On Tuesday, we learned that the Russian lawyer from the Trump Tower meeting allegedly misled a federal court about her work for the Russian prosecutor general’s office. We also learned that Paul Manafort’s former business partner, a former Russian military officer, pitched him on a peace plan for Ukraine while he was still running Trump’s campaign. So what’s so suspicious about two former Russian officials popping out of the woodwork to proposition senior Trump campaign folks on two of the Kremlin’s most important diplomatic priorities?
Welcome to Rabbit Hole.
Not her first rodeo: Natalya Veselnitskaya was on the receiving end of a federal indictment for allegedly misleading prosecutors about the fact that she ghostwrote a diplomatic note from the Russian government to American officials while trying to recover assets that the U.S. says were stolen by corrupt Russian officials.
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If you’re surprised that Veselnitskaya was working as a de facto arm of the Russian general prosecutor’s office, you haven’t been paying attention. In the summer of 2018, the Dossier Center in London, run by anti-Putin dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky, handed over emails from Veselnitskaya it said an anonymous source had passed along. Those emails show Veselnitskaya pulled a similar stunt in Cyprus with the Russian general prosecutor’s office to the one she’s accused of in the New York case. The emails the AP looked at show Veselnitskaya drafted an affidavit submitted by the Russian government to its Cypriot counterparts in another attempt to go after Browder.
Nor even her second: Nor is the Cyprus case the only instance where the line between Veselnitskata’s writing and the Russian government’s is blurry. The talking points she used at the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting were nearly identical to talking points issued by the general prosecutor’s office to former Congressman Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA).
Betrayed by track changes: The New York indictment also makes clear that it wasn’t just the AP and Khodorkovsky’s Dossier Center poking around Veselnitskaya’s inbox. Flip through the document and you’ll see that the quoted information could have only come from someone with access to the email traffic between Veselnitskaya and Russian prosecutors. Prosecutors summarize emails she sent to the personal account of a supervision, note the use of track changes in attached documents, and chart the progression of her writing from a personal email to Russian officials until it appeared in an official Russian diplomatic response to the U.S. government.
Opsec, how does it work? So who wasn’t reading Veselnitskata’s emails at this point? Given her apparent importance in high-profile Russian law enforcement investigations, she did a pretty bad job of covering it up. And it’s not like she was hurting for good security advice. The AP story notes that right before her meeting at Trump Tower, her translator suggested they switch to an encrypted means of communication like “Telegram, Signal or PGP.” It’s unclear whether they ever made the switch but even if they did, her old messages stayed in cleartext and made for easy pickings for anyone who had the hacking skill or legal authority to yank them.
Why does this matter? There was plenty of schadenfreude among #Resistance types today that one of the Russian players in the Trump Tower meeting got hit with an indictment. But those hoping Veselnitskaya could see a U.S. courtroom one day shouldn’t hold their breath. She joins a long cast of Russian nationals with direct or de facto ties to the government there who have been indicted but will probably at most see a modest change to their future travel plans as a result.
The indictment came from regular federal prosecutors in SDNY, but the charges still go to the very heart of the special counsel’s inquiry. Over and over again, news outlets have reported that Mueller’s team has an intense interest in the meeting. We know Veselnitskata used to be an official employee of the Russian prosecutor general’s office. Emails show she wrote an affidavit for prosecutors in the Browder case. Today’s indictment alleges she wrote diplomatic correspondence for them (and lied about it). Given all of that, how hard is it to take the next step and believe that her meeting with senior Trump campaign officials was the product of Russian government planning rather than independent initiative?
Black highlighter: Speaking of opsec fails, Paul Manafort’s defense team had a pretty big one today. Manafort’s lawyers were supposed to file a response to Mueller’s allegations that their client breached the terms of a plea deal by lying to prosecutors. They filed it under seal—or so they thought. Copy and paste the redacted text in the filing and it will spit out the verbatim bits that were supposed to be blacked out. So what did we learn?
Paul Manafort, diplomat: The most tantalizing bit of redacted information relates to Mueller’s claim that Manafort lied about “the fact and frequency” of his interactions with Konstantin Kilimnik, his former business partner and an alleged former Russian military intelligence official. The first blob of black text quotes from Mueller’s original accusation that Manafort only "'conceded' that he discussed or may have discussed a Ukraine peace plan with Mr. Kilimnik on more than one occasion" and met with him during a trip to Madrid.
What peace plan? Good question. We know that Ukraine, Russia’s annexation of a chunk of it and the low-grade proxy war it's fighting in other parts of it is at the top of Russia’s diplomatic agenda with the West. And a whole lot oddly surfaced between would-be intermediaries for the Russian government and people in Trumpworld during the campaign (and shortly after).
Seychelles plan: There’s the peace plan floated in a memo by Russian sovereign wealth fund chief Kirill Dmitriev to Trump adviser and former Blackwater boss Erik Prince during a January 2017 meeting in the Seychelles. That memo, first revealed by The Daily Beast, proposed closer relations between the Trump administration and Russia through a variety of measures, including giving Ukraine a hard time for its supposed failures to live up to the terms of a previous (and failed) peace plan negotiated with the U.S. and EU.
Cohen and Sater plan: Then there’s another plan cooked up by a Ukrainian politician, Andrii V. Artemenko, and shared with two Trump associates, his former attorney Michael Cohen and real estate associate Felix Sater. Around the same time that Dmitriev was pitching Prince on his Ukraine peace plan, Artemenko passed his along to Sater and Cohen who in turn handed it off to Michael Flynn, shortly before he was fired.
The Kilimnik plan: The details on all of the plans, including the one Kilimnik proposed to Manafort, are too sparse to say whether or not they’re the same. But the timing of Kilimnik’s plan is altogether earlier and more intriguing. Kilimnik’s plan was “raised during the period [Manafort] was engaged with work related to the presidential campaign.” His lawyers say their client’s memory about the pitch was fuzzy because his campaign chairman duties meant that it was “not at the forefront of Mr. Manafort's mind." Given that the Trump campaign changed the Republican party platform to remove references to providing lethal aid to the Ukrainian government in its war against Russia under Manafort’s tenure, it’s not surprising that Mueller’s team doesn’t find that argument persuasive.
