Irakly "Ike" Kaveladze was the eighth person at Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting last June with a Russian lawyer, Scott Balber, an attorney representing Kaveladze, confirmed to CNN on Tuesday.
Kaveladze attended the meeting as a representative of Aras and Emin Agalarov, the wealthy Russians who first requested the meeting be arranged. He works for the Agalarovs' real-estate company, Crocus Group, and Aras Agalarov asked Kaveladze to attend the meeting on his behalf, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
Balber told The Post that someone from special counsel Robert Mueller's office had called him over the weekend and requested the identity of the Agalarovs' representative at the meeting. The request is the first public sign that Mueller's team is looking into the meeting, according to The Post.
The meeting also included President Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner; his campaign manager at the time, Paul Manafort; the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya; the British music publicist Rob Goldstone; the Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin; and the Russian translator Anatoli Samachornov.
Kaveladze has lived in the US and been a citizen for many years, Balber told The Post. He is also a member of the US-Russia Business Council and the Georgian Association in the USA, according to his résumé.
Kaveladze was implicated in a Russian money-laundering scheme in 2000, during which investigators found that several Russians and Eastern Europeans had formed shell companies and used them to move money through American banks.
The New York Times reported at the time that Kaveladze had set up more than 2,000 corporations and their bank accounts in Delaware for Russian clients without knowing who owned the corporations.
When reached for comment by The Times, Kaveladze said he had done nothing wrong and called the investigation a "witch hunt."
Balber told The Post on Tuesday that Kaveladze initially believed he was attending the meeting between Trump Jr. and Veselnitskaya as a translator but realized after arriving that Veselnitskaya had brought Samachornov as her translator.
But Kaveladze has long served a far more important role than translator for the Agalarovs. He is the vice president of the development firm founded by Aras Agalarov, Crocus Group, and he met with Trump in 2013 when Aras Agalarov brought his Miss Universe Pageant to Moscow. (He can be seen standing behind Emin Agalarov as he speaks with Trump in a video taken in Moscow in 2013.)
Kaveladze mentioned Trump's visit to Crocus Group in an anecdote he shared in a Facebook post in April 2016.
"Moscow. Crocus. Driver Yura comes up to me. We started working together in 1990. He asked me when I was going to the States. I named a date. Now he'll ask me to bring a car part, I thought," Kaveladze wrote.
He continued:
"But Yuri did not ask for a car part and instead said the following: 'Me and the boys in the transportation department discussed it and decided that we all support Trump. We all know it. He's a normal guy. Some boys have photos with him.' (Donald Federovich [Trump] visited the Crocus in 2013 for the Miss Universe contest.) 'The other candidates are shady. Who the hell/fuck knows what you can expect from them. Pass that on to them.' I said that I will pass it on even though I knew that I most likely wouldn't."
The Trump Tower meeting has attracted sharp scrutiny in recent days, as Trump Jr.'s statements about its purpose have evolved.
Trump Jr. said in an initial statement that the meeting was a "short introductory" one and that he and Veselnitskaya "primarily discussed" an adoption program that Russian President Vladimir Putin cut off in retaliation for the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which blacklisted Russians suspected of human-rights abuses.
It is unclear, however, why a discussion of Russia's adoption policy would have required the presence of the vice president of Agalarov's company, who appears to be based in Los Angeles.
The email thread posted by Trump Jr.last Tuesday between himself and Goldstone may offer further clues as to the meeting's true purpose, which was to obtain damaging information about Hillary Clinton that was described as "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump."
Trump's outside legal counsel initially said he was unaware of the meeting at the time.
Soon after news of the meeting broke, however, reports said Trump had signed off on Trump Jr.'s first statement, which was subsequently amended several times to address reports of new details about the meeting.
Trump Jr. has so far confirmed all the facts of the meeting as they've been reported.
When Alan Futerfas, his lawyer, was asked why Trump Jr. didn't disclose those details when the initial report came out, he said it was because the reports concerned "events that occurred 13 months ago that were considered insignificant at the time and essentially forgotten."
Trump Jr. announced after initial reports about his meeting that he had hired Futerfas to represent him. But on Saturday, it emerged that Trump's reelection campaign made a $50,000 payment in June to Futerfas' office, weeks before the meeting became public knowledge.
New questions have also been raised about whether Trump was involved in the meeting after one of Trump's lawyers, Jay Sekulow, said on Sunday that the meeting was innocent. If it weren't, he said, the Secret Service would not have let the guests into Trump Tower.
"Well, I wonder why the Secret Service, if this was nefarious, why the Secret Service allowed these people in," Sekulow said on ABC's "This Week." "The president had Secret Service protection at that point, and that raised a question with me."
But the Secret Service released a statement the same day confirming that Trump Jr. was not under its protection when the meeting took place. The agency said it "would not have screened anyone he was meeting with at that time." Neither Kushner nor Manafort was under Secret Service protection at that point either.
The meeting has been said to have taken place on the floor beneath the one Trump occupied during the campaign. Trump had just clinched the Republican nomination at the time, and he was also under Secret Service protection.
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