Spoiler alert: the meetings weren’t with Trump. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:
Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a close associate of Vladimir Putin, has gone on record with The Hill‘s John Solomon – admitting to colluding with Americans leading up to the 2016 US election, except it might not be what you’re thinking.
Deripaska, rumored to be Donald Trump’s “back channel” to Putin via the Russian’s former association with Paul Manafort, says he “colluded” with the US Government between 2009 and 2016.
In 2009, when Robert Mueller was running the FBI, the agency asked Deripaska to spend $25 million of his own money to bankroll an FBI-supervised operation to rescue a retired FBI agent – Robert Levinson, who was kidnapped in 2007 while working on a 2007 CIA contract in Iran. This in and of itself is more than a bit strange.