A final report in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of the 2016 election is out and it paints a damning level of cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russian government officials.
The New York Times writes: “The Russian government undertook an extensive campaign to try to sabotage the 2016 American election to help Mr. Trump become president, and some members of Mr. Trump’s circle of advisers were open to the help from an American adversary.“
Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) calls it a “breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and the Russian government.” Those contacts were at the highest level of the campaign and included Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s extensive contacts with high-level Russians, including Konstantin Kilimnik, suspected of being KGB, and oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Axios writes:
- The bottom line: “Taken as a whole, Manafort’s high level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik and associates of Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave counterintelligence threat,” the committee wrote.
The committee also wrote it agreed with the Mueller report In that the Trump campaign eagerly embraced Russian help in 2016
NBC News writes of new information released in the report:
The report highlighted some never-before-seen evidence about Trump and Russia, including three allegations of potentially compromising material relating to Trump’s private trips to Russia that were unconnected to the dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.
“Separate from Steele’s memos, which the Committee did not use for support, the Committee became aware of three general sets of allegations” involving women, the report said, two of which described a tape. No such allegations were confirmed, but the finding lent new credence to at least one claim in the widely discredited Steele dossier.
Read the entire committee report here.
Read the New York Times coverage here.