So Rinat Akhmetshin (who we now know was at the meeting) has some
interesting work experience on his resume:
In court papers filed with the New York Supreme Court in November 2015, Akhmetshin was described as “a former Soviet military counterintelligence officer” by lawyers for International Mineral Resources (IMR), a Russian mining company that alleged it had been hacked.
Those documents accuse Akhmetshin of hacking into two computer systems and stealing sensitive and confidential materials as part of an alleged black-ops smear campaign against IMR. The allegations were later withdrawn.
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. The corporate-espionage case was brought by IMR, which alleged that Akhmetshin was hired by a law firm representing a fertilizer producer company called Eurochem.
A New York law firm paid Akhmetshin $140,000, including expenses, to organize a public-relations campaign targeting IMR. Shortly after he began that work, IMR suffered a sophisticated and systematic breach of its computers, and gigabytes of data allegedly stolen in the breach wound up the hands of journalists and human-rights groups critical of the mining company. IMR accused Akhmetshin of paying Russian hackers to carry out the attack.
IMR went so far as to hire a private investigator to follow Akhmetshin on a trip to London. That private eye, Akis Phanartzis, wrote in a sworn declaration to the court that he eavesdropped on Akhmetshin in a London coffee shop and heard Akhmetshin boast that “he organized the hacking of IMR’s computer systems." “Mr. Akhmetshin [noted] that he was hired because there were certain things that the law firm could not do,” Phanartzis said.
Of course, there's nothing there that the Trump campaign would find useful.