The New Russia Sanctions Resolve a Mystery That Mueller Left Unanswered

Paul Manafort and his lawyer Kevin Downing arriving at a courthouse in May 2018. (Flickr/Victoria Pickering, https://flic.kr/p/27AraYT; CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/) On April 15, the Treasury Department answered one of the biggest questions left unresolved by the Mueller investigation—and left unanswered as well by the 2020 Senate Select Intelligence Committee report about 2016 election interference. The resolution of the mystery arrived unexpectedly, tucked inside the department’s announcement of a package of sanctions against Russia issued in response to the SolarWinds hack and the Russian government’s attempts to interfere in the 2020 election. As important as the nugget is, the Treasury Department didn’t particularly highlight it. Any reader would have to look closely and be obsessively familiar with past developments in the Mueller investigation to know what to keep an eye out for. But there it was: Under a heading labeled “Treasury Targets Known Russian Agent Konstantin Kilimnik,” the department announced that Kilimnik—whom the press release described as a “Russian and Ukrainian political consultant and known Russian Intelligence Services agent”—had, in 2016, “provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy.”  Both the Mueller report and the Senate investigation established that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had passed that sensitive information to Kilimnik—but only now, years later, has the Treasury Department unveiled what Kilimnik did with it. With President Trump no longer in office, the development has attracted less excitement than it might have during the era of constant outrages about Trump’s friendliness with the Russian government and the former president’s attempts to hamstring investigations into his willingness to accept foreign help. But the Kilimnik news is worth paying attention to. As the New York Times put it , the Treasury Department’s press release provides “the strongest evidence to date that Russian spies had penetrated the inner workings of the Trump campaign” in 2016.  That should be concerning as a historical matter. But it should be even more worrying for what it says about the future of American elections. Kilimnik was something of an eminence grise of the 2016 Russia scandal. He entered the picture through his connections with Trump’s campaign manager, Manafort, for whom he had worked during Manafort’s time consulting for the pro-Russian former president of Ukraine. Kilimnik, the Times reported in 2018, was linked to Russian intelligence—and another member of Trump’s 2016 campaign had told an associate that Kilimnik “was a former Russian Intelligence Officer with the G.R.U.,” Russia’s military intelligence agency. But Kilimnik’s true star turn came in the Mueller report itself. “[T]he FBI,” Mueller wrote, “assesses [Kilimnik] to have ties to Russian intelligence.” The report described how Kilimnik had shared with Manafort a “peace plan” for addressing the conflict in eastern Ukraine sparked by Russia’s invasion of Crimea—on terms very favorable to Russia—that Kilimnik hoped the Trump campaign would adopt. (It’s not clear whether Manafort shared the plan with anyone else on the campaign.) And most notably, Mueller wrote that Manafort had shared polling data generated by the Trump campaign with Kilimnik—meaning, essentially, that Trump’s campaign manager had shared internal information with someone who had been, and maybe still was, a Russian spy. But what did Kilimnik do with the data? On this point, the Mueller report is frustratingly vague, and its explanation is marred by a redaction for grand jury material that couldn’t be made public: The Office could not reliably determine Manafort’s purpose in sharing internal polling data with Kilimnik during the campaign period. Manafort [REDACTED] did not see a downside to sharing campaign information …. Because of questions about Manafort's credibility and our limited ability to gather evidence on what happened to the polling data after it was sent to Kilimnik, the Office could not assess what Kilimnik (or others he may have given it to) did with it. The Office did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort’s sharing polling data and Russia's interference in the election[.] The closest the report gets to answering this question is a hint that Manafort may have aimed to use the data to smooth over a bumpy relationship with a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, with whom both he and Kilimnik had worked and whom the Mueller report describes as “closely aligned with Vladimir Putin.”  The next piece of information about Kilimnik’s role arrived in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s mammoth bipartisan summer 2020 report on Russian election interference. The Senate report is far blunter than Mueller on the subject of Kilimnik’s connections to Russian intelligence, writing directly that “Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer.” And it suggests that Manafort knew, too: “Manafort … at some point harbored suspicions that Kilimnik had ties to intelligence services. Manafort was undeniably aware—often from first-hand experience—of suspicious aspects of Kilimnik’s behavior and network. Nevertheless, Manafort later asserted to [Mueller’s team] that Kilimnik was not a spy.” The Senate report provides a little more information about what the mysterious polling data might have contained. According to two Trump campaign associates, Manafort seems to have shared data with Kilimnik on “polls that identified voter bases in blue-collar, democratic-leaning states”—including Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota—“which Trump could swing,” along with data on negative public sentiment toward Trump’s 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton.  So far, so suspicious. But once again, the report admits that the Senate committee was unable to figure out why Manafort shared the data or what Kilimnik did with it. “The Committee was unable to determine Kilimnik’s actions after sharing the data,” the report states. “The Committee did, however, obtain a single piece of information that could plausibly be a reflection of Kilimnik’s actions” after receiving the material from Manafort. Unfortunately, however, the reader does not get even that single piece of information. The next paragraph in the report looks like this:   A later section in the report, describing the committee’s suspicions about Kilimnik’s possible involvement with the Russian military hacking operation to obtain Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee emails in the spring of 2016, is likewise redacted. This brings the story to this week’s Treasury Department announcement, and the revelation that Kilimnik did, in fact, share the Trump campaign data with Russian intelligence. In one sense, the news might seem relatively minor. It’s one more development in a story that has been slowly dripping out into the public for more than three years. But that development answers a crucial question—and strengthens the evidence of coordination between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.  Previously, government documents had shown that Kilimnik—a person linked to some degree or another to Russian intelligence—had received inside information about the Trump campaign’s strategy from Trump’s campaign manager. Perhaps, those documents suggested, Kilimnik had passed that information to Deripaska, an oligarch known to have close connections with Putin. The Treasury Department announcement updates this story in two ways: First, the U.S. government has now said exactly what it thinks Kilimnik did with that data, rather than hedging or admitting defeat. And second, the government believes that Kilimnik gave that data not just to a person who might have passed the data to the Russian government, but directly to the Russian intelligence services.  On the Russian side, that significantly increases the possibility that the polling data reached the desk of someone who might have used it to further Russian election interference—perhaps to target ads or other efforts—rather than getting lost somewhere between Deripaska’s office and the Kremlin. On the American side, it means that Trump’s campaign manager passed internal campaign information to the Kremlin about how Trump planned to win the election, whether or not Manafort knew it was headed there directly or through a more circuitous route. That certainly sounds a lot like the “collusion,” at least on the part of Manafort and the institutional campaign, that Trump has so vociferously denied.  So why wasn’t this included in the Mueller report? For one thing, it’s worth keeping in mind that Mueller understood his investigation as prosecutorial work—not counterintelligence. Perhaps Mueller had access to this
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