Update on 08sep20: attaching Dr Heather Cox Richardson's essay of the same date appended BEFORE this 'Lawfare' excert due to its explaining the back-story of Paul Manafort's behaviour, which -- in my opinion only (not explicitly stated or necessarily implied by Dr Richardson) -- is tantamount to treason.
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https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-7-2020
I have been holding off for a calm news day to examine exactly what the fifth volume of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan report on Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election said, and why it is important. The report came out on August 18 and, in the storm of other news, has gotten less attention than it should have.
While Special Counsel Robert Mueller marshaled a team to look into potential crimes committed by members of the Trump campaign and by Russian actors in the 2016 election, the Senate Intelligence Committee also conducted an investigation. The Senate committee was not limited, as Mueller was, by a directive from the acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. It looked more widely at the contacts between members of the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives. Because Republicans control the Senate, the Senate Intelligence Committee is chaired by a Republican, first by Richard Burr (R-NC) and then, after Burr stepped down under allegations of insider trading, by Marco Rubio (R-FL).
The first volume of the committee’s report established that Russians successfully breached U.S. election systems in 2016. According to the Intelligence Community, “Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple U.S. state or local electoral boards,” but the Department of Homeland Security “assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.” Interestingly, the section on Russian attacks on voting machines is almost entirely redacted.
The second volume explained that Russian operatives “sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton's chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.” It concluded that “in 2016, Russian operatives… used social media to conduct an information warfare campaign designed to spread disinformation and societal division in the United States. Masquerading as Americans, these operatives used targeted advertisements, intentionally falsified news articles, self-generated content, and social media platform tools to interact with and attempt to deceive tens of millions of social media users in the United States. This campaign sought to polarize Americans on the basis of societal, ideological, and racial differences, provoked real world events, and was part of a foreign government's covert support of Russia's favored candidate in the U.S. presidential election.”
The third volume examined how the U.S. government responded to the Russian attacks. The fourth reviewed and defended the methods and findings of the Intelligence Community.
And, on August 18, the committee released the fifth volume. The committee reviewed about a million documents and interviewed more than 200 witnesses. Its 966 pages establish extensive connections between Russian operatives and Trump campaign officials in 2016.
They established that Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort worked closely during the campaign with his longtime business associate in Ukraine, Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the report identifies as a “Russian intelligence officer.”
This means that, according to Republicans—as well as the Democrats on the committee—in 2016, Trump’s campaign manager was actively working with a Russian intelligence officer.
Paul Manafort’s backstory matters.
Manafort cut his political teeth in Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign, along with his friend Roger Stone, whom he had met in the Young Republicans organization, a social and political network of young professionals. Manafort worked for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George H. W. Bush in 1988. In 1980, he and Roger Stone were two of the three principals who formed a lobbying firm in Washington, D.C., that brought under one roof lobbying and political consulting as well as public relations. Bundling these functions was groundbreaking: they would get their clients elected, and then help clients lobby them. One of their first clients was a friend of Stone’s: Donald J. Trump.
Quickly, Manafort began to look to foreign countries for his clients. He took advantage of the anti-communist focus of foreign policy after Reagan, cleaning up shady clients to look good enough to U.S. lawmakers that they could get U.S. dollars to shore up their political interests. Touting his connections to the Reagan and Bush administrations, Manafort racked up clients. He backed so many dictatorial governments—Nigeria, Kenya, Zaire, Equatorial Guinea, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia, among others—that a 1992 report from the Center for Public Integrity called his firm “The Torturers’ Lobby.”
In 1995, Manafort started his own firm and, a decade later, he began working for a young Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, who was eager to prove useful to Vladimir Putin. At the time, Putin was trying to consolidate power in Russia, where oligarchs were rising to replace the region’s communist leaders and were monopolizing formerly publicly held industries. In 2004, American journalist Paul Klebnikov, the chief editor of Forbes in Russia, was murdered as he tried to call attention to what the oligarchs were doing.
In 1991, Ukraine had declared its independence from the USSR, and threats of Ukrainian freedom soon worried Deripaska, who had business interests there. In 2004, it appeared at first that a Russian-backed politician, Viktor Yanukovych, was elected president of Ukraine. But Yanukovych was rumored to have ties to organized crime, and the election was so full of fraud—including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe—the government voided the election and called for a do-over. Yanukovych needed a makeover fast, and for that he called on a political consultant with a reputation for making unsavory characters palatable to the media: Deripaska’s friend Paul Manafort.
For ten years, from 2004 to 2014, Manafort worked for Yanukovych and his party, trying to make what the U.S. State Department called a party of “mobsters and oligarchs” look legitimate. He made a fortune thanks to his new friends, especially Deripaska. In 2010, Yanukovych finally won the presidency on a platform of rejecting NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization through which Europe joined together to oppose first the USSR, and then the rising threat of Russia. Immediately, Yanukovych turned Ukraine toward Russia. In 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in what is known as the Revolution of Dignity. Yanukovych fled to Russia.
Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia itself and also on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in United States territories. These sanctions crippled Russia and froze the assets of key Russian oligarchs.
Now without his main source of income, Manafort owed about $17 million to Deripaska. By 2016, his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone was advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, and Manafort was happy to step in to help remake it. He did not take a salary, but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking him “How do we use to get whole? Has OVD [Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska] operation seen?”
Manafort began as a campaign advisor in March 2016, and became the chairman in late June, after the June 9 meeting between Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and Manafort with a number of people, including a Russian lawyer associated with Putin’s intelligence services, in Trump Tower. (Remember that Trump tried to explain away that meeting as being about “adoptions,” because the Russian response to sanctions was to shut down American adoptions of Russian children.)
The fifth volume of the Senate Intelligence Report establishes that Kilimnik is a “Russian intelligence officer,” and that he acted as a liaison between Manafort and Deripaska while Manafort ran Trump’s campaign. On several occasions, Manafort passed the campaign’s sensitive internal polling data to Kilimnik, although because their communications were encrypted, the committee could not determine what became of the information. (Such polling might well dovetail with the information in volume 2.)
The report says Kilimnik may have been directly involved in hacking Democratic National Committee emails and handing the stolen files to WikiLeaks. The committee also found “significant evidence” that WikiLeaks was “knowingly collaborating with Russian government officials.” The report also establishes that Trump repeatedly discussed the WikiLeaks document dumps with operative Roger Stone, then lied about those discussions with investigators.
The report says Manafort lied consistently about his interactions with Kilimnik, and has chosen to go to jail rather than change his story. It also notes that it is Kilimnik who launched the story that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the U.S. election.
According to the report: "Taken as a whole, Manafort's high level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik and associates of Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave counterintelligence threat."
The report also established that the White House “significantly hampered” the investigation.
The Manafort story is only one of the issues covered in Volume 5.
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Notes:
Rosenstein limited Mueller: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/us/politics/trump-russia-justice-department.html
Overview: https://www.lawfareblog.com/collusion-reading-diary-what-did-senate-intelligence-committee-find
Yanukovych: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/what-did-ex-trump-aide-paul-manafort-really-do-ukraine-n775431
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/politics/paul-manafort-roger-stone/
Manafort: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/10/30/paul-manafort-what-we-know-he-did-and-why-he-might-have-been-ensnared-by-the-investigation/
https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/29/politics/russian-former-spy-paul-manafort-trump-campaign/index.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/11/roger-stones-long-history-in-trump-world/581293/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/paul-manafort-american-hustler/550925/
Black ledger: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/21/why-is-rudy-giuliani-trying-drag-my-countrys-president-into-trumps-reelection-campaign/
Russia: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/senate-intelligence-trump-russia-report/2020/08/18/62a7573e-e093-11ea-b69b-64f7b0477ed4_story.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/08/19/yes-there-was-collusion/
https://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/81820
volume 5: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/senate-russia-report-proves-trump-was-wrong-mueller-was-right-ncna1237743
https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/512613-five-takeaways-from-final-senate-intel-russia-report
Senate Report:
Vol 1: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume1.pdf
Vol 2: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume2.pdf
Vol 3; https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume3.pdf
Vol 4: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume4.pdf
Vol 5: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/report_volume5.pdf
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LAWFARE
Tuesday, September 1, 2020 https://www.lawfareblog.com/collusion-reading-diary-what-did-senate-intelligence-committee-find
Intelligence Studies Essay; Lawfare Research Paper Series
A Collusion Reading Diary: What Did the Senate Intelligence Committee Find?
By Todd Carney, Samantha Fry, Quinta Jurecic, Jacob Schulz, Tia Sewell, Margaret Taylor, and Benjamin Witts
The fifth and final volume of the Select Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan report on Russian interference in the 2016 election is an incredibly long and detailed document. At a whopping 966 pages, volume 5 alone is more than twice the length of the Mueller report, and it covers a great deal more ground.
It is important for another reason: Along with the shorter volumes 1-4, the Senate’s report is the only credible account of the events of 2016 to which Republican elected officials have signed their names. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in a press release praised the report on the investigation he set in motion way back in December 2016, saying, “I commend my colleagues on both sides for keeping their work out of the partisan spotlight and focused on the facts.” McConnell, in the same press release, echoes the statements of Acting Committee Chairman Marco Rubio, stating that “[t]heir report reaffirms Special Counsel Mueller’s finding that President Trump did not collude with Russia.”
It is a bit of a mug’s game at this point to fight over whether what either Mueller or the Intelligence Committee found constitutes collusion and, if so, in what sense. The question turns almost entirely on what one means by the term “collusion”—a word without any precise meaning in the context of campaign engagement with foreign actors interfering with an election.
So rather than engaging over whether the Intelligence Committee found collusion, we decided to read the document with a focus on identifying precisely what the committee found about the engagement over a long period of time between Trump and his campaign and Russian government or intelligence actors and their cut-outs.
Whether one describes this activity as collusion or not, there’s a lot of it: The report describes hundreds of actions by Trump, his campaign, and his associates in the run-up to the 2016 election that involve some degree of participation by Trump or his associates in Russian activity. In this post—which we are generating serially as we read through the document—we attempt to summarize, precisely and comprehensively, what the eight Republicans on the committee, along with their seven Democratic colleagues, report that the president, members of his campaign and his associates actually did.
One overarching note: There is a fair amount of overlap between this document and the Mueller report. But the Senate report covers a fair bit more ground for a few reasons. For one thing, it was not limited to information it could prove beyond a reasonable doubt in court, as Mueller was.
Just as important, the committee included counterintelligence questions in its investigative remit—whereas Mueller limited himself to a review of criminal activity. So the document reads less like a prosecution memo and more like an investigative report addressing risk assessment questions. This volume is an attempt to describe comprehensively the counterintelligence threats and vulnerabilities associated with Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. So it’s inherently a little more free-wheeling and speculative.
We summarize each section of the report in the order in which it appears. We’ll be updating and adding summaries of new sections as we read.
A. Paul Manafort
B. Hack and Leak
C. The Agalarovs and the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower Meeting
D. Trump Tower Moscow
E. George Papadopoulos
F. Carter Page
G. Trump's Foreign Policy Speech at the Mayflower Hotel
H. Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin, pp. 568-630
I. Allegations, and Potential Misinformation, About Compromising Information, pp. 636-662
J. Influence for Hire, pp. 663-694
A. Paul Manafort (pp. 27-169)
The first section of the report concerns Paul Manafort, Trump’s one-time campaign chairman who resigned from the campaign in August 2016 following news reports of his previous work for a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party. Manafort was indicted in October 2017 in the course of the Mueller investigation and was eventually convicted of, and pleaded guilty to, charges including bank and tax fraud.
Manafort’s business associate Rick Gates, who served on the Trump transition team, also pleaded guilty to fraud charges. Much of the Senate report’s information on Manafort echoes the Mueller report’s conclusions, but the Intelligence Committee is far more aggressive in its description of the counterintelligence threats posed by Manafort’s involvement with the campaign.
“Manafort had direct access to Trump and his Campaign’s senior officials, strategies, and information,” the committee notes, as did Gates—and “Manafort, often with the assistance of Gates, engaged with individuals inside Russia and Ukraine on matters pertaining both to his personal business prospects and the 2016 U.S. election.”
The report provides a brief overview of Manafort’s “connections to Russia and Ukraine,” which date to “approximately 2004.” In brief, Manafort began work then for the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine, which eventually led to his role in engineering the 2010 election to the Ukrainian presidency of pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych.
While the Mueller report described Deripaska as “closely aligned with Vladimir Putin,” the committee’s report is much more direct: “The Russian government,” the committee writes, “coordinates with and directs Deripaska” in conducting influence operations, with which Manafort also assisted. At another point, the committee states that “Manafort’s influence work for Deripaska was, in effect, influence work for the Russian government and its interests.”
In other words, as a baseline matter, the Trump campaign was—for a time—run by a man who himself had carried out influence operations on behalf of Russian interests.
It gets worse, however.
Manafort’s work in Ukraine and with Deripaska also led him to have a long-term business relationship with a man named Konstantin Kilimnik, the report states, who “became an integral part” of Manafort’s business. Kilimnik is no stranger to those who have followed L’Affaire Russe. The Mueller report had reported that “[t]he FBI assesses that Kilimnik has ties to Russian intelligence.” But here again, the Senate report goes much further, bluntly stating that “Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer.”
What’s more, Manafort was likely aware of this fact, the committee states: In a footnote, the committee states that “Manafort … at some point harbored suspicions that Kilimnik had ties to intelligence services. Manafort was undeniably aware—often from first-hand experience—of suspicious aspects of Kilimnik’s behavior and network. Nevertheless, Manafort later asserted to [Mueller’s team] that Kilimnik was not a spy.”
As the Senate writes, Manafort’s work for the Trump campaign took place in the wake of a business dispute between Manafort and Deripaska involving money owed to Deripaska by Manafort, as well as a separate dispute involving money Manafort felt he was owed by other clients, pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs. The report states that Manafort “was actively seeking a position on the Trump campaign” in January 2016 on the grounds that it would help iron out his financial disputes with Deripaska and the Ukrainian oligarchs.
Trump associate Roger Stone reached out directly to Trump and helped Manafort lobby for that role, the committee writes. According to Trump associate Tom Barrack, Manafort’s willingness to work for free was central to his getting the job of chairman—and, the Senate writes, Manafort was hired without the campaign conducting any vetting, “including of his financial situation or vulnerability to foreign influence."
The report states that Manafort “likely made Kilimnik aware of the possibility [that] he would join the Trump Campaign prior to its public announcement” in March 2016. After the public announcement, “Manafort used Kilimnik to send private messages to three Ukrainian oligarchs—at least one of whom Manafort believed owed him money—and to Deripaska.” The report contains several heavily redacted pages following a description of Manafort’s communications with Kilimnik during this time, which, from unredacted footnotes, seem to involve Kilimnik’s outreach to various oligarchs.
During his time on the Trump campaign, the committee writes, Manafort also worked with Kilimnik on developing a peace plan to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine on terms favorable to Russia. And, the committee states, “On numerous occasions over the course of his time on the Trump campaign, Manafort sought to secretly share internal Campaign information with Kilimnik.” Most notably, Gates told investigators that Manafort had instructed him to share internal campaign polling data with Kilimnik.
Gates “understood” that the data would be shared with Deripaska as well. Notably, the committee writes that “Kilimnik was capable of comprehending the complex polling data,” given his “significant knowledge of, and experience with” such material. On the basis of testimony by Kilimnik’s business partner Samuel Patten, it appears that the data involved information about the public’s negative views of Hillary Clinton, which Manafort felt could give Trump a chance to win the election.
In other words, throughout his work on the Trump campaign, Manafort maintained an ongoing business relationship with a Russian intelligence officer, to whom he passed nonpublic campaign material and analysis.
So what did Kilimnik do with the data—and why did Manafort share it? This was one of the great mysteries left unsolved by the Mueller report, and the Senate was also unable to come up with an answer. Gates, apparently, did not know: “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.” The report states that “the Committee did … obtain a single piece of information that could plausibly be a reflection of Kilimnik’s actions” after receiving the data—but the next paragraph is entirely redacted.
Perhaps the most tantalizing suggestion in this section involves the redacted pages following the committee’s assertion that “[s]ome evidence suggests Kilimnik may be connected to the GRU hack-and-leak operation related to the 2016 election”—that is, the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. The suggestion that Kilimnik may have had some link to the hack-and-leak operation is new.
[This suggestion] was not included in the Mueller report. Sections of unredacted text discuss the “Cyber Berkut” hacker group—which the report identifies as a “GRU influence operation”—and the 2014 leak of a conversation between State Department official Victoria Nuland and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, which the White House at the time accused Russia of releasing.
The committee goes further, stating that there is a “possibility” that Manafort himself was somehow connected to the hacking and leaking. Much of the text that follows is redacted, though the unredacted text includes information about Manafort’s one-time son-in-law Jeffrey Yohai, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The possible connection between Yohai and the GRU operation is unclear.
In other words, according to the committee, not only was the chairman of the Trump campaign engaged in a business relationship with a Russian intelligence officer during the campaign and feeding him confidential information, but one or both of them might have played some kind of role in the hacking and dumping operation at the heart of the Russian electoral interference.
The engagement did not end when Manafort resigned from the campaign in August 2016. Manafort remained in contact both with members of the Trump campaign and with Kilimnik after his resignation, the report states—and “Kilimnik was aware that Manafort remained in contact with Trump and the Campaign generally and took an interest in making use of the connection.”
Manafort’s contacts included providing advice to Trump and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and sending the campaign a memo days before Election Day predicting Trump’s victory. Among the advice Manafort gave Kushner, emails show, was the suggestion to use “WikiLeaks information” for the campaign. Manafort’s work along these lines, and his relationship with Kilimnik, continued even after the election.
Kilimnik, the report states, “began considering how to leverage his relationship with Manafort for influence” under the new Trump administration. And “Kilimnik specifically sought to leverage Manafort’s contacts with the incoming Trump administration to advance” Kilimnik’s preferred policies in Ukraine. The report quotes an email shared with Manafort by Kilmnik advocating the deployment of the peace plan discussed by the two men in August 2016.
As part of this effort, Manafort met with a representative of Deripaska in Madrid, the committee states—and “provided false and misleading information” about that meeting to the committee and the special counsel’s office—and later met with Kilimnik in Madrid as well. Additionally, Kilimnik traveled to the United States for Trump’s inauguration and met with Manafort while he was there, though he did not attend the inauguration itself. Through 2018, Manafort helped Kilimnik with polling on the possible peace plan, the committee states.
Finally, the report notes that “Manafort, Kilimnik, Deripaska, and others associated with Deripaska participated in … influence operations” spread by the Russian government after the election that were designed to “discredit investigations into Russian interference … and spread false information about the events of 2016.” Notably, the committee states that “Kilimnik almost certainly helped arrange some of the first public messaging that Ukraine had interfered in the U.S. election”—the same false idea that led to Trump’s animosity toward Ukraine and precipitated the scandal at the center of the president’s impeachment.
Some of the material in this section is redacted, but the unredacted text sketches how Manafort and Kilimnik sought to discredit Ukrainian investigations of Manafort and seed the idea that the real 2016 election interference was by Ukraine in support of Clinton, including contacts between Kilimnik and the Ukrainian prosecutor whose false allegations against U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch became a central component of the impeachment scandal.
It is particularly striking that the committee’s Republicans signed onto this portion of the report, given the insistence by Trump and many Senate Republicans that Ukraine interfered in the 2015 election. Yet here are Republican senators, some of whom have even endorsed that theory, admitting that its origins lie in Russian disinformation.
Notably, the committee states that its investigation into Manafort was limited by the committee’s inability to interview Manafort and Gates to the extent desired; by Manafort, Gates and Kilimnik’s use of encrypted communications and other means of avoiding documentation; and by Manafort’s lies to the special counsel’s office about his relationship with Kilimnik.
“Manafort's obfuscation of the truth surrounding Kilimnik was particularly damaging to the Committee's investigation,” the report notes, “because it effectively foreclosed direct insight into a series of interactions and communications which represent the single most direct tie between senior Trump Campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services.”
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