https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/us/politics/microsoft-solarwinds-hack-russia-china.html Preparing for Retaliation Against Russia, U.S. Confronts Hacking by China The proliferation of cyberattacks by rivals is presenting a challenge to the Biden administration as it seeks to deter intrusions on government and corporate systems. WASHINGTON — Just as it plans to begin retaliating against Russia for the large-scale hacking of American government agencies and corporations discovered late last year, the Biden administration faces a new cyberattack that raises the question of whether it will have to strike back at another major adversary: China. Taken together, the responses will start to define how President Biden fashions his new administration’s response to escalating cyberconflict and whether he can find a way to impose a steeper penalty on rivals who regularly exploit vulnerabilities in government and corporate defenses to spy, steal information and potentially damage critical components of the nation’s infrastructure. The first major move is expected over the next three weeks, officials said, with a series of clandestine actions across Russian networks that are intended to be evident to President Vladimir V. Putin and his intelligence services and military but not to the wider world. The officials said the actions would be combined with some kind of economic sanctions — though there are few truly effective sanctions left to impose — and an executive order from Mr. Biden to accelerate the hardening of federal government networks after the Russian hacking, which went undetected for months until it was discovered by a private cybersecurity firm. The issue has taken on added urgency at the White House, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies in recent days after the public exposure of a major breach in Microsoft email systems used by small businesses, local governments and, by some accounts, key military contractors. Microsoft identified the intruders as a state-sponsored Chinese group and moved quickly to issue a patch to allow users of its software to close off the vulnerability. But that touched off a race between those responsible for patching the systems and a raft of new attackers — including multiple other Chinese hacking groups, according to Microsoft — who started using the same exploit this week. The United States government has not made public any formal determination of who was responsible for the hacking, but at the White House and on Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Wash., the fear is that espionage and theft may be a prelude to far more destructive activity, such as changing data or wiping it out. The White House underscored the seriousness of the situation in a statement on Sunday from the National Security Council. “The White House is undertaking a whole of government response to assess and address the impact” of the Microsoft intrusion, the statement said. It said the response was being led by Anne Neuberger, a former senior National Security Agency official who is the first occupant of a newly created post: deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technologies. The statement said that national security officials were working throughout the weekend to address the hacking and that “this is an active threat still developing, and we urge network operators to take it very seriously.” Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, said on Twitter on Thursday that the White House was “closely tracking” the reports that the vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange were being used in “potential compromises of U.S. think tanks and defense industrial base entities.” The discovery came as Mr. Biden’s national security team, led by Mr. Sullivan and Ms. Neuberger, has moved to the top of its agenda an effort to deter attacks, whether their intent is theft, altering data or shutting down networks entirely. For the president, who promised that the Russian attack would not “go unanswered,” the administration’s reactions in the coming weeks will be a test of his ability to assert American power in an often unseen but increasingly high-stakes battle among major powers in cyberspace. A mix of public sanctions and private actions is the most likely combination to force a “broad strategic discussion with the Russians,” Mr. Sullivan said in an interview on Thursday, before the scope of the Chinese attack was clear. “I actually believe that a set of measures that are understood by the Russians, but may not be visible to the broader world, are actually likely to be the most effective measures in terms of clarifying what the United States believes are in bounds and out of bounds, and what we are prepared to do in response,” he added. From the first day of the new administration, Mr. Sullivan has been reorganizing the White House to fashion such responses. The same order he issued on Jan. 20, requiring the military to advise the White House before conducting drone strikes outside war zones, contained a paragraph with separate instructions for dealing with major cyberoperations that risk escalating conflict. The order left in place, however, a still secret document signed by President Donald J. Trump in August 2018 giving the United States Cyber Command broader authorities than it had during the Obama administration to conduct day-to-day, short-of-war skirmishes in cyberspace, often without explicit presidential authorization. Under the new order, Cyber Command will have to bring operations of significant size and scope to the White House and allow the National Security Council to review or adjust those operations, according to officials briefed on the memo. The forthcoming operation against Russia, and any potential response to China, is likely to fall in this category. The hacking that Microsoft has attributed to China poses many of the same challenges as the SolarWinds attack by the Russians that was discovered late last year. American officials continue to try to better understand the scope and damage done by the Chinese attack, but every day since its revelation has suggested that it is bigger, and potentially more harmful, than first thought. “This is a crazy huge hack,” Christopher C. Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, wrote on Twitter on Friday. The initial estimates were that 30,000 or so systems were affected, mostly those operated by businesses or government agencies that use Microsoft software and run their email systems in-house. (Email and others systems run on Microsoft’s cloud were not affected.) But the breadth of the intrusion and the identities of the victims are still unclear. And while the Chinese deployed the attack widely, they might have sought only to take information from a narrow group of targets in which they have the highest interest. There is little doubt that the scope of the attack has American officials considering whether they will have to retaliate against China as well. That would put them in the position of engaging in a potentially escalating conflict with two countries that are also its biggest nuclear-armed adversaries. It has become increasingly clear in recent days that the hacking that Microsoft has attributed to Beijing poses many of the same challenges as the SolarWinds attack conducted by the Russians, although the targets and the methodology are significantly different. Like the Russians, the Chinese attackers initiated their campaign against Microsoft from computer servers — essentially cloud services — that they rented under assumed identities in the United States. Both countries know that American law prohibits intelligence agencies from looking in systems based in the United States, and they are exploiting that legal restriction. “The Chinese actor apparently spent the time to research the legal authorities and recognized that if they could operate from inside the United States, it takes some of the government’s best threat-hunters off the field,” Tom Burt, the Microsoft executive overseeing the investigation, said on Friday. The result was that in both the SolarWinds and the more recent Chinese hacking, American intelligence agencies appeared to have missed the evidence of what was happening until a private company saw it and alerted the authorities. The debate preoccupying the White House is how to respond. Mr. Sullivan served as Mr. Biden’s national security adviser while he was vice president, as the Obama administration struggled to respond to a series of attacks. Those included the Chinese effort that stole 22.5 million security-clearance records from the Office of Personnel Management in 2014 and the Russian attack on the 2016 presidential election. In writings and talks over the past four years, Mr. Sullivan has made clear that he believes traditional sanctions alone do not sufficiently raise the cost to force powers like Russia or China to begin to talk about new rules of the road for cyberspace. But government officials often fear that too strong a response risks escalation. That is a particular concern in the Russian and Chinese attacks, where both countries have clearly planted “back doors” to American systems that could be used for more destructive purposes. American officials say publicly that the current evidence suggests that the Russian intention in the SolarWinds attack was merely data theft. But several senior officials, when speaking not for attribution, said they believed the size, scope and expense of the operation suggested that the Russians might have had much broader motives. “I’m struck by how many of these attacks undercut trust in our systems,” Mr. Burt said, “just as there are efforts to make the country distrust the voting infrastructure, which is a core component of our democracy.” Russia broke into the Democratic National Committee and state voter-registration systems in 2016 largely by guessing or obtaining passwords. But they used a far more sophisticated method in the SolarWinds hacking, inserting code into the company’s software updates, which ushered them deep into about 18,000 systems that used the network management software. Once inside, the Russians had high-level access to the systems, with no passwords required. Similarly, four years ago, a vast majority of Chinese government hacking was conducted via email spear-phishing campaigns. But over the past few years, China’s military hacking divisions have been consolidating into a new strategic support force, similar to the Pentagon’s Cyber Command. Some of the most important hacking operations are run by the stealthier Ministry of State Security, China’s premier intelligence agency, which maintains a satellite network of contractors. Beijing also started hoarding so-called zero-days, flaws in code unknown to software vendors and for which a patch does not exist. In August 2019, security researchers got their first glimpse of how these undisclosed zero-day flaws were being used: Security researchers at Google’s Project Zero and Volexity — the same company in Reston, Va., that discovered the Microsoft attack — found that Chinese hackers were using a software vulnerability to spy on anyone who visited a website read by Uighurs, an ethnic minority group whose persecution has drawn international condemnation. For two years, until the campaign was discovered, anyone who visited the sites unwittingly downloaded Chinese implants onto their smartphones, allowing Beijing to monitor their communications. Image Kevin Mandia of FireEye, Sudhakar Ramakrishna of SolarWinds and Brad Smith of Microsoft testified last month in a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on the Russian hacking.Credit...Drew Angerer/Agence France-Presse, via Pool/Afp Via Getty Images The Chinese attack on Microsoft’s servers used four zero-days flaws in the email software. Security experts estimated on Friday that as many as 30,000 organizations were affected by the hacking, a detail first reported by the security writer Brian Krebs. But there is some evidence that the number could be much higher.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/16/put...ormation-to-trump-allies-during-election.html Putin pushed Biden misinformation to Trump allies and media in 2020 election, U.S. says Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin authorized intelligence assets to promote misinformation about President Joe Biden through U.S. media and people close to then-President Donald Trump to try to boost Trump’s election chances, an American intelligence report said. In particular, the report said that Putin “had purview over the activities of Adriy Derkach, a Ukrainian legislator who played a prominent role in Russia’s election influence activities.” Derkach, who has ties to Russian intelligence, is known to have met with Rudy Giuliani, the personal lawyer to Trump, who for months promoted discredited allegations against Biden and his son Hunter Biden. Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin authorized intelligence assets to promote misinformation about President Joe Biden through U.S. media and people close to then-President Donald Trump to try to boost Trump’s election chances, an American intelligence report said Tuesday. In particular, the report said that Putin “had purview over the activities of Adriy Derkach, a Ukrainian legislator who played a prominent role in Russia’s election influence activities.” Derkach, who has ties to Russian intelligence, is known to have met with Rudy Giuliani, the personal lawyer to Trump, who for months promoted discredited allegations against Biden and his son Hunter Biden. The findings are outlined as the second “key judgment” of the declassified report on “Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections” by the National Intelligence Council. “A key element of Moscow’s strategy this election cycle was its use of people linked to Russian intelligence to launder influence narratives including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden through US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, some of whom were close to former President Trump and his administration,” the report said. “We assess that President Putin and other senior Russian officials were aware of and probably directed Russia’s influence operations against the 2020 Presidential election,” the report said. The report said that Russian intelligence services, and people in Ukraine who had ties to those services, alleged that there were “corrupt ties between President Biden, his family, and other US officials and Ukraine.” “Russian intelligence services relied on Ukraine-linked proxies and these proxies’ networks — including their US contacts — to spread this narrative to give Moscow plausible deniability of their involvement,” the report said. “We assess that the goals of this effort went beyond the US presidential campaign to include reducing the Trump administration’s support for Ukraine. As the US presidential election neared, Moscow placed increasing emphasis on undermining the candidate it saw as most detrimental to its global interests.” The report said, “A network of Ukraine-linked individuals including Russian influence agent Konstantin Kilimnik — who were also connected to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) took steps throughout the election cycle to damage US ties to Ukraine, denigrate President Biden and his candidacy, and benefit former President Trump’s prospects for reelection.” “We assess this network also sought to discredit the Obama administration by emphasizing accusations of corruption by US officials, and to falsely blame Ukraine for interfering in the 2016 US presidential election.” Kilimnik, who was a key associate of Paul Manafort, the disgraced Republican consultant who at one point ran Trump’s 2016 campaign, was identified last summer by the Senate Intelligence Committee as a Russian intelligence officer who may have helped coordinate the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails in 2016. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said Tuesday, “The Intelligence Community Assessment released today underscores what we all knew already – that Russia interfered to support former President Trump, hurt President Biden, and undermine confidence in our electoral process.” “Through proxies, Russia ran a successful intelligence operation that penetrated the former president’s inner circle,” Schiff said. “Individuals close to the former president were targeted by agents of Russian intelligence including Andriy Derkach and Konstantin Kilimnik, who laundered misinformation into our political system, with the intent of denigrating now-President Biden and damaging his candidacy.”
'It takes one to know one' Putin retorts after Biden says he thinks he is a killer https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN2BA0S1 resident Vladimir Putin retorted on Thursday that it takes one to know one after U.S. President Joe Biden said he thought the Russian leader was a killer and already poor relations between Moscow and Washington sank to a new post-Cold War low. Putin was speaking on television after Biden, in an ABC News interview that prompted Russia to recall its Washington ambassador for consultations a day earlier, said "I do" when asked if he believed Putin was a killer. Biden also described Putin as having no soul, and said he would pay a price for alleged Russian meddling in the November 2020 U.S. presidential election, something the Kremlin denies. Russia is preparing to be hit by a new round of U.S. sanctions in the coming days over that alleged meddling as well as over an alleged hack. In a highly unusual move following Biden's interview, Moscow recalled its ambassador to the United States for consultations. Putin, responding to Biden's characterisation of him, said he knew the U.S. leader personally, and, in an apparent reference to Biden's age (78), said he sincerely wished him good health. Suggesting Biden was hypocritical in his remarks, Putin said that every state had to contend with "bloody events" and added Biden was accusing the Russian leader of something he was guilty of himself. "I remember in my childhood, when we argued in the courtyard with each other we used to say: it takes one to know one. And that's not a coincidence, not just a children's saying or joke. The psychological meaning here is very deep," Putin said.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/vesel...erup-linked-to-secret-russian-weapons-program Veselnitskaya’s Trump Tower Coverup Linked to Secret Russian Chemical Weapons Program Documents obtained by The Daily Beast link the $230 million fraud discussed at the Trump Tower meeting in 2016 to Russia’s black-market weapons of mass destruction program. LONDON—A company newly sanctioned by the U.S. over Alexei Navalny’s poisoning attack is tied to the money-laundering network that Natalia Veselnitskaya tried to cover up at the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting, according to financial records obtained by The Daily Beast. Now we know why Vladimir Putin was so desperate to play down the international corruption probes that began when Sergei Magnitsky uncovered a $230 million fraud on the Russian people. For the first time, that dark-money network can be linked to the murderous chemical-weapons program run by Russia’s notorious intelligence services. After exposing the massive theft of state money, Magnitsky ended up dead in a Russian prison cell. Legislation in his name has been enacted all over the world by governments seeking to clamp down on corruption, including the U.S.’s Magnitsky Act. Despite the interventions of Veselnitskaya—a Russian lawyer who was sent to the U.S. to persuade the Trump campaign to overturn the law—investigations tracing that stolen money continue to expose an international web of bank accounts linked to alleged wrongdoing. This month, the Biden administration said it was sanctioning a German chemicals company called Riol-Chemie because of its “activities in support of Russia’s weapons of mass destruction programs.” It was part of the administration’s response to the attempted murder of Putin nemesis Navalny. The anti-corruption campaigner narrowly survived a chemical-weapon attack after a plane carrying him on a long flight home to Moscow was diverted and he was able to receive emergency medical care—first in a Siberian hospital, and then in Germany, where he was airlifted for further treatment. After waking up from a weeks-long coma, Navalny outwitted a member of the assassination team by impersonating a senior FSB official and tricking his would-be killer into explaining over the phone how the kill squad had rubbed the Novichok nerve agent into the seams of Navalny’s underpants. President Trump shrugged off the attack, but the Biden team announced sanctions against seven senior Russian officials and 14 other entities involved in chemical and biological weapons production on March 2. One of the entities singled out by the U.S. government as a cog in Russia’s weapons of mass destruction program was Riol-Chemie. Investigative files compiled by the authorities in Lithuania—and reviewed by The Daily Beast—show that Riol-Chemie received hundreds of thousands of dollars from a British Virgin Islands-registered company accused of laundering some of the stolen money that was uncovered by Magnitsky. According to sources close to a separate investigation by French authorities, financial records show that two New Zealand-registered companies, which also received funds from the $230 million fraud, wired over $1 million to Riol-Chemie. Riol-Chemie did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast. The United States’ formal designation of Riol-Chemie as a sanctioned entity does not give any detail about its role in Russia’s weapons program, but purchase orders and invoices seen by The Daily Beast show that the company received components from a now-defunct American manufacturer called Aeroflex. Records show that Aeroflex, which was then based in New York, took orders for radiation-hardened semiconductors and regulators in 2007. These components are often used to build missiles and satellites. The orders were to be sent to Riol-Chemie in northern Germany, but records show that the tightly controlled radiation chips were paid for by yet another entity accused of laundering the stolen Russian money. According to the paperwork, the invoice went to Tolbrist Alliance Inc., a shell company listed in the Offshore Leaks Database by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists as being registered to a post-office box in the British Virgin Islands. According to bank records reviewed by The Daily Beast, Lithuanian authorities discovered that Tolbrist Alliance Inc. had received around $50 million from companies linked to the fraud uncovered by Magnitsky. This clearly shows why Putin has become unhinged because of the Magnitsky investigation. — Bill Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital, which was raided in $230 million fraud. Financial records show that Tolbrist spent at least $1.5 million at Aeroflex. Aeroflex, which is no longer trading, was busted by the State Department for hundreds of International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) violations “largely consisting of unauthorized exports.” There is no indication that the company broke the law by delivering the rad-chips to Riol-Chemie—the transactions occurred years before the U.S. government announced that the German company was a secret part of Putin’s illicit arms-smuggling operation. The repeated links between companies accused of laundering the $230 million and Riol-Chemie may point to a wider, calculated scheme with far-reaching political implications. Money stolen from the Russian people—while the authorities turned a blind eye—was apparently channeled into a black-market weapons program. Whoever directed the dispersal of the stolen funds also played a top-secret role in Russian national security. “This clearly shows why Putin has become unhinged because of the Magnitsky investigation,” said Bill Browder, who has led the anti-corruption campaign in the name of his former lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky. “Every layer of this onion that is peeled, ever more dirty and dangerous information emerges.” Previous reports have also claimed that some of the stolen funds ended up in the hands of people connected to Syria’s chemical-weapons program. The man given the task of shutting down the Magnitsky-inspired investigations that were blooming all over the world was Yury Chaika, one of Putin’s top fixers and Russia’s prosecutor-general up until last year. President Obama signed the anti-corruption Magnitsky Act into law in 2012, and Chaika’s protégée, Veselnitskaya, was sent to make the case against the law at the notorious Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort in 2016. Putin brought it up with Trump himself at the Helsinki summit in 2018. The former president listened, nodding along with a litany of distortions about election interference, Crimea, and Browder during a joint press conference. Veselnitskaya was also part of the legal team defending Prevezon, another of the companies accused of laundering the stolen money, which was under investigation by the Southern District of New York. The case was eventually settled out of court with Prevezon paying $6 million. Veselnitskaya was charged with obstruction of justice for colluding with Chaika’s office in Moscow to doctor evidence submitted to the court. While Trump-Russia speculation was at its height, Veselnitskaya always insisted that she was not at Trump Tower to try and help sway the election; she was there to put the case against the Magnitsky investigation. “To summarize, those were not the happiest days of my life,” Veselnitskaya told NBC News amid the backlash surrounding the Trump Tower meeting. Despite the personal costs, it seems that Putin and his cronies will stop at nothing to stymie the fraud investigations they face. But the U.S. government’s sanctioning of Riol-Chemie may offer an important lesson to the Kremlin: Even dark money can be followed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/us/politics/russian-intelligence-trump-campaign.html Biden Administration Says Russian Intelligence Obtained Trump Campaign Data A Treasury Department document shed more light on links between the campaign and Russian spies. WASHINGTON — The Biden administration revealed on Thursday that a business associate of Trump campaign officials in 2016 provided campaign polling data to Russian intelligence services, the strongest evidence to date that Russian spies had penetrated the inner workings of the Trump campaign. The revelation, made public in a Treasury Department document announcing new sanctions against Russia, established for the first time that private meetings and communications between the campaign officials, Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, and their business associate were a direct pipeline from the campaign to Russian spies at a time when the Kremlin was engaged in a covert effort to sabotage the 2016 presidential election. Previous government investigations have identified the Trump aides’ associate, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, as a Russian intelligence operative, and Mr. Manafort’s decision to provide him with internal polling data was one of the mysteries that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, sought to unravel during his two-year investigation into Russia’s election meddling. “During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, Kilimnik provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy,” the Treasury Department said in a news release. “Additionally, Kilimnik sought to promote the narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” The Biden administration provided no supporting evidence to bolster the assessment that the Russian intelligence services obtained the polling data and campaign information. And the release shed no light on why Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates gave polling data to Mr. Kilimnik, although previous government reports have indicated that Mr. Manafort thought Trump campaign strategy information could be a valuable commodity for future business deals with Kremlin-connected oligarchs. Having the polling data would have allowed Russia to better understand the Trump campaign strategy — including where the campaign was focusing resources — at a time when the Russian government was carrying out its own efforts to undermine Donald J. Trump’s opponent. Mr. Gates said in a statement on Thursday that the Treasury Department had failed to provide any evidence to back up its claim, adding that “the polling data passed periodically to Kilimnik at Paul Manafort’s direction was simplistic and outdated, never in real time.” “It was from both public and internal sources,” Mr. Gates said. “It was not massive binders full of demographics or deep research. It was ‘topline’ numbers and did not contain any strategic plans.” The new sanctions against Russia are in response to the Kremlin’s election interference, efforts to hack American government agencies and companies, and other acts of aggression against the United States. The sanctions now make it extremely difficult for Mr. Kilimnik, who was indicted by the Justice Department in 2018 on charges of obstruction of justice, to engage in financial transactions that may involve the United States. It is unclear how long American spy agencies have held the conclusion about Mr. Kilimnik. Senior Trump administration officials, fearing Mr. Trump’s wrath, repeatedly tried to keep from the public any information that seemed to show Mr. Trump’s affinity for Russia or its president, Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Kilimnik had been a longtime business partner during Mr. Manafort’s time as a political consultant in Ukraine. In 2018, prosecutors for Mr. Mueller’s office announced that Mr. Kilimnik had “ties to Russian intelligence” and that Mr. Manafort had instructed Mr. Gates to pass the polling and campaign information to Mr. Kilimnik. The Senate Intelligence Committee went further last August in its bipartisan report that scrutinized the links between the Trump campaign and Russia — calling Mr. Kilimnik a “Russian intelligence officer.” The report contained several significant redactions that appeared related to Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kilimnik but said that Mr. Manafort’s willingness to share the information with him “represented a grave counterintelligence threat.” The report called the relationship between Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kilimnik “the single most direct tie between senior Trump campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services.” The Senate report portrayed a Trump campaign stacked with businessmen and other advisers who had little government experience and “presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities.” A New York Times article in 2017 said that there had been numerous interactions between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence during the year before the election. F.B.I. officials had disputed the report, but both the Senate report and the Treasury Department document confirm the article’s findings. The assertion that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that sought to disrupt the 2016 election has long been both a Kremlin talking point and a claim by Mr. Trump that foreign actors tried to help his opponent, Hillary Clinton, rather than him. Mr. Trump’s obsession over Ukraine’s supposed role in the election was the impetus for a 2019 phone call with the Ukrainian president that was central to the first impeachment proceedings against Mr. Trump. Mr. Manafort was brought into the Trump campaign in March 2016, at a time when Mr. Trump had largely sewn up the Republican presidential nomination. Mr. Manafort and his longtime business associate, Mr. Gates, joined the Trump campaign after years of doing political consulting work in Ukraine, where they met Mr. Kilimnik, a Russian Army-trained linguist. The two men met with Mr. Kilimnik several times after joining the campaign, and in June 2016, Mr. Manafort became the Trump campaign chairman. Details about Mr. Manafort’s relationship with Mr. Kilimnik were revealed in 2018 as the government prosecuted Mr. Manafort and charged Mr. Kilimnik with obstruction of justice for trying to coach potential witnesses in the investigation. Mr. Kilimnik never came to the United States to face charges. He is wanted by the F.B.I., and the bureau is offering $250,000 for information that could lead to his arrest.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/24/politics/don-mcgahn-house-testimony/index.html Ex-WH counsel McGahn agrees to testify before House Judiciary Committee behind closed doors next week (CNN)Former Trump White House Counsel Don McGahn has agreed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee next week after House Democrats and the Justice Department struck a deal paving the way for his closed-door testimony, according to three sources familiar with the discussions. McGahn's testimony is coming after a years-long legal battle between House Democrats and the Trump administration, after McGahn ignored a 2019 subpoena from the Judiciary panel and the Justice Department under then-President Donald Trump fought the subpoena and other sensitive information about Trump in court. The New York Times first reported that McGahn had agreed to testify. The Biden administration's Justice Department and the House struck an agreement earlier this month for McGahn to testify about Trump's attempt to obstruct former special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, avoiding a precedent-setting legal battle over the case. A transcript of the interview will be released afterward. Under the agreement, committee members can ask McGahn about the incidents documented in the Mueller report of Trump's attempts to fire Mueller and block the Russia investigation. They can also ask about the Mueller investigation's accuracy. The Justice Department can assert executive privilege or McGahn can decline to answer on other topics, which would essentially block House Democrats from learning details he might know about other major scandals during Trump's presidency.