NBC’s Tom Winter has the details:
Prosecutors allege that Veselnitskaya “concealed from the Court that she, as a member of the defense team in the Prevezon action, had participated in drafting … supposed exculpatory investigative findings in secret cooperation with a senior Russian prosecutor.”
— NBC Politics (@NBCPolitics) January 8, 2019
The charges against Veselnitskaya are important for two separate reasons. The first is that the allegations fully put to bed the attempts by Veselnitskaya and supporters of the President that she is not working as an agent of the Russian government; specifically for senior lawyers in the office of Russia’s General Prosecutor. The second is that it raises the question of how the Southern District of New York’s prosecutors and investigators came by this information. Was it through their own investigative work or was this handed off to them by the Special Counsel from information developed through the joint counterintelligence task force that he inherited in 2016 and has been overseeing ever since. We don’t have answers to this question right now. And, we may never actually know. Regardless of how the Southern District of New York made the determination necessary to charge Veselnitskaya, the fact that US Federal prosecutors were able to do so should have a lot of people connected to Veselnitskaya very, very concerned. Especially as the original settlement in the case occurred shortly after former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara was fired by the President and because of the connections between people in the President’s orbit and the original Prevezon case.
Open thread.