his pre- and post-election secret meetings with Trump’s onetime campaign manager “very significant meetings,” and special counsel Robert Mueller has since alleged, as has Gates, that Kilimnik had not just past but ongoing ties to Russian intelligence throughout the period he was meeting with Manafort.127
At the August 2, 2016, Manafort-Kilimnik meeting at the Grand Havana Room, Kilimnik conveys to Manafort a “message” from the Kremlin’s onetime puppet president in Ukraine, Yanukovych. The message is a “peace plan” for Ukraine that Manafort later concedes to the special counsel’s office was a “‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.”128 According to the Mueller Report, Manafort and Kilimnik will again meet to discuss the plan, which also involves an end to U.S. sanctions on Russia, in December 2016, January 2017, February 2017, and spring 2018—with the most consequential meeting coming during the presidential transition, when Kilimnik tells Manafort, and Manafort thereafter communicates to the Trump transition team, that “all that is required to start the [Ukrainian crisis-resolving and sanctions-dropping] process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from [Donald Trump].”129 Whether Trump receives this message from Manafort is unclear; what is clear is that he shortly thereafter attempts to implement a plan constituting far more than just a “wink” or “push”: immediately upon taking office, Trump sets into motion a sub rosa scheme to drop all sanctions on Russia—a scheme blocked by alarmed career officials in the State Department after a series of desperate backroom maneuvers.130 Manafort will subsequently lie to the special counsel’s office about his communications with both Kilimnik and the campaign regarding sanctions relief for the Kremlin. He will also take actions that keep the special counsel from “gain[ing] access to all of [his] electronic communications” during the relevant period.131 A federal judge eventually finds by a preponderance of the evidence that, even while he was under a federal cooperation agreement and plea deal with the special counsel’s office in 2018, Manafort “made multiple false statements to the FBI, the [special counsel’s] Office, and the grand jury concerning his interactions and communications with Kilimnik.” Notably, it is during this period that Trump—who, his attorneys claim, remains in a joint defense agreement with Manafort even after the latter’s plea, meaning that the legal teams of the two men share both information and legal strategies—boasts to friends that he is safe from liability in the Mueller probe because Manafort will not “flip” on him.132
Trump’s private statements about Paul Manafort’s hold over his own legal future raise the specter that Trump had knowledge of his campaign manager’s collusive mid-campaign interactions with a Russian intelligence agent, a knowledge that subsequently compels Trump to engage in, per legal analysts speaking to NBC News, acts that “could amount to obstruction of justice or witness tampering,” such as floating a pardon in exchange for Manafort’s silence.133
Manafort’s initial lie to federal investigators about his involvement in negotiating a “peace plan” with a Kremlin agent sees him insisting that he discussed such a plan with Kilimnik only once, in August 2016. When prosecutors challenge his narrative, Manafort admits that he and the Russian intelligence agent discussed the plan at least three more times after August.134 The judge in one of Manafort’s two federal trials will ultimately say that Manafort’s lies about the “peace plan” and Konstantin Kilimnik go to “the undisputed core of the … special counsel’s investigation”—the question of Trump-Russia collusion.135
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Manafort’s nearly a decade of public relations work in Ukraine came to a halt in 2014, when a revolution against his and Putin’s man in the country, Yanukovych, led to Yanukovych and his allies fleeing to Russia to seek Kremlin protection.136 Putin’s subsequent illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula was part of his pushback to this rebellion; his actions led to the very sanctions on Russia that Trump and Manafort would thereafter oppose throughout the 2016 primary and general election seasons.137 According to the New York Times, the approximately $12.7 million Manafort appears to have received from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions before his and Yanukovych’s simultaneous departure from Ukraine constituted “undisclosed cash payments … [that were] part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials”—in other words, the monies listed as earmarked for Manafort, often hidden in offshore bank accounts, may well have been evidence of an election-interference scheme partly backed by the Kremlin.138 Prosecutors in Ukraine now say that Manafort “must have realized the implications of his financial dealings” in that country preceding his purportedly “unpaid” work for Donald Trump.139