Remember the good ole days when that June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr., aka Not-Ivanka, was just him, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer? Well, those days are long gone; it turns out that not only was there a fifth, sixth and seventh attendee, but an eighth person was also involved in the meeting.
That’s right, an eighth person; and at this point it would probably be easier to have a flow chart of the people who didn’t attend this meeting, which was pitched as a way to expose Hillary Clinton’s corruption but somehow turned into a treaty on American adoption of Russian babies.
According to the Washington Post, the eighth person was Ike Kaveladze, “[an] American-based employee of a Russian real estate company ... ”
Remember when Not-Ivanka released emails on Twitter last week in the spirit of transparency? The “transparency” that was shaped in the form of a gun held by the New York Times to Not-Ivanka’s head with a report that was going to expose said meeting in print? Since then, names have been leaking from said meeting like Niagara Falls.
For those keeping record, here’s a list, according to USA Today, of everyone who attended the meeting in New York City that should never have been, yet totally was, because this administration is full of opportunists who believe that collusion is part of the game:
- Not-Ivanka
- Jared “Got Dem Visas” Kushner
- Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign manager
- Rob Goldstone, publicist and the one who arranged the meeting
- Natalia Veselnitskaya, Russian lawyer
- Anatoli Samochornov, a Russian-born American translator who accompanied Veselnitskaya as her translator
- Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist with former ties to Soviet military counterintelligence
- And Kaveladze, who, the Post reports, believed that he would act as a translator, but arrived to discover that the lawyer had brought her own translator
It was a goddamn Russian hoedown.
Here is what the Post had to say about Kaveladze:
Born in the Soviet Republic of Georgia, Kaveladze came to the United States in 1991. According to his LinkedIn profile, he holds a business degree from the University of New Haven.
In 2000, Kaveladze’s actions as the head of a Delaware company called International Business Creations were the subject of a government investigation into how Russians and other foreigners were able to launder large amounts of money through U.S. banks.
The GAO report, which had been requested by Congress, concluded that it was “relatively easy” for these foreigners to use shell companies to open U.S. banks accounts and route hidden money through the American financial system.
The Post notes that Kaveladze was never charged with any wrongdoing.
Sounds like the exact group of people who should be meeting with the president’s son.
Read more at the Washington Post and USA Today.