Trump aides spoke with Russian officials during 2016 campaign.
WASHINGTON — Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former U.S. officials.
U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time that they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.
The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.
Includes Trump associates
But the intercepts alarmed U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. At one point last summer, Trump said at a campaign event that he hoped Russian intelligence services had stolen Hillary Clinton’s emails and would make them public.
The officials said the intercepted communications were not limited to Trump campaign officials, and included other associates of Trump. On the Russian side, the contacts also included members of the Russian government outside of the intelligence services, the officials said. All of the officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the continuing investigation is classified.
The officials said that one of the advisers picked up on the calls was Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign chairman for several months last year and had worked as a political consultant in Russia and Ukraine. The officials declined to identify the other Trump associates on the calls.
The call logs and intercepted communications are part of a larger trove of information that the FBI is sifting through as it investigates the links between Trump’s associates and the Russian government, as well as the DNC hack, according to federal law enforcement officials. As part of its inquiry, the FBI has obtained banking and travel records and conducted interviews, the officials said.
Manafort, who has not been charged with any crimes, dismissed the accounts of the U.S. officials in a telephone interview on Tuesday.
“This is absurd,” he said. “I have no idea what this is referring to. I have never knowingly spoken to Russian intelligence officers, and I have never been involved with anything to do with the Russian government or the Putin administration or any other issues under investigation today.”
Manafort added, “It’s not like these people wear badges that say, ‘I’m a Russian intelligence officer.’”
FBI sought aid from NSA
Several of Trump’s associates, like Manafort, have done business in Russia, and it is not unusual for American businessmen to come in contact with foreign intelligence officials, sometimes unwittingly, in countries like Russia and Ukraine, where the spy services are deeply embedded in society. Law enforcement officials did not say to what extent the contacts may have been about business.
Officials would not disclose many details, including what was discussed on the calls, which Russian intelligence officials were on the calls, and how many of Trump’s advisers were talking to the Russians. It is also unclear whether the conversations had anything to do with Trump.
The intercepted calls are different from the wiretapped conversations last year between Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, and Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The FBI declined to comment.
Two days after the election in November, Sergei Ryabkov, the deputy Russian foreign minister, said “there were contacts” during the campaign between Russian officials and Trump’s team.
“Obviously, we know most of the people from his entourage,” Ryabkov said in an interview with the Russian Interfax news agency.
The Trump transition team denied Ryabkov’s statement. “This is not accurate,” Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for Trump, said at the time.
The National Security Agency, which monitors the communications of foreign intelligence services, initially captured the communications between Trump’s associates and Russians as part of routine foreign surveillance. After that, the FBI asked the NSA to collect as much information as possible about the Russian operatives on the phone calls, and to search through troves of previous intercepted communications that had not been analyzed.
The FBI has examined at least four other people close to Trump, although it is unclear if their calls were intercepted. They are Carter Page, a businessman and former foreign policy adviser to the campaign; Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative; and Flynn.
All of the men have strongly denied they had any improper contacts with Russian officials.