A MEETING IN A NEW YORK CIGAR ROOM AT THE HEART OF AN INVESTIGATION

… Konstantin Kilimnik & Paul Manafort

Why did three men leave the smoke-filled cigar lounge via three different exits?

For months, and now years, there are questions regarding all the meetings that occurred between members of the Donald Trump Presidential Campaign and key members and associates of Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin.

Well, one of those meetings has taken a special position in Robert Mueller III’s Russia investigation.

That meeting was right after the 2016 nominating conventions had concluded, and the presidential race was hitting a new level of intensity.  At that time, Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, had ducked into an unusual dinner meeting at a private cigar room a few blocks away from the campaign’s Trump Tower headquarters in Manhattan.

The court records show that Manafort was joined by his campaign deputy, Rick Gates, at the Grand Havana Room.  This is a classic, mahogany-paneled, smoke-filled lounge with floor-to-ceiling windows offering panoramic views of the city.

These two Americans met with an overseas guest, who was a longtime associate of their former international consulting business who had flown to the United States just for this meeting.  The individual was a high-level Russian political operative named Konstantin Kilimnik.

The Aug. 2, 2016, meeting between these two senior Trump campaign officials and Kilimnik, who has close ties to Russian intelligence, has emerged as a potential target in the special counsel Robert Mueller III’s investigation.

It was at this meeting that it is believed that Manafort and Gates may have exchanged key information with Kilimnik that was relevant to Russia and Trump’s presidential bid.  The encounter goes “very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating”.  That is a statement per the prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann’s statement to a federal judge in a sealed hearing just last week.

The statement said that one subject the men discussed was a proposed resolution to the conflict over Ukraine, an issue of great interest to the Russian government, according to a partially redacted transcript of the Feb. 4 hearing.

During the hearing, the judge also appeared to allude to another possible interaction at the Havana Room gathering.  That being a handoff by Manafort of internal political polling data from Trump’s presidential campaign to his Russian associate.  (In other words, possible poll data showing that Trump was looking better in the polls...?) 

These new details provide a rare look at what Mueller is examining in the final stretch of his nearly 21-month-old investigation.  This underscores Mueller’s deep interest in the Grand Havana Room gathering, which ended with the three men leaving through separate doors, as the Judge, Amy Berman Jackson has noted.

The point being, if this was just a meeting of old associates getting together, why did they make the point of leaving through three different exits...?

The prosecutor Weissmann said in the hearing, that one of the special counsel’s main tasks is to examine contacts between Americans and Russians during the 2016 race and to determine whether Trump associates conspired with the Russian-backed election interference campaign.  “That meeting, and what happened at that meeting, is of significance to the special counsel,” Weissmann said pointedly.

This particular hearing was held in a closed courtroom, and only a partial transcript has been released.  This is because the special counsel has argued that public disclosure of the issues discussed could harm “ongoing law enforcement investigations.”

As expected, and as usual, the spokesman for Mueller declined to comment.

The spokesman for Manafort, who the prosecutors have said Manafort breached a cooperation agreement by lying to the investigators, also declined to comment.  Manafort has pleaded guilty to crimes related to the same consulting work he did in Ukraine when associated with Kilimnik.  So far, Manafort has not been accused of coordinating with the Russians to tilt the election.

Kilimnik, whom prosecutors have charged with working with Manafort to obstruct the investigation, did not respond to a request for comment.

In a 2017 statement to The Washington Post, Kilimnik denied any connection to Russian intelligence and he said the Grand Havana Room meeting had nothing to do with politics or the presidential campaign.

Instead, he called the session a “private” visit, during which he and Manafort gossiped about “bills unpaid by our clients” and the political scene in Ukraine, where Manafort had worked as a political consultant for a decade before joining Trump’s campaign.

There have long been questions about why Manafort would break away from his many duties running Trump’s campaign to meet with his former Russian associate, an encounter The Post first reported in 2017.

“Why would at the height of Russia tensions and the Trump campaign, would the campaign chairman meet with a former business associate from the Ukraine?”

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA official who now teaches at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, said that this episode raises many red flags.  Manafort “goes way outside the normal bounds of behavior,” Mowatt-Larssen said.

Even though Manafort has since been found to have lied to the Mueller investigators, his associate, Rick Gates has been cooperating to the fullest.  It would appear that if Gates really is cooperating, the investigators would already know from Gates what went on in the Grand Havana Room meeting, unless he is also lying

Less than two weeks earlier, the issue of Russia’s role in the campaign had exploded into view when WikiLeaks published thousands of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee.  Hillary Clinton’s supporters immediately fingered Russia in the computer hack, a view that was later also embraced by US intelligence agencies.

Instead of condemning the Kremlin, Trump mockingly asked Russia to find emails Clinton had deleted while serving as secretary of state. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said at a July 27 news conference.

Trump also made a series of public statements in July that appeared to echo Kremlin talking points on foreign policy.  In an interview with the New York Times, he questioned the US commitment of defending NATO partners from Russian aggression.  Then he promised to look into recognizing Russia’s invasion of Crimea which he did not do.

“You know, the people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were,” Trump said in an ABC News interview.

In court last week, prosecutors focused on Manafort’s choice to meet with Kilimnik in person during this campaign period.

“There is an in-person meeting at an unusual time for somebody who is the campaign chairman to be spending time and to be doing it in person,” Weissmann said.

                 

In April 2016, Manafort emailed Kilimnik to ask if the “OVD operation” had seen the positive press Manafort was receiving for his Trump work, The Post had previously reported. That was an apparent reference to Deripaska, a onetime Manafort business partner.

“How do we use it to get whole?” Manafort wrote.

Kilimnik has told The Post that he came to the United States and met with Manafort on May 7 to discuss business issues. Then, on July 7, Manafort e-mailed Kilimnik, asking him to inform Deripaska that if he needed “private briefings” about the Trump campaign, “we can accommodate.”

At the same time, Manafort was figuring out how to use his prominent role with the Trump campaign to halt a personal financial spiral, court records show. He owed millions in property taxes and for home improvements, insurance policies, credit cards and other debts, according to documents introduced during his trial in Virginia last summer.

Manafort viewed Kilimnik as his liaison to high-level Ukrainian politicians and Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska who was the key to leveraging his unpaid role as Trump’s campaign chairman, emails reviewed by The Post show. These two individuals were in frequent contact during Manafort’s tenure at Trump’s campaign, also according to court records.

Kilimnik told Manafort he had met that day with the man who had given Manafort “the biggest black caviar jar several years ago.” The Post previously reported that the investigators had determined that Kilimnik’s reference to “black caviar” was a Russian code word for “money”.  Money from Oleg Deripaska…?

Kilimnik wrote that he and the "caviar" man had talked for five hours and he had important messages to relay to Manafort.  As a result. Kilimnik asked when Manafort would be available to meet.  “Tuesday would be best,” Manafort responded. The following Tuesday was Aug. 2.

Flight records show that a private plane belonging to Deripaska landed at Newark Liberty International Airport shortly after midnight on Aug. 3, just hours after Kilimnik and Manafort met. The plane spent only a few hours on the ground before taking off again and returning to Moscow.

Weissmann has said Manafort had a motive to lie about sharing material with Kilimnik while he was running Trump’s campaign. “It’s obviously an extremely sensitive issue,” the prosecutor said, adding, “We can see what it is that he would be worried about.”

What exactly might have been shared with Kilimnik at the Grand Havana Room appears to be a matter of dispute.

On the day of the gathering, Manafort sent Gates an email asking him to print material for the meeting, according to court records. The substance of the material has not been publicly disclosed.  The attorney for Gates declined to comment.

In the days after the meeting, Manafort’s work in Ukraine bubbled into public view. On Aug. 19, he resigned from Trump’s campaign.

It has been stated more than once that the Manafort and Gates meeting with Kilimnik in the Grand Havana Cigar Room is at the heart of the Manafort and Russian investigation.

Copyright G.Ater 2019