Following up on my column about the SSCI Russia report this morning, I thought I would excerpt this part of Franklin Foer’s article on the same topic. (He is something of a Manafort whisperer.) He focuses on the failure of the Mueller investigation:
When Mueller’s prosecutors appeared in court, in February 2019, they implied that the most troubling evidence they had uncovered implicated Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman. This wasn’t a surprising admission. Throughout their filings, Mueller’s team referred to Manafort’s Kyiv-based aide-de-camp, Konstantin Kilimnik, as an active Russian agent. Manafort had clearly spoken with Kilimnik during the campaign, and had even passed confidential campaign information to him, with the understanding that the documents would ultimately arrive in the hands of oligarchs close to the Kremlin.
One of the great disappointments of the Mueller Report is that it fails to provide narrative closure after building so much anticipation for the Kilimnik story line. Mueller did not fully explain why Manafort’s relationship with his Ukraine-based adviser so bothered his prosecutors. Why had Manafort passed along the documents? And what did the oligarchs want with them?
The committee fills in the gaps somewhat. It reports that Manafort and Kilimnik talked almost daily during the campaign. They communicated through encrypted technologies set to automatically erase their correspondence; they spoke using code words and shared access to an email account. It’s worth pausing on these facts: The chairman of the Trump campaign was in daily contact with a Russian agent, constantly sharing confidential information with him. That alone makes for one of the worst scandals in American political history.
The significant revelation of the document is that Kilimnik was likely a participant in the Kremlin scheme to hack and leak Clinton campaign emails. Furthermore, Kilimnik kept in close contact with the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a former client of Manafort’s. The report also indicates that Deripaska was connected to his government’s hacking efforts. This fact is especially suggestive: Deripaska had accused Manafort of stealing money from him, and Manafort hoped to repair his relationship with the oligarch. Was Manafort passing information to him, through Kilimnik, for the sake of currying favor with an old patron?
As maddeningly elliptical as this section of the report may be—and much of it is redacted—it still makes one wonder why Mueller would cut a deal with an established prevaricator like Manafort before pursuing his investigation of Kilimnik to more concrete conclusions.
When Manafort—with a pardon dangling in front of him—brazenly lied to prosecutors, he helped save Trump from having to confront this damning story. He wasn’t the only Trump associate to obstruct justice. (The committee has referred five Trump aides and supporters to the Justice Department for possibly providing false testimony.) By undermining investigators, Trump’s cronies rendered Mueller’s report a hash lacking a firm conclusion. They helped detonate the charge of collusion, letting it fizzle well ahead of the 2020 election.
Just to reiterate: Trump’s campaign chairman was working hand in glove with a Russian agent who was involved with the Russian interference plot, giving him campaign details, including polling data. The only possible reason for that was to help them with targeting. If that’s not collusion then nothing is. And yet Bill Barr is actually out there saying the FBI had no good reason to investigate! It’s insane.
Mueller’s team apparently didn’t know about some of this:
Andrew Weissmann, one of the lead prosecutors on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team and the architect of the case against Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, said there is “definitely new information” in the final volume of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on 2016 Russian interference released Tuesday.
It underscores the degree to which the 996-page report goes further than the Mueller investigation in some of its findings, as well as the explosive nature of some of the revelations about Manafort and other top Trump campaign officials.
The bipartisan Senate report describes Manafort’s right-hand man Konstantin Kilimnik as a Russian intelligence officer. “That is much further than he was described publicly by the special counsel’s office,” Weissmann points out.
The committee, like Mueller, found that Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates passed sensitive internal campaign data and strategy to Kilimnik, but it could not determine with whom Kilimnik went on to share it or why he shared it.
The report also found that there was some evidence to suggest that Kilimnik was involved in the Russian operation to hack and leak Democratic emails — which Weissmann described as “substantial new information.”
Mueller obviously severely restricted the scope of the investigation, following Rod Rosenstein’s instructions to the letter and rushing to a conclusion in order not to be accused of being a fishing expedition. (I’ve always thought they were fighting the last war, worrying about what the Starr investigation turned into.) They were accused of being a partisan witch hunt and a hoax anyway, so I don’t know what that bought them. When Bill Barr took over, they were done.
In the end the sad truth is that the Mueller investigation actually became part of the cover-up.
And so is every Republican who had access to this information and failed to convict Trump when they had the chance. They knew what he was. And they knew he did it all over again with Ukraine. And they backed him to the hilt.