President Joe Biden’s top intelligence official faces congressional pressure to review and “expeditiously” declassify Senate findings on Paul Manafort’s ties to Russia’s intelligence operations.
“It is critical that these details be made public to the greatest extent possible,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) wrote to Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence. “As the Committee recommended, the public should be informed as soon as a foreign influence campaign is detected.”
Wyden, a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, justified the prod by pointing to reports that former President Donald Trump might tap Manafort as an adviser to his 2024 presidential campaign. Manafort, who secured a position as a senior member of Trump’s 2016 team when the outsider campaign needed to add professional political hands, loomed large in the controversy over Russian election interference due to his past work with associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“As the Committee recommended, the public should be informed as soon as a foreign influence campaign is detected,” Wyden wrote Tuesday. “Only by understanding the details of that threat can the public guard against a malign foreign influence effort that could once again threaten an American election.”
Manafort joined the Trump campaign in 2016, after 12 years of political work in Ukraine on behalf of a Russian billionaire named Oleg Deripaska, who was sanctioned during Trump’s presidency by the Treasury Department, which noted his work “on behalf of, directly or indirectly, a senior official of the Government of the Russian Federation.” In those ventures, he “hired and worked increasingly closely” with a certain Konstantin Kilimnik.
“Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer,” the Senate Intelligence Committee stated in volume five of its report on Russia’s “active measures” operations. “Kilimnik became an integral part of Manafort’s operations in Ukraine and Russia, serving as Manafort’s primary liaison to Deripaska and eventually managing Manafort’s office in Kyiv. Kilimnik and Manafort formed a close and lasting relationship that endured to the 2016 U.S. elections and beyond.”
Senate investigators “obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the GRU’s hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election,” the report also said, in an apparent reference to the theft and publication of Democratic National Committee documents and the personal email account of John Podesta, who chaired 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Manafort resigned from the Trump campaign in August of 2016 after Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, concluded that “he hadn’t been entirely forthright about his activities overseas,” as Politico put it at the time. Manafort received a pardon from Trump in 2020 that covered a conviction for tax fraud charges brought under the auspices of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian election interference.
His 73-month sentence was handed down after a judge found that he had “made intentionally false statements [about] … co-defendant Konstantin Kilimnik’s role in the obstruction of justice conspiracy.”
From 2016 and 2018, Manafort’s relationship with Kilimnik included a running dialogue about “a peace plan for eastern Ukraine that benefited the Kremlin,” according to the Senate report. He also “worked with Kilimnik starting in 2016 on narratives that sought to undermine evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.”
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Manafort’s prospective role with the 2024 campaign remains unclear. “The job discussions have largely centered on the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July and could include Manafort playing a role in fundraising for the presumptive GOP nominee’s campaign,” according to the Washington Post. “While no formal decision has been made, the four [sources] described the hiring as expected and said Trump was determined to bring Manafort back into the fold.”
Wyden wants Haines to “determine whether additional declassification” of information in that Senate report can be authorized. “[M]any of the details of this threat remain classified,” he wrote.