Former intelligence officials say the Mueller report shows the Trump campaign left itself wide open to Russians.
— senior members of a presidential campaign and transition holding secret talks with a sophisticated foreign adversary, without the benefit of State Department and intelligence community counsel.
The Mueller report says the special counsel investigated whether Russia's wooing of Trump officials"constituted a third avenue of attempted Russian interference with or influence on the 2016 presidential election," in addition to Russian hacking of Democratic emails and social media manipulation through false personas.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire, Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2016, in Eau Claire, Wis.Trump officials took those meetings knowing their campaign had benefited from information stolen by the Russian government, the Mueller report says. NBC News reported that the Trump campaign received a counterintelligence briefing in the summer of 2016 warning that it could be the subject of Russian spying and infiltration attempts.
"Butina's stated goal of establishing a backchannel of communication, if it had been achieved, would have benefited the Russian government by enabling Russia to bypass formal channels of diplomacy, win concessions, and exert influence within the United States," wrote Robert Anderson, a former head of counterintelligence for the FBI, in the affidavit.
Maria Butina, leader of a pro-gun organization in Russia, speaks to a crowd during a rally in support of legalizing the possession of handguns in Moscow, Russia.Andrew Weiss, a Russia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, cited Anderson's affidavit this week as evidence that the Mueller report's narrative of Trump-Russia contacts is damning.
President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, pose for a photograph at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, Finland, on July 16, 2018.In July, after a Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki, Trump seemed to accept Putin's denial that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election, dismissing the findings of American intelligence agencies.
At the time, Simes was lobbying the Trump transition team, on Burt's behalf, to appoint Burt U.S. ambassador to Russia, the report says. Simes told Burt that a secret channel wasn't a good idea, given the media attention to Trump's dealings with Russia. Soon enough, Dmitriev found another route, He reached out to a friend of Kushner, Rick Gerson, a hedge fund manager. The two talked about potential joint ventures between the Russian wealth fund and Gerson's fund, the Mueller report says. And together they worked on a proposal for reconciliation between the United States and Russia, which Dmitriev implied he cleared through Putin, the report says.
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