Konstantin Kilimnik. IMAGE: AP Photo
A key finding in the Mueller Report was that Ukrainian Businessman Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Paul Manafort, is allegedly tied to Russian intelligence, John Solomon noted in his opinion piece published on the Hill.
But Special Counsel Robert Mueller disregarded hundreds of pages of US government documents that described Kilimnik as a “sensitive” intelligence source for the U.S. State Department who informed on Ukrainian and Russian matters.
That part about Kilimnik was completely omitted from the report, setting up a narrative completely opposite of reality.
And the establishment of him being tied to Russian intelligence is so vital that it is mentioned on the 6th page of the report. “The FBI assesses” Kilimnik “to have ties to Russian intelligence,” Mueller’s team wrote.
It completely disregards that Konstantin Kilimnik was a “sensitive” intelligence source for US State Department from at least 2013, while he was still working for Paul Manafort, according to FBI and State Department memos Solomon reviewed.
The Ukrainian businessman wasn’t a low-level source, too.
“He interacted with the chief political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, sometimes meeting several times a week to provide information on the Ukraine government. He relayed messages back to Ukraine’s leaders and delivered written reports to U.S. officials via emails that stretched on for thousands of words,” the memos showed.
And the FBI was fully aware of that, long before former FBI Director Robert Mueller’s investigation concluded.
Alan Purcell, the chief political officer at the Kiev embassy from 2014 to 2017, told FBI agents that State officials, including senior embassy officials Alexander Kasanof and Eric Schultz, deemed Kilimnik to be such a valuable asset that they kept his name out of cables for fear he would be compromised by leaks to WikiLeaks.
“Purcell described what he considered an unusual level of discretion that was taken with handling Kilimnik,” stated one FBI interview report that Solomon reviewed. “Normally the head of the political section would not handle sources, but Kasanof informed Purcell that KILIMNIK was a sensitive source.”
Purcell told the FBI that Kilimnik provided “detailed information about OB (Ukraine’s opposition bloc) inner workings” that sometimes was so valuable it was forwarded immediately to the ambassador.
Other Western government relied to Konstantin Kilimnik too, Purcell learned.
“One time, in a meeting with the Italian embassy, Purcell heard the Italian ambassador echo a talking point that was strikingly familiar to the point Kilimnik had shared with Purcell,” the FBI report states.
Kasanof, who was the US Embassy political officer before Purcell said he knew Kilimnik worked with Manafort and the administration of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich, whose party hired Manafort to provide lobbyist services.
“Kilimnik was one of the only people within the administration who was willing to talk to USEMB,” referring to the U.S. Embassy, and he “provided information about the inner workings of Yanukovych’s administration,” Kasanof told the FBI agents.
“Kasanof met with Kilimnik at least bi-weekly and occasionally multiple times in the same week,” always outside the embassy to avoid detection, the FBI wrote. “Kasanof allowed Kilimnik to take the lead on operational security” for their meetings.
State officials also were cited by the FBI as saying that he had no allegiance to Moscow and was critical of “the invasion of Crimea.”
“Most sources of information in Ukraine were slanted in one direction or another,” Kasanof told agents. “Kilimnik came across as less slanted than others.”
“Kilimnik was flabbergasted at the Russian invasion of Crimea,” the FBI added.
Furthermore, the Mueller report flagged Kilimnik’s delivery of a peace plan to the Trump campaign for settling the two-year-old Crimea conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
“Kilimnik requested the meeting to deliver in person a peace plan for Ukraine that Manafort acknowledged to the Special Counsel’s Office was a ‘backdoor’ way for Russia to control part of eastern Ukraine,” the Mueller report stated.
But State emails showed Kilimnik first delivered a version of his peace plan in May 2016 to the Obama administration during a visit to Washington.
Officials for the State Department, the FBI, the Justice Department and Mueller’s office did not respond to requests for comment. Kilimnik did not respond to an email seeking comment but, in an email last month to The Washington Post, he slammed the Mueller report’s “made-up narrative” about him. “I have no ties to Russian or, for that matter, any intelligence operation,” he wrote.
Thus, one question surfaces, if the Mueller report constructs a separate version of reality when it comes to Konstantin Kilimnik, what else could it potentially be alleging about?
“Attorney General William Barr has said some of the Mueller report’s legal reasoning conflicts with Justice Department policies. And former Trump attorney John Dowd made a compelling case that Mueller’s report wrongly portrayed a phone message he left for a witness.
A few more such errors and omissions, and Americans may begin to wonder if the Mueller report is worth the paper on which it was printed,” Solomon concluded.
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