Agent GRU or State Department?

Spy scandal against the backdrop of tramp impeachment preparation

Recently, the Law Committee of the American House of Representatives arranged a hearing on the topic "Lessons that can be learned from the Müller report: presidential interference with the investigation and other crimes." The Topic Topic: She signals that the hearings will be held in preparation for the impeachment of Donald Trump, which is currently calling for about 40 out of 235 democrats and one congressman-public.

The guide of the program was 80-year-old John Dean, who worked as a legal adviser to the White House under Richard Nixon, who resigned in the summer of 1974 in order to avoid imminent impeachment.

American right -wingers despise Dean for the first to change Nixon and instead of the judge's inflammation gave murderous testimonies against the president’s associates. All of them were convicted.

Lefts carry Dean in their hands for the same reason, and also because in recent months his serial performances at SI-EN-EN helped to draw a parallel between Watergate and Rashagate.

In addition to Dean, the Democrats invited several former federal prosecutors to the meeting, mainly those who treat Trump without reverence.

In addition, the Intelligence Chamber also appointed a hearing on the issue of “counterintelligence lessons”, which can be extracted from Müller's report. Former heads of counterintelligence department of the FBI were called there.

The head of the Committee Adam Schiff said that the hearings will explain the American people "the scale of the unethical and nonpatriotic behavior described [in Müller's report], and will outline measures that will prevent its repetition in the future." In the one whose behavior was meant, no one had doubts.

The head of the republican minority of the Law Committee Dag Collins addressed the head of the Committee Democrat Jerold Nadrel with a letter in which he recalled that the internal rules of the House of Representatives prohibit publicly questioning the ethics, motives, decency, patriotism or loyalty of the president of the country.

The speaker of the house democrat Nancy Pelosi, on the contrary, said that Trump should not be imprisoned, but imprisoned, but this was said not publicly, but at the closed meeting of her faction, so she did not violate.

And against this background, John Solomon, journalist John Solomon, poured water on the Republican Mill, who published a lengthy article on the Russian Constantine Kilimnik on the Hill website, who is repeatedly mentioned in Müller's report in connection with the former head of the Trumpovsky campaign headquarters to Paul Manafort.

Republicans have recently been increasingly finding flaws in Müller’s report, who the other day in almost open text called Congress to the impeachment of Trump.

Then Solomon rendered them a greater service, accusing the special prosecutor of the fact that he concealed in his report the fact that Kilimnik for a long time maintained contact with the US State Department, supplying him with information about the political situation in Ukraine (which he is also a citizen) and in Russia.

Müller, obviously, gave the figure of a kilimnik great importance, since he already mentioned it on the 6th page of his report, noting that "the FBI characterizes him as a person who has connections with Russian intelligence."

The report does not say about the sources of this information, therefore it is unclear whether it is based on wiretaps, testimonies of defectors who could be slandered on a kilimnik or make mistakes, or on copies of secret documents of Russian intelligence agents, whose authenticity is difficult to determine. But rumors about his connections with the GRU have been going on for a long time.

On June 8, 2017, the Politico website placed an article about a kilimnik, entitled "Manafort Man in Kyiv." It said that the kilimnik, who was born in 1970 in Krivoy Rog and known as the KK, graduated from a military educational institution in which he took possession of English and Swedish, served in the army as a translator and inevitably had to come into contact with military intelligence.

In 1995, he was hired at the Moscow branch of the International Republican Institute (MRI) - a non -profit organization that helped to play democratic institutions in New Russia. Kilimnik did not hide that he was in military service, and when he was asked where he got such a good English, he replied that he had learned him in Russian military intelligence.

As one former MRI employee joked on the Politico website, "I did not call the GRU headquarters so that they would give a characteristic for him." In MRI it was considered a common place that the kilimnik served in intelligence, called the site five of his former colleagues, especially since he did not unlock.

“Kostya, small of the GRU,” this is how we called him, ”recalls one American who worked at that time in Moscow. “The institute was aware that he was from the GRU, but it did not matter, because we did not engage in any secret.”

According to the American media, the Ukrainian authorities tried to find out whether the kilimnik and the GRU were still working, but they did not find evidence.

If the American intelligence agencies consider the KK Rossi agent, it is not clear why they continued to be allowed in the United States and in 2016, when he arrived there twice, Solomon writes. Now he would also be happy to let him in, but would not have been released, since Müller would attract him with Manafort for interference with the investigation.

Prior to this, the kilimnik, according to Solomon, was an important source of information for American diplomats in Kyiv, who cherished them so much that they were not even called in their dispatches of fear that they would then be published by Vikilix. The KC supplied them with delicate information (starting, at least since 2013).

Solomon studied, according to him, a lot of closed documents, including the memorandums of the State Department and the protocols of the FBI interrogations, which are called among their “302” for brevity, since they are printed on forms called “302nd form”. He writes that Kilimnik spoke with the main political officer of the US Embassy in Kyiv, sometimes meeting him several times a week. He also sent him lengthy imiles.

Moreover, he transferred the messages of American diplomats to members of the Ukrainian leadership, writes Solomon, perplexed,

Why Müller mentioned in his report the opinion of the FBI of Kilimnik as a Russian agent, but did not say a word that the kilimnik had shared information with employees of the State Department for years.

In touch with Kilimnik, the main political officer of the embassy Alan Persell, who held this post from 2014 to 2017. Before him, this position was held by the diplomat Alexander Casanof, who also maintained contact with the KK. Employees of such a rank usually did not have direct contact with the sources of information, but Persell showed on an interview with the FBI that they made an exception for a kilimnik: sometimes he reported such useful information that it was immediately brought to the attention of the US ambassador.

Persell also noted that other Western diplomats in Kyiv used the kilimnik information. Once he met with an Italian ambassador and drew attention to the fact that he voiced a thought that was strikingly reminiscent of the one that the American heard from the kilimnik.

Casanof told the FBI that Kilimnik was one of the few reliable sources of information that the US Embassy received regarding the internal cuisine of the government of Viktor Yanukovych. And it is clear why: Kilimnik worked in the lobbying company Manafort, hired by the ruling Party of Regions.

According to Solomon, three well -aware sources told him that Müller and his team had long known about the long -term cooperation of the kilimnik with the State Department, but did not mention him in their report, limiting himself to the statement that the FBI considers him related to Russian intelligence. Solomon sees in this omission a sign of the tendentity of the report, the authors of which, according to him, wanted to portray the proximity of Manafort with a kilimnik in the most sinister light.

The owner of the White House immediately retweeted the article by Solomon and also stated that she showed Müller's bias, whose report “exposes absolute prejudice against Trump”.

I note in defense of the special prosecutor that he may have concealed the relations of the kilimnik with the State Department not from the trend, but in order not to light a valuable source of information.