New participant at Trump Tower meeting: a Russian-American lobbyist

A controversial meeting at Trump Tower in 2016 billed as a handover of dirt on Hillary Clinton included a veteran of the Soviet military who has worked as a political "gun-for-hire" in Washington on behalf of Russian clients.

The meeting was arranged by Donald Trump Jr., the President's son. E-mails released on Tuesday show that the younger Mr. Trump had welcomed the chance to receive information described as "ultra-sensitive" and part of a Russian government effort to help his father's presidential candidacy.

The presence of Rinat Akhmetshin, the political operative, sheds new light on the meeting, which was not public knowledge until earlier this month. The encounter represents the first evidence that Mr. Trump's team was open to receiving Russian help and is sure to be scrutinized by the special counsel investigating possible collusion between the campaign and the Kremlin.

FREEZE: I met the Russian-American lobbyist who attended the Trump Jr. meeting in an unlikely place

Mr. Akhmetshin was one of the people at the meeting. They include the younger Mr. Trump; Paul Manafort, then chairman of Donald Trump's presidential campaign; Mr. Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner; and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. Another unnamed person, possibly acting as a translator, also arrived with Ms. Veselnitskaya, according to several media reports.

Mr. Akhmetshin provided an account of the meeting to the Associated Press. He arrived dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, he said, because Ms. Veselnitskaya had asked him to come at the last minute. During the encounter, Ms. Veselnitskaya handed over a folder of print-outs that she said documented illicit donations to the Democratic National Committee. The younger Mr. Trump asked whether the evidence backed up her claims and lost interest when Ms. Veselnitskaya said more research was needed.

The meeting was "not substantive," Mr. Akhmetshin said.

Mr. Akhmetshin is an American citizen who has lived in the United States since the 1990s. He served in the Russian military from 1986 to 1988 in a unit linked to counter-intelligence, but denied he had trained or worked as a spy, according to the Associated Press. In 2015, during a conversation with a Globe reporter at the Halifax International Security Forum, Mr. Akhmetshin described serving with Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

As an operative and lobbyist, Mr. Akhmetshin has worked with a variety of clients, charging $450 (U.S.) an hour for his services, according to court documents. His clients have ranged from opponents of the Kazakh government to a Russian firm embroiled in a business dispute to a wealthy Russian businessman living in New York who sought to publicly discredit a rival.

More recently, Mr. Akhmetshin – together with Ms. Veselnitskaya – worked to undermine the Magnitsky Act. Passed in 2012, the act is a bipartisan piece of U.S. legislation enacted in response to the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who was imprisoned after revealing a massive tax fraud.

The Magnitsky Act blocks certain Russian officials suspected of human rights abuses from entering the United States. The Kremlin has engaged in a sustained campaign to undermine the act. In response to the legislation, Moscow banned U.S. adoptions of Russian children and established its own blacklist of U.S. officials.

Four days after the 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, Mr. Akhmetshin was back in Washington for an event he arranged: the screening of an anti-Magnitsky film, complete with snacks and a panel discussion, according to a report by Radio Free Europe. Screenings of the film were cancelled in Europe after Mr. Magnitsky's friends and relatives denounced it as a posthumous smear job.

In 2015, Mr. Akhmetshin was accused in a lawsuit of stealing confidential information from the computer systems of a Dutch mining company. Mr. Akhmetshin was acting as an adviser to a Russian fertilizer firm enmeshed in a commercial dispute with the Dutch company. The complaint described Mr. Akhmetshin as having "special expertise in running negative public relations campaigns." Several months later, the lawsuit was dropped and the allegations retracted.

Mr. Akhmetshin has carried out activities under the rubric of a think tank he founded called the International Eurasian Institute for Economic and Political Research. Last year, he registered in a congressional lobbying database as representing a client called the "Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation."

A bare-bones website for the foundation shares only that its goal is to overturn the ban on U.S. adoptions of Russian children – the measure instituted by Moscow in response to the Magnitsky Act.