Lawyer shopped story about Hillary’s ties to hedgie who got kicked out of Russia

The Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. had at roughly the same time been peddling information to others that she thought would be damaging to Hillary Clinton, a new report said Wednesday.

Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Kremlin-linked attorney, was shopping a story about hedge fund manager William Browder and Ziff Brothers Investments, which had invested with Browder, Bloomberg News reported.

Russian authorities were going after the investors in a fraud investigation, and Browder and at least one member of the Ziff family had given money to the Clinton Global Initiative.

Veselnitskaya, the news service reported, thought that amounted to a scandal that would hurt Clinton politically.

But the amounts were so miniscule and were so well known that the supposed dirt she wanted to dish likely would have had little effect on her candidacy, besieged as it was in the summer of 2016 by the release of hacked DNC emails and controversy over her private email server.

Browder’s firm, Hermitage Capital, was listed as a contributor of $10,000 to $25,000 to the Clinton Global Initiative because he paid to attend a conference sponsored by the group about a decade ago.

Ziff Brothers’ Daniel Ziff is recorded as contributing $50,000 to $100,000 to CGI, a former arm of the Clinton Foundation.

Browder, who had been in Russia pushing for greater transparency in its financial sector, was kicked out of the country in 2005, and then tried in absentia and convicted of tax fraud in 2013. No charges were ever filed against the Ziffs.

It’s unclear if the information about the investors came up when Veselnitskaya met with Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort during a June 2016 sitdown at Trump Tower, a meeting now under investigation by Congress and special counsel Robert Mueller.

Trump Jr. on Tuesday released an email chain of messages he exchanged with British-born music promoter Rob Goldstone, who wanted to arrange the meeting with the Russian lawyer, who has worked for Moscow’s regional government and Kremlin officials.

Offered dirt on the former first lady, Trump Jr. repled “I love it,” and never alerted authorities about the effort to interfere in the election by a foreign government.

Browder will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee at a hearing next week on Veselnitskaya’s links to the Russian government, The Daily Beast reported.

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA spook who headed the agency’s European directorate of operations, said she had to be working on behalf of the Kremlin, a charge she has denied.

“Russian intelligence’s practice is to co-opt such a person by arming them with secret intelligence information and tasking them to pass it to Trump’s people and get their reaction,” he wrote on Just Security, a website devoted to national security issues.

“The key point is that essentially no Russian citizen or lawyer has compromising material on Hillary Clinton which has not been supplied to them from Russian intelligence,” he wrote.

“The simple assertion that she had such information is tantamount to declaring that Veselnitskaya was acting as agent of Russian government in this particular role.”