Mueller Is Looking Into a U.S. Foundation Backed by Russian Money
Source: Bloomberg News
By Stephanie Baker and Irina Reznik
December 21, 2017, 4:00 AM EST
Sara Peterson flew to Moscow in 2012 to take home two Russian orphans just as the Kremlin, angry about sanctions on Russian officials, banned U.S. adoptions. For the next four years she knocked on doors in Washington to no avail. So when she read about a foundation “to help restart American adoption of Russian children,” she set up a meeting.
It was August 2016 when Peterson, of Maryland, traveled to Washington and waited at a train station sandwich shop for a Russian-American man named Rinat Akhmetshin. He wanted to know which members of Congress he should approach, she said. At that meeting and later ones, he said “things would change” after the upcoming elections.
Peterson didn’t know it but Akhmetshin, a former Soviet intelligence officer, had recently met with senior officials of the Donald Trump campaign in New York: the candidate’s son, son-in-law and campaign manager. It didn’t take long for her to realize that the foundation wasn’t all it seemed. As she put it, “I don’t think adoptions were their primary agenda.”
Now Special Counsel Robert Mueller is looking into the foundation. Robert Arakelian, a lobbyist and employee of the foundation, recently testified to the special counsel’s office about the organization and its funding, two people familiar with the probe said. Arakelian didn’t respond to requests for comment, and a Mueller spokesman declined to comment.
Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-21/russia-funded-adoption-group-is-said-to-draw-mueller-scrutiny
= new reply since forum marked as read
Does that mean the fix was in, and they knew how to manipulate vote totals in key states? 