I have been holding off for a calm news day to examine exactly what the fifth volume of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan report on Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election said, and why it is important. The report came out on August 18 and, in the storm of other news, has gotten less attention than it should have.
While Special Counsel Robert Mueller marshaled a team to look into potential crimes committed by members of the Trump campaign and by Russian actors in the 2016 election, the Senate Intelligence Committee also conducted an investigation. The Senate committee was not limited, as Mueller was, by a directive from the acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. It looked more widely at the contacts between members of the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives. Because Republicans control the Senate, the Senate Intelligence Committee is chaired by a Republican, first by Richard Burr (R-NC) and then, after Burr stepped down under allegations of insider trading, by Marco Rubio (R-FL).
The first volume of the committee’s report established that Russians successfully breached U.S. election systems in 2016. According to the Intelligence Community, “Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple U.S. state or local electoral boards,” but the Department of Homeland Security “assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.” Interestingly, the section on Russian attacks on voting machines is almost entirely redacted.
The second volume explained that Russian operatives “sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton's chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.” It concluded that “in 2016, Russian operatives… used social media to conduct an information warfare campaign designed to spread disinformation and societal division in the United States. Masquerading as Americans, these operatives used targeted advertisements, intentionally falsified news articles, self-generated content, and social media platform tools to interact with and attempt to deceive tens of millions of social media users in the United States. This campaign sought to polarize Americans on the basis of societal, ideological, and racial differences, provoked real world events, and was part of a foreign government's covert support of Russia's favored candidate in the U.S. presidential election.”
The third volume examined how the U.S. government responded to the Russian attacks. The fourth reviewed and defended the methods and findings of the Intelligence Community.
And, on August 18, the committee released the fifth volume. The committee reviewed about a million documents and interviewed more than 200 witnesses. Its 966 pages establish extensive connections between Russian operatives and Trump campaign officials in 2016.
They established that Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort worked closely during the campaign with his longtime business associate in Ukraine, Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the report identifies as a “Russian intelligence officer.”
This means that, according to Republicans—as well as the Democrats on the committee—in 2016, Trump’s campaign manager was actively working with a Russian intelligence officer.
Paul Manafort’s backstory matters.
Manafort cut his political teeth in Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign, along with his friend Roger Stone, whom he had met in the Young Republicans organization, a social and political network of young professionals. Manafort worked for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George H. W. Bush in 1988. In 1980, he and Roger Stone were two of the three principals who formed a lobbying firm in Washington, D.C., that brought under one roof lobbying and political consulting as well as public relations. Bundling these functions was groundbreaking: they would get their clients elected, and then help clients lobby them. One of their first clients was a friend of Stone’s: Donald J. Trump.
Quickly, Manafort began to look to foreign countries for his clients. He took advantage of the anti-communist focus of foreign policy after Reagan, cleaning up shady clients to look good enough to U.S. lawmakers that they could get U.S. dollars to shore up their political interests. Touting his connections to the Reagan and Bush administrations, Manafort racked up clients. He backed so many dictatorial governments—Nigeria, Kenya, Zaire, Equatorial Guinea, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia, among others—that a 1992 report from the Center for Public Integrity called his firm “The Torturers’ Lobby.”
In 1995, Manafort started his own firm and, a decade later, he began working for a young Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, who was eager to prove useful to Vladimir Putin. At the time, Putin was trying to consolidate power in Russia, where oligarchs were rising to replace the region’s communist leaders and were monopolizing formerly publicly held industries. In 2004, American journalist Paul Klebnikov, the chief editor of Forbes in Russia, was murdered as he tried to call attention to what the oligarchs were doing.
In 1991, Ukraine had declared its independence from the USSR, and threats of Ukrainian freedom soon worried Deripaska, who had business interests there. In 2004, it appeared at first that a Russian-backed politician, Viktor Yanukovych, was elected president of Ukraine. But Yanukovych was rumored to have ties to organized crime, and the election was so full of fraud—including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe—the government voided the election and called for a do-over. Yanukovych needed a makeover fast, and for that he called on a political consultant with a reputation for making unsavory characters palatable to the media: Deripaska’s friend Paul Manafort.
For ten years, from 2004 to 2014, Manafort worked for Yanukovych and his party, trying to make what the U.S. State Department called a party of “mobsters and oligarchs” look legitimate. He made a fortune thanks to his new friends, especially Deripaska. In 2010, Yanukovych finally won the presidency on a platform of rejecting NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization through which Europe joined together to oppose first the USSR, and then the rising threat of Russia. Immediately, Yanukovych turned Ukraine toward Russia. In 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in what is known as the Revolution of Dignity. Yanukovych fled to Russia.
Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia itself and also on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in United States territories. These sanctions crippled Russia and froze the assets of key Russian oligarchs.
Now without his main source of income, Manafort owed about $17 million to Deripaska. By 2016, his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone was advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, and Manafort was happy to step in to help remake it. He did not take a salary, but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking him “How do we use to get whole? Has OVD [Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska] operation seen?”
Manafort began as a campaign advisor in March 2016, and became the chairman in late June, after the June 9 meeting between Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and Manafort with a number of people, including a Russian lawyer associated with Putin’s intelligence services, in Trump Tower. (Remember that Trump tried to explain away that meeting as being about “adoptions,” because the Russian response to sanctions was to shut down American adoptions of Russian children.)
The fifth volume of the Senate Intelligence Report establishes that Kilimnik is a “Russian intelligence officer,” and that he acted as a liaison between Manafort and Deripaska while Manafort ran Trump’s campaign. On several occasions, Manafort passed the campaign’s sensitive internal polling data to Kilimnik, although because their communications were encrypted, the committee could not determine what became of the information. (Such polling might well dovetail with the information in volume 2.)
The report says Kilimnik may have been directly involved in hacking Democratic National Committee emails and handing the stolen files to WikiLeaks. The committee also found “significant evidence” that WikiLeaks was “knowingly collaborating with Russian government officials.” The report also establishes that Trump repeatedly discussed the WikiLeaks document dumps with operative Roger Stone, then lied about those discussions with investigators.
The report says Manafort lied consistently about his interactions with Kilimnik, and has chosen to go to jail rather than change his story. It also notes that it is Kilimnik who launched the story that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the U.S. election.
According to the report: "Taken as a whole, Manafort's high level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik and associates of Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave counterintelligence threat."
The report also established that the White House “significantly hampered” the investigation.
The Manafort story is only one of the issues covered in Volume 5.
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Notes:
Rosenstein limited Mueller: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/us/politics/trump-russia-justice-department.html
Overview: https://www.lawfareblog.com/collusion-reading-diary-what-did-senate-intelligence-committee-find
Yanukovych: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/what-did-ex-trump-aide-paul-manafort-really-do-ukraine-n775431
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/politics/paul-manafort-roger-stone/
Manafort: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/10/30/paul-manafort-what-we-know-he-did-and-why-he-might-have-been-ensnared-by-the-investigation/
https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/29/politics/russian-former-spy-paul-manafort-trump-campaign/index.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/11/roger-stones-long-history-in-trump-world/581293/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/paul-manafort-american-hustler/550925/
Black ledger: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/21/why-is-rudy-giuliani-trying-drag-my-countrys-president-into-trumps-reelection-campaign/
Russia: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/senate-intelligence-trump-russia-report/2020/08/18/62a7573e-e093-11ea-b69b-64f7b0477ed4_story.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/08/19/yes-there-was-collusion/
https://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/81820
volume 5: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/senate-russia-report-proves-trump-was-wrong-mueller-was-right-ncna1237743
https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/512613-five-takeaways-from-final-senate-intel-russia-report
Senate Report:
Vol 1: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume1.pdf
Vol 2: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume2.pdf
Vol 3; https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume3.pdf
Vol 4: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume4.pdf
Vol 5: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/report_volume5.pdf
Michael Cohen: Trump would ‘manipulate ballots’ to stay in office
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump is an authoritarian, racist sexual predator, according to a new book by his former lawyer and confidant, who says Trump admires ruthless dictators and openly mocks the working-class Americans he has duped into supporting him.
In "Disloyal: A Memoir," the lawyer, Michael Cohen , writes that he believes his longtime client won't leave office willingly if he is defeated in the November election.
While Cohen's book is filled with such stark warnings , he doesn't offer any major new revelations about alleged Russia ties, sexual assaults or racism. He said he doesn't know whether Russia has financial leverage over Trump, has never heard Trump use the N-word and isn't in a position to know for sure whether the sexual assault allegations against Trump are true or false.
Cohen, who served prison time for lying to Congress and doesn't expect readers to like him, paints a more subtle portrait of moral decrepitude.
White House spokesman Brian Morgenstern responded in a statement to NBC News: "Michael Cohen's book is fan fiction. He readily admits to lying routinely but expects people to believe him now so that he can make money from book sales. It's unfortunate that the media is exploiting this sad and desperate man to attack President Trump."
Cohen said Trump praised Russian President Vladimir Putin during the 2016 campaign because he assumed he would lose and wanted to make sure he could borrow money from Russian sources for his real estate empire.
IMAGE: Donald Trump and Michael Cohen (Jonathan Ernst / Reuters file) As previously detailed in court records, Trump also had dispatched Cohen to try to build a Trump Tower Moscow, a 120-story building in Red Square with a free penthouse apartment for Putin.
"The whole idea of patriotism and treason became irrelevant in his mind," Cohen writes. "Trump was using the campaign to make money for himself: of course he was."
It wasn't a new concept, Cohen writes. When a Russian oligarch bought Trump's mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, in 2008 for nearly double what Trump paid for it — a $50 million profit — Trump believed Putin was secretly funding the deal, Cohen writes.
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As he told Congress, Cohen says he was present when Trump discussed a WikiLeaks dump of hacked Democratic emails before their release, and he says he heard Trump talking with his son about hosting Russians in Trump Tower before the notorious June 2016 meeting. Trump told special counsel Robert Mueller that he didn't recall discussing either subject.
Cohen says the Trump campaign didn't need to conspire with the Russian election interference effort. All the candidate had to do was sit back and reap the benefits. The fact that the help came from a foreign adversary was of no consequence to him, Cohen says.
"What appeared to be collusion," Cohen writes, "was really a confluence of shared interests in harming Hillary Clinton in any way possible, up to and including interfering in the American election — a subject that caused Trump precisely zero unease."
With Putin, it wasn't just self-interest — Trump genuinely admires the Russian leader, Cohen says.
Trump worships wealth and power, Cohen writes.
"Everyone other than the ruling class on earth was like an ant, to his way of thinking, their lives meaningless and always subject to the whims of the true rulers of the world," he writes.
"The cosmic joke was that Trump convinced a vast swath of working-class white folks in the Midwest that he cared about their well-being. The truth was that he couldn't care less."
Cohen writes in detail about the episode that helped land him in prison — his role in paying off the porn star known as Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election to cover up allegations of an affair with Trump. Trump has denied the allegations of an affair.
But his role in silencing women goes back to 2007, when he first joined the Trump Organization, Cohen writes, and National Enquirer executive David Pecker called to ask him to handle a sexual assault allegation by Jill Harth, a makeup artist.
"It's not about the truth. ... Mr. Trump told me to call you, that you and I will work together and handle these problems together," Cohen quotes Pecker as saying.
Harth's ex-husband alleged that Trump lunged at Harth at Mar-a-Lago, Trump's resort in Florida, in the early 1990s, "trying to force himself on her, pushing her into Ivanka's bed and grabbing her genitals," Cohen recounts.
The ex-husband was looking to sell the story to the National Enquirer, and Pecker got wind of it and called Trump "to conspire to cover it up or catch and kill," Cohen says.
The allegation resurfaced when Trump ran for president, and Cohen quotes Trump as saying, "She was really great looking back then."
Cohen writes that he has no doubt that Trump "stuck his hands between her legs and groped her," as Trump once bragged on tape of doing to women in general.
Trump assistant Rhona Graff "kept a file cabinet filled with files on women who had alleged that Trump assaulted them," Cohen writes.
Trump has denied sexually assaulting women.
When Cohen's daughter was 15, he writes, Trump saw her finishing up a tennis lesson.
"Look at that piece of a--," Trump said, according to Cohen. "I would love some of that."
When Cohen told Trump she was his daughter, he played it off, Cohen writes.
"You better watch out because in a few years I'll be dating one of your friends," Cohen quotes Trump as telling the 15-year-old girl.
Skyhorse Publishing via AP (Skyhorse Publishing via AP) Throughout the book, Cohen expresses regret for his complicity in all this behavior, portraying himself as a deluded member of a Trump cult. He also acknowledges that many people won't view him as credible, although he points out that Mueller's office believed and used his testimony.
In an exclusive interview "NBC Nightly News" anchor Lester Holt, Cohen said: "Donald Trump will do anything and everything ... to win. And I believe that includes manipulating the ballots."
Trump already has invited foreign interference in the fall election, Cohen said, echoing the impeachment charge made by House Democrats about the president's request that Ukraine investigate his opponent, as well as the words of former national security adviser John Bolton, who says Trump asked the Chinese leader to help him win.
"I believe that he would even go so far as to start a war in order to prevent himself from being removed from office," said Cohen, who began working for Trump in late 2006 and once said he would take a bullet for his boss. "My biggest fear is that there will not be a peaceful transition of power