Vice News reports congressional investigators are interested in knowing more about a very short private jet stopover in Newark, NJ in the last few months of the 2016 presidential campaign.
In August 2016, a private jet linked to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska traveled from Moscow to Newark Liberty International Airport in Newark, New Jersey. The Gulfstream G550 (registration M-ALAY) landed shortly after midnight and, according to publicly available flight records, flew back to Moscow that same afternoon.
The jet arrived within hours of a meeting in nearby Manhattan between Paul Manafort, then chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and Konstantin Kilimnik. Kilimnik spent over a decade as Manafort’s translator and fixer in Ukraine. Weeks earlier, Manafort had emailed his old associate and told him to extend an offer of "private briefings" to Deripaska, according to The Washington Post.
Congressional investigators looking into Russian meddling in the 2016 election are now probing the relationship between Manafort, Kilimnik, and Deripaska, according to two people familiar with the matter. The jet’s brief trip to New Jersey raises fresh questions about the relationship between the three men during the 2016 presidential campaign. Deripaska is believed to have close ties with the Kremlin. Kilimnik has been widely reported to be the unnamed person identified in court filings by special counsel Robert Mueller's office this week as having ties to Russian intelligence — a relationship Kilimnik has long denied.
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A spokesperson for Deripaska confirmed the Gulfstream jet’s flight to New Jersey to VICE News, but said the trip had nothing to do with Manafort’s offer of briefings, which the spokesperson said Deripaska never received ... “As it was previously stated, Mr. Deripaska had no communications, meetings, briefings, or other interaction with Mr. Manafort during, after, or in the run-up to the 2016 Presidential Election." ...
Deripaska's spokesman says only family members were on the plane.
Kilimnik didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment, and two people who know him, including a reporter in Ukraine who was in touch with Kilimnik in 2017, told VICE News that he has stopped responding to requests for interviews in recent months. Yet Kilimnik is known to have been in direct email contact with Manafort as recently as late November 2017, according to court filings by Mueller’s team.
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A former Ukrainian government official who has known both Manafort and Kilimnik for years described Kilimnik to VICE News as Manafort’s “right hand… in Kiev.” He said Kilimnik “translated for him [Manafort] at all high-level meetings.”
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According to a story in Politico last year, after he returned from meeting Manafort in Manhattan in August 2016, Kilimnik suggested to an unnamed associate in Ukraine that he had helped remove language from the Republican Party platform that would have laid out a tougher stance toward Russia.
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“He led me to believe that he was involved in the platform fight, but not necessarily through Paul,” a Kiev-based operative, described as someone who “travels in the same circles” as Kilimnik, told Politico. But the person added that Kilimnik could have been “just bullshitting like political consultants do.”
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On July 29, Kilimnik sent an email to Manafort with the subject line “Black Caviar” proposing the two men meet in person. Kilimnik wrote that he had “important messages” to deliver to Manafort from an unnamed person, “provided that he buys me a ticket.”
“I met today with the guy who gave you your biggest black caviar jar several years ago,” Kilimnik wrote, according to The Atlantic report. “We spent about 5 hours talking about his story, and I have several important messages from him to you. He asked me to go and brief you on our conversation. I said I have to run it by you first, but in principle I am prepared to do it, provided that he buys me a ticket. It has to do about the future of his country, and is quite interesting. So, if you are not absolutely against the concept, please let me know which dates/places will work, even next week, and I could come and see you.”
Manafort reportedly wrote back: “Tuesday is best.”
The next Tuesday was August 2.
Previous press reports have given the date of Manafort and Kilimnik’s meeting in Manhattan’s Grand Havana Room cigar club as August 2, or "about two weeks before Manafort resigned" from the Trump campaign, which happened on August 19. Sources who spoke to VICE News have not been able to confirm the exact date of the meeting in early August 2016.
Read more: Paul Manafort, a mysterious Russian jet, and a secret meeting (Vice News)