NEW UPDATE: Mueller Probe Grows as More Key Players in Focus & Plot Thickens

“Not me or anyone near me is involved with Russia”

(Pay no attention to the guy standing next to me)

The plot thickens and smack dab in the middle is Rick Gates (pictured above next to Trump) — who happens to be a longtime associate of Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort with this startling headline:

“New Mueller court filing links Trump campaign, Russian intelligence, and WikiLeaks”

Original Post Follows this Update:

THIS UPDATE IDENTIFIES TO “PERSON A” NAMED IN THE ORIGINAL POST THAT FOLLOWS AFTER THIS UPDATE. IT IS A MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH FOR THE MUELLER TEAM:

“Person A” seems to be Konstantin Kilimnik: His name has surfaced many times in the 2016 election drama. He is a Russian national who was a longtime fixer in Ukraine for lobbyists Paul Manafort and Rick Gates.

Kilimnik also was a conduit between a Russian oligarch and Manafort, who was Trump’s Campaign Chairman and Gates who was the Deputy Campaign Chairman. 

Kilimnik communicated with Gates just ahead of the presidential vote in November 2016, and a year later, he traded emails with a freshly indicted Paul Manafort. Now, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has fleshed out another detail and now it seems that Gates, when questioned, revealed that he knew (all along) that Kilimnik was a onetime Russian military intelligence officer with the GRU (Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate), according to this recent Mueller court filing.

The FBI is even more direct saying: “Our Agents believe he has ties to a Russian intelligence service and had such ties in 2016.”

Related to all this is here from CNN. 

B/L: Mueller is doing, as they say: A Yeoman's job.

=====================================================

ORIGINAL POST FROM HERE:

In a recent late night court filing, special counsel Robert Mueller’s office revealed that it has linked Gates, a former Trump campaign official, and he is cooperating with the special counsel’s investigation, to a person who “has ties to a Russian intelligence service ever since 2016.”

According to Mueller’s office, Gates was “directly communicating” with “Person A” who Gates identified to associates as “a former Russian Intelligence Officer with the GRU.” Those contacts occurred “in September and October 2016” and are “pertinent to the investigation” says Mueller.

A GRU agent is believed to be responsible for hacking the DNC emails that were later published by WikiLeaks. According to a recent Daily Beast report, Guccifer 2.0, the “lone hacker who took credit for supply WikiLeaks with the DNC hacked emails, was in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU)… an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft (that revealed that key data).”

In its declassified report about Russian interference in the 2016 election, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) assessed “with high confidence that the GRU used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release U.S. victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks.”

Noteworthy: Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone exchanged Twitter direct messages with Guccifer 2.0 during the 2016 campaign.

During the same months that Gates was allegedly in touch with the former GRU officer, Trump was exploiting the stolen emails on the campaign trail. In fact, Trump mentioned WikiLeaks 164 times during the month of October 2016 alone — then he preposterously later claimed after the election that WikiLeaks had “absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.” 

(I Note: Mr. Trump, the public you say “I love Wikileaks.” Now based on that reminder, key the laughter and sustain it from here on out).

To date, Manafort and Gates have been charged with laundering about $30 million and working as unregistered foreign agents for Ukraine. Gates is now cooperating with Mueller, and it is possible that more will become known about the specific nature of his communications with the former GRU agent as a result.

Though Trump has tried to spin Manafort and Gates and their alleged criminal conduct as happening “years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign,” court filings indicate Gates was lying about his foreign bank accounts as recently as October 2017.

Manafort has pleaded “not guilty” to all Mueller charges.

Gates has pleaded “guilty” to only two charges (lying under oath, and to conspiracy against the United States).

All options are still open – which way S/C Mueller ends up going and taking the country is the key of course. So, stay tuned.

Thanks for stopping by.