You into the genesis of this weird conspiracy. it suggests that it was promoted by paul manafort, his campaign chairman. one of paul manafort s long-time associates, constantin kilimnik, who the fbi believed has ties to russian intelligence services are it seems this conspiracy was cooked up in the summer of 2016, right as the campaign is heating up, as the first documents begin to come out. you see manafort, kilimnik, and general mike flynn, begin to tell the president, we don t believe this is russia, we believe this is probably ukraine. do they care if it s true? hard to tell. our documents are reporting doesn t bear that out at the moment. it does seem they are acting in bad faith. there is quite a lot of evidence, at least some of like michael flynn, the intelligence services of the united states believe this is a russian hack. it s clear to us that he is attempting to shape that narrative to fit something that the trump campaign can use. why would it help them that much during 2016?
Campaign, ultimately shaped the president s views about that country as some of the reporting over the weekend suggests he has become obsessed with it, detests ukraine and his views of that country are so negative, in the trope of the mueller reports, rick gates suggests paul manafort introduced this theory that ukraine may have hacked the dnc server and trump basically runs away with it, and here we are. that theory may have started with manafort s associate, constantin kilimnik. we did a video timeline of all the interactions between trump and giuliani and the ukrainians last year at the wall street journal. one comment we have is giuliani on television saying in response to a question if you re the president s personal attorney, why are you flying to ukraine and having meetings with ukrainians? he said because they had an alternative explanation that cleared my client.
And what we learned was paul manafort was in contact with constantin kilimnik, a russian associate of his who investigators say has tied to russian intelligence while he was the campaign chairman. they talked about a ukrainian peace deal. at one point paul manafort actually shared campaign polling data with this russian associate and this relationship continued into 2017 after donald trump was elected. the two of them met up in madrid and mueller s prosecutors said this is one of the things that manafort was lying about during these interviews where manafort was supposed to be cooperating. so it s not just that he met with shared this information with this guy, he then went on and lied about it to mueller s team. that s right. now, manafort s attorneys said in this filing he didn t intentionally lie, he just misremembered a couple of these things along the way. the interviews are very long. these things happened a long time ago. he may have mangled a couple of the details. i think they said he would wake up early in the morning to do these interviews and that was part of the problem. yes, and that they would perhaps last all day. but i think what this tells you is look, this is a guy who was
Operative with ties to the controversial data firm hired by president trump has a nearly two decade long friendship and business relationship. the washington based operative sam patten would not say whether he has been interviewed by mueller s team as part of the investigation into russia s election interference and potential collusion between trump campaign and moscow. but mr. patten says that his relationship with kilimnik, the former officer in gru who worked closely with deputy rick gates for over a decade, he said his relationship has been thoroughly explored by relevant government entities. this is how you know you re following a good reporter. dude, you have never heard of before, turns up in one of her profiles as a potentially interesting connection between two big parts of a big sprawling scandal that otherwise as yet don t seem to be connected. never heard of the guy before.
When you talked to him? so that was the thing i was most interested in. i had wanted to know if he had been contacted by mueller. he had all these ties. and he told me that he had spoken to relevant government entities. i assumed that meant congress, maybe the fbi had reached out to him once or twice. he did not give me a firm answer on whether or not he had been interviewed by mueller. now we know he was. but he was very coy and he would not go into much detail about the work this company that he set up with constantin kilimnik. up it was on behalf foreign clients. did you have any domestic messaging role in the u.s.? all he said was no, it was only clients outside the u.s. he seemed very eager to hide the fact that he was lobbying on behalf of foreign clients in the united states which explain in turn why he did not register as a foreign agent at the justice department. right. he was lobbying the government