Washington, D.C.
Manafort’s data dump: Former
Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort shared polling data with a longtime associate tied to Russian intelligence, according to a court filing unsealed this week. The exchange, which included public data as well as internal polling, occurred in the spring of 2016, The New York Times reports, as Donald Trump was securing the GOP nomination and the Russian interference operation was in full swing. Manafort instructed deputy campaign manager Rick Gates to tell his former associate, Konstantin Kilimnik, to pass the data along to two Ukrainian oligarchs. The information could have helped Russian hackers target issues and demographics important to the Trump campaign. The filing, which Manafort’s attorneys accidently failed to redact, also revealed that Manafort and Kilimnik met in early 2017 in Madrid, where they discussed a Ukrainian peace plan that would end U.S. sanctions on Russia. “This is the closest thing we have seen to collusion,” said Clint Watts of the Foreign Police Research Institute.
How soon special counsel Robert Mueller will deliver his much-anticipated report remains unclear, though Mueller received a six-month extension this week for a federal grand jury impaneled since July 2017. Multiple outlets reported that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, an emphatic defender of the Mueller probe, plans to resign after a new attorney general takes over. Confirmation hearings for William Barr are scheduled to begin Jan. 15. Rosenstein assumed oversight of the investigation following the recusal of Trump’s former attorney general, Jeff Sessions. Since Sessions’ departure Rosenstein has kept day-to-day oversight of the Mueller probe—a role he has managed to retain despite intense public criticism from Trump and his GOP allies in Congress. NBC News reported that Rosenstein intends to stay until Mueller submits his report, which a source predicted would happen by early March.