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Senate Intelligence Committee report provides a treasure trove of new details about Donald Trump’s relationship with Moscow, says a Russian national who worked closely with Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 was an intelligence officer careers.
The bipartisan report is nearly 1,000 pages long and goes beyond last year’s investigation into Russian election interference by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller. It features an astonishing network of contacts between Trump, his top electoral assistants, and Russian government officials, in the months leading up to the 2016 election.
The Senate panel identifies Konstantin Kilimnik as a Russian intelligence officer employed by the GRU, the military intelligence agency behind the poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in 2018. He cites evidence – some of which were redacted – linking 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 poll data. The committee said it could not “reliably determine” why Manafort transmitted this information, or what Kilimnik was doing with it exactly.
He describes Manafort’s willingness to pass confidential information to suspected Moscow agents as a “serious counterintelligence threat.” The report calls Kilimnik a “group of individuals operating outside the Russian government but who nonetheless carry out Kremlin-led influence operations.” He adds that key oligarchs, including Oleg Deripaska, are funding these operations, along with the Kremlin.
The investigation revealed that Kilimnik tweets under the pseudonym Petro Baranenko (@PBaranenko). The story regularly propagates the Moscow line on international issues, such as the conflict in Ukraine and the downfall of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17.
The fact that a Republican-controlled Senate committee established a direct link between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence makes it harder for Trump and his supporters to allege that the investigation into possible collusion was a ‘witch hunt’ or a “hoax” as the president has repeatedly asserted, in the remaining three months before the elections.
The Republican-controlled Senate committee said it was hampered in its search for the truth by the fact that Kilimnik and Manafort were keeping their communications secret. They used burner phones, encrypted chat services, and frequently changed email accounts. They also sent a message via a shared draft email.
The committee dismisses the case of former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, who alleged that the Kremlin has cultivated Donald Trump for at least five years, but stops before giving an opinion on the veracity of the allegations it contains. This file contained an allegation 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 vigorously denies this claim.
However, the Senate report offers the most compelling account to date of what happened inside the hotel. He alleges 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 the rooms. The officer’s agency has been redacted, but it is probably the FSB, the spy agency run by Vladimir Putin, in charge of counterintelligence.
The report states: “The committee found that the Ritz Carlton in Moscow is a high risk counterintelligence environment. The committee believes that the hotel likely has at least one permanent Russian intelligence agent on staff, government surveillance of guest rooms and the regular presence of large numbers of prostitutes, likely with at least the tacit approval of authorities. Russian.
He adds: “According to two former employees of the Ritz Carlton in Moscow, in 2013 there was at least one [redacted] officer permanently stationed at the hotel. This officer without a uniform was believed to be a [redacted] and had access to the hotel’s property management system, guest portfolios and ratings, as well as the hotel’s network of “hundreds” of security cameras.
“The [redacted] was supposed to be able to monitor camera feeds from his office. “
The committee, which spent three years gathering evidence for its report, also looked at Trump’s previous trips to Russia. He says that during a visit in 1996, Trump attended a party for a group of American investors at the Baltschug Kempinski Hotel. The party was hosted by David Geovanis, a Moscow-based businessman who the report says has ties to Russian security services.
The report notes: “In some circles of the expatriate American business community in Moscow, it is common for visiting businessmen to be taken to nightclubs or parties where prostitutes are present. Russian security or intelligence services are likely to take advantage of these opportunities to collect information.
“During the 1990s and 2000s, David Geovanis built a reputation in Moscow, in part as a host of visiting business people.”
He goes on to say that Trump “may have started a brief relationship with a Russian woman” whom he met at the Geovanis party. His name is withheld. One source of information is Theodore Liebman, an architect who lived in Moscow and New York in the 1990s and who traveled to Russia with Trump to attend the event. Geovanis has spoken to reporters and is reluctant to travel to the United States, the committee notes.
He describes the Russian government’s comprehensive operation in favor of Trump in 2016 as “aggressive and multifaceted.” The language echoes that of Mueller, who called Moscow’s interference “radical and systematic.” But in many places the committee is more damning, suggesting a high level of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian intermediaries.
The report states that Trump’s close friend Roger Stone was working closely with WikiLeaks in the summer of 2016. This suggests that Stone was briefing Trump in real time and that the Trump campaign was shaping his messages before WikiLeaks published it. Democratic emails stolen from Moscow by GRU state hackers.
He says: “Trump and senior campaign officials have sought advance information on planned WikiLeaks releases through Roger Stone. Under their leadership, Stone took steps to gain insider knowledge about the campaign and shared his alleged knowledge directly with Trump and senior campaign officials on several occasions.
Trump believed Stone was obtaining “inside information” from WikiLeaks, the committee said, adding that it was unable to establish whether this was indeed the case. He also said it was “implausible” that Trump’s foreign policy aide George Papadopoulos – who learned of the hack in April 2016 – failed to pass this information on to the Trump campaign.
Scott Horton, a professor at Columbia Law School, said Tuesday that the Senate committee report “confirms almost everything” about Trump’s ties to Moscow. He said this confirmed claims by Democrats and others that the campaign had indeed colluded with the Russians – something Trump has vehemently denied.
“The committee offers a much deeper insight into the intelligence gathered by US authorities than does the much more summary Mueller report. This will support the view that Mueller, far from exonerating Trump, simply expected to hand over to Congress for further investigation.
Manafort was convicted in 2018 and 2019 on several counts of money laundering and bank and tax fraud, as well as obstruction of justice. The charges related to his lobbying work in Ukraine. In May, he was released from prison, where he was serving a 90-month sentence, due to the risk of contracting Covid-19.
In February, a court sentenced Stone to 40 months in prison for lying to investigators and tampering with witnesses – only to have Trump commute his sentence in July, days before he appeared in jail.
A new poll released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center found that 75% of Americans now expect Russian or foreign interference in the November election, and a declining percentage (47% from 55% two years ago) is convinced that the administration will make “serious efforts” to protect the election against hacking and other external threats.
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