Congressional investigators, meanwhile, have expressed dissatisfaction with the document productions from top Trump officials, including Mr. Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and former campaign aide who now serves as a senior White House adviser.
On Thursday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), the top Democrat on the committee, said in a letter to Mr. Kushner’s attorney that the response they received to an earlier request was “incomplete.”
In their letter, the senators said others had given them a document involving “a Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite” that Mr. Kushner forwarded, but the Kushner team didn’t turn over that document to the committee.
The letter doesn’t give other details about the material. A Judiciary Committee spokesman didn’t immediately respond to questions about the document.
The senators addressed the three-page letter to Mr. Kushner’s attorney, Abbe Lowell. In a statement after the letter was made public, Mr. Lowell said Mr. Kushner had been “responsive to all requests” and had provided documents related to “Mr. Kushner’s calls, contacts or meetings with Russians during the campaign and transition, which was the request.”
During a two-day period in July, Mr. Kushner met with staff members on the Senate intelligence committee and spoke to lawmakers on the House panel.
In the letter, the senators said that Mr. Lowell hadn’t turned over documents relating to a government form Mr. Kushner filed in applying for a security clearance, which initially omitted what he said were more than 100 contacts he had with more than 20 countries.
The two senators said Mr. Lowell had declined to produce records involving the form, known as an SF-86, “on the basis that the documents are confidential and have been submitted to the FBI for its review.”
They asked Mr. Lowell to turn over the material nonetheless, saying there are no restrictions on Mr. Kushner providing it to the committee.
The senators also said Mr. Kushner failed to provide email communications about WikiLeaks, the online operation that last year published a trove of damaging Democratic emails that the U.S. intelligence community concluded were stolen by Russian hack
Special Counsel Mueller Issued Subpoena for Russia-Related Documents From Trump Campaign Officials
Senate committee also pressures Kushner lawyer to turn over more documents
The British music publicist who arranged a meeting between Donald Trump's inner circle and a Russian lawyer who claimed to have damaging information on Hillary Clinton has insisted he was a merely "useful idiot" who became inadvertently embroiled in the scandal.
Rob Goldstone has agreed to be questioned by Special Counsel Robert Mueller about the meeting, which is at the heart of a probe into alleged collusion between Mr Trump presidential campaign and the Kremlin.
The publicist emailed the US leader's son, Donald Trump Jr, last year offering "official" Russian documents he claimed would "incriminate" Hillary Clinton and "be very useful to your father".
He was acting on behalf of his client Emin Agalarov, an Azerbaijani-Russian pop star whose oligarch father wanted to make contact with Mr Trump.
Mr Trump Jr quickly replied: "If it's what you say it is, I love it."
The exchange was forwarded to Mr Trump's son -in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner and his then campaign manager Paul Manafort. Both joined Mr Trump Jr at a subsequent meeting with a Russian delegation that included Natalia Veselnitskaya, a lawyer with links to the Kremlin, on 9 June last year.
Mr Goldstone, a former journalist, fled his New York him for the Far East shortly after the emails were published online in July this year, bringing intense new scrutiny on claims of collusion between Mr Trump's campaign and Moscow.
In his first interview since the scandal erupted, Mr Goldstone said he regretted his involvement but insisted he had merely been a "useful idiot".
"I never thought in a million years that an email I wrote to [Donald Trump Jr]... would be examined by the world many times over," he told The Sunday Times. "I should have listened to that little voice in my head. I remember specifically saying to Emin: you know, we probably shouldn't get involved in this."
He said the meeting at Trump Tower ended inconclusively, adding he believed the Russians used the promise of dirt on Ms Clinton as a "pretext" to lobby the Trump campaign on unrelated issues.
Mr Goldstone claimed he "puffed up" the wording of his emails to Mr Trump Jr to secure the meeting.
"If I'm guilty of anything, and I hate the word guilty, it's hyping the message and going the extra mile for my clients," the publicist added
The said he did not know of any other collusion between Moscow and Mr Trump's campaign "but I'm sure I wasn't part of it".
Mr Goldstone has accepted an invitation to meet Mr Mueller's investigation team. He said: "I want to share what I know... I'm keen to talk to [the justice department] and put my recollection of events in the public record."
WASHINGTON - Political guru Paul Manafort took at least 18 trips to Moscow and was in frequent contact with Vladimir Putin's allies for nearly a decade as a consultant in Russia and Ukraine for oligarchs and pro-Kremlin parties.
Even after the February 2014 fall of Ukraine's pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovych, who won office with the help of a Manafort-engineered image makeover, the American consultant flew to Kiev another 19 times over the next 20 months while working for the smaller, pro-Russian Opposition Bloc party. Manafort went so far as to suggest the party take an anti-NATO stance, an Oppo Bloc architect has said. A key ally of that party leader, oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, was identified by an earlier Ukrainian president as a former Russian intelligence agent, "100 percent."
It was this background that Manafort brought to Donald Trump's presidential campaign, which he joined in early 2016 and soon led. His web of connections to Russia-loyal potentates is now a focus of federal investigators.
Manafort's flight records in and out of Ukraine, which McClatchy obtained from a government source in Kiev, and interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with his activities, including current and former government officials, suggest the links between Trump's former campaign manager and Russia sympathizers run deeper than previously thought.
What's now known leads some Russia experts to suspect that the Kremlin's emissaries at times turned Manafort into an asset acting on Russia's behalf. "You can make a case that all along he ... was either working principally for Moscow, or he was trying to play both sides against each other just to maximize his profits," said Daniel Fried, a former assistant secretary of state who communicated with Manafort during Yanukovych's reign in President George W. Bush's second term.
"He's at best got a conflict of interest and at worst is really doing Putin's bidding," said Fried, now a fellow with the Atlantic Council.
A central question for Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller and several congressional committees is whether Manafort, in trying to boost Trump's underdog campaign, in any way collaborated with Russia's cyber meddling aimed at improving Trump's electoral prospects.
His lucrative consulting relationships have already led a grand jury convened by Mueller to charge him and an associate with conspiracy, money laundering and other felonies - charges that legal experts say are likely meant to pressure them to cooperate with the wider probe into possible collusion.
Government investigators are examining information they've received regarding "talks between Russians about using Manafort as part of their broad influence operations during the elections," a source familiar with the inquiry told McClatchy.
Suspicions about Manafort have been fueled by a former British spy's opposition research on Trump. In a now-famous dossier, former MI6 officer Christopher Steele quoted an ethnic Russian close to Trump as saying that Manafort had managed "a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation" between the campaign and the Kremlin.
Jason Maloni, a spokesman for Manafort, called that allegation "false," saying that Manafort "never - ever - worked for the Russian government." He also denied that Manafort ever recommended Ukrainian opposition to NATO, saying he "was a strong advocate" of closer relations with the western military alliance while advising political parties there.
"Paul Manafort did not collude with the Russian government to undermine the 2016 election," Maloni said. "No amount of wishing and hoping by his political opponents will make this spurious allegation true."
Maloni declined to say whether, while in Moscow, Manafort met with any Russian government officials.
Land of the oligarchs
The trail of Manafort's decade of dealings 5,000 miles from America's capital is murky. But the previously unreported flight records, spanning from late 2004 through 2015, reflect a man seemingly always on the move. Over those years, Manafort visited Ukraine at least 138 times. His trips between Ukraine and Moscow all occurred between 2005 and 2011 and were mostly in 2005 and 2006.
Prosecutors have charged that Manafort and associate Rick Gates funneled through a maze of foreign accounts at least $75 million in consulting fees from an array of Kremlin-leaning clients: Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, who secretly paid them $10 million annually for several years; a second Ukrainian oligarch; and the ruling Party of Regions, which supported Yanukovych until corruption allegations and bloody protests led to his overthrow in February 2014.
Maloni said Manafort's trips to Russia were "related to his work on behalf of Oleg Deripaska's commercial interests."
The further unmasking of Manafort's relationship with Deripaska in recent months, however, has heightened suspicions about Manafort.
In July 2016, weeks after he was named Trump's campaign chairman, Manafort crafted an unusual, eyebrow-raising proposal for Deripaska, a member of Putin's inner circle. In emails first reported by The Washington Post, Manafort offered in seemingly coded language to provide "private briefings" on the U.S. presidential race for the Russian aluminum magnate. Manafort directed a trusted associate, Konstantin Kilimnik, to relay his message to Deripaska, remarking that it could be a way to make himself "whole" - possibly an allusion to a multimillion-dollar legal action Deripaska had filed against Manafort. Kilimnik, a Ukrainian citizen, once attended a Russian military academy known for training spies.
Deripaska, who did not respond to a request for comment, has denied seeing Manafort's proposal and says it went nowhere. Kilimnik did not respond to emailed questions, but he has denied in published reports having any connection to Russian intelligence services.
California Rep. Adam Schiff, the lead Democrat in the House Intelligence Committee's inquiry, told McClatchy: "It certainly looks like Mr. Manafort viewed his position on the campaign as a way of further profiting personally from the work that he was doing on behalf of Russian interests."
Manafort's proposal to Deripaska "shows a certain willingness to trade information in the hope of obtaining financial rewards from pro-Russian interests," Schiff said in a phone interview. "If accurate, that's a dangerous quality to have in a campaign chairman for a presidential campaign."
Two former U.S. government officials with knowledge of the way Putin operates said three of the oligarchs with whom Manafort had contacts - Deripaska, Dmitry Firtash, who helped finance the party behind Yanukovych, and Medvedchuk - were potential conduits with the Kremlin.
"All three of those guys are able to pass messages directly to Putin, as well as to his subordinates and aides within the Russian presidential administration," said one of the ex-officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. "So they all have access and Manafort knew all three or their close associates fairly well."
No evidence has surfaced that Manafort used any of them to pass messages between the campaign and the Kremlin.
During Manafort's five-month tenure with the campaign, Russian emissaries made at least two behind-the-scenes offers to deliver "dirt" about opponent Hillary Clinton to Trump's campaign, including at a June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower three weeks after Manafort was promoted to campaign chairman; he attended the meeting along with Donald Trump Jr., Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and a Russian lawyer. Trump's aides say nothing came of that discussion, or a similar offer conveyed in April 2016 to foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos; Manafort was copied on an email relaying that offer, which said the Russians had "thousands" of emails from Democrats.
In July, days before the Democratic National Convention, the British transparency group WikiLeaks began publishing thousands of embarrassing emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia was behind the hacking, and also was responsible for the social media dissemination of a blizzard of fake and harshly critical news about Clinton.
Schiff, emphasizing he could only discuss what's on the public record, said "these are some of the communications and interactions that are of deep interest to us, because obviously the timing is highly suggestive. It's one of the reasons why Manafort is such a key figure in all of this."
Globe-trotting consultant
Manafort first began to establish connections in Ukraine - ground zero in the geopolitical struggle between Putin's Russia and the West - in late 2004. His reputation as a masterful political strategist and fixer was earned over decades hopping planes to the Congo, Philippines and elsewhere to advise authoritarian rulers friendly with the United States.
By the end of that year, the former Soviet republic of Ukraine was paralyzed by widespread protests amid allegations that Yanukovych, the prime minister in a government rife with corruption, had won the presidency in a rigged election. What became the Orange Revolution persisted until another, internationally monitored vote was held and rival Viktor Yushchenko was declared the winner.
Manafort and a partner formed Davis Manafort Partners Inc. in early 2005 and opened offices in Kiev.
Manafort's first client in Ukraine was Rinat Akhmetov, the country's richest man and a key funder of Yanukovych's Party of Regions. Deripaska introduced Manafort to Akhmetov, who hailed from Russia-leaning Eastern Ukraine. In the summer of 2005, Akhmetov tapped Manafort to help Yanukovych and his party in the 2006 elections, according to an American consultant based in Kiev, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid damaging relationships.
The multimillion-dollar political consulting deal was sealed at a meeting in an elite Moscow hotel attended by Manafort, Akhmetov and a half dozen other wealthy Ukrainians.
Manafort spent the next several years advising Deripaska, Akhmetov and other Ukrainian oligarchs and giving the gruff-talking Yanukovych a makeover down to his hair style and attire. Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010.
In 2014, however, Manafort's business took a hit when Yanukovych fled to Russia, days before Kremlin-backed forces invaded Eastern Ukraine. He was quickly hired by the Opposition Bloc, which leaned even more toward Moscow.
His work drew rave reviews from one Oppo Bloc leader, Nestor Shufrych, whom multiple people in positions to know described as a close ally of Medvedchuk. Shufrych told a Ukrainian publication that Manafort urged the new party to take an anti-NATO stance and be the "voice of Russians in (Ukraine's) East."
Calling Manafort "a genius," Shufrych said the party had paid him about $1 million, and the investment "paid off."
Philip Griffin, a former associate of Manafort's who consults in Kiev, said he could not imagine Manafort opposing NATO. "Paul Manafort is a Reagan Republican," Griffin said. "He would never betray that legacy by doing Russia's bidding."
Maloni said Manafort argued strongly that "Ukraine was better served by having closer relations with the West and NATO."
He also said Manafort succeeded in pushing "a number of major initiatives that were strongly supported by the U.S. government and opposed by Russia," including the denuclearization of Ukraine and the expansion of NATO exercises in the region.
Some former U.S. government officials, though, are skeptical.
Despite Ukraine's popular uprising against Yanukovych that led to at least 75 deaths, "Paul Manafort maintained ties to the Opposition Bloc party and Viktor Yanukovych's former cronies, thus choosing to associate himself with crooks and kleptocrats rather than Ukraine's pro-Western reformers," said Mike Carpenter, who focused on Russia matters as a top Pentagon and National Security Council official during the Obama administration. "This speaks volumes about his character and lack of respect for democratic values."
One of Shufrych's and Oppo Bloc's behind-the-scenes allies was Medvedchuk, who is so close to Putin that the Russian president is the godfather of his daughter.
Partial transcripts from tape recordings of then-Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma, published in 2002, show Kumcha saying: "Well, we know about it, that he was a KGB agent, 100 percent."
Details of Manafort's contacts with Medvedchuk could not be learned. But Medvedchuk, who is under U.S. sanctions, has acknowledged meeting Manafort once in 2014.
Flights of interest
Several of the trips in Manafort's flight records could draw investigators' interest.
In April 2014,for instance, Manafort traveled to Vienna. Ukrainian oligarch Firtash had been arrested there the prior month on U.S. charges that he helped orchestrate an $18.5 million bribery scheme involving the government of India, a U.S. firm and a Firtash company in the Virgin Islands. A former U.S. government official, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter, said Manafort met with Firtash in Vienna, where he is awaiting extradition to the United States.
Another Manafort trip that could interest investigators took place in July 2013 when Manafort and Kilimnik flew to Frankfurt on a private plane owned by Andrey Artemenko, a pro-Moscow Ukrainian legislator.
American experts on Russia said privately they suspect the trip was a prelude to a broader Russian influence effort to dissuade Yanukovych's government from signing an agreement to associate with the European Union. That decision, experts say, opened the door to Russia's 2014 invasion of eastern Ukraine. This year, Artemenko was expelled from the Ukrainian legislature and his citizenship was revoked after disclosures he and a Trump attorney had pitched a "peace plan" for Ukraine and Russia widely seen as favoring Moscow.
Pro-Russia stances
Some of Trump's most remarked-upon statements about foreign policy that directly or indirectly implicated Russia occurred on Manafort's watch in the 2016 campaign. For example, Trump launched broadsides against NATO allies for not contributing enough money and suggested the United States might rethink its commitment to the European mutual defense alliance credited with deterring Russian military ambitions.
Trump also raised doubts about whether he would stand behind U.S. sanctions that President Barack Obama imposed in December 2014 in retaliation for the Crimean invasion.
As the GOP platform committee drew up party positions a week before the Republican National Convention, a plank calling for the United States to provide "lethal weapons" for Ukraine's defense was altered in a controversial and mysterious move. The American consultant in Ukraine said that Manafort aide Kilimnik had boasted he played a role in easing the language to recommend only "appropriate assistance" to Ukraine's military.
Charlie Black, a onetime partner of Manafort's, says he remains baffled by the change.
"It was inexplicable to me that a majority of platform members would have taken a pro-Russian position on Ukraine," he said. "They must not have known this was a pro-Russia provision."
In late July 2016 after FBI Director James Comey said he would not back prosecution of Clinton over her use of a private email server to conduct State Department business, Trump took a bizarre step. He publicly beseeched Russia to help unearth 30,000 emails that Clinton said she had deleted because they dealt with personal matters.
During the summer, a U.S. group supporting Ukraine asked both presidential candidates for a letter recognizing the country's 25th year of independence since the fall of the Soviet Union. Clinton obliged. But the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America was unable to wrest a letter from the Trump campaign, said a person familiar with the matter. The group's president did not respond to phone messages.
Manafort resigned from the campaign on Aug. 19, 2016, after The New York Times disclosed a secret Ukrainian ledger indicating he was to receive more than $12 million in off-the-books payments from Yanukovych's party from 2007 to 2012.
Schiff said he found an intriguing symmetry between Trump's Russia stances and Manafort's work in Kiev that might explain their mutual attraction.
"Whether he was attracted to the Trump campaign or the campaign was attracted to him on the basis of his Russian contacts," Schiff said, "the fact of the matter is, he did bring those Russian contacts and pro-Russian prejudices with him to the campaign and apparently found a welcome home there."
___
(Kevin G. Hall, James Whitlow and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project contributed to this report. Peter Stone is a McClatchy special correspondent.)
Visit the McClatchy Washington Bureau at www.mcclatchydc.com
President Trump famously promised that, if elected president, he would “drain the swamp” — upending the culture in Washington that favors the well-connected.
It is special counsel Robert S. Mueller III whose work seems to be sending shock waves through the capital, by exposing the lucrative work lobbyists from both parties engage in on behalf of foreign interests.
The Mueller probe has already claimed its first K Street casualty: Tony Podesta. His lobbying firm, the Podesta Group, a Washington icon of power and political influence, notified its employees recently that the enterprise is shutting its doors.
Since Mueller was appointed, more people and firms have either filed or amended registrations that make public their work on behalf of foreign interests than had done so over the same time period in each of at least the past 20 years. Lobbyists, lawyers and public relations professionals who work for foreign companies and governments say Mueller’s probe has spooked K Street, and firms are likely to be more careful in their compliance with public disclosure standards.
“My colleagues are being contacted by waves of clients concerned about this,” said Joe Sandler, an ethics and lobbying lawyer in Washington who specializes in Foreign Agents Registration Act issues.
The Podesta Group was famous for providing access to Washington power, hosting events for a roster of high-profile domestic and international clients who helped make it one of the city’s most successful lobbying firms. Revenue declined after the 2016 election, but the firm remained a powerhouse.
Tony Podesta, 74, the brother of longtime Democratic adviser and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, resigned on the day Mueller announced charges against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his business partner Rick Gates.
[The rise and fall of the Podestas, Washington’s powerful brother act]
The 12-count indictment included charges of failing to accurately report lobbying work for a Ukrainian political party as required under FARA. That section made reference to “Company A and Company B,” later confirmed to be the Podesta Group and Mercury LLC, another lobbying dynamo that includes Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota who worked on the Ukraine account.
Mueller was appointed in May to investigate possible coordination between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign to influence the 2016 election, but his work and similar congressional inquiries have stretched into other areas. The charges against Manafort and Gates were unrelated to their Trump campaign work.
According to the indictment, the men used a Brussels-based nonprofit organization, the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, to hide that they were running a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign for a Ukrainian political party friendly to Russia. Mueller’s team alleged that the men hired the Podesta Group and Mercury to lobby for the Ukrainians in the United States.
According to the indictment, Gates told Mercury it would be “representing the Government of Ukraine,” and provided talking points to the Podesta Group falsely describing how Manafort and Gates merely provided an introduction to connect them with the European Centre.
An official from the Podesta Group wrote back that there was “a lot of email traffic that has you much more involved than this suggests,” adding, “we will not disclose.” The indictment alleges that Gates and Manafort had weekly phone calls and exchanged frequent emails with the two firms to provide direction on specific lobbying steps they should take. The men paid the firms, which have not been publicly accused of any crimes, more than $2 million from offshore accounts they controlled. Podesta officials have said they initially thought the work they were doing was solely for the European Centre and learned only later of Gates’s connection to the Ukrainian political party.
Even before Manafort and Gates were charged, the Justice Department had put pressure on them to register as foreign agents for their Ukraine work, and they — along with the Podesta Group and Mercury — did so retroactively before indictments were issued.
Mueller’s team, though, still charged Manafort and Gates with including misleading statements on their FARA form, such as the assertion that their efforts did not include outreach within the United States.
Officials from Mercury and Podesta have said for months that they have been cooperating with investigators and have a long-standing commitment to disclosure via FARA and the traditional domestic lobbying disclosure system. They said they did not initially file under FARA in this case based on the advice of counsel.
“We are continuing to fully cooperate as we have from the start,” said Michael McKeon, a Mercury partner.
On the day of the indictment, Podesta announced his resignation from the firm he had founded, telling employees, “It is impossible to run a public affairs firm while you are under attack by Fox News and the right-wing media.”
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