Editor's note
An earlier version of this story published on April 18, 2019, referred to previous reporting in The Washington Post that Belarusan-American businessman Sergei Millian had been a source of information for a dossier of unverified allegations against Donald Trump. In November 2021, The Post removed that material from the original 2017 story after the account was contradicted by allegations in a federal indictment and undermined by further reporting. References to the initial report have been removed from this piece.
The publication of the redacted version of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s full report summarizing his team’s findings included an enormous amount of new information. There are any number of questions that remain unanswered and enough new material that isolating all of it is prohibitive.
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Many details provided are centered on the period that had the most attention in the first two years of President Trump’s administration: the campaign. The Mueller report provides moments and relationships that fall between Trump’s declaration of his candidacy and his winning the presidency.
Below are pieces of information we uncovered in reading the report. Not everything listed below is new; we included information necessary to understand the context of the new revelation. Did we miss something? Send an email.
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We’ve included page numbers for your reference. (I/10) refers to Volume One (I), page 10.
Manafort sharing polling information
？ Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates shared polling information with their former business partner Konstantin Kilimnik multiple times over the course of the election, starting months before and continuing after an Aug. 2, 2016, meeting in which Manafort shared his “strategy for winning Democratic votes in Midwestern states,” including in Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. (I/7 and 140)
？ Manafort, the report states, expected Kilimnik to share the information with people in Ukraine and with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. The investigators could not determine the reason for sharing the data and did not find a connection between it and Russia’s interference effort. One possibility was that Manafort hoped to use the information and his position to be repaid on some debts. (I/129-131)
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？ Gates suspected Kilimnik was a “spy.” The FBI believes Kilimnik has ties to Russian intelligence. (I/134)
？ Manafort and Kilimnik also met in New York on May 6, 2016, where Manafort briefed Kilimnik on the campaign, “expecting Kilimnik to pass the information back to individuals in Ukraine and elsewhere.” (I/138)
The June 2016 Trump Tower meeting
？ According to Gates, shortly before the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016, Donald Trump Jr. claimed to have “a lead on negative information about the Clinton Foundation” that came from a group in Kyrgyzstan “to whom he was introduced by a friend.” It’s not clear if this relates to the Trump Tower meeting. (I/115)
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？ The meeting did not work out as Donald Trump Jr. had hoped. When the Kremlin-linked attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya offered information about money made by unrelated business executives, he asked her how it was connected to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, without success. “Trump Jr. asked what they have on Clinton, and Kushner became aggravated and asked ‘[w]hat are we doing here?’,” according to an attendee. Kushner emailed staff at his private company to call him and give him an excuse to leave. (I/118)
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？ Trump had a meeting scheduled with Manafort on the morning of the Trump Tower meeting. He does not recall if he kept it. (C-14/9)
The Russian interference effort
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？ Russian entities besides the Internet Research Agency communicated with Americans during the campaign, trying to “coordinate political activities,” including holding political rallies. (I/14)
？ The effort to hold political rallies began as early as November 2015, with a “confederate rally” planned for Houston. (I/29)
？ DCLeaks, an account associated with the Russian hackers, contacted WikiLeaks on June 14, 2016, to suggest the two organizations work together on releasing derogatory information about Clinton. At another point, DCLeaks exchanged a private message with Guccifer 2.0, though both entities are believed to be linked to Russian intelligence. (I/45, 46)
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？ Russian hackers allegedly shared information stolen from the Democratic National Committee with WikiLeaks in July 2016. The transfer of information stolen from the email account of John Podesta, who was chairman of the Clinton campaign, appears to have happened on Sept. 22, 2016. (I/47)
？ Mueller’s team, though, could not rule out the idea that material was hand-delivered to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in London. (I/47)
The focus on Hillary Clinton’s emails
？ Trump and his campaign were very focused on obtaining emails that Clinton had deleted from her server. (She says her attorneys determined the emails were not related to her work at the State Department and therefore needn’t be preserved.) The campaign planned a press strategy on the possible release of the emails by WikiLeaks. (I/54)
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？ About five hours after Trump publicly called on Russia to release emails from Clinton’s private server, Russian hackers tried for the first time to access it. (I/49)
？ Shortly after that, Trump asked people associated with his campaign, including Michael Flynn, to try to obtain them. That kicked off an external effort involving multiple parties to obtain and publish the files. One man, Peter Smith, raised money to do so. (I/62)
？ Another person, Barbara Leeden, said she had obtained the files. Erik Prince, founder of the company Blackwater and brother to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, provided money to determine the authenticity of the files, which were fake. (I/64)
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Contacts with WikiLeaks
？ A writer named Ted Malloch, who has a relationship with conservative writer Jerome Corsi, discussed with Corsi an assertion, apparently made by Stone, that hacked emails from Podesta would be published before the election. (Note that this is before Mueller’s team believes WikiLeaks had those files.) MAlloch himself never made contact with WikiLeaks. (I/56)
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？ When Corsi asked Malloch to contact WikiLeaks in late July (apparently at the request of Trump ally Roger Stone, who was asked by a campaign official to contact WikiLeaks), Corsi suggested that British politician Nigel Farage might have a connection. Corsi, Stone and Farage had dined at the Republican convention a few days prior. (I/55)
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Contacts with Russians
？ Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s outreach to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, about facilitating the development of a real estate project in Moscow failed because he typed the email address incorrectly. He later spoke with Elena Poliakova, the spokesman’s personal assistant. (I/74-75)
？ Someone who knew Ivanka Trump through the fashion industry sent Ivanka and Trump invitations from a Russian deputy prime minister to an economic conference being held in St. Petersburg in 2016. The invitation was declined. (I/78-79)
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？ Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos and Sergei Millian were first in contact in mid-July. The next month, Millian offered Papadopoulos “disruptive technology” that might help Papadopoulos’s “political work.” (I/94-95)
？ When campaign adviser Carter Page was in Moscow in July, Russian officials discussed meeting with him. Peskov declined, writing in an email: “Specialists say that he is far from being the main one. So I better not initiate a meeting in the Kremlin.” (I/100)
？ Mueller’s team found no evidence that former attorney general Jeff Sessions and Sergey Kislyak had any significant conversation at an event at the Mayflower Hotel event in April 2016. (I/107)