A Republican-Backed Senate Report Shows Trump and His Backers Are Russian Dupes

The Committee observed numerous Russian-government actors from late 2016 until at least January 2020 consistently spreading overlapping false narratives which sought to discredit investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections and spread false information about the events of 2016. Manafort, Kilimnik, [Putin-friendly Russian oligarch Oleg] Deripaska, and others associated with Deripaska participated in these influence operations. As part of these efforts, Manafort and Kilimnik both sought to promote the narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.

The report notes that Kiliminik—whom it describes as both a “Kremlin agent” and a “Russian intelligence officer”—“almost certainly helped arrange some of the first public messaging that Ukraine had interfered in the U.S. election.” He did this, according to the report, by being a source for a Financial Times story in August 2016 that reported Ukraine’s leaders were working against Trump. At the same time, Kilimnik was pushing out information suggesting that Manafort, who had been accused of corruptly accepting millions of dollars for his consulting work for a pro-Russia Ukrainian party called the Party of Regions, had been framed. The report states that Kilimnik helped write an opinion article for Serhiy Lyovochkin, a top Ukrainian politician in the Party of Regions, which claimed that the case against Manafort had been “manufactur[ed]” and that Trump had no Russia ties. There was “no real fire behind all this smoke,” the article said. In early 2017, U.S. News & World Report published this opinion piece that was secretly written by a Russian intelligence officer. 

Significant portions of the report’s section on this Russian venture to develop the Ukrainian counter-narrative are redacted. But it does disclose that Manafort pushed this view and that during a February 2017 meeting with Trump Jr., he “discussed how Ukraine, not Russia had meddled in the election.” Last year, the Washington Post reported that Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, had “consulted several times with Manafort through the federal prisoner’s lawyer in pursuit of information…that would bolster his theory that the real story of 2016 is not Russian interference to elect Trump, but Ukrainian efforts to support Hillary Clinton.”

Kilimink, according to the intelligence committee’s report, used a Twitter account under the alias @PBaranenko to spread information supporting this distraction. At one point, Kilimnik retweeted a story by Sputnik reporter Lee Stranahan, who claimed that interactions between a Democratic Party official and the Ukrainian government was “THE REAL 2016 Election Interference.”

The report’s descriptions of Deripaska’s attempt to disseminate the Ukrainian alibi are largely redacted. But the committee notes, “it is likely that some coordination occurred between Deripaska-directed efforts and those undertaken by Kilimnik and Manafort.”

Meanwhile, according to the report, the Kremlin was all in on this endeavor:

[I]n mid-2017, other Russian-government proxies and personas worked to spread the false narrative that Ukraine interfered in the U.S. election. On July 12, 2017, [pro-Russian hacktivists] Cyber Berkut—which had been dormant for months—alleged on its blog that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 U.S. elections. In the post, Cyber Berkut claimed that hacked emails revealed a set of financial transactions between [Ukrainian oligarch] Viktor Pinchuk and the Clinton Foundation. On July 13, 2017, @USA_Gunslinger, a long-running false persona account of the [Russian disinformation outfit] Internet Research Agency (IRA), tweeted about “Clinton and her campaign team’s collusion with Ukraine to interfere in the US election.”

About this time, Ukrainian parliamentarian Andrii Derkach sent a letter to Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko asking Lutsenko to investigate Ukrainian “interference” in the US election. Derkach, whose father is a former KGB officer who became head of Ukraine’s intelligence service, studied at Moscow’s FSB Academy, which trains Russian intelligence officers, in the 1990s. He later joined Ukraine’s pro-Russian Party of Regions. The report doesn’t dwell on this fact, but this is a Russian-linked pol pushing for a Ukrainian probe that would advance the Ukraine-not-Russia-interfered theory. (Last December, Derkach met in Kiev with Giuliani, and he has been part of a group of Ukrainians spreading allegations about Vice President Joe Biden. This month, William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, named Derkach as assisting a clandestine Russian effort to “denigrate” Biden.)

The section of the report on this Russian influence operation contains numerous references to stories by conservative journalist John Solomon, published in The Hill, which promoted unfounded accusations about Biden’s actions in Ukraine. But many of these passages are redacted. One Solomon article mentioned in the report cited Lutsenko’s claim that he had “opened a probe into alleged attempts by Ukrainians to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” And the committee report notes that Kilimnik, using a false persona, retweeted this piece. (“Kilimnik repeatedly tweeted information related to the Bidens and Ukraine, much of which originated from Solomon,” the report says.) Moreover, the report reveals that Kilimnik had reached out to Lutsenko “in an apparent effort to propose that Lutsenko pursue political office with the assistance of Kilimnik and others.” So Kilimink—a Russian intelligence officer and Manafort crony—offered to back a Ukrainian politician who could mount an investigation that would shift the focus from Russia to Ukraine.