Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump gives a thumbs up as his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, looks on during Trump's walk through at the Republican National Convention, in Cleveland, on July 21, 2016.Rick Wilking/Reuters
A sprawling report released Tuesday by a Republican-controlled Senate panel that spent three years investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election laid out an extensive web of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Kremlin officials and other Russians, including at least one intelligence officer and others tied to the country’s spy services.
The report by the Senate intelligence committee drew to a close one of the highest-profile congressional investigations in recent memory and could be the last word from an official government inquiry about the expansive Russian campaign to sabotage the 2016 election.
It provided a bipartisan Senate imprimatur for an extraordinary set of facts: The Russian government disrupted an American election to help Donald Trump become President, Russian intelligence services viewed members of the Trump campaign as easily manipulated, and some of Mr. Trump’s advisers were eager for the help from an American adversary.
The report showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied to the Kremlin – including a long-standing associate of the one-time Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the report identified as a “Russian intelligence officer.”
The Senate report was the first time the government has identified Mr. Kilimnik as an intelligence officer – special counsel Robert Mueller’s report in April, 2019, had labelled him as someone with ties to Russian intelligence. Most of the details about his intelligence background in the Senate report were blacked out.
Mr. Manafort’s willingness to share information with Mr. Kilimnik and others affiliated with the Russian intelligence services “represented a grave counter-intelligence threat,” the report said.
It also included a potentially explosive detail: that investigators had uncovered information possibly tying Mr. Kilimnik to Russia’s major election interference operations, conducted by the intelligence service known as the GRU.
Democrats highlighted Mr. Kilimnik’s potential ties to the interference operations in their own appendix to the report, noting that Mr. Manafort discussed campaign strategy and shared internal campaign polling data with the Russian and later lied to federal investigators about his actions.
“This is what collusion looks like,” Democrats wrote.
Their assertion was a sign that even though the investigation was carried out in bipartisan fashion, and Republican and Democratic senators reached broad agreement on its most significant conclusions, a partisan divide remained on some of the most politically sensitive issues.
The report is an exhaustive look at the various ways that the Kremlin’s intelligence services exploited ties to the Trump campaign to help carry out a stealth attack on American democracy. By focusing on the Russian actions as a national-security threat, the Senate investigation differed from the Mueller inquiry, which examined whether there was evidence to charge anyone with specific crimes.
The Senate investigation found that two other Russians who met at Trump Tower in 2016 with senior members of the Trump campaign – including Mr. Manafort; Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law; and Donald Trump Jr., the President’s eldest son – had “significant connections to Russian government, including the Russian intelligence services.”
Links between the Kremlin and one of the individuals, Natalia Veselnitskaya, “were far more extensive and concerning than what had been publicly known,” the report said.
The report’s findings about Mr. Kilimnik and other Russians in touch with Trump campaign advisers confirmed an article in The New York Times from 2017 that said there had been numerous interactions between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence in the year before the election. FBI officials had disputed the report.
Although there was no evidence of any agreement between the Russians and the Trump campaign to work together, there was clear co-ordination, said Maine Senator Angus King, who caucuses with the Democrats and is a member of the intelligence committee.
“The Russians were doing things to disrupt American democracy and help the Trump campaign and the Trump campaign was doing things to amplify and utilize what the Russians were supplying,” Mr. King said in an interview. “There may not have been an explicit agreement but they were both consciously pursing the same end, which was the election of Donald Trump. And for the Russians, the extra benefit was disrupting American democracy.”
Members of Mr. Trump’s own party led the intelligence committee’s work. Much of the investigation was overseen by North Carolina Senator Richard Burr, but he temporarily stepped aside as the chairman of the panel in May because of a federal investigation into stock sales he made before the coronavirus pandemic began rattling the United States. He was replaced by Florida Senator Marco Rubio, although Mr. Burr voted to endorse the report’s conclusions.
The report could have partisan benefits for Democrats, who were using their convention this week as a platform to portray Mr. Trump as unfit and incapable of being President. Andrew Bates, a spokesman for former vice-president Joe Biden, said the report shows “the Russian government intervened in 2016 to help Donald Trump get elected and to undermine our democracy. Donald Trump welcomed it with open arms. They are working toward the same goals again this year, and Trump refuses to reject their assistance.”
Mr. Trump called the report “a hoax,” but a White House spokesman said it helped confirm what the President and his allies had long said – “that there was absolutely no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
“This never-ending, baseless conspiracy theory peddled by radical liberals and their partners in the media demonstrates how incapable they are at accepting the will of the American people and the results of the 2016 election,” said the spokesman, Judd Deere.
The report is the product of one of the few congressional investigations in recent memory that retained bipartisan support throughout. Lawmakers and committee aides interviewed more than 200 witnesses and reviewed hundreds of thousands of documents, including intelligence reports, internal FBI notes and correspondence among members of the Trump campaign. The committee convened hearings in 2017 and 2018, but most of its work took place out of public view.
The report suggested that Mr. Manafort was compromised by his financial ties with Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, who themselves were connected to Mr. Kilimnik, the Russian intelligence operative.
It cited Mr. Manafort’s ties to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch described as a “proxy” for Russian state and intelligence services who claimed that Mr. Manafort owed him money. And it described at length Mr. Manafort’s relationships with a cluster of pro-Russia oligarchs in Ukraine, who had paid him tens of millions of dollars as a political consultant in Ukraine.
“Manafort conducted influence operations that supported and were a part of Russian active measures campaigns, including those involving political influence and electoral interference,” the report said.
Before, during and after he was forced out as Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, the report said, Mr. Manafort offered inside information and assistance to these Russian-aligned interests. Mr. Kilimnik was Mr. Manafort’s intermediary with both Mr. Deripaska and the Ukrainian oligarchs, according to the report. It recounted how he briefed Mr. Kilimnik at an August, 2016, meeting on the Trump campaign’s strategy to defeat Hillary Clinton, describing efforts in the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Minnesota and the margins by which Mr. Trump might win.
The report also shed new light on the interaction between Russian intelligence and WikiLeaks – and between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign. WikiLeaks, which released tranches of stolen Democratic e-mails that helped damage Ms. Clinton’s campaign, not only played a clear role in the election interference but also “very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort,” the report said.
The committee sent a letter last summer to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington suggesting that Trump campaign advisers may have illegally made false or misleading statements to congressional investigators conducting the panel’s inquiry, according to four people with knowledge of the letter, which was first reported by The Los Angeles Times.
The committee said in the letter that Mr. Trump’s one-time chief strategist Stephen Bannon and his former campaign co-chair Sam Clovis may have committed a crime by lying under oath, and they cast doubt on the testimony of Donald Trump Jr. and Mr. Kushner. Prosecutors never filed charges.
Mr. Barr has appointed a criminal prosecutor, John Durham, to review the actions that intelligence and law enforcement officials took in 2016 to better understand the Kremlin’s interference campaign and interactions between Russians and Trump campaign advisers. Last month, Mr. Barr told a congressional committee that he was determined “to get to the bottom of the grave abuses involved in the bogus ‘Russiagate’ scandal.”
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