RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT

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theatlantic.com
Russiagate Was Not a Hoax
Franklin Foer
3-4 minutes
The thousand-page fifth volume doesn’t definitively settle the question, in part because the SSCI was unable to procure a full record of events. The White House engaged in gamesmanship, invoking executive privilege to deny witnesses and block access to a paper trail. A slew of important witnesses invoked the Fifth Amendment. Others, such as Paul Manafort, lied relentlessly to investigators. The election of 2016 is one of the most closely studied events of recent memory, yet even the best-informed students of Russian interference don’t have a comprehensive understanding of it.

When Mueller’s prosecutors appeared in court, in February 2019, they implied that the most troubling evidence they had uncovered implicated Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman. This wasn’t a surprising admission. Throughout their filings, Mueller’s team referred to Manafort’s Kyiv-based aide-de-camp, Konstantin Kilimnik, as an active Russian agent. Manafort had clearly spoken with Kilimnik during the campaign, and had even passed confidential campaign information to him, with the understanding that the documents would ultimately arrive in the hands of oligarchs close to the Kremlin.

One of the great disappointments of the Mueller Report is that it fails to provide narrative closure after building so much anticipation for the Kilimnik story line. Mueller did not fully explain why Manafort’s relationship with his Ukraine-based adviser so bothered his prosecutors. Why had Manafort passed along the documents? And what did the oligarchs want with them?

Franklin Foer: Paul Manafort, American hustler

The committee fills in the gaps somewhat. It reports that Manafort and Kilimnik talked almost daily during the campaign. They communicated through encrypted technologies set to automatically erase their correspondence; they spoke using code words and shared access to an email account. It’s worth pausing on these facts: The chairman of the Trump campaign was in daily contact with a Russian agent, constantly sharing confidential information with him. That alone makes for one of the worst scandals in American political history.

The significant revelation of the document is that Kilimnik was likely a participant in the Kremlin scheme to hack and leak Clinton campaign emails. Furthermore, Kilimnik kept in close contact with the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a former client of Manafort’s. The report also indicates that Deripaska was connected to his government’s hacking efforts. This fact is especially suggestive: Deripaska had accused Manafort of stealing money from him, and Manafort hoped to repair his relationship with the oligarch. Was Manafort passing information to him, through Kilimnik, for the sake of currying favor with an old patron?

As maddeningly elliptical as this section of the report may be—and much of it is redacted—it still makes one wonder why Mueller would cut a deal with an established prevaricator like Manafort before pursuing his investigation of Kilimnik to more concrete conclusions.
 
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nydailynews.com
Caught red-handed: A detailed report confirms Russia’s collusion and Trump’s lies
Caught red-handed: A detailed report confirms Russia’s collusion and Trump’s lies
By Daily News Editorial Board
New York Daily News |
Aug 19, 2020 at 4:10 AM




JBNRYC63DNDE7BFGQKWWAKJNY4.JPG

Da! Comrades in arms. (NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)

A major reason Donald Trump doesn’t deserve re-election: The suspected original sin of this presidency — cheating to win with Russian collusion — has mostly proven true.

So says near-1,000-page fifth and final bipartisan report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence detailing a wide web of contacts between Russian intelligence operatives and the 2016 Trump campaign.

Key findings: Vladimir Putin personally directed the weaponizing of hacked Democratic campaign emails. The Trump campaign received assistance from various Russian pass-throughs, most significantly Roger Stone via his Julian Assange WikiLeaks back-channel.

Former campaign chair Paul Manafort is deemed a “grave counterintelligence threat” due to repeated contacts with Konstantin Kilimnik, exposed as a Russian intelligence officer. The report also suggests Kilimnik early on tried blaming any campaign interference on Ukraine, a revelation that underscores the case for impeachment and removal made earlier this year.

Stone knew as early as August 2016 that WikiLeaks hacked Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails — yet waited until the October “Access Hollywood” tape was about to go public before giving the go-ahead to release them.

The report from a Republican-chaired committee all but declares that Trump lied in written testimony to Bob Mueller about not remembering conversations with Stone about WikiLeaks. Last month, Trump pardoned Stone for his conviction for lying to Congress.

Yes, Trump’s campaign cronies solicited and accepted foreign interference in 2016. He got away with it then. He mustn’t again.
 
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nbcnews.com
Manafort associate is Russian spy, may have helped coordinate e-mail hack-and-leak, report says
The report says Manafort associate Konstantin Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer who may have helped coordinate Russia's hack-and-leak operation.
Tom Winter
6-7 minutes
The Senate Intelligence Committee said in a report released Tuesday that a key associate of Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort is a Russian intelligence officer who may have helped coordinate the Russian hacking and leaking of Democratic emails, and that Manafort himself may have had knowledge of the effort before the emails were leaked.

According to the bipartisan Senate report, Manafort associate and ex-employee Konstantin Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer who may have had links to the hack-and-leak operation of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency, which hacked the emails of prominent Democrats and provided them to WikiLeaks.

The report includes three bulleted items that were redacted before release. The report says the redacted information "suggests that a channel for coordination on the GRU hack-and-leak operation may have existed through Kilimnik, [but] the Committee had limited insight into Kilimnik's communications with Manafort and [REDACTED], all of whom used sophisticated communications security practices."


According to the report, "On numerous occasions over the course of his time on the Trump Campaign, Manafort sought to secretly share internal Campaign information with Kilimnik," and Kilimnik was briefed by Manafort on the Trump campaign's strategy for beating Hillary Clinton.

"The Committee was unable to reliably determine why Manafort shared sensitive internal polling data or Campaign strategy with Kilimnik," the report says. The report notes that both Manafort and his then-business partner and Trump campaign official Rick Gates said the sharing of the information was an attempt to resolve past business disputes and gain new work with their former Russian and Ukranian clients.

According to the report, "Gates ultimately claimed that he did not trust Kilimnik, that he did not know why Manafort was sharing internal polling data with him, and that Kilimnik could have given the data to anyone."

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Ultimately, the committee says it concluded that a significant amount of internal polling data generated by Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio made its way to Kilimink, but because of the communication methods Kilimnik employed the committee doesn't know what he then did with the data.


The committee report says Manafort had links to people who posed a "grave counterintelligence threat," but doesn't conclude whether Manafort took part in the GRU's efforts to hack the campaign. "Manafort's involvement with the GRU hack-and-leak operation is largely unknown," the report says.

The committee notes, however, that "two pieces of information ... raise the possibility of Manafort's potential connection to the hack-and-leak operations."

The report also says that the committee observed "numerous Russian-government actors from late 2016 until at least January 2020 consistently spreading overlapping false narratives which sought to discredit investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections and spread false information about the events of 2016."

Specifically, "Manafort and Kilimnik both sought to promote the narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 U.S. election and that the 'ledger' naming payments to Manafort was fake."

The report says it was Kilimnik who "almost certainly helped arrange some of the first public messaging that Ukraine had interfered in the U.S. election." President Trump and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani would later repeat that messaging.


The report also says Kilimnik "repeatedly tweeted information related to the Bidens and Ukraine."

Who hired Manafort?
The committee says Manafort's introduction to then-candidate Trump came in February 2016 primarily through financier Tom Barrack, a Trump friend, with additional lobbying by Trump's daughter Ivanka.

According to the report, Manafort used Barrack as the person to push his cause because Trump had a "love-hate" relationship with another long-time friend of both Manafort and Trump, Roger Stone.

Barrack's pitch, the report says, was forwarded to Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner. The report says, "Ivanka Trump ultimately did share the email with her father along with a handwritten note at the bottom which read: 'Daddy, Tom says we should get Paul.'"

Ultimately, it was Manafort's willingness to work for free that sealed the deal, the committee says. "Barrack recalled that Manafort's offering to work for free 'were the magic words,'" the report says.

Manafort joined the Trump campaign in March 2016 and left in August 2016 after media reports about his work in Ukraine forced his resignation. He was ultimately charged and pleaded guilty in an investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller's office, and later a federal judge determined he violating the cooperation agreement that was part of his guilty plea by lying to investigators.

According to the report in December 2016, Manafort and Kilimnik tried to conceal their continuing communications by writing draft emails that each other could see, without actually sending the e-mail, in a practice the FBI describes as "foldering."

The primary topic, the committee says, was to work on a plan for former Manafort client and former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to come back to Ukraine and take control of the embattled eastern Ukraine as a proxy of the Russian government.

An attorney for Manafort did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tom Winter is a New York-based correspondent covering crime, courts, terrorism and financial fraud on the East Coast for the NBC News Investigative Unit.

ken-dilanian-circle-byline-template_1c5ca23c4e8c423213b27f66d3dc8b38.focal-100x100.jpg
Ken Dilanian

Ken Dilanian is a correspondent covering intelligence and national security for the NBC News Investigative Unit.
 
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