Senator-elect Adam Schiff of California lies just as easily as he breathes. Just two weeks ago he was insisting, yet again, on CNN that his House Intelligence Committee investigation had identified Russian collusion with Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. “High-level Trump campaign officials were passing polling information to a Russian intelligence asset,” Schiff lied yet again.
The campaign official Schiff is referring to is former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and the alleged “Russian intelligence asset” is Konstantin Kilimnik. There are actually two fundamental problems with this phony narrative. First is the substantial evidence that not only is Kilimnik not a Russian intelligence asset, but evidence shows that he was working extensively with US Intelligence. Kilimnik actually worked for US Senator John McCain prior to the 2016 Presidential Campaign.
Paul Manafort himself addressed this in his book, Political Prisoner: Persecuted, Prosecuted, but Not Silenced when he said, “…my associate Konstantin Kilimnik…. was not only not a Russian agent, but he was a US asset. He was so important to the US embassy in Kiev that he had a code name to protect him in cable traffic between Ukraine and Washington.” Manafort went on to say that “The same anonymous US government sources who pushed this false narrative had access to the State Department files that identified him as a valued asset. They knew he was not a spy.”
Independent journalist Matt Taibbi reported, “The FBI’s own declassified reports show Kilimnik met with the head of the Kiev embassy’s political section “at least biweekly” during his time working with Manafort and Yanukovitch, adding that he “displayed good knowledge and seemed to know what was going on,” and came across as “less slanted” than other sources, among many other things. This fits with what I was told by multiple former colleagues of Kilimnik’s, that staffers in the Kiev embassy valued his analyses above those of some Americans in Yanukovitch’s orbit. Taibbi also noted that Kilimnik was so valued as a source by the State Department that his name was redacted from classified cables to and from the U.S. embassy in Kiev.
The other major problem with this false claim of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign and that Manafort passed highly secret polling to this alleged Russian agent is the fact that Manafort had no poll numbers that were proprietary to the Trump campaign at the time both Democrats and Federal prosecutors claimed he had shared the data with Kilimnik.
Again Manafort wrote, “The major misrepresentation by Weissman related to the “secret internal” polling data that I supposedly gave to Kilimnik. The fact that the campaign polling that I supposedly gave Kilimnik at the August 2 meeting was not even completed until August 8 was ignored. Also, ignored, was (Manfort Deputy Rick) Gates’s testimony in his proffers to the FBI that the information that he gave to Kilimnik was publicly available information.
The significance is that the campaign had no non-public polling data on August 2. Republican Pollster Tony Fabrizio, who was working for Trump had gone into the field in the battleground states on Aug 1 with the preliminary results not becoming available to me or Gates until Aug 8 and later.”
