Manafort's 'Smoking Gun' on Collusion With Russia

      Paul Manafort, while serving as chairman of Donald Trump's presidential campaign, met with a Russian spy and gave him confidential polling data from the campaign even as reports were already swirling of Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election. The stunning, unintentional disclosure in a court filing by Manafort's own lawyers struck some legal experts and Democratic politicians alike as the long-sought proof of the Trump campaign's collusion with Russian agents that Trump has repeatedly and insistently denied.
      A "smoking gun," the prominent Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe tweeted after the Washington Post story went online on Tuesday [Jan. 8]. Sen. Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat and the party's ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, had a similar reaction the next day. "This appears as the closest we've seen yet to real, live, actual collusion," Warner told CNN's Manu Raju in a corridor interview.
      The White House, consumed with the impasse over Trump's border wall and partial government shutdown, had little reaction beyond Trump's perfunctory denial two days later. "I didn't know anything about it," he told reporters when questioned on the White House lawn. Trump apologists began intimating, however, that Manafort was freelancing in his own interest when he passed on valuable political data to a Russian he knew from representing the pro-Russian elements in neighboring Ukraine.
      The disclosure of Manafort's campaign-time gift to his Russian associate, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, came from a filing by Manafort's lawyers aimed at limiting the eventual prison sentence for their convicted felon client. Manafort is due to be sentenced in March, but special counsel Robert Mueller's office has charged him with lying as part of a plea deal and warned on that basis of asking for more prison time.
      Manafort's lawyers deny that their client has been lying to Mueller's office and apparently included the information about the meeting with Kilmnik to prove their client's bona fides. They intended to redact that sentence from the court filing, but it emerged unredcated apparently because of a formatting error on their part.
      The disclosure of Manafort's meeting with a Russian well known to have ties to the Kremlin's intelligence services makes unavoidable the inference that Russia used the information better to target its interference in the 2016 presidential campaign for the benefit of Vladimir Putin's preferred candidate, Trump. The many questions unaddressed so far include, for example, whether Manafort told Trump in advance, after the fact, or never at all.
      With those questions pending, however, a leading election law expert surmises that the disclosure shows an apparent violation of federal campaign finance law. Paul Ryan, vice president for policy and litigation at the venerable campaign finance watchdog group Common Cause, notes that federal law flatly prohibits foreign nationals from directly or indirectly making contributions to U.S. campaigns and likewise prohibits U.S. campaigns from soliciting or receiving contributions from foreign nationals.
      Campaign experts interviewed by various news organizations over the next few days emphasized that the information Manafort acknowledges turning over apparently went beyond publicly available polling data and instead included the kind of "analytics" useful in precision targeting of political messages. Manafort's anonymous apologists suggested that he was providing the information to his Ukrainian clients by way of buttressing their backing of a pro-Russian "peace plan" for the region.
      Other experts emphasized that the Ukrainians had no real use for the data, but the Russians — based on their now confirmed interference in the 2016 campaign — clearly did know how it could be used and presumably used it for Trump's benefit. On that basis, Ryan posits that the Trump campaign violated federal law by receiving an "in-kind contribution" from foreign nationals in the form of "coordinated expenditures' and by failing to report those contributions and expenditures.
      As with the Trump campaign's failure to report the hush-money payment to Trump's porn-star accuser Stormy Daniels, this apparent campaign finance violation is no inadvertent bookkeeping oversight, but deliberate concealment of information that voters had a right to know before casting their ballots. President Obama, it will be recalled, backed away at the time from disclosing the intelligence community's assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election. A Trump campaign filing with the Federal Election Commission would have been proof positive of the campaign's dalliance with the United States' most significant geopolitical adversary.
      Now, more than two years after the fact, the evidence shows that Trump campaign operatives had more than 100 contacts with Russian agents during the course of the 2016 campaign despite warnings from the FBI of the Russians' attempts at insinuation. Trump's response as candidate and later as president was so inexplicable, the New York Times has now disclosed in a stunning report, that the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation after the firing of FBI director James Comey to determine whether Trump was consciously or unwittingly doing Russia's bidding as president.
      In a parliamentary system, the time would be ripe for a vote of no-confidence from the people's elected representatives in what is now a Democratic-majority House of Representatives. In the United States' presidential system, the constitutional remedy is impeachment, a procedure the Framers devised in part to guard against improper foreign influence on the chief executive. That remedy awaits the final report from Mueller's office but faces a seemingly insuperable obstacle in the Senate unless Republicans realize that Trump's presidency threatens not just the country but perhaps their own political fortunes as well.