Former president Donald Trump is preparing to bring back into his campaign fold a man convicted of multiple crimes and whom a bipartisan Senate report labeled a “grave counterintelligence threat” because of his ties to a Russian spy.
Trump has long surrounded himself with and even hired colorful and problematic characters. But the idea of bringing Paul Manafort back for another round might take the cake.
The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey reported Monday that Trump plans to do just that. Four people close to Trump said he was expected to hire Manafort as a campaign adviser later this year, with potential jobs centering on the Republican National Convention and/or fundraising. While Trump has shelved plans to hire certain people after backlashes — think far-right provocateur Laura Loomer — he is reportedly determined to rehire Manafort.
The move would be characteristically defiant. Trump pardoned Manafort after losing the 2020 election, claiming he had been treated unfairly and sparing him years more in confinement after his convictions for money laundering, obstruction and foreign lobbying violations. And Trump has broadly dismissed the Russia probe that ensnared Manafort as a “hoax.”
But importantly, the finding that Manafort was a “grave counterintelligence threat” and that the man he worked with during the 2016 campaign was a “Russian intelligence officer” was not from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia report. Rather, it came in a later, bipartisan 2020 report from the Senate Intelligence Committee. (That committee’s acting chairman at the time: Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.)
So what do those two reports say about Manafort and the risks he would seem to pose by working with a potential future president?
Particularly relevant were the findings that Manafort effectively became a conduit for potential Russian influence.
The key findings from the Senate report:
- “The Committee found that Manafort’s presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for the Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign.”
- “The Committee assesses that [Russian intelligence officer Konstantin] Kilimnik likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services, and that those services likely sought to exploit Manafort’s access to gain insight info the Campaign.” (Kilimnik has denied ties to Russian intelligence.)
- “Taken as a whole, Manafort’s high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik, represented a grave counterintelligence threat.”
The Senate report also repeatedly cited the fact that there remained much we didn’t know about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. It said that was largely because Manafort repeatedly lied about these subjects, thereby obscuring “the single most direct tie between senior Trump Campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services.” This raised the prospect that there was more actual collusion beneath the surface.
And crucially, it casts those lies as both inexplicable — because Manafort had entered into a cooperation agreement and was risking more prison time — and conspicuous, given that the lies focused almost exclusively on his ties to Kilimnik.
“Manafort’s true motive in deciding to face more severe criminal penalties rather than provide complete answers about his interactions with Kilimnik is unknown,” the committee report said, “but the result is that many interactions between Manafort and Kilimnik remain hidden.”
An important question from there is whether Manafort knew or believed he was working with a Russian spy. To the extent we have a window into it, their work together involved sharing Trump campaign polling data and discussing proposals related to Ukraine.
Manafort told Mueller’s investigators that Kilimnik was not a spy, but the reports contain evidence that he at least suspected it. Fellow top Trump campaign aide Rick Gates told Mueller’s team that Gates suspected Kilimnik was a spy and shared that view with Manafort and others. Gates said that Manafort would occasionally insert false statements into discussions with Kilimnik to see if he would pass along that information. The Senate report also says that Manafort told former Ukraine president Viktor Yanukovych to have Kilimnik probed to make sure they could have “sensitive” conversations in Kilimnik’s presence.
“Manafort, like others who dealt with Kilimnik, at some point harbored suspicions that Kilimnik had ties to intelligence services,” reads a footnote in the Senate report. “Manafort was undeniably aware — often from first-hand experience — of suspicious aspects of Kilimnik’s behavior and network.”
Also relevant are Manafort’s potential actions to further Kilimnik’s — and by extension, per the Senate report, Russia’s — interests.
One involves a Ukraine “peace plan” that Manafort later acknowledged to investigators was effectively a “backdoor” for Russia to gain control of parts of eastern Ukraine. Manafort told them that he cut off conversation on the subject and told Kilimnik the plan was crazy. But the Senate report said Manafort “continued working with Kilimnik on the plan, including efforts to draft a poll to test aspects of the plan as late as 2018.”
The most tantalizing prospect laid out in the Senate report is that Manafort might not have served just as a conduit for information or influence, but that he might have actually played a role in Russia’s hacking and leaking of Democrats’ emails in 2016.
The report was clear that this was something of a black box and that there is not “reliable, direct evidence” that either Manafort or Kilimnik were involved. Then it adds: “Two pieces of information, however, raise the possibility of Manafort’s potential connection to the hack-and-leak operations.”
Precisely what the information is, we still don’t know. Most of the next two pages were redacted. And again, the report notes that Manafort’s lack of transparency makes all of this difficult to suss out.
But the fact that the bipartisan Senate report included it, along with other warnings about Manafort, would seem extremely relevant in a moment in which the potential next president is looking to hire him — again, and despite it all.
