Trump campaign officials tried to swap access to Trump for favors from Russia at least 3 times

Thomson Reuters

U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks to U.S. and Japanese business leaders at the U.S. ambassador's residence in Tokyo

• A Russian lawyer said Donald Trump Jr. told her that the president would review Magnitsky Act sanctions once elected in exchange for dirt on Hillary Clinton.
• It was the second of at least three times that one of President Donald Trump's campaign officials alluded to swapping access to Trump for favors from Russia.
• The pattern will likely be of interest to special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating whether any Trump associates colluded with Moscow to undermine Clinton during the election.

The Russian lawyer who met with President Donald Trump's son, son-in-law, and former campaign chairman at Trump Tower last June says Trump Jr. offered to review US sanctions on Russia if his father were elected president in exchange for dirt on his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

"Looking ahead, if we come to power, we can return to this issue and think what to do about it," Trump Jr. said, according to the lawyer Natalia Veselnitsksya.

Trump Jr. was referring to the Magnitsky Act sanctions levied by the US in 2012, which Veselnitskaya has been lobbying against along with the Russian-American political operative Rinat Akhmetshin since at least last year.

"I understand our side may have messed up, but it'll take a long time to get to the bottom of it," Trump Jr. added, according to Veselnitskaya.

Veselnitskaya made the remarks in an interview with Bloomberg, weeks after reports surfaced that she may have been acting as an agent of the Kremlin.

The memo she brought with her to the meeting contained many of the same talking points as one written by the Russian prosecutor's office two months earlier. But she has insisted that she did not provide the campaign with the dirt they had been expecting.

Still, the revelation that Trump Jr. may have signaled a willingness to exchange a major policy shift for help winning the election from a Kremlin-connected lawyer will likely be of interest to special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow to undermine Clinton during the election.

'Russia has been eager to meet with Mr. Trump for some time'

That meeting was not the first time someone on the Trump campaign had expressed interest in exchanging access to the president for a favor from Russia.

Thomson Reuters

FILE PHOTO: Manafort leaves U.S. Federal Court after being arraigned on twelve federal charges in the investigation into alleged Russian meddling, in Washington

Court documents filed by Mueller's office and unsealed last week revealed that early Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos was told that Moscow had dirt on Clinton, the former Democratic nominee for president, in late April 2016 - six weeks before the Trump Tower meeting.

According to the special counsel's office, Papadopoulos kept trying to organize a meeting between the campaign and Russian government officials even after learning that Russia was trying to compromise Clinton.

It is still unclear whether Papadopoulos' efforts were connected to the Trump Tower meeting. The meeting was pitched to Trump Jr. by Rob Goldstone, a music publicist for the son of a wealthy Russian-Azerbaijani real estate developer with close ties to the Kremlin.

Goldstone told Trump Jr. in an email that "the Crown prosecutor of Russia … offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father."

The information, Goldstone said, was "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump."

Those emails were forwarded to Manafort, then the campaign chairman, who had already been fielding emails from Papadopoulos asking whether a Trump-Putin meeting could be arranged.

"Russia has been eager to meet with Mr. Trump for some time and have been reaching out to me to discuss," Papadopoulos wrote to Manafort on May 21.

Manafort forwarded the email to his associate, Rick Gates, and said: "Let's discuss. We need someone to communicate that DT is not doing these trips. It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal."

Papadopoulos emailed Manafort again on June 19, telling him that he would be willing to travel to Moscow to meet with Russian government officials "if it's in the interest of Mr. Trump and the campaign to meet specific people."

'If he needs private briefings we can accommodate'

That trip never took place. But on July 7, about one month after the Trump Tower meeting, Manafort offered to accommodate a Russian oligarch's request for private briefings on the campaign. Manafort's representative has said he was trying to leverage his high-level role on the campaign to collect past debts.

"If he needs private briefings we can accommodate," Manafort wrote, referring to the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

Manafort had been a top adviser to Ukraine's pro-Russia Party of Regions from 2004 to 2014 and was in debt to pro-Russian interests by as much as $17 million by the time he joined the Trump campaign, according to The New York Times. He and Gates were indicted last week by Mueller's office.

Russian sources cited in a dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele say that by late July 2016, there was "a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between [the campaign] and the Russian leadership," both of which had an interest in defeating Clinton.

The Steele dossier also said that the campaign agreed to sideline the issue of Russia's invasion of Crimea and interference in eastern Ukraine in exchange for WikiLeaks releasing the stolen Democratic National Committee emails.

The Trump campaign's national-security policy representative for the Republican National Convention acknowledged in an interview with Business Insider in September that he had given his campaign colleagues the opportunity to "intervene" when an amendment to the GOP's draft policy on Ukraine was introduced in Cleveland last July.

The original amendment, which proposed that the GOP commit to sending "lethal weapons" to the Ukrainian army to fend off Russian aggression, was ultimately altered to say "provide appropriate assistance" before it was included in the party's official platform.

Papadopoulos was still pursuing a Trump campaign-Russia meeting as late as August 15, 2016, when a campaign supervisor told him that he would "encourage" him and another foreign policy adviser "to make the trip" to Moscow "if feasible."