Russians spoke of ways to sway Trump, officials say.
U.S. intelligence found discussions of ties to campaign advisers
WASHINGTON — U.S. spies collected information last summer revealing that senior Russian intelligence and political officials were discussing how to exert influence over Donald Trump through his advisers, according to three current and former U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence.
The conversations focused on Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman at the time, and Michael Flynn, a retired general who was advising Trump, the officials said. Both men had indirect ties to Russian officials, who appeared confident that each could be used to help shape Trump’s opinions on Russia.
Some Russians boasted about how well they knew Flynn. Others discussed leveraging their ties to Viktor Yanukovych, the deposed president of Ukraine living in exile in Russia, who at one time had worked closely with Manafort.
Questions remain
The intelligence was among the clues — which also included information about direct communications between Trump’s advisers and Russian officials — that U.S. officials received last year as they began investigating Russian attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of Trump’s associates were assisting Moscow in the effort. Details of the conversations, some of which have not been previously reported, add to an increasing understanding of the alarm inside the U.S. government last year about the Russian disruption campaign.
The information collected last summer was considered credible enough for intelligence agencies to pass to the FBI, which during that period opened a counterintelligence investigation that is continuing. It is unclear, however, whether Russian officials actually tried to directly influence Manafort and Flynn. Both have denied any collusion with the Russian government.
John Brennan, the former director of the CIA, testified Tuesday about a tense period last year when he came to believe that President Vladimir Putin of Russia was trying to steer the outcome of the election. He said he saw intelligence suggesting that Russia wanted to use Trump campaign officials, wittingly or not, to help in that effort. He spoke vaguely about contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials, without giving names.
Whether the Russians worked directly with any Trump advisers is one of the central questions that federal investigators, now led by Robert Mueller, the newly appointed special counsel, are seeking to answer.
“If there ever was any effort by Russians to influence me, I was unaware, and they would have failed,” Manafort said in a statement. “I did not collude with the Russians to influence the elections.”
The White House, FBI and CIA declined to comment. Flynn’s lawyer did not respond to an email seeking comment.
The current and former officials agreed to discuss the intelligence only on the condition of anonymity.
Last week, CNN reported about intercepted phone calls during which Russian officials were bragging about ties to Flynn and discussing ways to wield influence over him.
In his testimony, Brennan discussed the broad outlines of the intelligence, and his disclosures backed up the accounts of the information provided by the current and former officials.
By early summer, U.S. intelligence officials already were fairly certain that it was Russian hackers who had stolen tens of thousands of emails from the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. That in itself was not viewed as particularly extraordinary by the Americans — foreign spies had hacked previous campaigns, and the United States does the same in elections around the world, officials said. The view on the inside was that collecting information, even through hacking, is what spies do.
But the concerns began to grow when intelligence began trickling in about Russian officials weighing whether they should release stolen emails and other information to shape U.S. opinion — to, in essence, weaponize the materials stolen by hackers.
An unclassified report by U.S. intelligence agencies released in January stated that Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election.”
Before taking the helm of the Trump campaign last May, Manafort worked for more than a decade for Russian-leaning political organizations and people in Ukraine, including Yanukovych, the former president. Yanukovych was a close ally of Putin.
Manafort’s links to Ukraine led to his departure from the Trump campaign in August, after his name surfaced in secret ledgers showing millions in undisclosed payments from Yanukovych’s political party.
Advocate for Russian ties
Flynn’s ties to Russian officials stretch back to his time at the Defense Intelligence Agency, which he led from 2012 to 2014. There, he began pressing for the United States to cultivate Russia as an ally in the fight against Islamic militants and even spent a day in Moscow at the headquarters of the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service, in 2013.
He continued to insist that Russia could be an ally even after Moscow’s seizure of Crimea the following year, and Obama administration officials have said that contributed to their decision to push him out of the DIA.
But in private life, Flynn cultivated even closer ties to Russia. In 2015, he earned more than $65,000 from companies linked to Russia, including a cargo airline implicated in a bribery scheme involving Russian officials at the United Nations, and a U.S. branch of a cybersecurity firm believed to have ties to Russia’s intelligence services.
The biggest payment, though, came from RT, the Kremlinfinanced news network. It paid Flynn $45,000 to give a speech in Moscow, where he also attended the network’s lavish anniversary dinner. There, he was photographed sitting next to Putin.