Report: Kremlin meddled in 2016
It faults staffers for Trump, FBI
The Senate intelligence committee concluded that the Kremlin launched an aggressive effort to meddle in the 2016 presidential contest as the Republican-led panel Tuesday released its fifth and final report in its investigation into election interference.
President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, posed a “grave counterintelligence threat” because of his interaction with people close to the Kremlin, according to the report that found extensive contacts between key campaign advisers and officials affiliated with Moscow’s government and intelligence services.
The nearly 1,000-page report states that Manafort worked with a Russian intelligence officer “on narratives that sought to undermine evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election,” including the idea that purported Ukrainian election interference was of greater concern.
It found that a Russian attorney who met with Manafort, Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner at Trump Tower in 2016 had “significant connections” to the Kremlin. The information she offered them was also “part of a broader influence operation targeting the United States that was coordinated, at least in part
with elements of the Russian government,” the report stated.
But the panel also concluded that the FBI’s handling of Russian threats to the election was “flawed,” and that the bureau gave “unjustified credence” to allegations about Trump’s Russia ties made in a debunked dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, “based on an incomplete understanding of Steele’s past reporting record.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s 3½-half-year investigation stands as Congress’ only bipartisan examination of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The panel agreed that the FBI overestimated Steele’s reliability, and that Manafort and other aides exposed the campaign to undue Russian influence.
“After more than three years of investigation by this Committee, we can now say with no doubt, there was no collusion,” a group of six panel Republicans, including acting chairman, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla, wrote in a statement, instead accusing the Democratic Party of coordinating with foreign actors to produce Steele’s dossier.
“In 2016, the Democratic Party, using a series of arm’s length transactions, hired a foreign citizen to seek out dirt on a political opponent, provided by foreign sources,” the Republicans wrote, attacking the FBI for “sloppy work and poor judgment.”
Five Democratic senators — including Kamala Harris, D-Calif., the party’s 2020 vice presidential nominee — asserted that the report “unambiguously shows that members of the Trump Campaign cooperated with Russian efforts to get Trump elected.” Referring specifically to their findings on Manafort, the Democrats wrote, “this is what collusion looks like.”
The report showed evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied to the Kremlin — including a long-standing associate of Manafort, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, whom the report identifies as a “Russian intelligence officer.”
The Senate report for the first time identified Kilimnik as an intelligence officer. Former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report had labeled him as someone with ties to Russian intelligence.
The intelligence committee’s vice chairman, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who did not sign onto the Democrats’ dissenting views, noted “a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives that is a very real counterintelligence threat to our elections,” and he encouraged “all Americans to carefully review the documented evidence of the unprecedented and massive intervention campaign waged on behalf of then-candidate Donald Trump by Russians and their operatives and to reach their own independent conclusions.”
The committee’s past chairman, Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., who oversaw the bulk of the investigation and steered clear of the GOP’s dissent, struck a position in the middle.
“One of the Committee’s most important — and overlooked — findings is that much of Russia’s activities weren’t related to producing a specific electoral outcome, but attempted to undermine our faith in the democratic process itself,” he said in a statement. “Their aim is to sow chaos, discord, and distrust. Their efforts are not limited to elections. The threat is ongoing.”
Burr and Warner launched the committee’s inquiry before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, and sustained the bipartisan investigation over the next 3½ years, even as other congressional investigations into the same matter faltered along partisan lines.
Since the Senate Intelligence Committee began its probe, Mueller released a 448-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 election — and Trump was impeached and acquitted after Democrats accused him of coercing Ukrainian leaders to interfere in the 2020 election.
Though the committee’s inquiry covers much of the same turf as Mueller’s investigation, it was different in nature. Mueller was running a criminal probe, the Senate committee was conducting an intelligence investigation.
The Senate panel’s probe, which was mostly driven by the committee’s bipartisan staff, included more than 200 witnesses, and considered evidence relating to Russian disinformation; Trump’s personal, business and campaign contacts with Russians; and the transition period after the 2016 election.
At one point, the document all but concludes that Trump aides were duped and manipulated by Russian interests.
“Russian officials, intelligence services, and others” acting in concert with the Kremlin “were capable of exploiting the transition team’s shortcomings,” the report concluded. “Based on the available information, it is possible — and even likely — that they did so.”
The report also presents a critical portrait of the Trump campaign’s hasty move in March 2016 to assemble a foreign policy team, asserting that it had recruited inexperienced people without thoroughly vetting them and thus potentially exposed itself to Russian influence.
“Ultimately,” the committee wrote, “the foreign policy team exposed the Trump Campaign to significant counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”
‘SUSPICIOUS’ CONTACTS
The committee pointed to Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, who attempted to secure a face-to-face meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin through “highly suspicious” contacts with people close to the Russian government. Ultimately, investigators concluded, Papadopoulos “was not a witting cooptee of the Russian intelligence services.”
The panel also found that while Russia seemed to show an interest in campaign adviser Carter Page, investigators “found no indication that Page had useful campaign information for the Russian intelligence services to extract, nor meaningful influence for them to exploit.”
The committee did find, however, that Putin personally directed the 2016 hackand-leak campaign targeting the Democratic Party, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
The anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks “actively sought and played a key role in the Russian campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort,” the report stated, surmising that a Russian military spy agency, known as the GRU, transferred hacked emails to WikiLeaks likely because it offered a more effective platform for publicity than the GRU’s own methods.
Yet investigators could not “reliably determine the extent of authentic, non-public knowledge” that Trump’s friend Roger Stone had about WikiLeaks’ coming releases and shared with the campaign.
The panel noted that its investigation was hampered by several witnesses refusing interviews and to produce documents, citing Fifth Amendment rights that protect against self-incrimination. These included Stone, Manafort and Rick Gates, the campaign’s deputy chairman at that time. The panel’s request to interview WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was rebuffed.
The committee also accused Blackwater founder and Trump supporter Erik Prince of stonewalling its investigation, saying it was “hampered by a lack of cooperation” and that his account of a controversial 2017 meeting in the Seychelles alongside a Russian official was “brief and deceptive.”
OTHER ASPECTS
The committee previously released other volumes detailing aspects of its inquiry. Those reports focused on U.S. election security, Russia’s use of social media in disinformation campaigns, the Obama administration’s response to the perceived threat in 2016, and the intelligence community’s joint assessment that Russia had interfered in an attempt to tip the scales in Trump’s favor.
Yet the panel’s effort to maintain a bipartisan approach has not saved it from partisan scrutiny. Last year, the panel came under fire from Senate Republicans after issuing a subpoena for Trump Jr. to go in for a second round of testimony.
After his testimony, Trump Jr. was one of several witnesses that the panel referred to the Justice Department for closer scrutiny over discrepancies between their testimony and that of Gates, the ex-deputy campaign chairman who was a key witness in Mueller’s probe.
Earlier this year, Burr stepped aside as panel chairman after coming under scrutiny over stocks that he sold in industries hit by the coronavirus pandemic. Rubio has been serving as acting chairman in his place.
The committee’s report drew to a close one of the highest-profile congressional inquiries in recent memory, one that the president and his allies have long tried to discredit as part of a “witch hunt” designed to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s election nearly four years ago.
Trump, who has repeatedly called the Russia investigations a “hoax,” said Tuesday that he “didn’t know anything about” the report, or Russia or Ukraine.
“All I know is that I have nothing to do with either one of them and that came out loud and clear in the report,” Trump said.
Information for this article was contributed by Karoun Demirjian, Ellen Nakashima, Tom Hamburger, Rosalind S. Helderman, Greg Miller and Matt Zapotosky of The Washington Post; by Mark Mazzetti and Nicholas Fandos of The New York Times; and by Eric Tucker and Mary Clare Jalonick of The Associated Press.