During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort pushed the idea that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers, Manafort’s deputy told investigators during the special counsel’s Russia probe.
The unsubstantiated theory, advanced by Trump even after he took office, would later help trigger the impeachment inquiry now consuming the White House.
Notes from an FBI interview were released on Saturday after lawsuits by BuzzFeed News and CNN led to public access to hundreds of pages of documents from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Photo: AP
The documents included summaries of interviews with other figures from the Mueller probe, including Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.
Information related to Ukraine took on renewed interest after calls for impeachment based on efforts by the president and his administration to pressure Ukraine to investigate former US vice president Joe Biden.
Trump, when speaking with Ukraine’s new president in July, asked about the DNC servers in the same telephone call in which he pushed for an investigation into Biden.
Manafort speculated about Ukraine’s responsibility as the campaign sought to capitalize on DNC e-mail disclosures and as Trump associates discussed how they could get hold of the material themselves, deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates told investigators, according to a summary of one of his interviews.
Gates said Manafort’s assertion that Ukraine might have done it echoed the position of Konstantin Kilimnik, a Manafort business associate who had also speculated that the hack could have been conducted by Russian operatives in Ukraine.
US authorities have assessed that Kilimnik, who was also charged in Mueller’s investigation, has ties to Russian intelligence.
US intelligence agencies have determined that Russia was behind the hack, and Mueller’s team indicted 12 Russian agents in connection with the intrusion.
Gates also said the campaign believed that retired US Army lieutenant general Michael Flynn, who later became Trump’s first national security adviser, would be in the best position to obtain former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton’s missing e-mails because of his Russia connections.
Flynn said he could use his intelligence sources to obtain the e-mails and was “adamant that Russians did not carry out the hack,” because he believed that the US intelligence community could not have figured out the source, according to the agent’s notes.
Flynn later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.
Mueller’s investigation concluded in March with a report that found insufficient evidence to establish a criminal conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign to sway the 2016 election.
The report also examined multiple episodes in which Trump sought to seize control of the Russia probe, but did not conclude one way or the other about whether the president had illegally obstructed justice.
US Attorney General William Barr ultimately concluded that the president had not committed a crime.
Gates worked with Manafort in a lucrative international political consulting business that included Ukraine and later testified against him. He pleaded guilty last year in Mueller’s investigation and has been one of the government’s key cooperators. He has yet to be sentenced as he continues working with investigators.
Manafort was sentenced to more than seven years in prison, in part for financial crimes arising from his Ukraine work.
During his interviews with investigators, Gates said that Donald Trump Jr would ask where the hacked e-mails were during family meetings in the summer of 2016.
Gates recalled that other key campaign aides, including then-US senator Jeff Sessions, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and Flynn, also “expressed interest in obtaining the e-mails as well,”according to an agent’s written summary of one interview.
The identity of one of the people who expressed interest in the e-mails is blanked out.
One time on the campaign aircraft, Gates told the FBI, candidate Trump said “get the e-mails.”
Gates also said that another point, Trump told him that more leaks were coming, though the heavily redacted documents do not indicate how Trump knew that.
Gates also described conversations with then-Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Reince Priebus, who later entered the White House as the first chief of staff.
Gates described the RNC as energized by the e-mails and said that though Trump and Kushner were initially skeptical about cooperating with the RNC, “the WikiLeaks issue was a turning point,” the FBI notes show.
WikiLeaks was the Web site that published the stolen e-mails in the weeks before the election.
The campaign was also very pleased by the releases, though Donald Trump was advised not to react to it, but rather to let it all play out, according to the interview summaries.
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