The name Konstantin Kilimnik, who is believed to be a Russian intelligence officer, repeatedly has come up in the ongoing investigations of the Obama administration’s use of the nation’s intelligence agencies to spy on the Trump campaign in 2016.
Kilimnik, who was born in Ukraine, has been described in a Senate report as a “grave counterintelligence threat” to Trump because of his links to Paul Manafort, Trump’s onetime campaign manager.
Nevertheless, new documents obtained by Just the News reveal that during the Obama administration, the State Department and U.S. Embassy in Kiev were routinely trading information with Kilimnik.
That was at a time when Joe Biden, now the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, oversaw Ukrainian policy for the Obama administration.
The Senate report found no evidence that Trump or others on his campaign sanctioned Manafort’s various contacts with Kilimnik. But the Obama administration, Just the News reported, was routinely trading information with a man the Senate report now portrays as an asset of a hostile foreign power.
In a December 2015 exchange, the Obama State Department and the ambassador to Kiev were fretting over a negative story about then-Vice President Biden ahead of his visit to Ukraine.
“Thank you very much for looking into this and very sorry to ask,” Alexander Kasanof, a U.S. Embassy official, wrote to Kilimnik in an email that was obtained during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the now-debunked Russia collusion investigation.
“Ambassador very unhappy about the article, though agree it stinks to me to (sic) of people we know very well,” the email said.
A few lines later, Kasanof offered Kilimnik some valuable inside information about the Obama administration’s assessment of a sensitive meeting between indicted fugitive Ukrainian oligarch Dmitri Firtash’s associate Yuriy Boyko and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland.
“I thought Boyko did quite well, in fact,” Kasanof wrote. “Don’t know that he convinced Nuland on everything (incl. DF intentions), but his performance was much less Soviet and better than I thought would be. So job well done!”
Obama administration officials not only treated Kilimnik as a valuable political intelligence source, they also shared their private insights with him.
Eric Schultz, for example, a former U.S. Embassy official in Ukraine, weighed in after Obama named Marie Yovanovitch as Ukraine ambassador and George Kent to be her top deputy.
“He’s ok i think — though yes, very pro-Ukraine,” Schultz said of Kent in an email to Kilimnik. As for Yovanovitch, Schultz added: “she’s not (doesn’t handle pressure and can be difficult) but then she might be more Russian oriented than you realize. she never learned Ukrainian when she was in kyiv before but speaks good Russian.”
Just the News reported intelligence officials were surprised by the conflict between the characterizations of Kilimnik.
“The Senate report does not give a complete picture to the Obama-era State Department contacts where information was shared two ways with Kilimnik and Manafort,” one U.S. intelligence source with knowledge of the situation said anonymously.
“Either this is as serious for State as it was for Trump and there needs to be a damage assessment, or the Senate report is overstating the concerns about Kilimnik for political effect.”
Manafort left Trump’s campaign after his Ukraine lobbying work came to light, and he later was convicted of financial crimes. Mueller accused Kilimnik of obstruction, but he hasn’t been arrested.
“Hundreds of pages of State Department emails, interviews and other communications reviewed by Just the News show Mueller’s team gathered evidence that both Kilimnik and Manafort had extensive dealings with the Obama State Department prior to the Russia probe starting in summer 2016,” the report said.
“The documents state flatly that Manafort had been used by the U.S. embassy for nearly a decade as a facilitator with Ukrainian officials on topics as sensitive as getting Ukrainians to turn over nuclear materials and arranging European aid packages. Kilimnik, meanwhile, was treated as a ‘sensitive source’ since at least 2013 by the U.S. embassy’s top officials in Kiev, the memos also show.”
One federal official confirmed Kilimnik was such a “valuable asset” during the Obama era that his name was protected in cables for fear his identity would leak.
