-In August of 2016, Paul Manafort
is the chairman of Donald Trump's campaign.
In early August, Paul Manafort goes to a room
on the penthouse of 666 Fifth Avenue, the Grand Havana.
It's a private cigar club.
He meets with a man who has come from outside the United States
for this meeting,
a guy named Konstantin Kilimnik --
a Russian who had worked at Paul Manafort's
political consulting business.
One of the things that's interesting about this meeting
is that the timing is just so significant.
You know, in July, we had this sequence
of really important events where people started to realize,
"Oh, goodness, Russia is doing something in this campaign."
-This WikiLeaks is like a treasure trove.
-WikiLeaks was the big one,
which was about two weeks before this meeting.
WikiLeaks first published these thousands of pages
of stolen Democratic party e-mails,
and people suspected Russia
had stolen them pretty much right from the start.
You had this press conference
that people may remember with Donald Trump.
-Russia, if you're listening -- -Where instead of sort of
condemning Putin and Russia,
he kind of mockingly said, you know,
"Russia, if you're listening, I hope you can find
Hillary Clinton's deleted e-mails."
So, there was all this attention on Russia,
and then right after that,
Paul Manafort is having this meeting.
Kilimnik was a guy who, he was a Soviet Army veteran,
he had trained at a language academy in Moscow
that's known as a sort of recruiting ground
for the Russian intelligence services,
and he worked for Paul Manafort for 10 years,
but just within the last year, the Special Counsel's Office
has told us something else really important about Kilimnik,
which is that the FBI has assessed that he had ties
to Russian intelligence throughout the campaign.
So at this moment when Paul Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnik
were meeting in New York City, Mr.
Kilimnik apparently was connected
in some way to the Russian intelligence services.
This August 2nd meeting is really key.
It looks like they were talking about a peace plan for Ukraine,
which was a top foreign policy goal for Russia,
and potentially also talking about polling data
that Paul Manafort gave to Kilimnik for some reason
related to the US presidential campaign.
Last week, there was a hearing in Paul Manafort's case.
The Special Counsel has been arguing to a judge
that even after he pled guilty and said he was gonna cooperate,
he continued to lie about certain things.
He hasn't been charged with conspiring with the Russians
to interfere with the campaign,
but all this stuff about what he was doing with Kilimnik
during the campaign speaks much more to the question
of whether or not there's a chance that, in fact,
he did help the Russians in their effort or not.
That clearly is what the Special Counsel is exploring.
Leading up to this meeting, Manafort and Kilimnik
had this series of really interesting e-mails.
We know that when Manafort first joins the campaign
in the spring of 2016,
he's kind of plotting with Kilimnik
how he can use his job with the Trump campaign to make money.
He asks Kilimnik to make sure that a Russian businessman
who's very close to Putin, Oleg Deripaska,
that his operation is seeing Manafort's good press,
and he says to Kilimnik,
"How do we use this to get whole?"
He means financially whole.
"How do we use this job I've got and this positive press
I'm getting with the Trump campaign to make money?"
There's a later e-mail where Manafort tells Kilimnik
to offer private briefings about the campaign to Deripaska.
Deripaska says he never received any briefings.
And then there's this really cryptic but interesting e-mail
that happens that's clearly what leads to this meeting
where Kilimnik writes to Manafort in late July
and says, "I just met today with the man
who gave you the biggest jar of black caviar you ever got.
I need to come and see you to talk about this."
And Paul Manafort writes back, "Tuesday is best,"
and Tuesday is August 2nd.
I just can't emphasize enough
how stunning this would have been
if we had learned it during the campaign.
The notion that Paul Manafort left Trump Tower
to go meet with a guy who had ties to Russian intelligence
and talk about the presidential campaign,
I mean, people would've -- their heads would've exploded
if we had learned this in August 2016,
and, you know, the passage of time
doesn't really make it any less stunning.