Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was granted special entry to the United States on multiple occasions in 2015 and 2016 at the request of the Justice Department, confirmed the Department of Homeland Security Friday.
Veselnitskaya was eventually granted a nonimmigrant work visa around the time she met Donald Trump Jr. in New York last summer, the report said.
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Homeland Security told The Hill that Veselnitskaya was allowed to enter the United States on multiple occasions between September 2015 and February 2016 under a “Significant Public Benefit Parole” document requested by the Justice Department so she could participate in a court case for a client. The request was done “in concurrence” with the U.S. attorney’s office in New York City, which was enforcing a civil asset forfeiture case against Prevezon Holdings, a company owned by Russian businessman Denis Katsyv, whom Veselnitskaya represented as a private attorney in their home country.
Homeland’s statement confirmed court testimony and records cited by The Hill on Wednesday that Veselnitskaya was initially turned down for a visa to enter the United States and required the special immigration parole permission as late as January 2016. The court records did not indicate how she entered the country after that time.
“In October the government bypassed the normal visa process and gave a type of extraordinary permission to enter the country called immigration parole,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Monteleoni was quoted in the court transcript as saying. “That’s a discretionary act that the statute allows the attorney general to do in extraordinary circumstances. In this case, we did that so that Mr. Katsyv could testify. And we made the further accommodation of allowing his Russian lawyer into the country to assist.”
A federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan told the court in a hearing in January 2016 that the “extraordinary circumstances” parole request needed to be approved by Attorney General Loretta Lynch.