In August 2016, Senate minority leader Harry Reid wrote to FBI director James Comey and demanded an investigation of the “connections between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.” This created a bit of a mystery. Yet to anyone paying attention, there was a Trump-Russia story to be had-and it seemed important. These serious Trump-Russia interactions were not publicly known. presidential election campaign, Kilimnik provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy.” It also stated that the committee had “two pieces of information” that “raise the possibility” that Manafort himself was tied “to the hack-and-leak operations.” The report concluded: “Kilimnik likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services.” In April 2021, the Treasury Department went further and stated, “During the 2016 U.S. That report noted that Kilimnik possibly was connected to Putin’s hack-and-leak operation that was being waged to bolster Trump. Manafort passed internal campaign polling data to the oligarchs and Kilimnik. During the campaign, Manafort was in secret contact with Russian and pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarchs and with a former business partner named Konstantin Kilimnik, who was identified in a 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report (approved by the Republicans and Democrats on the committee) as a Russian intelligence officer.But this secret meeting signaled to the Trump campaign that Moscow was aiming to help Trump on the down-low, and it signaled to the Kremlin that the Trump camp did not object to Moscow’s clandestine intervention in the election. The Trumpers later claimed her information was not significant. As part of that effort, a Russian operative supposedly bearing dirt on Clinton was soon sent to Trump Tower, where Trump Jr., campaign chief Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner met with her. had been informed in early June that the Kremlin wanted to covertly help the Trump campaign. Trump had been secretly pursuing a tower deal in Moscow that could have earned him hundreds of millions of dollars, and the Trump Organization (via Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer) had privately asked Putin’s office for help in securing the deal.Here’s some of what was kept from the public at the time: They were simultaneously denying the obvious and, as we later learned, hiding what they knew. (Russian hackers hours later tried to break into the servers used by Clinton’s personal office.) Roger Stone, a Trump confidante who claimed to have a backchannel to WikiLeaks, insisted that the paper-thin cover story put out by the Russians-a Romanian hacker was the culprit-was accurate. Despite the consensus among cybersecurity specialists that the Kremlin was behind these attacks on America’s election, Trump and his top aides stridently denied any Moscow involvement-even as Trump himself publicly encouraged Russian hackers to target Clinton. Other dumps designed to undermine Democrats followed in subsequent weeks. Weeks later-at the start of the Democratic convention in Philadelphia-WikiLeaks dumped documents that had been swiped by the Russian cyber-thieves.Ĭlearly, this was a move by Moscow to harm Hillary Clinton’s campaign. ![]() And in June 2016, the news broke that Russian hackers had penetrated the computers of the Democratic National Committee. He often spoke positively-even effusively-about the repressive Russian leader. ![]() During the 2016 campaign, Trump’s relationship with Putin and Russia was a key question. ![]() ![]() The Steele dossier-and how it was covered by media outlets-is but a sideshow to the main event: how the Kremlin clandestinely attacked the 2016 election to help Trump become president and how Trump and his crew aided and abetted that assault on American democracy. In fact, it’s a distraction and a deflection. But the controversy over these documents is distinct from the dark and troubling core of the Trump-Russia affair. (I’ve been assailed for having been the first journalist to reveal their existence-more on that shortly). They have blasted the media for its reporting on Steele’s memos and claimed that this further undermining of his reports demonstrates the Russia scandal was a hoax.Ĭertainly, the credibility of Steele’s memos has been, once more, severely impugned. With the recent indictment of Igor Danchenko, the primary source for former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele’s 2016 dossier that alleged ties between Donald Trump and Moscow, the Trump-Russia denialists have had a field day. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.
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