UPDATED: Mueller Caught In More Deception?

Deception--that would be the polite way to say: lies.

John Solomon's latest Thursday night bombshell is a biggie.

Do you remember Konstantin Kilimnik? He was a key Ukrainian associate of Paul Manafort, and he ended up being charged by Mueller with obstruction and conspiracy. He's said to have coached witnesses, preventing Mueller from getting to the real truth. Kilimnik is so important to the whole narrative that Mueller flags him right up front--on page 6 of his Dossier:

“The FBI assesses [Kilimnik] to have ties to Russian intelligence.”

That's so that each time you see Kilimnik's name mentioned throughout the rest of the Mueller Dossier you'll say to yourself: "Ha, that guy with Russian intelligence ties again--talking to the Trump campaign!" And you'll draw the conclusion Mueller wants you to draw: there was no way to prove collusion, but there was still something fishy going on. It also helps to keep alive the myth of "all out" Russian "meddling" in the election. How convenient that Kilimnik is another of those elusive Russians (Ukrainians?) who Mueller indicted but will never see the inside of a US courtroom.

And, wouldn't you know, the NYT picked up on that angle, too, when they learned that Paul Manafort had shared polling data from the Trump campaign with Kilimnik and even--the horror--discussed a peace plan for Ukraine! It must be collusion!

... during the campaign, Mr. Manafort and his Russian associate, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, discussed a plan for peace in Ukraine. Throughout the campaign and the early days of the Trump administration, Russia and its allies were pushing various plans for Ukraine in the hope of gaining relief from American-led sanctions imposed after it annexed Crimea from Ukraine. 

Prosecutors and the news media have already documented a string of encounters between Russian operatives and Trump campaign associates dating from the early months of Mr. Trump’s bid for the presidency, including the now-famous meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan with a Russian lawyer promising damaging information on Hillary Clinton. [This] disclosure appeared to some experts to be perhaps most damning of all. 

But, we're told, this information is the worst of all:

“This is the closest thing we have seen to collusion,” Clint Watts, a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said of the data-sharing. “The question now is, did the president know about it?”

What did Trump know and when did he know it?


That story came out on January 8 of this year, 2019. The last gasp for the collusion narrative before the Mueller Dossier laid the the whole Russia Hoax to rest.

But there's a big problem with this story, and with the Mueller Dossier, and that's what John Solomon is telling us in his latest: Key figure that Mueller report linked to Russia was a State Department intel source. If you're guessing that that State Department intel source is Kilimnik, you're guessing right. Here's what Solomon documents.

Despite "assessing" in the Mueller Dossier that Kilimnik had "ties to Russian intelligence," the FBI and Team Mueller were fully aware of Kilimnik's close ties to the US State Department. Those ties were so close that Kilimnik was used to relay messages between the US government and the Ukraine government. This interaction had been going on since at least 2013. And to show you how important a source Kilimnik was Solomon describes for us the unusual measures that were taken to safeguard his identity. To take just one example:

State officials ... deemed Kilimnik to be such a valuable asset that they kept his name out of cables for fear he would be compromised by leaks to WikiLeaks.

And as for Kilimnik's political sympathies:

State officials told the FBI that although Kilimnik had Ukrainian and Russian residences, he did not appear to hold any allegiance to Moscow and was critical of Russia’s invasion of the Crimean territory of Ukraine.

There's much more, all along these lines, in Solomon's article. And Mueller knew all this:

Three sources with direct knowledge of the inner workings of Mueller’s office confirmed to me that the special prosecutor’s team had all of the FBI interviews with State officials, as well as Kilimnik’s intelligence reports to the U.S. Embassy, well before they portrayed him as a Russian sympathizer tied to Moscow intelligence or charged Kilimnik with participating with Manafort in a scheme to obstruct the Russia investigation.

But things get even more interesting, regarding that peace plan:

[The Mueller Dossier] makes a big deal about Kilimnik’s meeting with Manafort in August 2016 at the Trump Tower in New York.

... 

Specifically, the Mueller report flagged Kilimnik’s delivery of a peace plan to the Trump campaign for settling the two-year-old Crimea conflict between Russia and Ukraine. 

“Kilimnik requested the meeting to deliver in person a peace plan for Ukraine that Manafort acknowledged to the Special Counsel’s Office was a ‘backdoor’ way for Russia to control part of eastern Ukraine,” the Mueller report stated.
But State emails showed Kilimnik first delivered a version of his peace plan in May 2016 to the Obama administration during a visit to Washington. [Yes, Kilimnik visited Washington twice during 2016, to meet with State Department officials.] 

... 

So Kilimnik’s delivery of the peace plan to the Trump campaign in August 2016 was flagged by Mueller as potentially nefarious, but its earlier delivery to the Obama administration wasn’t mentioned. That’s what many in the intelligence world might call “deception by omission.”

Deception by omission. Or lying by omission.

Solomon claims to have reviewed memos and emails and FBI reports detailing all this and much more. That means that plenty of other people--at the FBI and DoJ and probably the White House--are already aware of Mueller's little game.

AG Barr can't stop with the origins of the Russia Hoax. For the good of the country he needs to turn the entire Hoax inside out, and that means turning the Mueller Inquisition inside out, too. Because Mueller was no less than a continuation of the disinformation and coup plot that was originally hatched by John Brennan.

UPDATE 1: J. E. Dyer summarizes the bottom line implications of Mueller's Kiliminik deceptions that I want to quote her:

The other 6 June update – this one qualifying as a “bombshell” – is that an infamous associate of Paul Manafort’s in Ukraine, Konstantin Kilimnik, has turned out to be materially misrepresented in the Mueller special counsel narrative. 

Kilimnik appeared all over the statements of offense for Manafort, Robert Gates, and attorney Alex van der Zwaan of Skadden, Arps, represented as an individual with a background in intelligence and espionage who was probably a spy for the Russians in Ukraine. 

It turns out, according to John Solomon’s always excellent reporting, that Kilimnik, a Ukrainian businessman, besides being linked to Democrat-run lobbying firms and Democratic politicians, has been a confidential informant for the U.S. State Department for years. 

In other words, Kilimnik may be a number of things, but one thing he is not is a character about whom the U.S. government has unsatisfied suspicions.  The U.S. government knows who this guy is.  The FBI and Mueller knew it too.  Kilimnik’s relationship with the U.S. embassy in Ukraine goes back to 2012, covering the timeframe when Manafort was doing business there.

UPDATE 2: Commenter Unknown suggests that Mueller might be well advised to lay low at this point. Precisely in that regard, Catherine Herridge is reporting that US Attorney Durham 'very dialed in' as he launches Russia probe review, met with Barr 'multiple times'. Durham is also said to be "asking all the right questions" and plans to conduct prosecutions personally. Given that Durham is the guy who investigated but was prevented from getting to the bottom of all the bad behavior by FBI/DoJ in the Whitey Bulger case--which included Robert Mueller--if I were Mueller I'd be feeling a bit apprehensive. The "very dialed in" Durham may feel that he has some unfinished business to attend to.