Special Counsel Mueller closes on Trump-Russia connections
Developments on Day 433 of the Trump Administration:
Trump Staffer Gates Frequently Spoke with former Russian Intelligence Officer
Special Counsel Robert Mueller comes closer to linking the Trump campaign with Russian intelligence, setting out the contacts of a top campaign advisor with a former officer of Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency.
A document filed with a court on Tuesday says Rick Gates — who pleaded guilty to tax, finance, and lobbying charges last month and is cooperating with the Trump-Russia investigation — had frequent phone calls in September and October 2016 with the former officer, identified as “Person A”.
A “person with knowledge of the matter” identified Person A as Konstantin Kilimnik. For years, Kiliminik was the right-hand man in Ukraine of Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager and Gates’ boss in 2016.
Manafort told associates that he did not believe Kilimnik had ties to Russian intelligence, but Gates told others of Kiliminik’s history in the intelligence services, according to the document, and that involvement was widely discussed for years among those who worked with Manafort and Gates in Ukraine.
Manafort associate Phil Griffin said last year that Kilimnik “was completely upfront about his past work with Russian military intelligence…it was no big deal”.
Manafort stepped down as Trump’s campaign manager in August 2016 over his claimed links to Ukraine and pro-Russian entities, but Gates remained as the Trump campaign’s liaison to the Republican National Committee at the time of the phone calls.
Manafort and Gates were both indicted last October for money laundering and other financial crimes over their Ukraine work. Unlike his top aide, Manafort has vowed to fight the charges.
In February 2017, the former campaign manager said he had “never knowingly spoken to Russian intelligence officers, and I have never been involved with anything to do with the Russian government of the Putin administration or any other issues under investigation today”. However, he covered the statement with “it’s not like these people wear badges that say, ‘I’m a Russian intelligence officer’”.
Kilimnik has denied any association with Russian intelligence. An investigation by Ukrainian prosecutors was closed late last year without charges.
The document filed Tuesday is a sentencing memorandum for Alex van der Zwaan, a lawyer who pleaded guilty in February to lying to federal investigators about his conversations with Gates in 2016 over the Ukraine work. The filing said Van der Zwaan “worked closely” on a report with Mr. Gates and Person A.
Trump Fires Veteran Affairs Secretary
Donald Trump dismisses Veteran Affairs Secretary David Shulkin, replacing him with the White House physician, Dr. Ronny Jackson, a Navy rear admiral.
Trump had upheld Shulkin as model for effective change, after rare legislative victories for the Administration, but the secretary fell from favor as conservative administration officials plotted against him and an inspector general’s report documented expensive overseas travel.
Jackson, appointed by Barack Obama in 2013, has been increasingly favored by Trump as he put out a January report about Trump’s physical health and dismissed speculation about the President’s mental fitness.
HUD Scales Back Enforcement of Fair Housing
The Housing and Urban Development Department is scaling back enforcement of fair housing laws and sidelining officials who have aggressively pursued civil rights cases.
Interviews with 20 current and former officials and internal agency emails set out the rollback of the Obama administration’s attempts to reverse decades of racial, ethnic, and income segregation in federally-subsidized housing and development projects.
This month Ben Carson, the HUD Secretary, struck the words “inclusive” and “free from discrimination” from the department’s mission statement.
In a memo to Department staff, Carson dismissed the idea that he is abandoning the fair housing mission. Spokesman Jereon Brown said any changes are part of routine recalibration from administration to administration.
But career officials and advocates for the poor say Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, and his political appointees are weakening the fair housing division, even as the agency has $28 billion in disaster recovery Community Development Block Grants for rebuilding of Puerto Rico and the Gulf Coast from Texas to Florida after Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria.
In a November e-mail, a top HUD official reported that the head of the Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity Division, Anna Maria Farías, ordered a hold on about a half-dozen fair housing investigations given the highest priority.
The “secretary-initiated cases” were used in the past to set precedent and to put other localities and developers on notice.
Carson’s aides also blocked an enquiry into Facebook allowing advertisers to exclude specific groups with “ethnic affinities” from seeing their ads.
