A spy by any other name
by Tom Sullivan
Marcy Wheeler ( @emptywheel ) appeared last night on “All In with Chris Hayes” to discuss what she has teased out of the Paul Manafort sentencing memo filed by Robert Mueller and the Office of Special Counsel on Saturday.
The memo had no direct mention of conspiracy between Manafort, the Trump campaign, and Russia. While bold in its depiction of Manafort as a career criminal, details were missing about the August 2, 2016 meeting at the Havana Room in Manhattan between Manafort, Rick Gates and Konstantin Kilimnik, a Ukrainian political operative with suspected ties to Russian intelligence. Allegedly, in addition to discussing a peace deal for Ukraine and Russian sanctions relief, Manafort provided Kilimnik with detailed internal polling data that might aid an operation to manipulate American opinion via social media.
Wheeler finds clues in a footnote that suggest there is more to come. (Audio here. There is no video yet):
Wheeler: Manafort’s lawyers in their very last memo, which is probably why no one noticed this, [present] here’s the email that Manafort sent to Rick Gates saying “print this out.” So we know that that’s the exhibit. And then it says here is the pages of the data that we are all discussing … It’s at least 75 pages long. So it’s a chunk of polling data. It wasn’t just toplines or something like that.
Hayes: Which does seem material to this, right? Because as you said, this question that had been hinted at by Mueller’s lawyers in the breach conversation about going to the heart of: What are they doing in this cigar bar, on this night, meeting with this guy, during the campaign, printing out polling data and giving it to him? And the idea that Manafort’s own lawyers are copping to the fact that what they gave him was a big, hefty chunk of whatever it was.
Wheeler: And his lawyers also say … “It was so complex and so focused that I don’t understand it.” And so the judge in the case, Amy Berman Jackson, is like that’s the point, right? And so her discussions about why it was material are actually really interesting. But Mueller isn’t saying that. Mueller has been silent about what that August 2, 2016 meeting is. We know it is central to the investigation. He just isn’t going to tell us what it means.
Another footnote (redacted) referencing Exhibit 233 refers to the material (also redacted) that Manafort gave Kilimnick. The page references in the footnote, however, are not redacted, Wheeler points out: See Gov. Ex. 233, pp. 4-79. “A big, hefty chunk of whatever it was,” as Hayes put it.
Wheeler writes at emptywheel:
It’s when you couple that data with what [OSC prosecutor Andrew] Weissmann and ABJ go on to say about it that the data is more damning. As I’ve noted before, Rick Gates testified that Manafort walked Kilimnik through the data at that clandestine August 2 meeting.
And the logic of ABJ’s judgment makes clear that this sharing of poll data amounts to a link to the Russian government.
Whether Kilimnick himself is an active spy or not, Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled.
Whatever Mueller delivers to Attorney General William Barr — whether it is next week or mid-March — will not end this investigation. “This is merely the end of chapter one,” says former Illinois federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti.
More to come.