WASHINGTON—The Russian lawyer whom Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort met last year with the hopes of receiving damaging information about Hillary Clinton says she talked with the office of Russia’s top prosecutor while waging a campaign against a U.S. sanctions law and the hedge-fund manager who backed it.

Lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya said she wasn’t working for Russian authorities, but she said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that she was meeting with Russian authorities regularly and shared information about the hedge-fund manager with the Russian prosecutor general’s office, including with Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika, a top official appointed by the Kremlin.

“I personally know the general prosecutor,” Ms. Veselnitskaya said. “In the course of my investigation [about the fund manager], I shared information with him.”

Mr. Chaika’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment on whether he knows and received information from Ms. Veselnitskaya.

President Donald Trump and others have stressed that she wasn’t formally working for the Russian government at the time of the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower. Mr. Trump said on Thursday at a news conference in Paris that his son’s meeting was brief and uneventful. “He took a meeting with a Russian lawyer. Not a government lawyer, but a Russian lawyer,” Mr. Trump said.

Ms. Veselnitskaya says she was working to spread information about William Browder, the U.S.-born fund manager turned Kremlin critic, who lobbied for passage of a 2012 U.S. law that incensed Moscow. The law, known as the Magnitsky Act, sanctioned Russians accused of defrauding Mr. Browder’s firm in Russia out of $230 million and causing the death of his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who died in Russian custody.


Also working on the anti-Magnitsky Act effort was a former Soviet military serviceman turned U.S. lobbyist, Rinat Akhmetshin, who told the Journal that he attended the meeting at Trump Tower. Mr. Akhmetshin’s presence at the meeting wasn’t previously disclosed by Donald Trump Jr. or the White House.

The multiyear saga between Russia and Mr. Browder has featured accusations of murder and fraud, extensive lobbying efforts on both sides, high-level court proceedings and public statements by Russian President Vladimir Putin suggesting Mr. Browder is a criminal. And now, the drama has extended to the Trump White House, which is already facing probes into the campaign’s relationship with Russia.

Mr. Browder, who has denied any wrongdoing, and federal prosecutors in the U.S. claim that Russian officials and people linked to Russian officials participated in the fraud against his fund.

Ms. Veselnitskaya says she is a former Moscow regional prosecutor turned private attorney, and represents Prevezon Holdings, a Cyprus-based hotel and real-estate group owned by Russian national Denis Katsyv. Mr. Katsyv’s father, Pytor, is a former top Moscow region official and vice president of state-owned Russian Railways. She says she was compiling information about Mr. Browder on behalf of Prevezon and met with the Trump camp to share her findings.

Emails released by President Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. offer evidence that senior campaign officials entertained accepting Russia’s help in the 2016 election. Trump has made a series of comments about Russia on the campaign trail and as president. Photo: Getty

The emails that Donald Trump Jr. disclosed Tuesday provided new fuel to critics of the Trump administration by making the prospect of possible collusion with Russia appear more concrete. WSJ's Gerald F. Seib explains the political impact of the emails. Photo: Getty

In 2014, Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, alleged that Prevezon laundered defrauded money from Mr. Browder’s fund into U.S. bank accounts and Manhattan real estate. Earlier this year, U.S. authorities and Prevezon reached a $5.9 million civil settlement. The company didn’t admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement.


Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee this week asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions whether the Trump Tower meeting was in any way connected to the settlement, which came two months after President Trump fired Mr. Bharara.

A spokeswoman for the Justice Department didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Ms. Veselnitskaya also said that at the time of the Trump Tower meeting she was representing Aras Agalarov, the Russian-Azerbaijani property developer who organized the 2013 Miss Universe pageant with President Trump in Moscow. However, in email correspondence with Donald Trump Jr., a British publicist presented her as a Russian government lawyer, a description she said was a mischaracterization.

Through the publicist, Mr. Agalarov’s pop-star son Emin helped arrange Ms. Veselnitskaya’s meeting with Donald Trump Jr., one of various people she said she petitioned to assist in her effort to have the law repealed and discredit Mr. Browder.


Rob Goldstone, the British publicist who worked for the Agalarovs, wrote in an email to the president’s son that the elder Mr. Agalarov had met with Russia’s top prosecutor who offered to provide the Trump campaign incriminating information on Mrs. Clinton. Ms. Veselnitskaya says she asked the elder Mr. Agalarov for help in arranging a meeting with the Trump campaign but denies it was about Mrs. Clinton. Both Ms. Veselnitskaya and Mr. Agalarov deny the meeting was arranged at Mr. Chaika’s request.

“Natalia has done some real estate-related legal work for Mr. Agalarov’s company over the years,” said Scott Balber, an attorney representing the Agalarov family. He denied the elder Mr. Agalarov met with Mr. Chaika, the prosecutor general,​ as described in the email. Mr. Agalarov, speaking on Russian radio Wednesday, called the content of the correspondence “some kind of fiction.”

Asked whether Mr. Chaika requested or participated in arranging Ms. Veselnitskaya’s meeting in New York or met with Mr. Agalarov, the Russian prosecutor general’s office said it “does not exchange information and does not conduct any meetings at the international level outside the framework regulated by international legal agreements and Russian procedural legislation.”

Ms. Veselnitskaya saw the younger Mr. Trump and his colleagues in Trump Tower on June 9 of last year.


“By the time I stepped into the meeting room to talk with Donald Trump Jr., all I knew was that I approached the elder Mr. Agalarov with a request to help,” Ms. Veselnitskaya said. “And I knew his son Emin communicated with Donald Trump Jr.”

She said her meeting wasn’t coordinated with official Russian government structures. She did, however, share information similar to what the Russian prosecutor general’s office gave to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R., Calif.) in a Moscow meeting two months earlier. Namely, she said she wanted to inform the Trump campaign of allegations that an American firm Mr. Browder worked with, Ziff Brothers Investments, had dodged taxes in Russia and later donated to Democrats.

A spokesman for Ziff Brothers Investments declined to comment for this article.

“Both during the meeting, while I was talking to Donald Trump Jr., and in the written materials I prepared, I was trying to tell the story that I myself had personally investigated,” Ms. Veselnitskaya said, referring to Mr. Browder.

Donald Trump Jr. wasn’t satisfied with the quality of the information she provided. In an interview Tuesday with Sean Hannity on Fox News, the younger Mr. Trump said: “It was this, ‘Hey, some DNC donors may have done something in Russia and they didn’t pay taxes.’ I was like, ‘What does this have to do with anything?’”

Ms. Veselnitskaya said: “My expectation before the meeting was he read my letter of information, he got interested, and he was going to help me. His expectations were totally different, as I can understand now.”

Mr. Browder denies the accusations that Ms. Veselnitskaya and the prosecutor general’s office have been leveling against him. He calls them “stale and disproven” and says they’re part of a well-resourced, Moscow-coordinated campaign to undermine him and the Magnitsky Act. The law he helped get passed angered Kremlin authorities in part because it allowed the U.S. to add Russian human-rights violators easily to a U.S. sanctions list, even individuals who had no part in the Magnitsky case.

“They were on a major full-court press on all fronts with Congress, with the press … with Trump Jr.,” Mr. Browder said, describing Ms. Veselnitskaya as a critical part of the anti-Magnitsky Act effort. “I think that she’s working hand in glove with Chaika, and it’s all part of a coordinated strategy back at headquarters.”

The Russian prosecutor general’s office didn’t respond to a request for further comment.

Mr. Putin has called the Magnitsky Act “imperialist behavior” by the U.S. and said Russian authorities believe Mr. Browder himself broke the law. Mr. Putin denied that Russian authorities were criminally negligent in the death of Mr. Magnitsky.

“There was a tragedy,” Mr. Putin said in 2013. “What, in American prisons, no one ever dies or something?”

Mr. Browder filed a complaint with the Justice Department in July 2016 that accused Ms. Veselnitskaya and others of violating U.S. lobbying laws by pushing for a repeal of the Magnitsky Act without registering their activities properly with the Justice Department. He says he hasn’t received a response.

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee is slated to hold a hearing later this month on violations of the lobbying law, known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Mr. Browder is scheduled to testify about the activities of Ms. Veselitskaya and others, the committee announced this week.

—Christopher S. Stewart contributed to this article.

Write to Brett Forrest at brett.forrest@wsj.com and Paul Sonne at paul.sonne@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

The first name of Rinat Akhmetshin was incorrectly spelled as Renat in an earlier version of this article. (July 14, 2017)