The nearly 1,000-page Senate report released Thursday morning shows new key points on Russian interference in the 2016 election, going further, and in open contradiction, the findings of the Mueller report.
The Senate Intelligence Committee released the report on Russian interference and allegations of links between The Trump Crusade and the Kremlin after 4 years of Republican paintings to investigate the issue.
The report is full of new revelations overlooking a serious infiltration of the Russian government in the ranks of Trump’s crusade, and even calling Trump’s Crusade President Paul Manafort a “serious threat of counter-espionage.”
The panel’s investigators, however, faced a much smaller evidence point than Mueller’s lawyers. Instead of applying the popular hack of evidence – “beyond a moderate doubt” – lawmakers “tried to report in detail on the applicable occasions and included conflicting data that the Committee may not reliably resolve.”
In particular, the bipartisan committee only supported many of Mueller’s findings, but went further in some of his findings and included important new points about trump’s crusader members and their associates.
Senate committee evidence was based on evidence provided by federal investigators. However, the Senate panel was more direct about the content of the investigation and how it fits into the broader conclusions of Russia’s 2016 campaign of influence.
Here is a look at the most complete, and most confusing, image of the Senate painted with its probe:
Throughout Mueller’s investigation, a mystery surrounded a close collaborator of Paul Manafort: Konstantin Kilimnik, the Russian political representative who gained knowledge of internal polls of Trump’s Crusade in Manafort.
Mueller investigated Kilimnik and even charged him in 2018 with fees for falsified witnesses. But he never publicly disclosed Manafort’s long-standing partnership with the Russian government, and only said he is a user “that the FBI believes has links to Russian intelligence.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee led by the Government of Panama went much further. “The Committee that Konstantin Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer,” the report says.
Senate investigators knew Kilimnik as “part of an organization of Americans operating outdoors by the Russian government but still implementing Kremlin-led influence operations.”
The investigation bases its conclusion on “electronic communications, interviews, police information” and redacted evidence.
The Senate suggests that Mueller misunderstood at least one key detail about Kilimnik in his 2019 report.
Kilimnik began pursuing Americans in the 1990s in the Moscow office, the International Republican Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit that pushes for liberalizing reforms abroad.
Mueller wrote that Kilimnik joined the IRI in 1998. But Senate investigators said the report had a “false” date. Instead, Kilimnik joined the IRI in 1995, the same year he ceased to be a lieutenant in the Russian army.
For Kilimnik, a linguist trained at the GRU Language Academy, this meant that it was a matter of months, not years, between his departure from the Russian army and his arrival at a Western expert group.
Mueller’s report noted that two Republican agents with which Kilimnik had businesses, Rick Gates and Sam Patten, did not think Kilimnik was a spy. But the Senate report suggests that Kilimnik idiotized them, claiming that the Russian citizen “intentionally minimized and misrepresented, privately adding to his affiliates such as Patten, the profile of Russian intelligence agents and their relationship with them to distance himself from those accusations. Matrix »
And while Mueller’s report suggests that Kilimnik was almost a passive player, who regularly gained knowledge of the Trump Crusade polls in 2016 and then passed it on, the Senate report offers a darker read of the situation.
The Senate report describes Kilimnik as a “Kremlin agent,” who actively infiltrates and engages the American political agents he has screwed up with.
Kilimnik, the Senate suggests, asked for knowledge of The Manafort polls. The two men discussed the knowledge and briefings, lawmakers said, as a way to pay off the debts of a Russian oligarch while pointing to the price of data as a way to catch The Ukrainian oligarchs of Manafort to pay it off.
Gates said the committee recalled that Kilimnik paralyzed Manafort with questions about the survey’s knowledge at a meeting in August 2016. Kilimnik, at that time, already served as a data channel for the former Soviet Union.
The Senate has followed a much darker view of Manafort and his intentions than Mueller, even rebuking Trump’s crusade for not examining the GOP political consultant for a long time.
Manafort, the Senate suggests, joined Trump’s crusade to pay off his debts to oligarchs in the former Soviet Union.
But where the Senate report is headed is through reaching a conclusion about Manafort and Kilimnik’s ties to the other side of Russian interference in the 2016 election: the GRU’s effort to hack into Clinton’s crusade and spread stolen WikiLeaks emails.
Mueller wrote that he can draw any conclusion about the wisdom of Kilimnik or Manafort from parallel effort. However, the Senate uncovered “fragmentary” evidence suggesting that Kilimnik acted as a “channel” for the GRU, and that two redacted evidence indicates that Manafort has a “potential link” to the GRU campaign.
Mueller’s report also took Manafort’s word saying no. Kilimnik was a spy, categorically stating that “Manafort told the Office no. Kilimnik was running for a Russian ‘spy’.”
But Senate investigators presented evidence that Manafort, while running in Ukraine in 2010, pleaded with his bosses to “have Kilimnik reviewed so that they would not have to contain sensitive conversations” “in Kilimnik’s presence.”
“Without a doubt, Manafort was aware of direct joy of the suspicious facets of Kilimnik’s behavior and network,” says a footnote to the Senate report. “However, Manafort later told the [Special Council] that Kilimnik was not a spy.”
In the end, Mueller’s investigators gave no explanation as to why Manafort lied to them about Kilimnik.
But the Senate report describes it much more clearly.
His lies “effectively prevented a series of interactions and communications that constitute the maximum direct link between senior Trump crusade officials and Russian intelligence agencies.”
“Manafort’s genuine explanation is unknown why deciding to face tougher criminal sanctions than offering full answers about his interactions with Kilimnik is unknown, but the result is that many interactions between Manafort and Kilimnik remain hidden,” the report says.
Most of Roger Stone’s main points were drafted when the Mueller report was published in 2018 due to the case of ongoing offenders opposed to Stone. Once the redactions were removed, it became clear that Mueller had significant evidence that two of Trump’s claims in his written responses to Mueller were false: that Trump did not remember talking to Stone for the last five months of the crusade and that Trump had not done so. . remembers talking in his crusade about Stone’s conscience on WikiLeaks. Mueller himself alluded to the discrepancy in testimony before Congress.
But the Senate intelligence report provides many more details on why the bipartisan organization of lawmakers itself concluded with a little luck that “on several occasions” Trump had had such conversations. Lawmakers pointed to phone records supporting the accounts of crusade officials recalling Trump’s conversations with Stone that allegedly involved WikiLeaks.
Stone had told Manafort and Gates “approximately” in May that WikiLeaks planned to publish harmful data about Clinton, according to the Senate report. Several phone calls between Stone and Trump took place after that.
For example, the Senate committee released phone records from several Trump-Stone talks in June, in the days that followed “Guccifer 2.0,” an online pseudonym we now know is supported by GRU, that made the DNC hack public. Emails.
“One such call would have given Stone the opportunity to share more information about WikiLeaks directly with Trump, and given the content of his conversations with Manafort and Gates combined with Trump’s known interest in the matter, the Panel believes it does.” the Senate panel said.
Trump’s obvious phone contact with Stone continued over the summer, adding key moments in the WikiLeaks timeline. Mueller’s report had in the past presented Michael Cohen, Manafort and Gates’ stories of his memories of Trump’s discussions with Stone about WikiLeaks. Lawmakers pointed to phone records verifying accounts.
One such call was a September 29 call between Stone and Trump that had been publicly described through Gates in the past. The committee compared the account to the phone records of then-Trump’s assistant Keith Schiller, whose phone, according to the report, liked to use Trump to “hide his communications.”
Like the Mueller report, the committee mainly points to frustration within the crusade in early October because WikiLeaks had published emails that had been publicized and publicized privately.
On October 6, the same day Stone tweeted a prediction of more Clinton-related document dumps, Stone had a six-minute phone call with Schiller’s number. The record of this call was not public in the past, similar telephone recordings played a leading role in Stone’s trial. The panel concluded that the call was “almost certainly” with Trump, the substance “not known” by the committee.
“However, at the time, Stone was focused on the prospect of an edition of WikiLeaks, the crusade was following the classified ads of WikiLeaks and Trump’s last call with Stone on September 29, also Schiller’s phone, connected to an edition of WikiLeaks,” the report says. Array “Given those facts, it’s very likely that Stone and Trump talked about WikiLeaks.”
Like Mueller, the committee struggled to analyze Jerome Corsi’s account of what happened on the day of the recording of “Access Hollywood.”
But the Senate panel revealed new main points about Corsi’s unconfirmed claims, which reported that Stone had been warned that a story about the tape was going to be produced and that Stone had asked Corsi to leak WikiLeaks to come in the emails to counteract that. WikiLeaks posted his share of John Podesta’s emails an hour after the Washington Post posted his story on a tape.
Mueller’s report recounted the special council’s review of Corsi’s allegations, which was hampered by Corsi’s contradictions in his interviews with the FBI. Like Mueller, the committee was unable to download evidence that would support Corsi’s version that Stone was encouraging the publication of WikiLeaks.
Although it was unable to determine Corsi’s conversion stories, the committee presented its accounts in more detail than Mueller. In an interview with the FBI, Corsi claimed that Stone had told him that he “wanted Podesta’s things to balance the news cycle” and that Corsi asked WikiLeaks to post those emails “immediately.”
The Senate report also developed some other details of Corsi’s account to which he referred only in Mueller’s report: that Corsi had anticipated the release of the Access Hollywood tape at a convention before the Post article was published, and that he had told the callers. succeed in and out. To Assange because the tape was a problem.
Echoing the claims made in Corsi’s book, the Senate report warned that he could have referred to a call with WorldNetDaily staff or a call with an informed corporate corsi that also included Ted Malloch, a spouse corsi had worked with in the past. sign up for WikiLeaks.
After the special defender did not discover anyone in those calls to remember Corsi’s message, the committee tried to verify the account itself.