Russian contacts cast dark cloud over Trump team

Continued denials add to suspicion as list of confirmed communications grows

WASHINGTON — Two days after the presidential election, a Russian official speaking to a reporter in Moscow offered a surprising acknowledgment: The Kremlin had been in contact with Donald Trump’s campaign.

The claim, coming amid allegations that Russia had interfered with the election, was met with an immediate no-wiggle-room blanket denial from Trump’s spokeswoman. “It never happened,” Hope Hicks told The Associated Press at the time. “There was no communication between the campaign and any foreign entity during the campaign.” In fact, it is now clear it did happen. The past few days have brought a growing list of confirmed communications between Trump campaign aides and Russian officials, with each new revelation adding to a cloud of suspicion that hangs over the White House as critics demand an independent investigation.

Trump’s team has offered various explanations for the meetings: Some encounters, they have said, were brief, no more than casual, polite introductions. Others involved the routine diplomacy common for officials surrounding a candidate for the nation’s highest office.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was an early Trump campaign adviser, said his two interactions with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, first reported this week by The Washington

Post, came in his role as a senator, not as a campaign surrogate.

It is unclear why the White House has consistently denied contacts with Russian officials if the meetings that took place were innocuous.

As a result, the confirmations of the encounters have trickled out through a series of news stories that have proved increasingly damaging to the Trump administration, with some Trump associates appearing to shift their accounts over time.

Already, Michael Flynn was forced to resign as national security adviser as a result of his postelection contacts with Kislyak. This week, the White House confirmed that those conversations included a brief meeting alongside Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, at Trump Tower in New York in December. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Friday termed that discussion merely a “courtesy meeting.”

Sessions has now recused himself from oversight of any investigation of Trump’s ties to Moscow and is facing calls to step down as a result of his statement, during his January confirmation hearing, that he had not had any contacts with the Russians.

On Friday, Sanders dismissed the brewing questions. “The big point here is the president himself knows what his involvement was, and that’s zero,” she said.

Nevertheless, the recent revelations have made the postelection comments from the Russian official newly relevant.

Those comments came from Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, who told the Interfax news agency in November that “there were contacts” with Trump’s aides.

“Obviously,” Ryabkov said, “we know most of the people from his entourage.”

As the Trump campaign rejected the assertion, other Russian officials said any communications would have been routine and offered to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign as well — a contention denied at the time by a Clinton aide.

Nearly all of the contacts that have emerged so far were with Kislyak, the affable Russian ambassador in Washington who is known as a consummate networker.

Kislyak appears to have worked to cultivate a relationship with the Trump campaign, starting his outreach even before Trump was thought likely to win the GOP nomination.

In April, Kislyak popped up at the Mayflower Hotel, where he was seated in the front row at one of Trump’s first major foreign policy addresses. During the speech, Trump offered a forceful promise that he would seek better relations with Russia.

The event’s host, Dimitri Simes, president of the Center for the National Interest, a foreign policy think tank, said Kislyak was one of four ambassadors who attended as guests of his group. Simes said he introduced Trump and Kislyak in a receiving line at a reception before the event, which was also attended by Sessions and Kushner, among other Trump aides.

Simes, who is Russian American and favors warmer relations with Moscow, said it is common practice for foreign diplomats to try to get to know important advisers, like Sessions, to presidential candidates.

Kislyak was also in attendance at the Republican National Convention, where he briefly met Sessions after a July 18 Heritage Foundation event attended by dozens of diplomats.

Two days later, Kislyak met with Trump advisers Carter Page and J.D. Gordon after a convention-related Global Partners in Diplomacy event at Case Western Reserve University.

In an email, Gordon said he briefly spoke to Kislyak in a group of diplomats there and also at an evening reception. Gordon called it a “brief, informal conversation,” during which he repeated public Trump statements about improving relations with Russia.

Page also confirmed his interaction with Kislyak at the event to MSNBC on Thursday. Last month, he told PBS that he had held “no meetings” with any Russian officials during the campaign.

Those meetings at the Republican convention came as questions about Trump’s stance on Russia started to seriously enter campaign trail conversation.