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one other little tidbit to add to that…
https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/07/russian-lawyer-natalia-veselnitskaya-entry-unrelated-trump-campaign/
Veselnitskaya purports to have extensive experience in Russian criminal, corporate, and property law. In the declaration, however, she did not even pretend to familiarity with American law, much less with the complexities of federal money-laundering and asset-forfeiture litigation. She did not attend an American law school. She is not a member of any state bar, let alone the bar of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. She would not have been eligible to appear in court as counsel for Prevezon Holdings, the Katsyv company in the case. And Prevezon, as already noted, was more than adequately represented by the BakerHostetler law firm.
Moreover, as we’ve also seen, the parole provision is supposed to be reserved for aliens whose presence will be beneficial to our country. Whatever positive effect Veselnitskaya may have portended for moving the case along was outweighed by the facts that (a) she was not qualified to perform the function that was the rationale for her admission; (b) there was reason to believe she was an agent of a hostile government that obstructed the investigation that led to the case; and (c) she was the spearhead of a Kremlin-backed lobbying campaign against the Magnitsky Act — the human-rights provision Congress enacted in response to Russia’s imprisonment, torture, and murder of Sergei Magnitsky.
When Veselnitskaya’s parole ended in January 2016, the U.S. attorney’s office refused to extend it. In explaining this position to the court, prosecutors recounted that she and others in Katsyv’s defense team had run up $50,000 in expenses in connection with his deposition. Veselnitskaya did not even attend the deposition, though she did bill U.S. taxpayers nearly $2,000 for a two-night stay at the Plaza the weekend after the deposition was concluded.
When Veselnitskaya made subsequent trips to the U.S., including the one in June 2016, during which she visited with Donald Trump Jr., she was traveling on a non-immigrant work visa. The process for issuing such a visa involves the Homeland Security and State Departments, not the Justice Department.
It is certainly worth asking why that visa — a work visa for a lawyer unqualified to work as a lawyer in the U.S. — was granted, especially in light of Veselnitskaya’s track record by that point in time.
As for the three-month immigration parole the Justice Department arranged in October 2015, I confess to sympathy for the prosecutors, having been in similar binds when, for many years, I was a prosecutor in the same office. Nevertheless, it is certainly fair to question the wisdom of supporting immigration parole for Veselnitskaya under the circumstances that obtained.
It is crystal clear, however, that the parole grant was strictly related to the Prevezon asset forfeiture case. It had nothing to do with the Trump campaign.