In December 2015, the Obama State Department and its ambassador in Kiev were upset over a negative story about then-Vice President Joe Biden ahead of his visit to Ukraine. So a U.S. embassy official turned to a “sensitive source” for help.
“Thank you very much for looking into this and very sorry to ask,” U.S. embassy official Alexander “Sasha” Kasanof wrote businessman Konstantin Kilimnik in a Dec. 6, 2015 email obtained by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators and reviewed by Just the News. “Ambassador very unhappy about the article, though agree it stinks to me to (sic) of people we know very well.”
A few lines later, Kasanof’s email offered Kilimnik some valuable inside skinny about the Obama administration’s assessment of a sensitive meeting between indicted fugitive Ukrainian oligarch Dmitri Firtash’s associate Yuriy Boyko and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. “I thought Boyko did quite well, in fact,” Kasanof wrote. “Don’t know that he convinced Nuland on everything (incl. DF intentions), but his performance was much less Soviet and better than I thought would be. So job well done!”
In addition to treating him as a valuable political intelligence source, State officials often shared their private insights with Kilimnik, a Ukrainian consultant close to the American lobbyist Paul Manafort, according to numerous communications obtained by Just the News. For instance, Eric Schultz, a former U.S. embassy official in Ukraine who by 2016 had become U.S. ambassador to Zambia, gave his frank personal assessment after President Obama named Marie Yovanovitch to be the new chief U.S. diplomat in Kiev and George Kent to be her top deputy.
“He’s ok i think — though yes, very pro-Ukraine,” Schultz wrote of Kent in an email from his personal Gmail account in May 2016 to Kilimnik, using mostly lower-case letters. As for Yovanovitch, Schultz added: “she’s not (doesn’t handle pressure and can be difficult) but then she might be more Russian oriented than you realize. she never learned Ukrainian when she was in kyiv before but speaks good Russian.”
Ordinarily, such discussions would raise little interest in everyday America. But it turns out Kilimnik is no ordinary contact: The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last week described Kilimnik as a Russian intelligence officer in its final report on Russian interference in the 2016 election…