Lobbyist at Trump Tower meeting has deeper ties to Russian gov't, Kremlin-backed oligarchs than previously known.
WASHINGTON — Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian immigrant who met last summer with senior Trump campaign officials, has often struck colleagues as a classic Washington mercenary — loyal to his wife, his daughter and his bank account. He avoided work that would antagonize Moscow, they suggested, only because he profited from his reputation as a man with valuable connections there.
But interviews with his associates and documents reviewed by The New York Times indicate that Mr. Akhmetshin, who is under scrutiny by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, has much deeper ties to the Russian government and Kremlin-backed oligarchs than previously known.
He has an association with a former deputy head of a Russian spy service, the F.S.B., and a history of working for close allies of President Vladimir V. Putin. Twice, he has worked on legal battles for Russian tycoons whose opponents suffered sophisticated hacking attacks, arousing allegations of computer espionage. He helped federal prosecutors bring corruption charges against an American businessman in the former Soviet Union who turned out to be working for the C.I.A.
He also helped expose possible corruption in government contracting that complicated American efforts to keep troops at an air base in Kyrgyzstan — an American presence that the Russians fiercely opposed.
In short, Mr. Akhmetshin’s projects over two decades in Washington routinely advanced the Kremlin’s interests, especially after he became an American citizen in 2009. American counterintelligence agents took notice of his activities, but drew no conclusions about where his allegiances lay, according to a former law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing government secrecy rules.
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Mr. Akhmetshin’s meeting with Trump campaign officials is of keen interest to Mr. Mueller, who is investigating the Kremlin’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. Of all the visitors who attended the June 2016 session at the Trump Tower, he appears to have the most direct ties to Russian intelligence. The session was arranged by a Russian businessman close to Mr. Putin whose emissary promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
Mr. Akhmetshin, who did not respond to repeated requests to be interviewed for this article, has said he was a last-minute guest at an inconsequential get-together. Trump campaign officials have dismissed the meeting as part of an effort to amend an American law that placed sanctions on Russians for human rights abuses. The 2012 law, known as the Magnitsky Act, infuriated Mr. Putin, whose government retaliated by restricting adoptions of Russian children by Americans.
Ronald J. McNamara, a former staff member of the United States Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe who met with Mr. Akhmetshin about Central Asian issues, said Mr. Akhmetshin openly alluded to involvement with Russian intelligence. “My understanding was that he had come from the security agencies in the Soviet Union-Russian Federation,” Mr. McNamara said. “He did not make it a secret.”
Mr. Akhmetshin, 49, said he is no Russian spy. “I am the target of a well-coordinated and financed smear campaign,” he said last month in a text message to The Times.
Keenly intelligent, relentlessly charming and assiduously opaque about his work, Mr. Akhmetshin sometimes referred to his contacts by pseudonyms and collected his salary in stacks of hundred-dollar bills. A trained biochemist who speaks four languages, he described himself on one official document as a “househusband. ” He identified himself as the head of a Washington think tank for years after it was officially dissolved.
“I think he works for us. I don’t think he works for them,” said Lanny Wiles, a veteran Republican political operative who has worked with Mr. Akhmetshin for more than 15 years. “But I don’t know what he really does.”
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