WASHINGTON – The Biden government on Thursday revealed that a business partner of Trump campaign officials provided campaign intelligence data to Russian intelligence services in 2016, the strongest evidence so far that Russian spies have infiltrated the Trump campaign.
The revelation, released in a Treasury Department document announcing new sanctions against Russia, established for the first time that private meetings and communications between the campaign officials, Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, and their business partner a was direct pipeline of the campaign to the Russian government. spies at a time when the Kremlin was making a secret attempt to sabotage the 2016 presidential election.
Previous government investigations have identified Trump’s assistant, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, as a Russian intelligence man, and the decision of Mr. Manafort to provide him with internal ballot box data was one of the mysteries that Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III was trying to unravel during his two-year investigation into Russia’s election.
“During the 2016 US presidential election campaign, Kilimnik provided the Russian intelligence services with sensitive information on ballot and campaign strategy,” the Treasury Department said in a news release. “In addition, Kilimnik tried to promote the story that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 US presidential election.”
Biden’s administration did not provide any evidence to support the assessment that the Russian intelligence services had obtained the ballot box data and campaign information. And the release sheds no light on why Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates ballot data to Mr. Kilimnik did not give, although previous government reports indicate that Mr. Manafort thought Trump information about the campaign strategy could be a valuable commodity for future business deals with Kremlin-linked oligarchs.
If you had the ballot box data, Russia could have better understood the Trump campaign strategy – including where the campaign focuses resources – at a time when the Russian government was making its own efforts to undermine Donald J. Trump’s opponent.
The new sanctions against Russia are in response to the Kremlin’s interference in the election, attempts to hijack US government agencies and companies, and other aggression against the United States.
The sanctions now make it extremely difficult for Mr. Kilimnik, who was indicted by the Department of Justice in 2018 on charges of obstruction of justice, for entering into financial transactions in which the United States may be involved.
It is unclear how long U.S. intelligence agencies have reached the conclusion about Mr. Kilimnik had. Senior officials of the Trump administration, for fear of the anger of Mr. Trump, has repeatedly tried to withhold information from the public that appears to be Trump’s affiliation with Russia or its president, Vladimir V. Putin.
Mr. Kilimnik was a longtime business partner during Manafort’s time as a political consultant in Ukraine. In 2018, prosecutors for the office of Mr. Mueller announced that Mr. Kilimnik has ‘ties with Russian intelligence’ and that Mr. Manafort instructed Mr. Gates to pass the ballot and campaign information to Mr. Kilimnik to transfer.
The Senate Intelligence Committee went further in August last year in its bipartisan report that examined the ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, and Mr. Kilimnik called a “Russian intelligence officer”.
The report contains several important editorials related to Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kilimnik, but said that Mr. Manafort’s willingness to share the information with him “represents a serious counter-intelligence threat.”
The report mentions the relationship between Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kilimnik “the most direct link between senior Trump campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services.”
The Senate report portrayed a Trump campaign with businessmen and other advisers who had little government experience and “offered attractive targets for foreign influence, creating striking counter-intelligence vulnerabilities.”
An article in the New York Times in 2017 states that during the year before the election, there were numerous interactions between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence. FBI officials disputed the report, but the Senate report and the Treasury document confirmed the article’s findings.
The allegation that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that wanted to disrupt the 2016 election was long a point of discussion in the Kremlin and an allegation by Mr. Trump that foreign actors tried to help his opponent, Hillary Clinton, rather than him.
Mr. Trump’s obsession with Ukraine’s alleged role in the election was the driving force behind a 2019 call with the Ukrainian president, which was central to the initial accusation against Trump.
Mr. Manafort was brought into the Trump campaign in March 2016, at a time when Mr. Trump largely overhauled the Republican presidential nomination.
Mr. Manafort and his longtime business partner, Mr. Gates, joined the Trump campaign after years of political consultative work in Ukraine, where they Mr. Kilimnik, a Russian army-trained linguist, met.
The two men met several times with Mr. Kilimnik met after joining the campaign, and in June 2016, Mr. Manafort became the Trump campaign chairman.
Details about the relationship of mr. Manafort with Mr. Kilimnik was unveiled in 2018 when the government Mr. Manafort prosecuted and Mr. Kilimnik was charged with obstruction of justice for trying to train potential witnesses in the investigation.
Mr. Kilimnik never came to the United States to face complaints. He is wanted by the FBI, and the bureau is offering $ 250,000 for information that could lead to his arrest.