The original NBC News reports suggested that Akhmetshin's intelligence past somehow has rolled forward until now, putting Russian spies in the same room with Donald Trump, Jr. Nothing I picked up in numerous intense reporting experiences with Akhmetshin over the years in the former U.S.S.R. and the U.S. suggested any current such relationships.
Last year, Akhmetshin took on clients attempting to tarnish Bill Browder, the former high-rolling American investor in Moscow and defender of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who only turned on the Russian president when he kicked him out of the country. Browder has since become one of Putin's fiercest critics, driven by the murder of his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, in a Moscow prison.
Four days after the Trump Tower meeting, Akhmetshin was responsible for arranging the high-profile showing of a revisionist anti-Magnitsky film at Washington, DC's Newseum.