A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee provides a treasure trove of new details about Donald Trump’s relationship with Moscow, saying that a Russian national who worked closely with Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 was a career intelligence officer .
The bilingual report runs to nearly 1,000 pages and goes beyond last year’s investigation into Russian election interference by special prosecutor Robert Mueller. It contains a wonderful web of contacts between Trump, his aides to the top elections and Russian government officials, in the months leading up to the 2016 elections.
The Senate panel identifies Konstantin Kilimnik as a Russian intelligence officer deployed at the GRU, the military intelligence agency behind the 2018 poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal. It cites evidence – some has been returned – and has linked Kilimnik to the GRU’s hacking and dumping of Democratic Party emails.
Kilimnik worked for more than a decade in Ukraine with Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager. In 2016, Manafort met with Kilimnik, discussed how Trump could beat Hillary Clinton, and gave the Russian spy internal polling data. The commission said it could not “reliably determine” why Manafort provided this information, or what exactly Kilimnik did about it.
It describes Manafort’s willingness to pass on confidential material to suspected Moscow agents as a “serious threat to countermeasures”. The report states Kilimnik is part of “a cadre of individuals who apparently operate outside the Russian government, but who nevertheless carry out Kremlin-directed influence operations”. It adds that key oligarchs including Oleg Deripaska fund these operations, along with the Kremlin.
The investigation found that Kilimnik tweets under the pseudonym Petro Baranenko (@PBaranenko). The account regularly propagates Moscow’s line on international issues, such as the conflict in Ukraine and the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17.
The fact that a Republican-controlled Senate panel established a direct link between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence makes it harder for Trump and his supporters to claim that the investigation into possible collusion was a ‘witch hunt’ or ‘hoax’ as the president has applied several times, in the remaining three months before the election.
The Republican-controlled Senate panel said it was hindered in its search for the truth by the fact that Kilimnik and Manafort kept their communications secret. They used burner phones, encrypted chat services, and frequently modified email accounts. They also send messages via a shared email concept.
The commission rejected the case by ex-MI6 officer Christopher Steele, who claimed the Kremlin had been cultivating Donald Trump for at least five years, but stopped short of offering advice on whether the allegations were true. That dossier contained an accusation that Russia spied on Trump during a visit to Moscow in November 2013 and filmed him in his private suite at the Ritz-Carlton hotel with two prostitutes. Trump vehemently denies the claim.
However, the First Chamber report provides the most compelling account of what went on in the hotel. It claims that a suspected Russian intelligence officer is permanently stationed in the building and presides over a ‘network’ of security cameras, some of which are hidden in guest rooms. The officer’s agency is being restored, but it is likely the FSB, led by spy agency Vladimir Putin, is in charge of counter-intelligence.
The report states: “The commission found that the Ritz Carlton in Moscow poses a high environmental risk to counterintelligence. The commission estimates that the hotel is likely to have at least one permanent Russian intelligence officer on staff, overseeing the guest room’s government, and the regular presence of a large number of prostitutes, likely with at least the silent consent of Russian authorities.
It adds: “According to two former employees of the Ritz Carlton in Moscow, there was at least one in 2013 [redacted] officer permanently stationed in the hotel. This non-uniformed officer was believed to be a [redacted] and had access to the hotel’s property management system, guest portfolios and notations, as well as the network of “hundreds” of security cameras in the hotel.
“The [redacted] was thought to be able to control the feeds of cameras from his office. ”
The commission, which spent three years providing evidence for its report, also examined previous trips by Trump to Russia. It says that during a visit in 1996, Trump attended a party for a group of American investors in the Baltschug Kempinski hotel. The party was led by David Geovanis, a Moscow-based businessman who reports that he has links to Russian security services.
The report notes: “In some parts of the American foreign business community in Moscow, it has been common for businessmen to visit nightclubs or parties where prostitutes are present. It is likely that Russian security and intelligence services are capitalizing on these opportunities to gather information.
“In the 1990s and 2000s, David Geovanis developed a reputation in Moscow, in part as a host for visiting businessmen.”
It goes on to say that Trump “perhaps began a brief relationship with a Russian woman” he met at the Geovanis party. Her name has become black. One source of the information is Theodore Liebman, an architect who lived in Moscow and New York in the 1990s, and who traveled to Russia with Trump after the event. Geovanis has spoken to journalists and is reluctant to visit the US, the commission notes.
It describes the Russian government’s general operation in support of Trump in 2016 as “aggressive and multifaceted”. The language echoes that of Mueller, who called the Moscow invasion ‘sweeping and systematic’. But in many places, the commission is more damned, suggesting a high level of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian intermediaries.
The report says that Trump’s close friend Roger Stone worked closely with WikiLeaks in the summer of 2016. It suggests that Stone was informed of Trump in real time, and that the Trump campaign had shaped his messages prior to WikiLeaks releases of Democratic emails stolen in Moscow by GRU state hackers.
It states: “Trump and senior campaign officials sought prior information about the planned release of WikiLeaks through Roger Stone. In her direction, Stone took action to gain knowledge within the campaign and shared his appointed knowledge directly with Trump and senior campaign officials on multiple occasions. ”
Trump believed Stone received “inside information” from WikiLeaks, the commission said, adding that it could not determine if this was indeed the case. It also said it was “impossible” that Trump’s foreign policy leader George Papadopoulos – who learned of the hack in April 2016 – did not pass this information on to the Trump campaign.
Scott Horton, a lecturer at Columbia Law School, said on Tuesday that the House report “confirms almost everything” about Trump’s ties to Moscow. He said the claims of Democrats and others confirmed that the campaign was indeed an alliance with the Russians – which Trump vehemently denied.
“The commission offers a much deeper look at the intelligence gathered by U.S. authorities than the much more sketchy Mueller reports. It will support the support that Mueller, far from being accountable to Trump, simply expected to pass the baton to Congress to conduct deeper investigations. ”
Manafort was convicted in 2018 and 2019 of multiple counts of money laundering and bank fraud and tax evasion, as well as obstruction of justice. The latest in connection with his lobbying work in Ukraine. In May, he was released from prison, where he served a 90-month work sentence, due to the risk of Covid-19.
In February, a court sentenced Stone to 40 months in prison for lending to investigators and witnesses of tampering – only for Trump to report his sentence in July, days before he would report to prison.
A new poll published by the Pew Research Center on Tuesday found that 75% of Americans now expect Russian or other foreign interference in the November election, and a declining percentage (47% compared to 55% two years ago) is there assured that the administration will make “Serious efforts” to protect the elections from hacking and other external threats.
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