Top Russian officials discussed how to influence Trump associates before election

WASHINGTON — U.S. spies collected information last summer revealing that senior Russian intelligence and political officials were discussing how to exert influence over Donald Trump through his advisers, according to three current and former U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence.

The conversations focused on Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman at the time, and Michael T. Flynn, a retired general who was advising Trump, the officials said. Both men had indirect ties to Russian officials, who appeared confident that each could be used to help shape Trump's opinions on Russia.

Some Russians boasted about how well they knew Flynn. Others discussed leveraging their ties to Viktor F. Yanukovych, the deposed president of Ukraine living in exile in Russia, who at one time had worked closely with Manafort.

The intelligence was among the clues — which also included information about direct communications between Trump's advisers and Russian officials — that U.S. officials received last year as they began investigating Russian attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of Trump's associates were assisting Moscow in the effort. Details of the conversations, some of which have not been previously reported, add to an increasing understanding of the alarm inside the U.S. government last year about the Russian disruption campaign.

The information collected last summer was considered credible enough for intelligence agencies to pass to the FBI, which during that period opened a counterintelligence investigation that is continuing. It is unclear, however, whether Russian officials actually tried to directly influence Manafort and Flynn. Both have denied any collusion with the Russian government on the campaign to disrupt the election.

John Brennan, the former director of the CIA, testified Tuesday about a tense period last year when he came to believe that President Vladimir Putin of Russia was trying to steer the outcome of the election. He said he saw intelligence suggesting that Russia wanted to use Trump campaign officials, wittingly or not, to help in that effort. He spoke vaguely about contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials, without giving names, saying they "raised questions in my mind about whether Russia was able to gain the cooperation of those individuals."

Whether the Russians worked directly with any Trump advisers is one of the central questions that federal investigators, now led by Robert S. Mueller III, the newly appointed special counsel, are seeking to answer. Trump, for his part, has dismissed talk of Russian interference in the election as "fake news," insisting there was no contact between his campaign and Russian officials.

"If there ever was any effort by Russians to influence me, I was unaware, and they would have failed," Manafort said in a statement. "I did not collude with the Russians to influence the elections."

The White House, FBI and CIA declined to comment. Flynn's lawyer did not respond to an email seeking comment.

The current and former officials agreed to discuss the intelligence only on the condition of anonymity because much of it remains highly classified, and they could be prosecuted for disclosing it.

Last week, CNN reported about intercepted phone calls during which Russian officials were bragging about ties to Flynn and discussing ways to wield influence over him.

In his congressional testimony, Brennan discussed the broad outlines of the intelligence, and his disclosures backed up the accounts of the information provided by the current and former officials.

By early summer, U.S. intelligence officials already were fairly certain that it was Russian hackers who had stolen tens of thousands of emails from the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton's campaign. That in itself was not viewed as particularly extraordinary by the Americans — foreign spies had hacked previous campaigns, and the United States does the same in elections around the world, officials said. The view on the inside was that collecting information, even through hacking, is what spies do.

But the concerns began to grow when intelligence began trickling in about Russian officials weighing whether they should release stolen emails and other information to shape U.S. opinion — to, in essence, weaponize the materials stolen by hackers.

An unclassified report by U.S. intelligence agencies released in January stated that Putin "ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election."

Before taking the helm of the Trump campaign last May, Manafort worked for more than a decade for Russian-leaning political organizations and people in Ukraine, including Yanukovych, the former president. Yanukovych was a close ally of Putin.

Manafort's links to Ukraine led to his departure from the Trump campaign in August, after his name surfaced in secret ledgers showing millions in undisclosed payments from Yanukovych's political party.

Russia views Ukraine as a buffer against the eastward expansion of NATO and has supported separatists in their yearslong fight against the struggling democratic government in Kiev.

Flynn's ties to Russian officials stretch back to his time at the Defense Intelligence Agency, which he led from 2012 to 2014. There, he began pressing for the United States to cultivate Russia as an ally in the fight against Islamic militants and even spent a day in Moscow at the headquarters of the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service, in 2013.

He continued to insist that Russia could be an ally even after Moscow's seizure of Crimea the following year, and Obama administration officials have said that contributed to their decision to push him out of the DIA.

But in private life, Flynn cultivated even closer ties to Russia. In 2015, he earned more than $65,000 from companies linked to Russia, including a cargo airline implicated in a bribery scheme involving Russian officials at the United Nations, and a U.S. branch of a cybersecurity firm believed to have ties to Russia's intelligence services.

The biggest payment, though, came from RT, the Kremlin-financed news network. It paid Flynn $45,000 to give a speech in Moscow, where he also attended the network's lavish anniversary dinner. There, he was photographed sitting next to Putin.

A senior lawmaker said Monday that Flynn misled Pentagon investigators about how he was paid for the Moscow trip. He also failed to disclose the source of that income on a security form he was required to complete before joining the White House, according to congressional investigators.

U.S. officials have also said there were multiple telephone calls between Flynn and Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States, on Dec. 29, beginning shortly after Kislyak was summoned to the State Department and informed that, in retaliation for Russian election meddling, the United States was expelling 35 people suspected of being Russian intelligence operatives and imposing other sanctions.

U.S. intelligence agencies routinely tap the phones of Russian diplomats, and transcripts of the calls showed that Flynn urged the Russians not to respond, saying relations would improve once Trump was in office, officials have said.

But after misleading Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of the calls, Flynn was fired as national security adviser after a tumultuous 25 days in office.