Paul Behrends, Ex-Staffer to Dana Rohrabacher Who Was Connected to Veselnitskaya Dies Abruptly Following a Fall

Rohrabacher’s former congressional spokesman Ken Grubbs instructed The Each day Beast that Behrends died at the clinic. “I did truly get in touch with Dana and he confirmed it,” he claimed. “What I have read is that he slipped… strike his head, and died in surgical procedure.”

Grubbs said there was no explanation to believe anything at all suspicious experienced took place to Behrends or that there was any website link to his associations with Russia. “No, no, not at all,” he stated.

Behrends’ son Josef Behrends informed The Every day Beast that no 1 experienced seen his father fall at all-around 10 p.m. on Friday evening but that his more mature brother, also termed Paul, experienced rushed to the scene just four blocks from the family members house when police arrived to the property.

“He was strolling via the neighborhood and then he went to the hospital from there,” he said. “And then he handed away on Saturday. Early early morning.”

Behrends created headlines for the first time in July 2017, just after Veselnitskaya’s explosive June 2016 Trump Tower assembly with Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., and then Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was uncovered. The meeting subsequently shone a light-weight on Behrends’ have Russian entanglements.

Behrends experienced traveled to Moscow with Rohrabacher in April 2016, a several months prior to that conference. In Russia, they had been given a document from the Prosecutor General’s Business office marked “confidential,” which included particulars of the Kremlin’s battle against U.S. sanctions and a professional-Kremlin propaganda film.

When they returned to D.C., Rohrabacher cited those Kremlin’s conversing details as he delayed the passage of the Global Magnitsky Act.

Behrends then worked along with Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin—a Soviet military veteran who accompanied Veselnitskaya to the infamous Trump Tower meeting—to help supply some of the solutions produced in Moscow. Veselnitskaya was afterwards indicted by the U.S. for allegedly colluding with Russian officers to impede justice in an American courtroom scenario.

They labored jointly to arrange a subcommittee hearing that would call the director of the propaganda movie as properly as other witnesses who have been sympathetic to President Putin. The hearing, which was established to re-take a look at U.S. sanctions against Russia, was sooner or later quashed and replaced by a entire committee hearing on Russia. Rohrabacher still succeeded in approvingly comparing President Trump to Putin and distributing testimony that claimed Russia was not behind the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB agent who was poisoned with a radioactive isotope in London.

After the hearing, Behrends, Rohrabacher, Akhmetshin, and Veselnitskaya had meal at the Capitol Hill Club, a non-public members’ club frequented by Republicans.

It was the subsequent working day that Kevin McCarthy, who was House bulk chief at the time, was recorded at a GOP conference stating: “There’s two men and women I consider Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” When colleagues laughed, he was listened to on tape stating: “Swear to God.”

A working day after these events were recounted in content articles at The Day by day Beast and The Atlantic, a spokesman for the Household International Affairs Committee claimed: “Paul Behrends no lengthier functions at the committee.”

After being ousted from the subcommittee function, Behrends continued to do the job carefully with Rohrabacher, who was afterwards defeated in the 2018 midterms. Behrends, whose political career started as an intern for Rohrabacher in the 1990s, was most not long ago a lover at Rohrabacher’s lobbying firm R&B Approaches.