A day after it was reported that a prominent Russian-American lobbyist and former Soviet military officer, Rinat Akhmetshin, was at the meeting between a Russian lawyer and President Donald Trump’s eldest son, it has emerged that there were at least eight people at the meeting.
Other than Donald Trump Jr and Mr Akhmetshin, we know of four others who were at the June 2016 meeting: President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, former campaign chief paul Manafort, Russian Natalia Veselnitskaya and publicist Rob Goldstone, who helped set up the meeting.
There were two others whose identities remain unknown. According to CNN the two others were a translator and a representative of the Russian family who had asked Mr Goldstone to set up the meeting.
Mr Akhmetshin confirmed his participation in the meeting on Friday, providing new details of a June 2016 sit-down.
His attendance at the meeting and his lobbying background created a new wrinkle to a story that has hounded the White House for days and added to questions about potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign.
The day-after-day drip-drip-drip of revelations over the past week about Mr Trump Jr.’s contact with the Russian lawyer underscores the White House’s inability to shake off the Russia story and close the book on a narrative that casts a shadow over Mr Trump’s presidency.
“I think the ‘drip-drip-drip’ is a perfect analogy, for that’s exactly what people said about Watergate and President Nixon’s Oval Office tapes,” said Luke Nichter, a historian who has written several books on the former President. “They were released piecemeal and every release was damaging.”
Even if the ongoing Russia questions don’t end in legal consequences for Mr Trump, they can still inflict serious political damage if allowed to drag out, experts say.
