The U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Thursday evening issued a statement contradicting President Trump’s claim that Loretta Lynch, President Obama’s attorney general, allowed the Russian lawyer who met with three Trump associates, including his son, into the United States. “In Sept. 2015, DHS paroled Natalia Veselnitskaya into the U.S. in concurrence with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York, allowing her to participate in a client’s legal proceedings,” the DHS statement to BuzzFeed News read. “Ms. Veselnitskaya was subsequently paroled into the U.S. several times between 2015 and 2016, ending in February 2016. In June 2016, she was issued a B1/B2 nonimmigrant visa (a standard tourist visa) by the U.S. Department of State.”

These facts contradict a statement America's loose-lips President Trump said in Paris on Thursday that “Somebody said that her visa or her passport to come into the country was approved by Attorney General Lynch. Now, maybe that's wrong. I just heard that a little while ago, but a little surprised to hear that. So, she was here because of Lynch,” echoing a conspiracy theory that the lawyer was actually part of a Democratic Party plot.

Former Attorney General Lynch's spokesperson immediately issued a statement insisting that she had no authority over whether or not the Russian lawyer was allowed to enter the country.

In a potentially related matter, House Judiciary Committee Democrats are questioning why Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions settled a Dept of Justice Case cheaply, with the very client that Natalia Veselnitskaya was representing.

Under the Obama Administration her client Prevezon was scheduled to go on trial for allegedly laundering money from a $230 million tax fraud. Sessions settled the case with a $6 million penalty, avoiding a trial completely.

House Judiciary ranking member John Conyers and other Dems wrote a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions asking whether lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya had a hand in settlement talks between Russian real estate firm Prevezon Holdings Ltd. and the U.S. Department of Justice.

Related: The Russian Attorney at the Center of the Trump Jr. Scandal The Atlantic

“She’s like tank,” says her friend, the Russian-born film director Andrei Nekrasov. “Maybe she overstepped some bounds when she was there [in New York last June]. But she felt she could do something on behalf of Russia. That’s the kind of person she is. She could get misty-eyed talking about this stuff. She’s a patriot.”

And it was evidently this sense of patriotism that took her from obscure origins as a regional prosecutor in Russia to Trump Tower last summer—and from there to the center of a scandal engulfing the American president.

Prominent Democrat lawyer Jamie Gorelick, the lawyer representing White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and also Ivanka and Jared as a couple in certain legal matters, is winding up her work with Jared Kushner on matters related to the Russia investigation. Gorelick said she is "completing the work" Kushner originally hired her to do before President Donald Trump was inaugurated: handling Kushner's ethics compliance, security clearance and other federal disclosures, explains the National Law Journal.

Abbe Lowell, whom Kushner added to his white-collar team on June 26, is now Kushner’s primary defender in the multiple investigations into the Trump team’s interactions with Russian officials.

“As you may recall, and as we have stated, once Bob Mueller and three of our partners left the firm to form the Special Counsel’s Office [at the Department of Justice], we advised Mr. Kushner to get independent legal advice whether to continue with us as counsel,” Gorelick said in an email Friday. “As [a] result of this process, Abbe is now responsible for the Russia-related inquiries.”

Lowell is also a prominent DC Democrat, as head of the white-collar group at Norton Rose Fulbright. Gorelick runs the regulatory department at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr.

The article notes the criticism -- we're previously written about it also -- that Gorelick, a former Clinton administration deputy attorney general -- has received from Hillary Clinton supporters. Many thought she would become (President) Hillary Clinton's Attorney General.

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