The CNN team wanted viewers to know there could be a very big development in the Trump Russia investigation.
“CNN has learned why special counsel Robert Mueller wants the cooperation of former Trump campaign deputy Rick Gates,” anchor Alisyn Camerota said Friday. “Court documents indicate that Gates could be critical to nabbing even bigger fish in a collusion case involving the Kremlin.”
Reporter Shimon Prokupecz said the Mueller team “has been primarily using Rick Gates for information about what they call the central mission of the investigation, which has been Russian interference and collusion in the 2016 campaign.” Gates pleaded guilty in February to charges unrelated to collusion and is now cooperating with Mueller.
Prokupecz said he had learned Mueller did not need Gates’ cooperation in the tax evasion and fraud case against former employer (and short-lived Trump campaign chairman) Paul Manafort. “Instead, [Mueller] wanted to hear about what he knew about contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians.” A “hint” about Mueller’s intentions, Prokupecz said, was contained in a new court filing that “shows Gates was communicating with a Russian intelligence official who was also a close associate of Paul Manafort, and the court document said that Gates knew of this connection while he was working for the Trump campaign.”
“What kind of information could Gates have?” asked Camerota.
Prokupecz did not appear to know, but suggested that Gates, because of his position, could possibly know a lot. “Gates has ties to members of Trump’s inner circle, including, as we said, Paul Manafort, long-time business associate of his, and Tom Barrack, who is a close friend of Trump’s,” Prokupecz said. “So Gates was in on some of the fundraising decisions. He was also the guy who developed this reputation for keeping tabs on what others were up to in the campaign, including that Trump Tower meeting which is under investigation by the special counsel where Donald Trump Jr. and others met with the Russian lawyer who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton.”
[Byron York: Trump-Russia, by the (misleading) numbers]
A few moments later, Camerota turned to analyst Ron Brownstein, who advised “modesty” in speculating about Mueller’s investigation because there is much that is not publicly known. Still, Brownstein, like Camerota before him, suggested Mueller left a trail of “bread crumbs” that could be significant.
“One thing we have learned is they do not casually drop these bread crumbs into their court filings,” Brownstein said. “The piece of information that Mr. Gates was in contact with a Russian intelligence officer that he knew to be such is significant, and it underscores that they are continuing to explore this central issue.”
“You call it bread crumbs, but the information that the deputy campaign chair was talking to someone connected with Russian intelligence—” anchor John Berman interjected.
“That may be a whole loaf,” said Brownstein.
“That’s like a hoagie,” said Berman. “There’s something going on there.”
Maybe that’s right. Maybe there is an entire hoagie there. And it appears that what the CNN talkers said was factually accurate, no corrections required. But at the same time, what was not said, especially about the court filing at the heart of the conversation, is essential to understanding the news, and also suggests that the developments discussed might be somewhat less exciting than CNN reported. Sometimes spin and omission can leave inaccurate impressions from accurate reporting. So here are a few more pieces of information about the case of Rick Gates and the Russian spy:
The “Russian intelligence official” mentioned by CNN is thought to be a man named Konstantin Kilimnik. If you want to know more about him, read an August 2016 article by Kenneth Vogel, then with Politico, called “Manafort’s Man in Kiev.” What follows comes from Vogel and a few other articles that reported much the same material.
Kilimnik, born in 1970, joined the Russian army as a translator — he speaks at least four languages — and his job “closely aligned him with the army’s intelligence services,” according to Vogel. In 2005, Kilimnik, working for a pro-democracy nonprofit, took a second job “translating and interpreting for a Manafort team that was working for [a] pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch” who backed top Manafort client Victor Yanukovych.
In 2009, when Yanukovych became a candidate for president, Vogel reported, “Manafort beefed up the operation running out of his Kiev office, and Kilimnik began playing a bigger part, orchestrating key campaign logistics in a way that transcended his initial role as translator and interpreter.”
Long story short, Kilimnik has been with Manafort — and that means with Gates, too — for quite a while. More recently, Vogel reported, Kilimnik “has had conversations with fellow operatives in Kiev about collecting unpaid fees owed to Manafort’s company by a Russia-friendly political party called Opposition Bloc.” Vogel cited locals who said the amount owed to Manafort was in the millions of dollars.
So, given that history, and given Manafort’s well-documented financial troubles caused by the manic overspending outlined in the charges against him, and given the effects the money problems had on the Manafort-Gates enterprise, it doesn’t seem terribly odd that Gates would be in touch with a “Russian intelligence official” — AKA the firm’s longtime guy in Kiev — about getting the money owed them. (Neither Manafort nor Gates took a salary during their time with the Trump campaign.)
But are there any clues as to what Gates and Kilimnik actually discussed? Anything that points toward collusion in the 2016 election? There are indeed clues in those court documents CNN mentioned, but they don’t, at least on their face, point toward collusion.
The specific document that got everybody’s attention was Mueller’s memo to the court on the sentencing of lawyer Alex van der Zwaan, who was part of an international law firm doing business with Manafort and pleaded guilty to lying to Mueller’s prosecutors. The memo refers to Kilimnik as “Person A,” and one paragraph says:
So Gates and Kilimnik were in fact directly communicating. But what were they directly communicating about? The sentencing memo explains that prosecutors know the answer because even though van der Zwaan lied about the conversations, he had in fact recorded them, and later turned over the recordings:
So the conversations apparently dealt with the “Tymoshenko report” and payments for it. The brief version of the story is that Manafort’s client, Yanukovych, put his political rival, Tymoshenko, in jail. Yanukovych wanted to claim that it was all on the up-and-up, so his adviser Manafort commissioned a law firm, Skadden Arps, to write a report arguing that Yanukovych’s actions “met international legal standards,” in the words of the Atlantic’s Natasha Bertrand, who has written about the deal. Not surprisingly, Skadden Arps found it was all OK.
But there were questions about how Manafort paid for the report. The transactions caught the eye of the Justice Department, Bertrand wrote, and then the special counsel. “Mueller’s team accused Manafort and Gates of using ‘one of their offshore accounts to funnel $4 million to pay secretly’ for the 300-page Tymoshenko report,” Bertrand explained. “Manafort has denied all of the charges, but Skadden could shed more light on the extent to which Manafort was involved in hiring and paying the firm on Yanukovych’s behalf.”
So putting it all together, yes, Gates was “in contact with a Russian intelligence officer.” And who knows? Perhaps they were plotting to fix the U.S. presidential election for President Trump. But the evidence that Mueller has revealed, and the statements he has made, suggest something more prosaic. Manafort, Gates, and Kilimnik were engaged in all sorts of shady and possibly illegal conduct in Ukraine. They were not interested in the world knowing about it. In addition, Manafort and Gates were strapped for cash and thought some Ukrainians owed them millions of dollars. Which means there were plenty of reasons for Gates and Kilimnik to be in contact in 2016, none of which they would want prosecutors to know about.
Ron Brownstein was right when he advised caution in drawing conclusions about the Mueller investigation. There is still too much that is hidden. But it is reasonable to assess what we know so far. And for the moment at least, the bread crumbs do not add up to a hoagie.
[Byron York: If Mueller didn’t charge Flynn and Manafort with collusion, then who was colluding?]
