Jaysus, This Story Grows Like Audrey II

The alleged former Soviet intelligence officer who attended the now-infamous meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and other top campaign officials last June was previously accused in federal and state courts of orchestrating an international hacking conspiracy.

[...]

The U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. was told in July 2015 that Akhmetshin had arranged the hacking of a mining company’s private records—stealing internal documents and then disseminating them.

[...]

Akhmetshin had been hired by Veselnitskaya to help with pro-Russian lobbying efforts in Washington. He also met and lobbied Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Sub-Committee for Europe, in Berlin in April.

  Daily Beast

Is Dana Rohrabacher going to get caught in this shitstorm?  There could be a good legal reason those GOP asshats are still defending Trump.

Hacking could be part of a pro-Russian lobbying effort. Getting Trump into the White House could certainly be part of a pro-Russian lobbying effort.

I wonder why Junior left this guy's involvement in the meeting out of the various statements, email releases and defenses he's been proffering.

Akhmetshin denied the accusation, but admitted passing around a “hard drive” filled with data on IMR’s owners. He said the information was all open-source material that he’d gotten from the former prime minister of Kazakhstan, Akezhan Kazhegeldin. The private investigator, though, said he recovered a copy of the data on a thumb drive provided by an anonymous source, and found it consisted of gigabytes of private files stolen in the computer intrusion. A computer-forensics expert examined the thumb drive and found metadata indicating some of the files had last been opened by a user with the initials “RA.”

Hmmmmmm....RA....RA....?

Lawyers acting for Akhmetshin deny that he allegedly confessed to hacking. They did not deny that he had bragged about his investigatory techniques in a public place, but claimed that his methods did not involve computer intrusion.

Whatever.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 7/19: More information concerning Rohrabacher.

UPDATE 8/29:  And more