The 'collusion' debate ended yesterday. We now know as a fact the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.
The accidental redaction error in the Manafort legal filing combined with the news published mid-evening by The New York Times is the biggest revelation in more than two years. It’s bigger than the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016, though the two cases can’t be fully understood without reference to each other. These new revelations combined with earlier reports effectively end the debate about whether there was ‘collusion’ between Russia and the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. There was. It wasn’t marginal. It was happening at the very top of the campaign. The campaign manager was secretly funneling campaign data and information to a Russian oligarch closely tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin, someone who had no possible use for such information other than to use it in the Russian efforts to get Donald Trump elected President.
Lets review key details.
According to the Manafort court filing, the Special Counsel’s Office charged that Manafort had lied about sharing “polling data” about the 2016 campaign with his former Ukrainian deputy Konstantin Kilimnik, a man who US intelligence has ID'd as Russian intelligence. Given that Manafort had also told Kilimnik to offer briefings on the campaign to Russian oligarch Oleg V. Deripaska, it was a reasonable surmise that handing over the polling data was meant for Deripaska as well.
Here are the two crucial paragraphs (emphasis mine).
"Both Mr. Manafort and Rick Gates, the deputy campaign manager, transferred the data to Mr. Kilimnik in the spring of 2016 as Mr. Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination, according to a person knowledgeable about the situation. Most of the data was public, but some of it was developed by a private polling firm working for the campaign, according to the person.
Mr. Manafort asked Mr. Gates to tell Mr. Kilimnik to pass the data to Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who is close to the Kremlin and who has claimed that Mr. Manafort owed him money from a failed business venture, the person said. It is unclear whether Mr. Manafort was acting at the campaign’s behest or independently, trying to gain favor with someone to whom he was deeply in debt."
This is all crystal clear. We’re not talking about vague conversations in which quid pro quos or campaign cooperation could have happened. It did happen. Manafort concedes passing on the campaign data in the court filing by his lawyers that they accidentally failed to properly redact. The Times confirms that the data came with the explicit instructions to pass it onto Russian oligarchs.
But none of this can be fully understood without murkier but now quite significant information first reported more than a year ago. Signals intercepts from mid-2016 about Manafort allegedly working with Russian intelligence to help the Trump campaign was one of the key factors that kicked off the investigation during the election. This goes back to the very beginning. Here’s a key paragraph from an August 2017 report from CNN:
"CNN has learned that investigators became more suspicious when they turned up intercepted communications that US intelligence agencies collected among suspected Russian operatives discussing their efforts to work with Manafort, who served as campaign chairman for three months, to coordinate information that could damage Hillary Clinton’s election prospects, the US officials say. The suspected operatives relayed what they claimed were conversations with Manafort, encouraging help from the Russians."
This is damning. We now have clear cut evidence from the other side that Manafort was doing precisely what was claimed: passing on confidential campaign data to a high-level Russian oligarch who Manafort knew from long experience was closely tied to Putin and the Russian intelligence services. There’s no longer any question about whether there was collusion. There was.
There's some speculation that this information could have been what Russian intelligence used to guide its campaign in the second half of 2016. We don’t know that yet. More importantly, we don’t need to know that. What is relevant is intent and action, not effectiveness.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/us/politics/manafort-trump-campaign-data-kilimnik.html
The only question remaining is what Trump knew and when he knew it. share