on Russian individuals and a Russian retaliatory response that bans Russian children from being adopted by American citizens.
The U.S. intelligence community alleged that Russia meddled in the U.S. presidential race last year and there were connections between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. Mueller and several congressional panels are investigating these allegations.
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