Ex-Hill Staffer Linked to Veselnitskaya Dies After Fall close His domestic
The longtime aide to “Putin’s Congressman” Dana Rohrabacher died suddenly from a head damage over the weekend.
Paul Behrends become found with the aid of emergency responders near his domestic on Friday nighttime with extreme head trauma. He turned into taken to a local health facility the place surgeons fought to store him, however he handed away on Saturday, in accordance with a spokesman for Rohrabacher.
Behrends became a controversial determine on Capitol Hill who misplaced his job as team of workers director for the house international Affairs subcommittee after The each day Beast reported on his hyperlinks to Trump Tower legal professional Natalia Veselnitskaya’s operation within the U.S.
GOP Lawmaker bought route From Moscow, Took It lower back to D.C.
Rohrabacher’s former congressional spokesman Ken Grubbs advised The each day Beast that Behrends died at the sanatorium. “I did in reality name Dana and he verified it,” he said. “What I’ve heard is that he slipped… hit his head, and died in surgical procedure.”
Grubbs spoke of there changed into no intent to think anything suspicious had came about to Behrends or that there was any link to his associations with Russia. “No, no, now not in any respect,” he observed.
Behrends’ son Josef Behrends instructed The daily Beast that no one had considered his father fall at around 10 p.m. on Friday nighttime however that his older brother, also referred to as Paul, had rushed to the scene just four blocks from the family unit home when police came to the house.
“He was running throughout the neighborhood and then he went to the sanatorium from there,” he stated. “after which he passed away on Saturday. Early morning.”
Behrends made headlines for the primary time in July 2017, after Veselnitskaya’s explosive June 2016 Trump Tower assembly with Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., after which Trump crusade chairman Paul Manafort was uncovered. The meeting as a result shone a light on Behrends’ personal Russian entanglements.
Behrends had traveled to Moscow with Rohrabacher in April 2016, a number of months earlier than that assembly. In Russia, they got a doc from the Prosecutor popular’s workplace marked “exclusive,” which included particulars of the Kremlin’s fight in opposition t U.S. sanctions and a professional-Kremlin propaganda movie.
once they again to D.C., Rohrabacher referred to these Kremlin’s speaking features as he delayed the passage of the world Magnitsky Act.
Behrends then labored alongside Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin—a Soviet military veteran who accompanied Veselnitskaya to the infamous Trump Tower meeting—to aid carry one of the advice made in Moscow. Veselnitskaya changed into later indicted through the U.S. for allegedly colluding with Russian officials to impede justice in an American court case.
They labored collectively to prepare a subcommittee hearing that might name the director of the propaganda movie in addition to other witnesses who were sympathetic to President Putin. The listening to, which turned into set to re-determine U.S. sanctions against Russia, was at last quashed and changed by way of a full committee hearing on Russia. Rohrabacher still succeeded in approvingly comparing President Trump to Putin and submitting testimony that claimed Russia become not behind the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB agent who was poisoned with a radioactive isotope in London.
After the listening to, Behrends, Rohrabacher, Akhmetshin, and Veselnitskaya had dinner at the Capitol Hill club, a personal members’ membership frequented through Republicans.
It become the next day that Kevin McCarthy, who became apartment majority chief on the time, changed into recorded at a GOP meeting saying: “There’s two people I suppose Putin will pay: Rohrabacher and Trump.” When colleagues laughed, he was heard on tape saying: “Swear to God.”
A day after these hobbies had been recounted in articles on the day by day Beast and The Atlantic, a spokesman for the house foreign Affairs Committee stated: “Paul Behrends not works on the committee.”
After being ousted from the subcommittee function, Behrends persisted to work carefully with Rohrabacher, who was later defeated within the 2018 midterms. Behrends, whose political career started as an intern for Rohrabacher in the Nineties, changed into most these days a accomplice at Rohrabacher’s lobbying company R&B options.
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