The man behind Donald Trump Jr.’s Kremlin connection is a British-born Jewish publicist who once worked as a reporter for a Jewish newspaper.
Rob Goldstone confirmed July 10 to The Washington Post that he had an exchange of emails with the son of then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016 to organize a meeting with Kremlin lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in New York.
“The lawyer had apparently stated she had some information regarding illegal campaign contributions to the [Democratic National Committee] which she believed Mr. Trump Jr. might find important,” Goldstone said in a statement to the Post.
The emails, first reported by The New York Times, have fueled speculation that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Goldstone was born in Manchester, England, and attended a Jewish day school there, according to the Manchester-based Jewish Telegraph newspaper. His father, Isaac Goldstone, helped found the Hillock Hebrew Congregation, an Orthodox synagogue, according to the paper. The younger Goldstone went on to work briefly as a sports reporter for the Jewish Gazette and later as a music journalist before launching a career as a music publicist.
One of his clients is Emin Agalarov, an Azerbaijani pop star and the son of real estate magnate Aras Agalarov, who has close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The elder Trump once appeared in a music video for the Azerbaijani singer.
Goldstone worked with Donald Trump on the Miss Universe pageant that Trump’s organization held in Russia, and appears to have become a link in backchannel communications between the Kremlin and the Republican presidential campaign.
“Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting,” Goldstone wrote in an email to Trump Jr. on July 3, 2016. “The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate [Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton] and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”
Though the meeting eventually took place, Goldstone told The Washington Post that little came of it.
That hasn’t stopped anti-Semitic trolls on the web from targeting the publicist for his heritage. Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website that strongly favors Trump, posted about Goldstone’s background hours after The Washington Post report, calling the story “fake news.”
Emin Agalarov, who goes by the stage name Emin, performed at The Wiltern theater in Los Angeles in May.
