Senate panel confirms Russian ties to Trump campaign
What happened
The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee concluded this week that Russia conducted “an aggressive, multifaceted effort” to sway the 2016 election for Donald Trump that Trump’s campaign knew about and welcomed. The committee said that Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort shared internal polling data with Russian intelligence officer Konstantin Kilimnik and strategized “in detail” with him about defeating Hillary Clinton. While the fifth—and final—report from the committee does not accuse the Trump campaign of a coordinated conspiracy with Russia, its nearly 1,000 pages portray a sprawling web of contacts between the campaign’s most senior officials and Russian intelligence operations. It also emerged this week that the committee made criminal referrals of White House strategist Steve Bannon, Donald Trump Jr., and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner for potentially false or misleading testimony.
The Trump campaign used former adviser Roger Stone to lobby WikiLeaks for advance notice on dumps of emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee by Russian spies, the report said, and encouraged “further theft of information.” The committee found that Trump told aides to “stay in touch” with Stone about future leaks, casting doubt on Trump’s insistence that he couldn’t recall discussing WikiLeaks. It also uncovered evidence independent of the controversial “Steele dossier”of Trump’s involvement with Russian women during visits to Moscow, including testimony that RitzCarlton Moscow employees discussed an elevator video of Trump with several women. Trump called the report “a hoax.”
What the columnists said
The Senate report reveals “damning” evidence, said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com. Manafort, it states, “on numerous occasions” shared internal information with Kilimnik, and then hid those communications using encrypted apps, burner phones, and other techniques. Precisely why Manafort did this remains unknown, but the report does link him and Kilimnik to Russia’s hacking of the DNC. Though some details are redacted, the report states that Manafort’s relationship with Kilimnik was a “grave counterintelligence threat”—and that he sought Russia’s assistance with Trump’s knowledge.
The report should settle, once and for all, that the FBI’s investigation into the Russian meddling “was not a hoax,” said Quin Hillyer in WashingtonExaminer.com. In fact, there is “so much irrefutable evidence” of Russian meddling in the report, as well as contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian spies, and people connected to them, that the FBI “would have been derelict” had it not opened an investigation. “Trump fans need to get this through their heads.”
The outing of Kilimnik as a spy is devastating for Trump, said Philip Bump in The Washington Post. Now, for the first time, we have a direct line from “Russian intelligence to Kilimnik to Manafort.” At one meeting, the longtime political operative, who made millions working for pro-Kremlin politicians in Ukraine, walked the spy through strategy for battleground states, identifying areas where Trump hoped to swing voters. As Democrats said in their addendum to the report, “This is what collusion looks like.”