US Senate report goes beyond Mueller to lay bare Trump campaign's Russia links

 

US Senate report goes beyond Mueller to lay bare Trump campaign's Russia links

 

Bipartisan intelligence panel says that Russian who worked on Trump’s 2016 bid was career spy, amid a stunning range of contacts

 

Luke Harding and Julian Borger

Tue 18 Aug 2020 20.27 BSTFirst published on Tue 18 Aug 2020 20.00 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/18/donald-trump-us-senate-report-russia-campaign

 

A report by the Senate intelligence committee provides a treasure trove of new details about Donald Trump’s relationship with Moscow, and says that a Russian national who worked closely with Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 was a career intelligence officer.

 

The bipartisan report runs to nearly 1,000 pages and goes further than last year’s investigation into Russian election interference by special prosecutor Robert Mueller. It lays out a stunning web of contacts between Trump, his top election aides 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 2018 poisoning of the Russian double agent Sergei Skripal. It cites evidence – some of it redacted – linking Kilimnik to the GRU’s hacking and dumping of Democratic party emails.

 

Kilimnik worked for over a decade in Ukraine with Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager. In 2016 Manafort met with Kilimnik, discussed how Trump might beat Hillary Clinton, and gave the Russian spy internal polling data. The committee said it couldn’t “reliably determine” why Manafort handed over this information, or what exactly Kilimnik did with it.

 

It describes Manafort’s willingness to pass on confidential material to alleged Moscow agents as a “grave counterintelligence threat”. The report dubs Kilimnik part of “a cadre of individuals ostensibly operating outside of the Russian government but who nonetheless implement Kremlin-directed influence operations”. It adds that key oligarchs including Oleg Deripaska fund these operations, together with the Kremlin.

 

The investigation found that Kilimnik tweets under the pseudonym Petro Baranenko (@PBaranenko). The account regularly propagates Moscow’s line on international issues, such as the conflict in Ukraine and the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17.

 

The fact that a Republican-controlled Senate panel established a direct connection 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 “hoax” as the president has repeatedly claimed, in the remaining three months before the election.

 

The Republican-controlled Senate panel said it was hampered in its search for the truth by the fact that Kilimnik and Manafort kept their communications secret. They used burner phones, encrypted chat services, and frequently changed email accounts. They also messaged via a shared email draft.

 

The committee is dismissive of the dossier by the ex-MI6 officer Christopher Steele, which alleged that the Kremlin had been cultivating Donald Trump for at least five years, but stops short of offering an opinion on whether the allegations within it are true. That dossier 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 strenuously denies the claim.

 

However, the Senate report offers the most compelling account yet of what went on inside the hotel. It alleges that a suspected Russian intelligence officer is stationed permanently in the building and presides over a “network” of security cameras, some of them hidden inside guest rooms. The officer’s agency is redacted, but is likely to be the FSB, the spy agency Vladimir Putin headed, in charge of counter-intelligence.

 

The report says: “The committee found that the Ritz Carlton in Moscow is a high counterintelligence risk environment. The committee assesses that the hotel likely has at least one permanent Russian intelligence officer on staff, government surveillance of guests’ rooms, and the regular presence of a large number of prostitutes, likely with at least the tacit approval of Russian authorities.

 

It 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 non-uniformed officer was believed to be a [redacted] and had access to the hotel’s property management system, guest portfolios and notations, as well as the network of “hundreds” of security cameras at the hotel.

 

“The [redacted] was believed to be able to monitor the camera feeds from his office.”

 

The committee, which spent three years taking evidence for its report, also examined previous trips by Trump to Russia. It says that during a 1996 visit, Trump attended a party for a group of American investors at the Baltschug Kempinski hotel. The party was arranged by David Geovanis, a Moscow-based businessman who the report says has links to the Russian security services.

 

The report notes: “In some circles of the US expatriate business community in Moscow, it has been common for visiting businessmen to be taken to nightclubs or parties where prostitutes are present. It is likely that Russian security or intelligence services capitalize on those opportunities to collect information.

 

“During the 1990s and into the 2000s, David Geovanis developed a reputation in Moscow, in part as a host for visiting businessmen.”

 

It goes on to say that Trump “may have begun a brief relationship with a Russian woman” he met at the Geovanis party. Her name is blacked out. One source of the information is Theodore Liebman, an architect who lived in Moscow and New York in the 1990s, and who travelled to Russia with Trump to the event. Geovanis has spoken to journalists and is reluctant to visit the US, the committee notes.

 

It describes the Russian government’s overall operation in support of Trump in 2016 as “aggressive and multi-faceted”. The language echoes that of Mueller, who called Moscow’s meddling “sweeping 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 says that Trump’s close friend Roger Stone was working closely with WikiLeaks in summer 2016. It suggests Stone was briefing Trump in real time, and that the Trump campaign was shaping its messages ahead of releases by WikiLeaks of Democratic emails stolen in Moscow by GRU state hackers.

 

It says: “Trump and senior campaign officials sought to obtain advance information about WikiLeaks’s planned releases through Roger Stone. At their direction, Stone took action to gain inside knowledge for the campaign and shared his purported knowledge directly with Trump and senior campaign officials on multiple occasions.”

 

Trump believed Stone was getting “inside information” from WikiLeaks, the committee said, adding that it wasn’t able to establish if this was indeed the case. It also said it was “implausible” that Trump’s foreign policy aide George Papadopoulos – who learned of the hack in April 2016 – did not pass this information on to the Trump campaign.

 

Scott Horton, a lecturer at Columbia law school, said on Tuesday the Senate committee’s report “confirms nearly everything” about Trump’s ties to Moscow. He said it vindicated claims by the Democrats and others that the campaign had indeed colluded with the Russians – something Trump has vehemently denied.

 

“The committee offers a much deeper view into the intelligence collected by US authorities than does the much sketchier Mueller report. It will support the view that Mueller, far from exonerating Trump, simply expected to pass the baton to Congress to conduct deeper inquiries.”

 

Manafort was convicted in 2018 and 2019 of multiple 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 allowed out of jail, where he was serving a 90-month sentence, because of the risk of contracting Covid-19.

 

In February a court sentenced Stone to 40 months in prison for lying to investigators and witness tampering – only for Trump to commute his sentence in July, days before he was due to report to prison.

 

A new poll published by the Pew Research Center on Tuesday found that 75% of Americans now expect Russian or other foreign interference in the November election, and a diminishing percentage (47% compared with 55% two years ago) are confident the administration will make “serious efforts” to protect the election from hacking and other external threats.