The Washington Post is out with a piece that names names in one of Trump Campaign/Russian connections…..
There will be more of this as the American Intelligence community does not have to be afraid of retribution from their President for reporting the doing’s of Trump people….
The name Paul Manafort is in this one….
And Robert Mueller’s people knew this….
So did the Trump admin people….
President Biden drops the other shoe on this in Russian sanctions for now….
On Thursday, the Treasury Department unveiled new sanctions against the Russian government linked to its apparent hack of U.S. government networks. But the news release also included a statement clearly answering our second question above.
“During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, Kilimnik provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy. Additionally, Kilimnik sought to promote the narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” the statement read.
“Kilimnik has also sought to assist designated former President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych. At Yanukovych’s direction, Kilimnik sought to institute a plan that would return Yanukovych to power in Ukraine,” it read.
Yanukovych was a member of the pro-Russian party for which Manafort had worked, the Party of Regions.
That one sentence, though, appears to finally complete the long-speculated line from Trump’s campaign to Russian intelligence. It goes like this, according to the aggregated information compiled by various parts of the government:
- Trump hires
- Manafort to run his campaign. Manafort then orders
- Gates, his deputy, to provide polling and strategy information to
- Kilimnik, their longtime colleague and, according to the Senate committee, a Russian intelligence officer. Kilimnik then shares that information with
- Russian intelligence agents.
It’s important to note that there is 1) no evidence at this point that Trump knew about the sharing of that information or 2) that Russia did much with the information it obtained. There were targeted ads from Russian actors during the campaign, but there remains no good evidence that those ads were targeted with insider information (much less well-targeted in general) nor that they had much of an effect.
What is instead revealed is that the government’s concern about the Trump campaign’s links to Russia — links that extended to other members of Trump’s team — was in this case probably warranted…