Who Is Natalia Veselnitskaya? Russian Lawyer Suggests Trump Jr Wanted Damaging Information About Clinton

Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer whom Donald Trump Jr. met at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, gave an exclusive interview with NBC that aired Tuesday in which she denied having damaging information about Hillary Clinton. However, she said Trump Jr. was eager to get information that would hurt his father's political opponent.

"I never had any damaging or sensitive information about Hillary Clinton. It was never my intention to have that," Veselnitskaya said in the interview that aired Tuesday. "It is quite possible that maybe they were longing for such an information. They wanted it so badly that they could only hear the thought that they wanted."

If Veselnitskaya's comments are confirmed, it would be the first report that a high-ranking member of the Trump campaign attempted to work in coordination with foreign agents to receive damaging information about their political opponents.

The Trump campaign is currently under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the FBI, and Senate and Congressional committees for potential collusion with the Russian government during the 2016 presidential election.

READ: Donald Trump Jr. Russia Meeting Violated Campaign Finance Laws, Government Watchdog Alleges

The lawyer denied reports that she has connections with the Kremlin and said that she met with Trump Jr. to talk about repealing the Magnitsky Act, a policy barring American families from adopting Russian children. Veselnitskaya has been an advocate for the act's repeal.

The Magnitsky Act was put in place in 2012 in retaliation after Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in captivity when he uncovered a $230 million tax fraud scheme in 2008, which has been one of the bigger scandals under Putin's government.

The New York Times wrote Monday that Trump Jr. was informed via email prior to the June 9 meeting and that it was going to include damaging information to the Clinton campaign.

Veselnitskaya also revealed in the NBC interview that Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and then-Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort were in the room for the interview.

"I could recognize the young gentleman who was only present in the meeting for probably the first seven to 10 minutes, and then he stood up and left the room," she said. "It was Mr. Jared Kushner. And he never came back, by the way."

"And the other individual who was in the same meeting, but all the time he was looking at his phone. He was reading something. He never took any active part in the conversation. That was Mr. Manafort," she continued.

READ: Why Did Donald Trump Jr. Meet With A Russian Lawyer?

In his statement to the New York Times, Trump Jr. said he met with the lawyer, but she didn't have "meaningful information."

"It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information," Trump Jr. said in a statement, and that the adoption policy "was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting."

The Trump son also tweeted a shifting defense of his actions, first sarcastically tweeting that he was the "first person" to hunt down oppositional research, and then took shots at the media and Democrats about hyping up the importance of the meeting.

"Obviously I'm the first person on a campaign to ever take a meeting to hear info about an opponent... went nowhere but had to listen," he tweeted Monday.

"Media & Dems are extremely invested in the Russia story. If this nonsense meeting is all they have after a yr, I understand the desperation!" he tweeted Tuesday morning.

As for Veselnitskaya, she said that she was distressed for being shot into the spotlight of an international scandal, and had to change holiday plans.

"Imagine yourself in my shoes. One morning you wake up and all of a sudden you are the focus of all the high ranking, upstream media of the world," she said. "To summarize, those were not the happiest days of my life, I have to say. I have to break up my holiday. I have to take a trip back to Moscow, because I just wanted to be able to answer the questions myself."