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The Russia Investigation: Trump Pardons Flynn (10 Viewers)
- Thread starter whoknew
- Start date
Rove!
Footballguy
Russia never offered anything to Trump or Trump jr.
Russia did, however, actually give “dirt” to the Clinton campaign via Steele.
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The Commish
Footballguy
He also said he didn't review the collected evidence either. Not sure what that's worth.
Henry Ford
Footballguy
Henry Ford
Footballguy
Rove!
Footballguy
Widbil83
Footballguy
Maddow is too busy writing hard hitting moderator questions like “would you send Ivanka and Jared to prison” for the big Democrat debate next week.
knowledge dropper
Footballguy
knowledge dropper
Footballguy
zoonation
Footballguy
Yeah. Trump’s lap dog said that. I’m talking about the real bipartisan army of prosecutors who actually read the report.
Widbil83
Footballguy
I’ve had a Tim “I’ve changed my mind” moment on Mueller testifying. At first I respected his wishes to not get involved in the Pelosi/Nadler Democrat Congress circus, but I think it’s time for him to explain some things. Mainly why it took him 2 years to find no collusion when it probably took 2 weeks. Why did this nothing burger drag on so long?
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
Well if Barr would have appeared he could just as well be asked how, if Mueller took 2 years and relied on two DOJ policies crafted over 45 years and analysis 474 pages long, he managed to analyze all that in less than 2 working days?
But let's say I agree that the GOP has the right to ask questions and 'examine the evidence' just as much as Dems, and they should. It has to be tested, I totally agree with that, and even from a GOP perspective it's not ok to just leave it there hanging in the clouds if you feel it's really problematic.
Henry Ford
Footballguy
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
Andrew McCarthy testifying for the GOP today.
- Shows the difference between writing an op piece in NR and testifying.
- Dem witnesses are Robert Anderson and Stephanie Douglass, formerly of the FBI.
- Rep. Crawford sees himself out.
yak651
Footballguy
Well to his credit, reading and understanding are 2 different things....and then objectively processing what is read would be a 3rd...
Yes....and how about...."Steele Dossier....ever heard of it?"
"Good....and where did your "extensive investigation" lead you when you investigated this?"
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SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
Considering Mueller says 'look at the report' for almost everything, he'll probably respond that the dossier came up once: Under "Additional Efforts to Have Sessions Unrecuse or Direct Investigations Covered by his Recusal":
- Trump responded to this with an attack on his own AG including the claim that he would not investigate the dossier.
Mueller seems to be saying that the President's demands that the DOJ investigate the dossier were themselves obstructive, basically a pretext for political interference in the DOJ.
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John Blutarsky
Footballguy
An interesting piece on the FBI and Russia
FBI Tragedy: Elites above the Law
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/fbi-tragedy-elites-above-law/amp/
FBI Tragedy: Elites above the Law
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/fbi-tragedy-elites-above-law/amp/
Sheriff Bart
Footballguy
Schiff opening statement: "For those who have not yet read the Mueller report, and most have not, they might be astonished to learn that a finding of no collusion, much less a finding of no obstruction, is nowhere to be seen on any page, or in any passage, of the Mueller report."
Rove!
Footballguy
So wanting more investigation of potential Russian inference is now considered an obstruction of investigating Russian interference? You guys have twisted yourselves into logical pretzels. Can this get more absurd?
Sheriff Bart
Footballguy
WHA, WHA, WHAT?!!? /Moe Syzslak
Rove!
Footballguy
Schiff has conclusive evidence of collusion, right?
why hasn’t he shared it with Mueller?
TobiasFunke
Footballguy
Just wanna make sure I'm clear on this:Widbil83 said:
You voted for and support a man who took out a full-page ad calling for for a suspension of civil liberties and administration of the death penalty for 5 black/Hispanic teenagers who after serving long sentences in prison turned out to be innocent, and who continued to rail against those black/Hispanic men long after they were exonerated, including during the campaign, correct?
You also think Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn should "have their convictions over turned immediately" because "the entire investigation was completely bogus" and "it's insane how people's lives have been ruined over this." Also correct?
Assuming both of these are accurate, I have a follow-up question: are you one of those people who gets upset when people talk about how racism runs rampant in Trump's base?
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SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
I’m just answering the question, that’s what’s in it about the dossier.
About your claim, no that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying Mueller was saying that Trump was using it as a pretext to fire Sessions or force him out. Trump’s response was specifically about Sessions reinforcing that DOJ policy prohibits political interference.
The Commish
Footballguy
So, I'm not sure which is more problematic:
1. "proof" vs "evidence"
2. "collusion" vs "conspiracy"
It's brutal either way
1. "proof" vs "evidence"
2. "collusion" vs "conspiracy"
It's brutal either way
timschochet
Footballguy
Except that he didn’t find that, right? Where in the report does it say “there was no collusion?”
Rove!
Footballguy
You mean that the motive for wanting Sessions to recuse might have been to get somebody follow up a significant lead on Russian interference? It seems like if anybody is obstructing a thorough look into Russian interference, it’s Mueller.
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
Passive voice here? Who did this, Democrats?
You're arguing that Democrats got Jeff Sessions - former GOP US Attorney, former GOP Senator, the man Dems denied a judgeship to, the first Congressman of any kind and really anyone with any stature to endorse Trump, a man whom Democrats have viewed with scorn (maybe for good reason) for being an official Bad Guy when it comes to race and civil rights, prison and drug reform - that guy chose Democrats' wishes over his Republican loyalties?
That's remarkable. No, the problem for Trump was that Sessions adhered to DOJ policies. I think it's pretty fair to say that he would not have broken them like Barr when the Mueller report came out. And it's really amazing but at the beginning of this whole thing 'Sessions overall came out looking pretty good' probably was not on the top of most people's expectations.
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ren hoek
Footballguy
I'd probably say stuff like this too if I staked my entire career on TrumpRussia alarmism.
A finding of no collusion is everywhere to be seen in real life. It's in Trump's posture toward Russia, which has "been much tougher on Russia than any in the post-Cold War era".
It's in his DOJ's prosecution of Julian Assange, who could totally out him for his supposed role in the conspiracy if it was a real thing that happened (it didn't).
It's in the fact that characters like Rob Goldstone (a British music publicist) and Felix Sater (an FBI informant that couldn't figure out contacting important Russians to get a Trump Tower deal from a hole in the ground) have been revealed to be sideshow hucksters, not participants to an international conspiracy theory.
It's in Deripaska's lawsuit against the US govt for sanctions that have cost him billions of dollars (sanctions which the EU opposed).
It's in Trump badgering Merkel to pull Germany out of the Nordstream 2 pipeline with Russia.
It's in Trump's bombing of Russian client state Syria, Trump's suffocating sanctions and regime change attempts against Russian ally Venezuela.
It's in Trump giving lethal weaponry to hostile anti-Russian forces in Ukraine.
It's in Trump's threatened withdrawal from the INF treaty (which NATO supports).
It's in Trump packing his administration with antiRussian neocon hawks.
It's in the fact that despite all of this, despite this conspiracy theory taking all the air out of the room and newsrooms allocating an obscene amount of investigative resources to it for years, despite a 22-month special prosecutor investigation with all the resources and subpoena power in the world, despite relations with Russia being so fraught that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists cited how "the US-Russia nuclear rivalry re-emerged" in keeping the Doomsday Clock at 2 minutes to midnight, that despite all of that, Russia has still not outed their "puppet".
At every turn, the things happening in the real world and not in total fantasyland reveal collusion to be a literal joke. It reveals Adam Schiff to be a complete fraud, and the whole thing to have been predicated on a ####### conspiracy theory.
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
Throw in Huber's plus now Durham's, who apparently is using DOJ staff and DC office space to boot.
eta - Actually that would make for a nice Foia request.
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Don't Noonan
Footballguy
Schiff once again being intentionally misleading and dishonest. No evidence of conspiracy with Russia is clearly stated which is the same thing as collusion. He is fooling no one except the Trump haters who fall for his lies.
Don't Noonan
Footballguy
Rove!
Footballguy
I meant to say unrecuse...if the pretext for wanting Sessions to unrecuse was to expand the Russian Interference investigation then it’s clearly not obstruction, and moreover it looks like Mueller is trying to block any attempt to follow up on a significant lead.
Skoo
Footballguy
Don't Noonan
Footballguy
Don't Noonan
Footballguy
Don't Noonan
Footballguy
Introduction to Volume 1, page 2 of Mueller report clearly states that collusion and conspiracy are interchangeable. Therefore, I agree that people who don't acknowledge that are just using semantics and ignoring reality.
ren hoek
Footballguy
On Manafort-Kilimnik: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/expos-in-the-hill-challenges-mueller
Exposé in "The Hill" challenges Mueller, media
Claim that would-be key Russiagate figure Konstantin Kilimnik is a longtime American informant might be a game-changing story – in a country with a real press corps
John Solomon of The Hill just came out with what could be a narrative-changing story. If news organizations that heavily covered Russiagate don’t at least check out this report – confirm it or refute it – few explanations other than bias will make sense.
In “Key figure that Mueller report linked to Russia was a State Department intel source,” Solomon asserts that Konstantin Kilimnik, the mysterious Ukrainian cohort of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, has been a “sensitive” source for the U.S. State department dating back to at least 2013, including “while he was still working for Manafort.”
Solomon describes Kilimnik meeting “several times a week” with the chief political officer of the U.S. Embassy in Kiev. Kilimnik “relayed messages back to Ukraine’s leaders and delivered written reports to U.S. officials via emails that stretched on for thousands of words,” according to memos Solomon reviewed.
Solomon’s report, which raises significant questions about an episode frequently described as the “heart” of the Mueller investigation (and which was the subject of thousands of news stories), came out on June 6th. As of June 8th, here’s the list of major news organizations that have followed up on his report:
The Washington Examiner
Fox News
That’s it. Nobody else has touched it.
Solomon is a controversial figure, especially to Democratic audiences. The Columbia Journalism Review has hounded him in the past for what it called “suspect” work, especially for pushing “less than meets the eye” stories that turned into right-wing talking points. The Washington Post has done stories citing Hill staffers who’ve complained that a trail of “Solomon investigations” that veered “rightward” was also misleading and lacking “context.” The Post likewise quoted staffers who complained that Solomon was making too much of texts between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok of the FBI.
On the Russiagate story, however, Solomon clearly has sources, as he’s repeatedly broken news about things that other reporters have heard about, but didn’t have in full. He reported about former British spy and FBI informant Christopher Steele speaking to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavelec before the 2016 election, among other things admitting he’d been speaking to the media.
Solomon also reported that Kavelec’s notes about Steele had been passed to the FBI, eight days before the FBI described Steele as credible in a FISA warrant application.
It would be one thing if other outlets were rebutting his claims about Kilimnik, as people have with some of this other stories. But this report has attracted zero response from non-conservative media, despite the fact that Kilimnik has long been one of the most talked-about figures in the whole Russiagate drama.
This story matters for a few reasons. If Kilimnik was that regular and important a U.S. government source, it would deal a blow to the credibility of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Kilimnik’s relationship with Manafort was among the most damaging to Donald Trump in the Mueller report. Here was Trump’s campaign manager commiserating with a man Mueller said was “assessed” to have “ties to Russian intelligence.”
In one of the most lurid sections of the Mueller report, Manafort is described writing to Kilimnik after being named Trump’s campaign manager to ask if “our friends” had seen media coverage about his new role.
“Absolutely. Every article,” said Kilimnik. To this, Manafort replied: “How do we use to get whole. Has Ovd operation seen?” referring to Deripaska.
The implication was clear: Manafort was offering to use his position within the Trump campaign to “get whole” with the scary metals baron, Deripaska. Manafort believed his role on the campaign could help “confirm” Deripaska would drop a lawsuit he had filed against Manafort.
When Manafort later sent “internal polling data” to Kilimnik with the idea that it was being shared with Ukrainian oligarchs and Deripaska, this seemed like very damaging news indeed: high-ranking Trump official gives inside info to someone with “ties” to Russian intelligence.
Mueller didn’t just describe Kilimnik as having ties to Russian intelligence. He said that while working in Moscow between 1998 and 2005 for the International Republican Institute– that’s an American think-tank connected to the Republican Party, its sister organization being the National Democratic Institute – IRI officials told the FBI he’d been fired because his “links to Russian intelligence were too strong.”
In other words, Mueller not only made a current assessment about Kilimnik, he made a show of retracing Kilimnik’s career steps in a series of bullet points, from his birth in the Dnieprpetrovsk region in 1970 to his travel to the U.S. in 1997, to his effort in 2014 to do PR work defending Russia’s move into Crimea.
Mueller left out a bit, according to Solomon, who says he “reviewed” FBI and State Department memos about Kilimnik’s status as an informant. He even went so far as to name the U.S. embassy officials in Ukraine who dealt with Kilimnik:
Alan Purcell, the chief political officer at the Kiev embassy from 2014 to 2017, told FBI agents that State officials, including senior embassy officials Alexander Kasanof and Eric Schultz, deemed Kilimnik to be such a valuable asset that they kept his name out of cables for fear he would be compromised by leaks to WikiLeaks.
“Purcell described what he considered an unusual level of discretion that was taken with handling Kilimnik,” states one FBI interview report that I reviewed. “Normally the head of the political section would not handle sources, but Kasanof informed Purcell that KILIMNIK was a sensitive source.”
This relationship was described in “hundreds of pages of government documents” that Solomon reports Mueller “possessed since 2018.” The FBI, he added, knew all about Kilimnik’s status as a State Department informant before the conclusion of Mueller’s investigation.
This is one of a growing number of examples of people whose status as documented U.S. informants goes unmentioned in the Mueller report, where they are instead described under the general heading, “Russian government links to, and contact with, the Trump campaign.”
One of the first such “Russian-government connected individuals” is Felix Sater, described in Mueller’s report as a “New York based real estate advisor” who contacted Cohen with a “new inquiry about building a Trump Tower project in Moscow.”
It’s Sater who initiates the inquiry and Sater who wrote the most oft-quoted emails to Cohen, like “Buddy our boy can become President of the USA” and “I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in.” Sater in the report encourages Cohen to keep the project alive and keeps promising he can deliver meetings with the likes of Putin and aide Dmitry Peskov.
But nowhere in the report is it disclosed that Sater, as reported by the Intercept, has been a registered FBI informant since 1998, when after racketeering and assault cases he signed a cooperation agreement. The document was signed on the government side by Mueller’s future chief investigator, Andrew Weissman, another detail no one seems to find odd.
Similarly there is a section in the report involving a character named Henry Oknyansky (a.k.a. Henry Greenberg). Oknyansky-Greenberg (he has other aliases) is a Miami-based hustler who approached former Trump aide Michael Caputo in May of 2016, ostensibly offering “derogatory information” on Hillary Clinton. Mueller lists the Greenberg case under a header about “potential Russian interest in Russian hacked materials.”
He leaves out the part where any idiot with a PACER account can run a search on Greenberg and find the series of court documents in which the oft-arrested figure claims, “I cooperated with the FBI for 17 years, often put my life in danger.”
Of course, anyone bold enough might claim to be an FBI informant in an effort to stave off deportation. But in this case, in an effort to prove to he was in fact a government tipster, Greenberg submitted a Freedom of Information Request to the FBI about himself – and actually got the documentation!
California court records show Oknyansky/Greenberg received a series of “significant public benefit” parole visas of varying lengths from the U.S. government between 2008 and 2012. The documents even list the name and phone number of his FBI case officer.
Mueller’s failure to identify the U.S. government links to either Greenberg or Sater was suspicious (there are other head-scratching omissions as well), but failing to do so in the case of Kilimnik would be mind-boggling. Manafort’s interactions with Kilimnik were described by Judge Amy Berman Jackson as the “undisputed core of the Office of Special Counsel’s investigation.”
Much was made of the fact that Kilimnik visited the Trump Tower in August of 2016 to present a plan for resolving the Russian-Ukrainian conflict:
Kilimnik requested the meeting to deliver in person a peace plan for Ukraine that Manafort acknowledged to the Special Counsel’s Office was a ‘backdoor’ way for Russia to control part of eastern Ukraine; both men believed the plan would require Trump assent to succeed.
But Solomon’s report indicates Kilimnik traveled to the U.S. twice in 2016 to meet with State officials, and delivered the same “peace plan” to Obama administration officials. Kilimnik appeared to have discussed the plan in Washington with former embassy official Alexander Kasanof – who’d since been promoted to a senior State position – at a dinner on May 5, 2016.
Not that anyone much cares, but Kilimnik has angrily denied the characterization of him as a spy. As Solomon writes:
Officials for the State Department, the FBI, the Justice Department and Mueller’s office did not respond to requests for comment. Kilimnik did not respond to an email seeking comment but, in an email last month to The Washington Post, he slammed the Mueller report’s “made-up narrative” about him. “I have no ties to Russian or, for that matter, any intelligence operation,” he wrote.
The Manafort-Kilimnik tale is a fundamentally different news story if Kilimnik is more of an American asset than a Russian one.
If Kilimnik was giving regular reports to the State Department through 2016, if his peace plan was not a diabolical Trump-Manafort backdoor effort to carve up Ukraine, if Kilimnik was someone who could be “flabbergasted at the Russian invasion of Crimea,” as Solomon says the FBI concluded, then this entire part of the Russiagate story has been farce.
It would become a more ambiguous story that was made to look diabolical through inference and omission. Though it might not absolve Paul Manafort of lying or thinking he was doing something wrong, it could change the complexion of the actual narrative, how we should understand the story.
“Trump campaign manager gives polling data to longtime U.S. government informant” doesn’t have the same punch as “Manafort Suggests He Gave Suspected Russian Spy 2016 Polling Data,” as the oft-hyperventilating Daily Beast put it.
The Times did cover some of this ground a while ago, in a story that to me lends credence to the idea that the Hill and the Times were looking at the same Kilimnik documents.
The Times, which has become a dependable venue for the gentle spinning of soon-to-be-released dispositive information about the collusion theory, wrote a long feature on Kilimnik in February: “Russian Spy or Hustling Political Operative? The Enigmatic Figure at the Heart of Mueller’s Inquiry.”
That piece, based on “dozens of interviews, court filings and other documents,” described Kilimnik as an “operator who moved easily between Russian, Ukrainian and American patrons, playing one off the other while leaving a jumble of conflicting suspicions in his wake.”
The Times added:
To American diplomats in Washington and Kiev, [Kilimnik] has been a well-known character for nearly a decade, developing a reputation as a broker of valuable information…
The paper noted that Kilimnik traveled “freely” to the U.S. and appeared to reference the dinner with Kasanof, noting Kilimnik “in May 2016 met senior State Department officials for drinks at the Off the Record bar.”
Only in the last two paragraphs did they get to the point, quoting Caputo:
To buttress this case, Mr. Manafort’s lawyers requested and received records from the government showing that Mr. Kilimnik communicated with officials at the American Embassy in Kiev.
“If he was a Russian intelligence asset, then the State Department officials who met with him over the years should be under investigation,” Mr. Caputo said.
No ####! It’s one thing if Kilimnik was just another hustler who moved back and forth between Western and Russian orbits, trading on connections on both sides. There were countless such figures in Moscow, especially dating back to the nineties, when Kilimnik began working for the IRI.
But it’s a different matter if Kilimnik was meeting multiple times a week with American embassy officials and providing thousands of words of intel on a regular basis. There’s no scenario where Kilimnik is actually a Russian spy and that kind of record doesn’t reflect badly on whoever was regularly downloading and sharing his intelligence on the American side.
There are two big possibilities: either Solomon’s report is wrong somehow, and the nature of Kilimnik’s relationship with the United States government has been misrepresented, or he’s right and this tale at the “heart” of the Mueller probe has been over-spun in an Everest of misleading news reports.
Either way, it has to be looked into. It appears, though, that no one among the usual suspects is interested, just as the press declined to descend upon Italy in search of the ostensible Patient Zero of Russiagate, Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud (who was said to be shacked up in a Rome apartment for seven months after the Russiagate insanity broke before going to ground).
MSNBC burned up countless hours obsessing over the Manafort-Kilimnik relationship. You can find the tale discussed ad nauseum here, here, here, here, and in many other places, with Kilimnik routinely described on air as a “Russian asset” with “ties to Russian intelligence,” who even bragged that he learned his English from Russian spies.
CNN has likewise done a gazillion reports on the guy: see here, here, here, here, and here. Some reports said Manafort’s conduct “hints” at collusion, while Chris Cilizza said his meetings with a “Russian-linked operative” were a “very big deal.” Bloviator-in-chief Jake Tapper wondered if this story was “Game, Set, Match” for the collusion case. Anytime a Democrat spoke about how “stunning” and “damning” was the news that Manafort gave Kilimnik poll numbers, reporters repeated those assertions in a snap.
I could go up and down the line with the Times,the Washington Post, and other print outlets. Every major news organization that covered Russiagate has covered the hell out of this part of the story. But the instant there’s a suggestion there’s another angle: crickets.
Russiagate is fast becoming a post-journalistic news phenomenon. We live in an information landscape so bifurcated, media companies don’t cover news, because they can stick with narratives. Kilimnik being a regular State Department informant crosses the MSNBC-approved line that he’s a Russian cutout who tried to leverage Donald Trump’s campaign manager. So it literally has no news value to many companies, even if it’s clearly a newsworthy item according to traditional measure.
Incidentally, Solomon’s report being true wouldn’t necessarily exonerate either Kilimnik or Manafort. It may just mean a complication of the picture, along with uncomfortable questions for Robert Muller and embassy officials who dealt with Kilimnik. That’s what’s so maddening. We’ve gotten to the point where news editors and producers are more like film continuity editors — worried about maintaining literary consistency in coverage — than addressing newsworthy developments that might move us into gray areas.
Our press sucks. There are third-world dictatorships where newspapers try harder than they do here. We used to at least pretend to cover the bases. Now, we’re a joke.
Claim that would-be key Russiagate figure Konstantin Kilimnik is a longtime American informant might be a game-changing story – in a country with a real press corps
John Solomon of The Hill just came out with what could be a narrative-changing story. If news organizations that heavily covered Russiagate don’t at least check out this report – confirm it or refute it – few explanations other than bias will make sense.
In “Key figure that Mueller report linked to Russia was a State Department intel source,” Solomon asserts that Konstantin Kilimnik, the mysterious Ukrainian cohort of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, has been a “sensitive” source for the U.S. State department dating back to at least 2013, including “while he was still working for Manafort.”
Solomon describes Kilimnik meeting “several times a week” with the chief political officer of the U.S. Embassy in Kiev. Kilimnik “relayed messages back to Ukraine’s leaders and delivered written reports to U.S. officials via emails that stretched on for thousands of words,” according to memos Solomon reviewed.
Solomon’s report, which raises significant questions about an episode frequently described as the “heart” of the Mueller investigation (and which was the subject of thousands of news stories), came out on June 6th. As of June 8th, here’s the list of major news organizations that have followed up on his report:
The Washington Examiner
Fox News
That’s it. Nobody else has touched it.
Solomon is a controversial figure, especially to Democratic audiences. The Columbia Journalism Review has hounded him in the past for what it called “suspect” work, especially for pushing “less than meets the eye” stories that turned into right-wing talking points. The Washington Post has done stories citing Hill staffers who’ve complained that a trail of “Solomon investigations” that veered “rightward” was also misleading and lacking “context.” The Post likewise quoted staffers who complained that Solomon was making too much of texts between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok of the FBI.
On the Russiagate story, however, Solomon clearly has sources, as he’s repeatedly broken news about things that other reporters have heard about, but didn’t have in full. He reported about former British spy and FBI informant Christopher Steele speaking to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavelec before the 2016 election, among other things admitting he’d been speaking to the media.
Solomon also reported that Kavelec’s notes about Steele had been passed to the FBI, eight days before the FBI described Steele as credible in a FISA warrant application.
It would be one thing if other outlets were rebutting his claims about Kilimnik, as people have with some of this other stories. But this report has attracted zero response from non-conservative media, despite the fact that Kilimnik has long been one of the most talked-about figures in the whole Russiagate drama.
This story matters for a few reasons. If Kilimnik was that regular and important a U.S. government source, it would deal a blow to the credibility of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Kilimnik’s relationship with Manafort was among the most damaging to Donald Trump in the Mueller report. Here was Trump’s campaign manager commiserating with a man Mueller said was “assessed” to have “ties to Russian intelligence.”
In one of the most lurid sections of the Mueller report, Manafort is described writing to Kilimnik after being named Trump’s campaign manager to ask if “our friends” had seen media coverage about his new role.
“Absolutely. Every article,” said Kilimnik. To this, Manafort replied: “How do we use to get whole. Has Ovd operation seen?” referring to Deripaska.
The implication was clear: Manafort was offering to use his position within the Trump campaign to “get whole” with the scary metals baron, Deripaska. Manafort believed his role on the campaign could help “confirm” Deripaska would drop a lawsuit he had filed against Manafort.
When Manafort later sent “internal polling data” to Kilimnik with the idea that it was being shared with Ukrainian oligarchs and Deripaska, this seemed like very damaging news indeed: high-ranking Trump official gives inside info to someone with “ties” to Russian intelligence.
Mueller didn’t just describe Kilimnik as having ties to Russian intelligence. He said that while working in Moscow between 1998 and 2005 for the International Republican Institute– that’s an American think-tank connected to the Republican Party, its sister organization being the National Democratic Institute – IRI officials told the FBI he’d been fired because his “links to Russian intelligence were too strong.”
In other words, Mueller not only made a current assessment about Kilimnik, he made a show of retracing Kilimnik’s career steps in a series of bullet points, from his birth in the Dnieprpetrovsk region in 1970 to his travel to the U.S. in 1997, to his effort in 2014 to do PR work defending Russia’s move into Crimea.
Mueller left out a bit, according to Solomon, who says he “reviewed” FBI and State Department memos about Kilimnik’s status as an informant. He even went so far as to name the U.S. embassy officials in Ukraine who dealt with Kilimnik:
Alan Purcell, the chief political officer at the Kiev embassy from 2014 to 2017, told FBI agents that State officials, including senior embassy officials Alexander Kasanof and Eric Schultz, deemed Kilimnik to be such a valuable asset that they kept his name out of cables for fear he would be compromised by leaks to WikiLeaks.
“Purcell described what he considered an unusual level of discretion that was taken with handling Kilimnik,” states one FBI interview report that I reviewed. “Normally the head of the political section would not handle sources, but Kasanof informed Purcell that KILIMNIK was a sensitive source.”
This relationship was described in “hundreds of pages of government documents” that Solomon reports Mueller “possessed since 2018.” The FBI, he added, knew all about Kilimnik’s status as a State Department informant before the conclusion of Mueller’s investigation.
This is one of a growing number of examples of people whose status as documented U.S. informants goes unmentioned in the Mueller report, where they are instead described under the general heading, “Russian government links to, and contact with, the Trump campaign.”
One of the first such “Russian-government connected individuals” is Felix Sater, described in Mueller’s report as a “New York based real estate advisor” who contacted Cohen with a “new inquiry about building a Trump Tower project in Moscow.”
It’s Sater who initiates the inquiry and Sater who wrote the most oft-quoted emails to Cohen, like “Buddy our boy can become President of the USA” and “I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in.” Sater in the report encourages Cohen to keep the project alive and keeps promising he can deliver meetings with the likes of Putin and aide Dmitry Peskov.
But nowhere in the report is it disclosed that Sater, as reported by the Intercept, has been a registered FBI informant since 1998, when after racketeering and assault cases he signed a cooperation agreement. The document was signed on the government side by Mueller’s future chief investigator, Andrew Weissman, another detail no one seems to find odd.
Similarly there is a section in the report involving a character named Henry Oknyansky (a.k.a. Henry Greenberg). Oknyansky-Greenberg (he has other aliases) is a Miami-based hustler who approached former Trump aide Michael Caputo in May of 2016, ostensibly offering “derogatory information” on Hillary Clinton. Mueller lists the Greenberg case under a header about “potential Russian interest in Russian hacked materials.”
He leaves out the part where any idiot with a PACER account can run a search on Greenberg and find the series of court documents in which the oft-arrested figure claims, “I cooperated with the FBI for 17 years, often put my life in danger.”
Of course, anyone bold enough might claim to be an FBI informant in an effort to stave off deportation. But in this case, in an effort to prove to he was in fact a government tipster, Greenberg submitted a Freedom of Information Request to the FBI about himself – and actually got the documentation!
California court records show Oknyansky/Greenberg received a series of “significant public benefit” parole visas of varying lengths from the U.S. government between 2008 and 2012. The documents even list the name and phone number of his FBI case officer.
Mueller’s failure to identify the U.S. government links to either Greenberg or Sater was suspicious (there are other head-scratching omissions as well), but failing to do so in the case of Kilimnik would be mind-boggling. Manafort’s interactions with Kilimnik were described by Judge Amy Berman Jackson as the “undisputed core of the Office of Special Counsel’s investigation.”
Much was made of the fact that Kilimnik visited the Trump Tower in August of 2016 to present a plan for resolving the Russian-Ukrainian conflict:
Kilimnik requested the meeting to deliver in person a peace plan for Ukraine that Manafort acknowledged to the Special Counsel’s Office was a ‘backdoor’ way for Russia to control part of eastern Ukraine; both men believed the plan would require Trump assent to succeed.
But Solomon’s report indicates Kilimnik traveled to the U.S. twice in 2016 to meet with State officials, and delivered the same “peace plan” to Obama administration officials. Kilimnik appeared to have discussed the plan in Washington with former embassy official Alexander Kasanof – who’d since been promoted to a senior State position – at a dinner on May 5, 2016.
Not that anyone much cares, but Kilimnik has angrily denied the characterization of him as a spy. As Solomon writes:
Officials for the State Department, the FBI, the Justice Department and Mueller’s office did not respond to requests for comment. Kilimnik did not respond to an email seeking comment but, in an email last month to The Washington Post, he slammed the Mueller report’s “made-up narrative” about him. “I have no ties to Russian or, for that matter, any intelligence operation,” he wrote.
The Manafort-Kilimnik tale is a fundamentally different news story if Kilimnik is more of an American asset than a Russian one.
If Kilimnik was giving regular reports to the State Department through 2016, if his peace plan was not a diabolical Trump-Manafort backdoor effort to carve up Ukraine, if Kilimnik was someone who could be “flabbergasted at the Russian invasion of Crimea,” as Solomon says the FBI concluded, then this entire part of the Russiagate story has been farce.
It would become a more ambiguous story that was made to look diabolical through inference and omission. Though it might not absolve Paul Manafort of lying or thinking he was doing something wrong, it could change the complexion of the actual narrative, how we should understand the story.
“Trump campaign manager gives polling data to longtime U.S. government informant” doesn’t have the same punch as “Manafort Suggests He Gave Suspected Russian Spy 2016 Polling Data,” as the oft-hyperventilating Daily Beast put it.
The Times did cover some of this ground a while ago, in a story that to me lends credence to the idea that the Hill and the Times were looking at the same Kilimnik documents.
The Times, which has become a dependable venue for the gentle spinning of soon-to-be-released dispositive information about the collusion theory, wrote a long feature on Kilimnik in February: “Russian Spy or Hustling Political Operative? The Enigmatic Figure at the Heart of Mueller’s Inquiry.”
That piece, based on “dozens of interviews, court filings and other documents,” described Kilimnik as an “operator who moved easily between Russian, Ukrainian and American patrons, playing one off the other while leaving a jumble of conflicting suspicions in his wake.”
The Times added:
To American diplomats in Washington and Kiev, [Kilimnik] has been a well-known character for nearly a decade, developing a reputation as a broker of valuable information…
The paper noted that Kilimnik traveled “freely” to the U.S. and appeared to reference the dinner with Kasanof, noting Kilimnik “in May 2016 met senior State Department officials for drinks at the Off the Record bar.”
Only in the last two paragraphs did they get to the point, quoting Caputo:
To buttress this case, Mr. Manafort’s lawyers requested and received records from the government showing that Mr. Kilimnik communicated with officials at the American Embassy in Kiev.
“If he was a Russian intelligence asset, then the State Department officials who met with him over the years should be under investigation,” Mr. Caputo said.
No ####! It’s one thing if Kilimnik was just another hustler who moved back and forth between Western and Russian orbits, trading on connections on both sides. There were countless such figures in Moscow, especially dating back to the nineties, when Kilimnik began working for the IRI.
But it’s a different matter if Kilimnik was meeting multiple times a week with American embassy officials and providing thousands of words of intel on a regular basis. There’s no scenario where Kilimnik is actually a Russian spy and that kind of record doesn’t reflect badly on whoever was regularly downloading and sharing his intelligence on the American side.
There are two big possibilities: either Solomon’s report is wrong somehow, and the nature of Kilimnik’s relationship with the United States government has been misrepresented, or he’s right and this tale at the “heart” of the Mueller probe has been over-spun in an Everest of misleading news reports.
Either way, it has to be looked into. It appears, though, that no one among the usual suspects is interested, just as the press declined to descend upon Italy in search of the ostensible Patient Zero of Russiagate, Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud (who was said to be shacked up in a Rome apartment for seven months after the Russiagate insanity broke before going to ground).
MSNBC burned up countless hours obsessing over the Manafort-Kilimnik relationship. You can find the tale discussed ad nauseum here, here, here, here, and in many other places, with Kilimnik routinely described on air as a “Russian asset” with “ties to Russian intelligence,” who even bragged that he learned his English from Russian spies.
CNN has likewise done a gazillion reports on the guy: see here, here, here, here, and here. Some reports said Manafort’s conduct “hints” at collusion, while Chris Cilizza said his meetings with a “Russian-linked operative” were a “very big deal.” Bloviator-in-chief Jake Tapper wondered if this story was “Game, Set, Match” for the collusion case. Anytime a Democrat spoke about how “stunning” and “damning” was the news that Manafort gave Kilimnik poll numbers, reporters repeated those assertions in a snap.
I could go up and down the line with the Times,the Washington Post, and other print outlets. Every major news organization that covered Russiagate has covered the hell out of this part of the story. But the instant there’s a suggestion there’s another angle: crickets.
Russiagate is fast becoming a post-journalistic news phenomenon. We live in an information landscape so bifurcated, media companies don’t cover news, because they can stick with narratives. Kilimnik being a regular State Department informant crosses the MSNBC-approved line that he’s a Russian cutout who tried to leverage Donald Trump’s campaign manager. So it literally has no news value to many companies, even if it’s clearly a newsworthy item according to traditional measure.
Incidentally, Solomon’s report being true wouldn’t necessarily exonerate either Kilimnik or Manafort. It may just mean a complication of the picture, along with uncomfortable questions for Robert Muller and embassy officials who dealt with Kilimnik. That’s what’s so maddening. We’ve gotten to the point where news editors and producers are more like film continuity editors — worried about maintaining literary consistency in coverage — than addressing newsworthy developments that might move us into gray areas.
Our press sucks. There are third-world dictatorships where newspapers try harder than they do here. We used to at least pretend to cover the bases. Now, we’re a joke.
Don't Noonan
Footballguy
A statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts.
We applied the term coordination in that sense when stating in the report that the investigation did not establish that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.
That page, 1-2?
Amused to Death
Footballguy
Summary pg2:
"A statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts."
Page 10, if you can make it that far:
The investigation did not always yield admissible information or testimony, or a complete picture of the activities undertaken by subjects of the investigation. Some individuals invoked their Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination and were not, in the Office’s judgment, appropriate candidates for grants of immunity. The Office limited its pursuit of other witnesses and information — such as information known to attorneys or individuals claiming to be members of the media — in light of internal Department of Justice policies. See, e.g., Justice Manual §§ 9-13.400, 13.410. Some of the information obtained via court process, moreover, was presumptively covered by legal privilege and was screened from investigators by a filter (or “taint”) team. Even when individuals testified or agreed to be interviewed, they sometimes provided information that was false or incomplete, leading to some of the false-statements charges described above. And the Office faced practical limits on its ability to access relevant evidence as well — numerous witnesses and subjects lived abroad, and documents were held outside the United States.
Further, the Office learned that some of the individuals we interviewed or whose conduct we investigated — including some associated with the Trump Campaign — deleted relevant communications or communicated during the relevant period using applications that feature encryption or that do not provide for long-term retention of data or communications records. In such cases, the Office was not able to corroborate witness statements through comparison to contemporaneous communications or fully question witnesses about statements that appeared inconsistent with other known facts.
Accordingly, while this report embodies factual and legal determinations that the Office believes to be accurate and complete to the greatest extent possible, given these identified gaps, the Office cannot rule out the possibility that the unavailable information would shed additional light on (or cast in a new light) the events described in the report.
The investigation did not always yield admissible information or testimony, or a complete picture of the activities undertaken by subjects of the investigation. Some individuals invoked their Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination and were not, in the Office’s judgment, appropriate candidates for grants of immunity. The Office limited its pursuit of other witnesses and information — such as information known to attorneys or individuals claiming to be members of the media — in light of internal Department of Justice policies. See, e.g., Justice Manual §§ 9-13.400, 13.410. Some of the information obtained via court process, moreover, was presumptively covered by legal privilege and was screened from investigators by a filter (or “taint”) team. Even when individuals testified or agreed to be interviewed, they sometimes provided information that was false or incomplete, leading to some of the false-statements charges described above. And the Office faced practical limits on its ability to access relevant evidence as well — numerous witnesses and subjects lived abroad, and documents were held outside the United States.
Further, the Office learned that some of the individuals we interviewed or whose conduct we investigated — including some associated with the Trump Campaign — deleted relevant communications or communicated during the relevant period using applications that feature encryption or that do not provide for long-term retention of data or communications records. In such cases, the Office was not able to corroborate witness statements through comparison to contemporaneous communications or fully question witnesses about statements that appeared inconsistent with other known facts.
Accordingly, while this report embodies factual and legal determinations that the Office believes to be accurate and complete to the greatest extent possible, given these identified gaps, the Office cannot rule out the possibility that the unavailable information would shed additional light on (or cast in a new light) the events described in the report.
