At Least Eight Attended Trump Junior’s Russia Meeting

CNN reports:

The June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort included at least eight people.

The revelation of additional participants comes as The Associated Press first reported Friday that a Russian-American lobbyist named Rinat Akhmetshin said he also attended the June 2016 meeting with Donald Trump Jr. CNN has reached out to Akhmetshin for comment.

So far acknowledged in attendance: Trump Jr., Kushner, Manafort, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, Akhmetshin and publicist Rob Goldstone, who helped set up the meeting. A source familiar with the circumstances told CNN there were at least two other people in the room as well, a translator and a representative of the Russian family who had asked Goldstone to set up the meeting. The source did not provide the names.

More from NBC News:

The Associated Press quoted Akhmetshin saying that Veselnitskaya brought with her to the meeting a plastic folder with printed-out documents that detailed what she believed was a flow of illicit funds to the Democratic National Committee.

The lobbyist said Veselnitskaya presented the contents of the documents to the Trump team, suggesting it could help the Trump campaign, he said. “This could be a good issue to expose how the D.N.C. is accepting bad money,” The AP quoted Akhmetshin recalling her saying.

Donald Trump Jr., she said, asked if she had any further supporting documents.  “He clearly asked me if I had any financial records to back and support the idea that some funds from illegal sources went to DNC, went to Hillary Clinton,” she told NBC News. “In reply to that, I told him that not only I don’t have any financial records of that time — there was no chance that I could somehow, anyhow, have such records.”