The revelations are significant because they mark the strongest connection to date between Trump's campaign and a Russian intelligence agency that is alleged by American intelligence agencies to have meddled in the 2016 election.
By Christopher Miller for RFE/RL, Apr 6, 2018 KYIV -- Person A loves good wine and craft beer, frequents Kyiv’s finest restaurants, speaks impeccable Russian, English, and Swedish, and may be a linchpin in the sprawling U.S. criminal investigation into Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election. Even before he was mentioned in U.S. court filings from the team of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Person A was extremely careful about revealing his true identity, particularly to media. He left scant evidence of his existence -- an image search, for example, will bring up nothing on the Internet. While his real name has not been revealed, Person A has been identified by media as Konstantin Kilimnik -- a former Russian army linguist and longtime fixer in Kyiv for former Donald Trump campaign aides Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. This would also mean Kilimnik is the man U.S. authorities are referring to in a March 27 document when they assert that Person A has ties to Russia's military-intelligence agency, the GRU; that the FBI has established that Person A had such ties in 2016, when Trump was elected U.S. president; and that Gates knew about those ties while working on Trump's campaign. The document said that Gates told London-based lawyer Alex van der Zwaan -- the first to be jailed as a result of the FBI's inquiry into collusion between Trump's campaign team and Russia -- about Kilimnik’s past work as a GRU officer. Van der Zwaan is known to have worked with Person A and Manafort on a report to whitewash the jailing of a political opponent of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a longtime former client. The revelations are significant because they mark the strongest connection to date between Trump's campaign and a Russian intelligence agency that is alleged by American intelligence agencies to have meddled in the 2016 election. […] https://www.rferl.org/a/person-a-in-ow ... ussia-probe/29150342.html
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