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President Trump

I've been seeing multiple stories over the past few days regarding details discovered in the case against Paul Manafort that appear to significantly undermine the president's position on accusations his campaign colluded with the Russian government for advantage in the 2016 presidential election.

The Washington Post characterized the information as "[indicative of] a pathway by which the Russians could have had access to Trump campaign data." ¹

It's also being widely reported that Manafort was in debt to Oleg Deripaska, and that Manafort's intention was to pass the polling data on to him through Konstantin Kilimnik, a Manafort associate since at least 2005 with known ties to Russian Intelligence.

Josh Marshall, an editor for TalkingPointsMemo, explains it in his blog post:

According to the Manafort court filing, the Special Counsel’s Office charged that Manafort had lied about sharing "polling data" about the 2016 campaign with his former Ukrainian deputy Konstantin Kilimnik, a man who US intelligence believes is himself tied to Russian intelligence. Given that Manafort had also told Kilimnik to offer briefings on the campaign to Russian oligarch Oleg V. Deripaska, it was a reasonable surmise that handing over the polling data was meant for Deripaska as well. Then yesterday mid-evening, The New York Times confirmed as much.²

Time Magazine reporting cited in the TalkingPointsMemo editorial offers some interesting background on Manafort at the time of the presidential campaign:

When he joined the campaign in the spring of 2016, Manafort was nearly broke. The veteran political consultant had racked up bills worth millions of dollars in luxury real estate, clothing, cars and antiques. According to allegations contained in court records filed in the U.S. and the Cayman Islands, he was also deeply in debt to... Oleg Deripaska... In a petition filed in the Cayman Islands in 2014, lawyers for Deripaska, a metals tycoon with close ties to the Kremlin, complain that Manafort and his then-partner had "simply disappeared" with around $19 million of the Russian’s money. When [Manafort] reappeared in the headlines around April 2016, [he] was serving as an unpaid adviser to the Trump campaign. He wanted his long-time patron in Moscow to know all about it. In a series of emails sent that spring and summer, Manafort tried to offer "private briefings" about the presidential race to Deripaska, apparently, as one of the emails puts it, to "get whole." Reports in The Atlantic and The Washington Post revealed those emails in the fall of 2017. ³

TPM's conclusion: "[N]ow we appear to have clear cut evidence from the other side that Manafort was doing precisely what was claimed: passing on confidential campaign data to a high-level Russian oligarch who Manafort knew from long experience was closely tied to Putin and the Russian intelligence services. There’s really no question about whether there was collusion. We have it right here in front of us."

MSNBC characterized it this way (transcription mine): "If this is the case, and Donald Trump's campaign was sharing polling data ... then Robert Mueller just might have an important piece of information about the intersection of the Trump political machine and Russian efforts to aid Donald Trump's campaign." ⁴

Collusion is not a legal term, but conspiracy IS — regardless of whether the Trump Campaign actually got anything of value in return — as Judge Andrew Napolitano, legal analyst for Fox News, reminds us in this interview with Shepard Smith:

UPDATE:
Reporting from Politico helps us understand what value there was in the polling data to the Russians:

Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio, who met with Mueller in early 2018, also worked for Manafort on Ukranian elections, narrowing the circle of participants.... After the [US] election, Fabrizio explained to Frontline how powerful his data was in identifying "Trump targets" who were ready to change direction in the upcoming election. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., did not inhibit himself from speculating that the polling data was put to direct use. "Did the Russians end up using this polling data in their efforts that took place later in the fall where they tried using the Internet Research Agency and other bots and other automated tools on social media to suppress, for example, the African-American vote?" Warner said.⁵

It certainly seems to fit. The Internet Research Agency has been shown to be an instrument of the GRU, with whom Kilimnik was a known affiliate. The polling data could have been used for targeting Russia's disinformation campaign.

My Conclusion

Question: Did the Trump Campaign conspire with the Russian government to install Donald Trump into the White House? — I believe that answer is effectively yes, and for reasons which extend beyond the scope of this post.

Question: Was Donald Trump responsible for the conspiracy? — I still don't know. What I do know, based on the above reporting, is that a guy who was $19MM in debt to a Russian oligarch offered to provide valuable insight into the Trump Campaign to get back in the black, and a former arms dealer-turned-enforcer/collections agent off his back.

It reads like a Cold War era espionage case — some enlisted solider or sailor starts selling secrets to the Soviets as a solution to financial problems. For Manafort, it seems the motivation was in getting out from under Deripaska, not in actually getting Trump elected. Simply put, I think Manafort got himself into a position to have something to sell (Recall he was working as campaign chairman for free!) and was perhaps able to discern Russian interest. Does motive matter? Not necessarily, but it does seem to respond to the second question I asked above.

So we know there was conspiracy between campaign staff and people with ties to the Kremlin. But we don't yet appear to have the smoking gun that ties it all back to Trump in any way other than by Manafort's position on his campaign staff. But is that enough?

We may have enough when one considers the totality of circumstantial evidence: Don't forget that whole thing with Don Junior and the infamous meeting at Trump Tower. (And who was there with Don Jr., by the way? Why, Paul Manafort was!)

Trump Jr. later told the Senate Judiciary Committee, "I did not collude with any foreign government and do not know of anyone who did." ⁶

All very exciting. But I'll bet Special Counsel Robert Mueller is going to make certain there's a solid link between the president and the Russians before sending a paddy wagon down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Is Polling Data Protected Information?

And by the way, is voter data worthy of such protection as to make its circulation outside of the United States a crime?

To answer this question, I tried calling the Information Security Oversight Office at the National Archives and Records Administration. My call went straight to voicemail.

Next, I opened a web chat session with USA.gov, asking the same question. The response I received was "Polling results are public information so it can be used by anyone anywhere." When I tried to dig a little deeper, I was referred to the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

So, I called the FEC, where again, nobody answered — simply a recording that said, "Due to unforseen circumstances." Seriously, that was the entire message.