It was five years ago when the Russian government first targeted the U.S. presidential election, launching a multifaceted attack on our political system with a single goal in mind: putting Donald Trump in power.
As part of the fallout from this scandal, the nation’s intelligence community is now required to do an assessment after every major election, reporting on possible foreign efforts to interfere in our political process.
And with that legal requirement in mind, the National Intelligence Council submitted a classified version of its report on the 2020 presidential election in January, the declassified version of which was released to the public yesterday. Among the many important revelations in the document: Russia took steps to help Trump last year, too. The New York Times reported:
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia authorized extensive efforts to hurt the candidacy of Joseph R. Biden Jr. during the election last year, including by mounting covert operations to influence people close to President Donald J. Trump, according to a declassified intelligence report released on Tuesday…. The declassified report represented the most comprehensive intelligence assessment of foreign efforts to influence the 2020 vote.
The Kremlin not only targeted our political system as part of a pro-Trump campaign twice, in some cases, it relied on an identical cast of characters. As Rachel explained in detail on the show last night, the U.S. intelligence community specifically focused attention on Russian influence agent Konstantin Kilimnik who was responsible for trying to “denigrate” then-candidate Joe Biden in order to “benefit” Donald Trump’s re-election prospects.
If Kilimnik’s name sounds at all familiar, it’s partly because he’s one of the stars of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, and partly because this Russian intelligence officer is a longtime associate of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman.
Indeed, remember when Manafort shared sensitive internal campaign information with a Russian operative during the 2016 race? The head of Trump’s political operation was feeding the information directly to Kilimnik — the same guy who also tried to help keep Trump in power last year.









