Senate Intelligence Panel Report: Manafort 'Was a Grave Counterintelligence Threat'

By Karoun Demirjian and Ellen Nakashima, The Washington Post

18 August 20

resident Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman posed a “grave counterintelligence threat” due to his interaction with people close to the Kremlin, according to a bipartisan Senate report released Tuesday that also found extensive contacts between key campaign advisers and officials affiliated with Moscow’s government and intelligence services.

The Senate Intelligence Committee report states that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort worked with a Russian intelligence officer “on narratives that sought to undermine evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election,” including the idea that Ukrainian election interference was of greater concern.

The report states that a Russian attorney who met with Manafort, the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and his son-in-law Jared Kushner at Trump Tower in 2016 had “significant connections” to the Kremlin. The information she offered to them was also “part of a broader influence operation targeting the United States that was coordinated, at least in part with elements of the Russian government,” the report states.

But the panel also found that the FBI’s handling of Russian threats to the election were “flawed,” and that the FBI gave “unjustified credence” to other allegations regarding Trump’s Russia ties that were made in a dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, “based on an incomplete understanding of Steele’s past reporting record.”

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s three and a half year investigation stands as Congress’s only bipartisan examination of Russian interference in the 2016 election. But the panel’s leaders were noticeably divided along party lines in how they interpreted the significance of the report — particularly concerning Trump’s Russia contacts — a sign that their tome will likely not put to rest the political fights over its substance.

“We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election,” acting chairman Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said in a statement Tuesday morning, though the acknowledged the “what the Committee did find however is very troubling” and included “irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.”

Vice Chairman Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), meanwhile, noted “a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives that is a very real counterintelligence threat to our elections,” and he encouraged “all Americans to carefully review the documented evidence of the unprecedented and massive intervention campaign waged on behalf of then-candidate Donald Trump by Russians and their operatives and to reach their own independent conclusions.”

The committee’s past chairman Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who oversaw the bulk of the investigation, struck a position in the middle.

“One of the Committee’s most important — and overlooked — findings is that much of Russia’s activities weren’t related to producing a specific electoral outcome, but attempted to undermine our faith in the democratic process itself,” he said in a statement. “Their aim is to sow chaos, discord, and distrust. Their efforts are not limited to elections. The threat is ongoing.”

Burr and Warner launched the committee’s probe before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, and sustained the bipartisan investigation over the following three and a half years, even as other congressional investigations into the same matter faltered along partisan lines. Since the Senate Intelligence Committee began its probe, former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III also released a 448-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, and Trump was impeached and acquitted after Democrats accused him of coercing Ukrainian leaders to interfere in the 2020 election.

The Senate panel’s probe was mostly driven by the committee’s bipartisan staff, who interviewed more than 200 witnesses and wrote thousands of pages detailing their findings. The committee previously released four volumes of their report examining U.S. election security, Russia’s use of social media in disinformation campaigns, the Obama administration’s response to the perceived threat in 2016, and the intelligence community’s joint assessment that Russia had interfered in an attempt to tip the scales in Trump’s favor.

Yet the panel’s effort to maintain a bipartisan approach also not saved it from partisan scrutiny. Last year, the panel came under fire from Senate Republicans after issuing a subpoena for Donald Trump Jr. to come in for a second round of testimony. Some directed their ire specifically at then-chairman Burr; Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), even suggested that Trump Jr. ought to flout the summons.

After his testimony, Trump Jr. was one of several witnesses that the panel referred to the Justice Department for closer scrutiny over discrepancies between their testimony and that of former deputy Trump campaign manager, Rick Gates, a key witness in Mueller’s probe.

Earlier this year, Burr stepped aside as panel chairman after coming under scrutiny over stocks he sold in industries hit badly by the coronavirus pandemic. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has been serving as acting chairman in his place.

Graham also claimed earlier this month that FBI officials had lied to the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding the reliability of information in a dossier of Trump’s alleged Russia ties prepared by British spy Christopher Steele. But Graham never informed the panel of his suspicions before taking them public, and Republicans and Democrats on the committee dispute his assertion.

The report comes as Democrats and Republicans head into their party conventions.