What did the Senate Intelligence Committee report specifically say about Manafort and Kilimnik?

1. Manafort’s conduct: repeated, secret sharing of campaign information

The report states that Manafort “on numerous occasions” sought to pass sensitive internal polling data and campaign strategy to Kilimnik, instructing intermediaries to keep communications covert and continuing contacts even after he left the campaign, a pattern the committee flagged as creating opportunities for foreign intelligence exploitation ^{[5] [2] [6]}.

2. The committee’s language: “grave counterintelligence threat”

Taken together, the panel judged Manafort’s high-level access and willingness to share information with people closely affiliated with Russian intelligence — particularly Kilimnik and associates of oligarch Oleg Deripaska — to be a “grave counterintelligence threat,” a blunt assessment the report repeats in multiple places ^{[1] [3] [7]}.

3. How the report characterizes Kilimnik

The Senate report goes further than earlier public reporting by explicitly describing Konstantin Kilimnik as a “Russian intelligence officer,” a stronger label than the Mueller report’s phrasing about ties to Russian intelligence; the committee adds that Manafort at times likely suspected Kilimnik had intelligence connections ^{[2] [8] [7]}.

4. The hack-and-leak linkage: redactions and limited certainty

The committee disclosed “some information” that suggested Kilimnik “may have been connected” to the Russian military intelligence (GRU) hack-and-leak operation that produced Democratic emails, but the section containing the most specific evidence is largely redacted; investigators therefore could not establish with certainty whether a coordination channel on the GRU operation actually ran through Kilimnik ^{[1] [3] [9]}.

5. What the committee could not prove or resolve

Despite its strong language, the Senate panel acknowledged limits: it “was unable to reliably determine” why Manafort shared the polling data, could not trace how Kilimnik used or further disseminated that information, and had “limited insight” into communications because Manafort and Kilimnik employed sophisticated operational security and redactions obscured key material ^{[5] [2] [10]}.

6. Broader activity: Ukraine peace plan and post-election coordination

Beyond campaign polling, the report documents Manafort’s discussions with Kilimnik about a Ukraine “peace plan” that the committee said would have advantaged the Kremlin and describes Manafort’s post-election coordination with Kilimnik and others close to Deripaska to pursue pro-Russian narratives that undermined evidence of Russian interference ^{[7] [11] [5]}.

7. Where the report sits in the larger investigative landscape

The committee’s findings stop short of asserting a provable criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia — language shared with the Mueller report — but the Senate report’s characterization of Kilimnik as an intelligence officer and its “grave counterintelligence threat” verdict represent a sharper, bipartisan judgment about the national-security implications of Manafort’s conduct ^{[8] [3] [4]}.

8. Disputes, caveats, and competing readings

Manafort’s lawyers and some commentators called aspects of the report conjecture, pointing to sealed material and contested interpretations; the committee’s own redactions, its inability to trace the data’s ultimate use, and the absence of an explicit finding of campaign-Russia criminal coordination leave space for alternative readings even as the panel emphasizes the serious security risk posed by Manafort–Kilimnik links ^{[1] [12] [5]}.