“The Russian lawyer who met Donald Trump Jr. after his father won the Republican nomination for the 2016 U.S. presidential election counted Russia’s FSB security service among her clients for years,” Reuters reports. Read story here. If you don’t understand what this means, it’s roughly akin to being the CIA’s civilian lawyer. Conceivably, the work might include acting as a go-between in dealings with foreign VIPs. She certainly has the connections for such work.
So what does it mean to be the FSB’s lawyer? Start with the fact that Russia is a gangster society, its government is in the business is stealing, and Veselnitskaya’s law practice involves facilitating official thievery. As The Atlantic explains,
“With the specter of state violence and the courts at their backs, officers of the FSB, as well as other security services agencies, have expropriated thousands of small and medium businesses, seized land, run protection rackets, embezzled state funds, and employed every trick under the sun to enrich themselves. … And if Americans see the FSB, accurately, as a den of spies, Russians have come to see the FSB, also accurately, as a den of thieves. … In other words, the Reuters story is not about espionage but about corruption.” Read about it here.