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Trump and Russia: 6 key takeaways from the Senate’s scathing report

Analysis: From allegations of Russian kompromat on Trump, to a campaign chairman who presented a ‘grave counterintelligence threat,’ the bipartisan Senate panel was unsparing against the president’s inner circle

Griffin Connolly
Washington
Wednesday 19 August 2020 18:06 BST
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Donald Trump says he should get third term because 'they spied on my campaign'

A bipartisan Senate committee led by Republican Marco Rubio of Florida pulled no punches in its damning conclusions about the ethical dubiousness of the 2016 Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia.

The Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday released the fifth and final volume of its report on Russian election interference that claims the Trump administration obstructed its investigation and embraced and encouraged help from the Russians in 2016.

As several national security and legal experts have already pointed out on Twitter, the Senate’s report goes into more granular detail over its thousands of pages about Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia than any of its antecedents, such as the House Intelligence Committee’s partisan 2018 reports and former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

That’s because Mr Mueller was constrained by the need to keep his evidence within criminally prosecutable confines. As his report outlines, those issues were compounded by a robust (and possibly criminal) Trump administration obstruction effort.

The Senate’s report had no such legal guardrails. At their core, congressional enquiries are fact-finding missions meant to educate the public and inform future legislation.

Free from the admissibility standards of presenting evidence in any sort of court – save the court of public opinion – Intelligence Committee members could draw and present logical conclusions based on a whole body of evidence, even if those conclusions and evidence could not be proven true beyond a reasonable doubt.

While Mr Mueller could not pass judgement, the senators could – and did: They were scathing on the 2016 Trump campaign’s actions and unflinching in their reporting of unsubstantiated allegations.

Here are six key takeaways from the fifth and final volume of the Senate Intelligence panel’s report on Russian election interference:

1. Kompromat on Trump? Maybe. Maybe not.

Over the course of the committee’s investigation it “became aware of three general sets of allegations” that Russia had collected compromising information on Mr Trump’s associations with women on his trips to the country in 1996 and 2013, according to the report. The panel was unable to shoot down allegations about the Moscow visits, even if confirmation was not found.

Two of those allegations mention video tapes of Mr Trump engaging in sexual behaviour with Russian women, including one instance in 2013 when he was married to now-first lady Melania Trump.

The report plainly states that after probing the claims it “did not establish that the Russian government collected kompromat on Trump, nor did it establish that the Russian government attempted to blackmail Trump or anyone associated with his campaign with such information”.

Nevertheless, it offers a general sketch of what the allegations purported, allegations that were made separately from the dossier compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele.

One set of the allegations against Mr Trump outlined in the Senate report relate to an unnamed individual, then an executive at the Marriott International hotel chain that owns Ritz Carlton.

The individual allegedly overheard two other Marriott executives discussing how to handle a tape of the president with women in an elevator at the Ritz Carlton Moscow, according to the report, which does not offer a specific timeline.

“Neither the allegedly overheard conversation, nor the content described, could be corroborated,” the Senate report concludes.

The committee offered a warning to anyone considering staying at the Ritz Carlton Moscow and engaging in questionable behaviour:

“Apart from allegations related to Trump, the Committee found that the Ritz Carlton in Moscow is a high counterintelligence risk environment,” the panel writes.

“The Committee assesses that the hotel likely has at least one permanent Russian intelligence officer on staff, government surveillance of guests’ rooms, and the regular presence of a large number of prostitutes, likely with at least the tacit approval of Russian authorities,” it writes.

2. Both parties condemn Trump’s embrace of WikiLeaks

Mr Mueller’s report and the prosecution of Trump confidant and informal 2016 campaign adviser Roger Stone revealed how the Russian intelligence agency GRU worked in tandem with WikiLeaks to release hacked documents from the Democratic National Committee and the campaign of the party’s 2016 nominee, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

The report concludes that instead of condemning Russia’s actions, the Trump campaign “sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump’s electoral prospects”, a remarkable statement from a panel that includes staunch Trump allies such as senator John Cornyn of Texas and Tom Cotton of Arkansas.

“Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks,” the committee writes in its report.

“The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort,” the report continues.

The president has continued to cast doubt on the intelligence community’s unanimous assessment that Russia was behind the Clinton and DNC email hacks.

That doubt crescendoed at a joint press conference with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in 2018, where Mr Trump sided with Mr Putin over his own intelligence community, denying Russia’s involvement.

While the committee could not prove that campaign officials received “an authoritative government notification” the hack was a Russian government operation before 7 October 2016, when US intel officials released a public statement to that effect, the campaign “was aware of the extensive media reporting and other private sector attribution of the hack to Russian actors prior to that point,” according to Tuesday’s report.

The Trump team did not care, the Senate report suggests, because acknowledging the hacks were Russian-perpetrated did not play to Mr Trump’s political advantage.

3. Paul Manafort was a ‘grave counterintelligence threat’

Ex-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who is serving a seven-year prison term related to financial fraud and corruption, was identified in the Intelligence Committee’s report as a “grave counterintelligence threat” due to his business and political ties to powerful Russia-sympathetic Ukrainians.

National security and legal observers have long assumed as much about Mr Manafort, whose prosecution by Mr Mueller’s team in 2018 exposed his deep political connections to the Russia-backed former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovitch in the early 2010s.

His business partner Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the report describes as a Russian intelligence agent, presumably also knew about Mr Manafort’s illegal use of tax havens to defraud the US government, a piece of kompromat that could have been leveraged while he was chairman of the 2016 Trump campaign.

“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 and associates of [Ukrainian oligarch] Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave counterintelligence threat,” the committee concludes.

4. The FBI was careless

The FBI committed multiple errors over the course of its counterintelligence operation against Russian election interference in 2016, the committee states, particularly in its use of the Steele dossier to obtain multiple Foreign Intelligence Surveillance warrants.

“Regarding the Steele Dossier, FBI gave Steele’s allegations unjustified credence, based on an incomplete understanding of Steele’s past reporting record,” the senators write.

Senate Republicans have grilled the FBI for relying too heavily on the Steele dossier over the course of its operations, and both parties have identified a FISA system rife with errors and prone to misuse.

The FBI did not take “the necessary steps to validate assumptions about Steele’s credibility” before using his dossier in its FISA application, according to the committee report.

The bureau likewise “did not effectively adjust its approach to Steele’s reporting once one of Steele’s sub-sources provided information that raised serious concerns about the source descriptions in the Steele Dossier,” the report states.

It adds that Steele’s reporting, which the author has said he never intended to be reported in the media for “all the world” to see, “lacked rigour and transparency about the quality of the sourcing.”

5. Trump team’s ‘inexperience’ created considerable problems

Throughout the Senate’s report, it makes reference to the amateur nature of Mr Trump’s 2016 campaign and transition team, and how that exposed it to foreign influence.

“Russia took advantage of members of the Transition Team’s relative inexperience in government, opposition to Obama Administration policies, and Trump’s desire to deepen ties with Russia to pursue unofficial channels through which Russia could conduct diplomacy,” the report writes in its principal findings.

It is normal after any election cycle for countries to establish contact with incoming administration officials, and US allies and adversaries in addition to Russia “sought inroads with the transition”.

But “the existence of a cadre of informal advisors to the Transition Team with varying levels of access to the president-elect and varying awareness of foreign affairs presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities,” the Senate Intelligence report concludes.

“The lack of vetting of foreign interactions by Transition officials left the Transition open to influence and manipulation by foreign intelligence services, government officials, and co-opted business executives,” it states.

The results of the transition team’s inexperience were glaring and quickly made their way into the public sphere, pitting the outgoing Obama administration and the incoming Trump administration against each other on America’s stance towards Russia.

The transition team “repeatedly took actions that had the potential, and sometimes the effect, of interfering in the Obama Administration’s diplomatic efforts,” causing “confusion” among both US allies and adversaries on official US policy, according to the report.

6. The Ukraine election interference conspiracy is bunk

During Mr Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, the president and his allies promoted a conspiracy theory that it was Ukraine, and not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 US election by abetting the DNC and Clinton campaign hacks.

But according to the Senate’s report on Tuesday, that theory began as a Russian intelligence disinformation campaign.

“The Committee identified no reliable evidence that the Ukrainian government interfered in the 2016 US election,” according to a footnote on page 108 of the report.

The report outlines how Mr Kilimnik, Mr Manafort’s business partner who had ties to Russian intelligence and may have even been an agent himself, “almost certainly helped arrange some of the first public messaging that Ukraine had interfered in the US election”.

News media investigations into the Ukrainian interference theory have likewise turned up no supporting evidence that the Ukrainian government engaged in a malign influence operation to aid Ms Clinton’s campaign, though some officials at the time expressed their preference for her.

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