The three intersecting threads linking Trump's campaign to Russian intelligence

By Philip Bump
January 22 at 12:47 PM

Many questions remain about President Trump’s familiarity during the 2016 campaign with a proposed development project in Moscow. Those questions were stoked in recent days thanks to BuzzFeed News’s claim last week that Trump told his longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen to lie about the extent of those conversation — a claim denied by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s office. The questions were amplified when one of Trump’s current attorneys, former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, claimed over the weekend that discussions about the project may have continued until Election Day. (Giuliani later walked back this assertion.)

Obscured in this discussion is an aspect of that discussion that’s flown under the radar: The involvement of yet another figure with links to Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate, better known as GRU. This link was highlighted in the wake of recent reporting by journalist Marcy Wheeler, but deserves to be considered in light of the broad range of contacts between the Trump campaign and active or former members of that intelligence group.

We’ve isolated three threads in which people linked to Russian intelligence overlapped with the Trump campaign and Trump advisers over the course of the election. There’s the Moscow development, as above (🏢 ), the hacking of Democratic targets believed to have been conducted by the GRU (💻 ) and Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s interactions with his longtime business partner Konstantin Kilimnik, who Mueller’s team believes is linked to intelligence as well (🕵️ ).

Timeline

June 16, 2015. Trump announces his candidacy.

🏢 September 2015. An intermittent business partner of the Trump Organization, Felix Sater, reaches out to Cohen to discuss a possible development project in Moscow. Eventually, that conversation includes a proposed trip to Moscow. Sater is a felon who has, at times, cooperated with federal officials in criminal investigations.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/22/three-intersecting-threads-linking-trumps-campaign-russian-intelligence/