The Shadowy Operative at the Center of the Russia Scandal

Buried in a late-night court filing in Robert Mueller’s expansive probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was an explosive claim: An adviser to President Donald Trump’s campaign and transition teams had knowingly been in contact with a former Russian intelligence officer as late as September 2016, prosecutors said. The revelation is the strongest connection to date between Trump’s campaign and Russia’s intelligence services, which U.S. officials say were behind the cyberattacks on Democrats during the election.

The adviser, Rick Gates, was a deputy to Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort and stayed on as a liaison between Trump’s transition team and the Republican National Committee after the election, well after Manafort was forced to step down over his alleged ties to dirty Ukrainian money. Manafort and Gates’s arrival to the campaign team coincided with the most pivotal Russia-related episode of the election: the release of emails that had been stolen from the Democratic National Committee by hackers working for the GRU, Russia’s premier military-intelligence unit. The GRU remained at the center of the Russians’ interference campaign, using the Guccifer 2.0 persona, DCLeaks.com, and WikiLeaks to publish the hacked material in droves before the election. Gates and Manafort, meanwhile, remained in touch with the former GRU officer who the special counsel’s office believes was still connected to Russian intelligence services during the election—raising new questions about what the campaign officials knew about Russia’s hack-and-dump scheme.

The former GRU officer was identified in Mueller’s latest filing only as “Person A.” But the descriptions allude to Konstantin Kilimnik—a Russian-Ukrainian dual citizen who attended a Soviet military school in Ukraine and later joined the Russian Army as a translator. Kilimnik left the army and eventually landed at the Moscow office of the International Republican Institute (IRI) in 1995, where he worked for over a decade.


Gates knew of Kilimnik’s background. He told Alex van der Zwaan—a lawyer he and Manafort worked with on a project to shore up support for Manafort’s client at the time, ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych—about the former intelligence officer’s past as a GRU officer, according to prosecutors. Gates was indicted last October on charges including money laundering and tax fraud, and is now cooperating with the special counsel.

An IRI spokeswoman told me that “he was asked to leave because he violated IRI’s code of ethics,” and that, to her knowledge, “no one had any reason to believe that he was affiliated with Russian intelligence.” The spokeswoman would not elaborate on Kilimnik’s alleged ethics breach, but it may have had something to do with his overlapping work as a translator for Manafort in 2005. Kilimnik soon began working for Manafort’s firms full time. The lawyer at the center of Tuesday’s court filing, van der Zwaan, had “grown too close to Manafort, Gates, and Person A,” prosecutors alleged.

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