MOSCOW — The Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. and other senior advisers to the Republican presidential candidate in a highly scrutinized meeting at Trump Tower last year had previously represented Russia’s top spy agency, the Federal Security Service, in a land dispute in Moscow, according to court documents.

Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Moscow lawyer who has powerful government contacts, represented a military unit founded by the spy agency in court cases in 2011 and 2012, court rulings seen by The Washington Post show.

In those cases, Veselnitskaya represented Military Unit 55002 in a property dispute over a five-story office building in northwest Moscow where a number of electronics companies were based. It was not immediately clear what the spy agency, known as the FSB, used the building for.

The news was first reported on Friday by Reuters, which said it had seen documents showing the relationship began in at least 2005 and lasted until 2013.

According to legal records, Military Unit 55002 was founded by the FSB, and its address is 12 Bolshaya Lubyanka, next door to the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the Soviet Union’s secret police and intelligence agency for decades. The military unit works on procurement for the FSB, which directs Russia’s counterintelligence and border security agencies.

There is no information that Veselnitskaya is herself an intelligence agent or an employee of the Russian government. She has said that she is in regular contact with Yuri Chaika, who has been the Russian prosecutor general since 2006. A British music agent who set up the meeting with Trump Jr. had indicated it would involve a Russian government lawyer who had damaging information about candidate Hillary Clinton provided by a senior Russian prosecutor.

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Chaika’s office has denied supplying such information.

Veselnitskaya could not immediately be reached for comment on Friday.

The court rulings are the first legal evidence to become public of a relationship between Veselnitskaya and the Russian intelligence establishment.

The lawsuit was filed by the Federal Property Management Agency, which had given the FSB-linked military unit the right to use the property in 2007. The military unit represented by Veselnitskaya was a third party in the lawsuit. The court ruled in favor of the Federal Property Agency in 2013.


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