WASHINGTON – Russian intelligence services are pursuing myriad avenues to influence the Trump campaign in 2016, according to the First Chamber Committee, but none were more important than the relationship between campaign chairman Paul Manafort and a man who had been a friend and collaborator for years: a Russian intelligence officer named Konstantin V. Kilimnik.
Their link was “the single most direct link between senior Trump campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services,” according to the fifth and final volume of the commission’s report on its two-year three-year investigation released Tuesday.
While the commission was voiced in its efforts to completely plunge the relationship between the two men, investigators there found enough to explain that Mr Manafort “posed a serious threat to opposition” by sharing information about the presidency with Mr Kilimnik and the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs he served.
The report portrayed Mr. Manafort as deeply compromised by years of business dealings with those oligarchs. Collectively, they had paid him tens of millions of dollars, lent him millions more and may even owe him millions.
These complex financial entanglements apparently shone in Mr. Manafort’s decision to Mr. Kilimnik in providing campaign information, including confidential polling data and details of Mr Campus’ campus strategy. Trump. The report builds on other evidence suggesting that Mr Manafort hopes Mr Kilimnik would open lucrative business deals with the oligarchs in return than that they view the value of the information as their own form of payment.
The commission had little explanation for the connection between the two men, citing Mr Manafort’s lies to federal authorities, along with the care the two men took to protect their communications, as street blocks to learn more.
“What did the Russians do with all this information, how did they use it, did they use it?” Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the commission’s top Democrat, asked Tuesday in an interview. “Those are serious questions against intelligence that we may never get the full answer to.”
The report said Mr Kilimnik was Mr Manafort’s link to Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch close to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin who had “acted at least in 2004 as a proxy for Russia. state and intelligence services “. , when Mr. Manafort apparently met him.
Mr Deripaska, who has worked to set up pro-Kremlin governments around the world, first hired Mr Manafort as a policy adviser, the report said. A group of pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine later became the financiers of Mr Manafort’s operations to help Viktor F. Yanukovych, a Russian – oriented politician, become the president of Ukraine.
Mr Manafort acknowledged the Kremlin’s interests, the report said. “This model could greatly benefit the Putin government if it works at the right levels with the appropriate commitment to success,” he wrote in a memo to Mr. Deripaska.
The report cited Mr Manafort’s efforts for the oligarch “in effect affecting the work of the Russian government and its interests.”
For more than a decade, the work made Mr. Manafort fabulously rich. At lunch after Mr Yanukovych was elected president in 2010, the report said, the new Ukrainian leader said “his fingers” and gave Mr Manafort a pot of caviar from $ 30,000 to $ 40,000.
Despite questions about who was behind Mr Kilimnik – both financially and politically – Mr Manafort became increasingly dependent on him. But by 2014, Ukraine work had dried up.
Mr. Yanukovych was forced into a popular uprising as president and fled to Russia. Mr. Manafort claimed that the Ukrainian oligarchs had ripped him out of millions for his work for Mr. Yanukovych. And Mr. Deripaska tried to collect from Mr. Manafort for a failed private equity deal in Eastern Europe.
No bruts, the Mr. Manafort volunteered to work for the Trump campaign, which hired him in March 2016. In a memo, Mr. Manafort offered to letter Mr. Deripaska about “this development with Trump.”
Mr. Manafort also quickly passed on the news of his new job to Mr. Kilimnik, who traveled specifically to the United States to meet him in May and again in August 2016. According to the report, Mr. Manafort was forthcoming: He informed Mr. Kilimnik on Mr Trump’s path to victory and his strategy of winning in battlefield states.
After stepping down as campaign chairman, Mr Manafort also instructed his deputy, Rick Gates, to periodically share confidential information about the Trump campaign with Mr Kilimnik, including polls showing which voters disliked him the most. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic opponent of Mr. Trump. Mr Gates “understood that Kilimnik would share the information with Deripaska,” the report said.
The transfer of internal campaign data to a well-known Russian agent is “almost as clear a coordination as cooperation between two entities as could be established,” said Senator Angus King, a Maine independent of the Senate Intelligence Committee that agrees with Democrats.
The commission said it had found evidence – returned for national security reasons – that Mr Kilimnik may have been involved in the Russian government’s secret attempt to hack into the computer networks of Democratic organizations and funnel damaged emails to the raw website WikiLeaks, which released them shortly before the election.
The report also cited, but did not disclose, saying that potentially Mr Manafort was linked to that operation, which was by far Russia’s most important attempt to disrupt the US election.
Mr. Manafort was forced to resign from the Trump campaign in August 2016 amid a growing scandal over his work in Ukraine. He later told the FBI that he had informed Mr. Trump about his work in Ukraine, but “did not go into detail because Trump was not interested.”
Even after he was fired, Mr Manafort remained in contact with campaign officials and with Mr Kilimnik, who believed Mr Manafort could still influence the new administration’s foreign policy, the report said.
Together, the men also promoted the false, Kremlin-backed story that Ukraine, not Russia, included in the 2016 elections. The report outlined the similarities in its efforts proposed coordination.
Yet what they may have said to each other remains a mystery. The pair used encryption applications such as Viber, Signal and WhatsApp or exchanged emails via “folders”, a technique that allows people to view the messages without actually sending them. They would warn each other to check the “tea bag” or the “updated itinerary” on a new message.
After being convicted of orchestrating a financial fraud scheme, Mr Manafort agreed to work with federal prosecutors working for the special council, Robert S. Mueller III, who investigated Russian interference in ‘ the elections.
The prosecutors were particularly apprehensive about asking him about Mr Kilimnik, who was also charged with accusations of obstruction of justice but could not be extradited. Mr. Kilimnik has denied bans to Russian intelligence services.
Prosecutors eventually ruled that Mr. Manafort read against them and withdrew a plea agreement with him. He is currently serving his seven-and-a-half-year prison sentence at home due to the coronavirus pandemic.
After being charged, Mr Manafort bought a pay-as-you-go phone, the report said. One primary purpose was to talk to Mr. Kilimnik.
