In a a nine-month inquiry that subpoenaed bank records, the investigators found that an unknown number of Russians and other East Europeans moved more than $1.4 billion through accounts at Citibank of New York and the Commercial Bank of San Francisco. The accounts had been opened by Irakly Kaveladze, who immigrated to the United States from Russia in 1991, according to Citibank and Mr. Kaveladze. He set up more than 2,000 corporations in Delaware for Russian brokers and then opened the bank accounts for them, without knowing who owned the corporations, according to the report by the General Accounting Office, which has not been made public.

Those are the results of a inquiry from 2000. Kaveladze has since spent more than a decade and-a-half honing his game, with a dozen of those years spent as vice president of Crocus Group, working for Trump’s partner, Aras Agalarov.

This was a meeting in which representatives of international real estate firms, all of which have been involved with channeling foreign investments into U.S. real estate for money laundering, got together to discuss how they could swing the U.S. presidency to their advantage.

That meeting has already paid off for Veselnitskaya’s bosses.

Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday asking why the Department of Justice settled a major money-laundering case involving a real-estate company owned by the son of a powerful Russian government official whose lawyer met with Donald Trump Jr. last year. … Prevezon described the settlement as proof that the company had done nothing wrong. It said it considered the offer from prosecutors "too good to refuse."

The conspiracy organizational meeting at Trump Tower wasn’t the first time most of these people had met, but it was the most definitive statement of what they were about.

The Trump team was given both the immediate payoff ...

“… to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and could be very useful to your father.”

… and the long-term benefit—destruction of the Magnitsky Act, assuring that the money from Russian oligarchs could continue to flow into New York real estate, just as it had been doing all along for Donald Trump.

In other words, after his business crashed, Trump was floated and made to appear to operate a successful business enterprise through the infusion of hundreds in millions of cash from dark Russian sources. He was their man.

The people who were in that room were not just Donald Trump’s associates. They were his owners, there to inform him of what they expected if the money was going to continue coming in.