SWEET: Trump Jr. meeting with Russian lawyer: The Chicago connection

WASHINGTON — William Browder, who grew up in Hyde Park — and whose Moscow-born father was a famous University of Chicago mathematician — is part of the back story to that increasingly controversial June 2016 meeting Donald Trump Jr. held with a Russian lawyer, others with Russian interests, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort.

Browder’s grandfather, Earl Browder, was a leader of the U.S. Communist Party, running twice for president, though he eventually was kicked out of the party.

“I came from this left-wing family of Communists and academics and my big rebellion,” Browder told me when we talked on Tuesday, “was to become a capitalist.”

THE STORY SO FAR

The news on Tuesday is that it turns out there were eight people at the Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016, as more details emerge, though Trump Jr. said he disclosed everything when he released his emails earlier this month.

From the Trump presidential campaign, there were Trump Jr., Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Manafort, then the Trump campaign chairman.

The added starter on Tuesday was, according to CNN, Ike Kaveladze, who represented a rich Russian family that had done business with President Donald Trump.

But the main spotlight has been on Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who has been lobbying in the U.S. for Congress to repeal the Magnitsky Act. She wanted to talk to Trump Jr. about Magnitsky. The catnip for Trump Jr.: supposedly she had dirt on Hillary Clinton dug up by the Russian government.

In one of the emails Trump Jr. received, setting up the meeting, she was described as a “Russian government attorney.” She said in an NBC interview she wasn’t working for the government — though getting Congress to back away from the Magnitsky law is a priority of Russian President Vladmir Putin.

The June 2016 meeting is now part of the ongoing investigations of Russian interference into the presidential elections and whether there was collusion with the Trump campaign.

WHAT IS THE MAGNITSKY ACT?

The law is named after Sergei Magnitsky. He was a Russian tax lawyer who helped dig up a massive financial fraud. Russian authorities ended up arresting him. He died in prison. Members of Congress said he was tortured.

The Magnitsky Act targets those deemed “responsible for, or benefitted financially from, the detention, abuse, or death” of Magnitsky, banning them from the U.S.

Browder at one time was one of the largest foreign investors in Russia, making a fortune buying up undervalued Russian companies.

Around 2005, Browder was expelled from Russia, where he had been living for years.

Once aligned with the Putin oligarchs, Browder is now a fierce Putin critic.

Magnitsky worked for William Browder.

BROWDER’S CHICAGO CONNECTIONS

Without Browder’s tenacious campaigning, there may likely be no Magnitsky law.

Browder moved to Chicago from Princeton, New Jersey, with his family when he was a year old. He grew up at 5505 S. Kimbark Ave.

Browder told me he attended nursery school at the University of Chicago, and moved up to the Lab School for elementary and high school.

He picked up his undergraduate degree from the U. of C. in economics in 1985 after attending the University of Colorado at Boulder for two years. He moved to Eastern Europe after earning a business degree from Stanford.

Browder’s own Russian-related ties dovetails, as it happens, into the tangled unfolding probe of Russia’s role in the election.

His father, Felix Browder, the son of a Russian Jewish mother, Raissa and Earl, born in Kansas, was at the U. of C. Mathematics Department from 1963 to 1986. He served two stints as department chairman before leaving for Rutgers.

Felix Browder was known for his nonlinear functional analysis work. He died last Dec. 10. Eva, his wife, who worked at the U. of C computer science department, died in 2015.

Earl Browder’s Communist ties dogged the career of his son, Felix.

William Browder told me that the U.S. push — though unsuccessful — to deport his Russian grandmother contributed to his decision to become a British citizen.

As for that June meeting at Trump Tower, Browder said, “The only thing being discussed was repealing the Magnitsky Act and dishing dirt on me and others.”