Lawyer Veselnitskaya tells investigators from U.S. Senate commission has not had contacts with people close to Trump
MOSCOW. April 21 (Interfax) - Russian lawyer Natalya Veselnitskaya said she has testified to investigators from the U.S. Senate commission on the so-called Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election.
"The investigators were interested in issues associated with my contacts with representatives from the United States. The meeting took place in Berlin on March 26," Veselnitskaya told Interfax on Saturday. She had not made this information public before.
The questioning was conducted behind closed doors, she said. "My testimony addressed not only my knowledge of the facts I had been directly involved in, but the U.S. investigators were also interested in my analysis, which I gladly shared with them on relations between the people who were behind the 'Trump dossier' and William Browder's team," she said.
"I officially said I had had no contacts with people close to Donald Trump, I only had a meeting with a friend of one of my clients' son - Donald Trump Jr.," Veselnitskaya said.
"That meeting was private and took place on his request, and that meeting had no relation to the personality of Hillary Clinton, or Donald Trump Sr., or the presidential election, or any election at all, she said.
"They were also very interested in issues involving the so-called hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), whose mail was broken into," the lawyer said.
The interview with the investigators from the U.S. Senate Committee on Intelligence was organized for a long time, she said.
"The Committee on Intelligence of the U.S. Senate sent me a letter asking for my secret interview with investigators from that committee," Veselnitskaya said.
She said she had insisted on a place where the United States, Russia and various international organizations were present, but the U.S. side had not agreed with that. "They offered to choose from four cities. I chose Berlin," Veselnitskaya said.
An audio recording was made during the meeting with three investigators, she said. The minutes of the interview are not ready yet and the minutes of the meeting cannot be given to her according to the existing rules, she said. "The only thing is that they can give it to me to read for me to see if my words were recorded correctly," Veselnitskaya said.
The media earlier reported that Donald Trump Jr. had met with Russian lawyer Natalya Veselnitskaya, who allegedly had compromising information on Hillary Clinton, who was Donald trump's rival in the 2016 presidential election, before the U.S. presidential election in June 2016.
The U.S. is conducting an investigation into the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.