Welcome to Rabbit Hole, a breaking-news analysis that helps you get smart on the one story everyone’s obsessing over—for Beast Inside members only.
The Special Counsel’s Office says it’s at “the heart” of its investigation and what went down there is of “significance” to prosecutors. Thanks to a transcript of a hearing about whether Paul Manafort violated his plea agreement, we now know that prosecutors are particularly interested in an Aug. 2, 2016 meeting between Manafort and his former Russian business partner. So what went down at that meeting and why is Robert Mueller’s team interested in it?
Kilimnik is a BFD: Andrew Weissman, one of Mueller’s top prosecutors, told the court that Konstantin Kilimnik’s activities go “very much to the heart of what the Special Counsel's Office is investigating." Kilimnik, a dual Russian and Ukrainian national and Manafort’s former business partner, was indicted alongside Manafort and charged with attempting to obstruct justice. Kilimnik and his alleged ties to Russian intelligence have been a subject of tense focus but Weissman pointed to one meeting in particular. Manafort and Kilimnik met in New York on Aug. 2, 2016 and "That meeting and what happened at that meeting is of significance to the special counsel," Weissman said.
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No such thing as “former”: So why focus on Kilimnik? For one, he’s got a shady past and present. Kilimnik used to serve in the Soviet army and attended a language training school normally reserved for members of the Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU—the same intelligence agency that hacked the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Since his name surfaced in the investigation, many have speculated that Kilimnik never fully left his old job. In the transcript, Weissman hints that the FBI thinks the same thing, too. Kilimnik, he said using the present tense, "is understood by the FBI, assessed to be—have a relationship with Russian intelligence."
The peace plan is important: Thanks to a redaction mistake by the defense counsel in January, we found out that Kilimnik and Manafort discussed a peace plan for Ukraine. Part of those discussions took place during the Aug. 2, 2016 New York meeting that Mueller’s team is so interested in. The timing of that meeting is important, too. Trump fired Manafort as campaign chairman later that month. But as of Aug. 2, if you wanted to get candidate Trump’s attention to an issue, you couldn’t get much higher up the campaign than Manafort.
Talks about it didn’t stop: On Thursday we learned that the peace plan talk allegedly didn’t stop after Manafort was indicted, either. The Special Counsel’s Office first indicted him in October of 2017, but Judge Amy Berman Jackson said that the Special Counsel’s Office contends that the two men allegedly discussed a peace plan for Ukraine "even into the winter of 2018."
That begs the question of why anyone would think a man under federal indictment would be a good vehicle to push forward a peace plan. In redacted prose, Weissman suggested an answer: Manafort still had juice in Washington and that "if [Manafort] were the spokesperson, and denominated as such within the United States, that he would have access to senior people."
Corroboration: The alleged latter peace plan chatter jives with one of the clues we’ve already seen from the Special Counsel’s Office. When Mueller’s team submitted their version of why they think Manafort lied and violated his plea agreement, they attached a heavily redacted filing which included a document called a “New Initiative for Peace.” The date on that document was in February 2018.
Manafort kept working in Ukraine: Weissman let slip the Special Counsel’s Office found out that it had recently learned that Manafort had done polling work in Ukraine in 2018. In a subsequent section of the transcript, both Weissman and Judge Berman Jackson suggest that the "draft poll tests" he carried out were for a candidate whose name is redacted.
Gates got him again: Manafort’s former aide, Rick Gates, copped a plea and agreed to cooperate with the Special Counsel’s Office. His testimony helped convict Manafort on tax and bank fraud charges but he may have also sunk his former boss by helping Mueller’s team catch Manafort in an alleged lie. A redaction failure in a court filing from the defense revealed that Manafort had shared internal Trump campaign polling data with Kilimnik. Weissman told the court that the special counsel’s source on that was Gates, and that Manafort allegedly lied about it despite having FBI notes of Gates’s conversations with the FBI about it.
