The timeline of claims made in an unsubstantiated dossier presented by top US intelligence officials to President Donald Trump and senior lawmakers last month has increased scrutiny of events that unfolded in the final months of the Trump campaign.
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The timeline of Trump's ties with Russia lines up with allegations of conspiracy and misconduct
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The dossier alleges serious misconduct and conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia's government. The White House has dismissed the dossier as fiction, and some of the facts and assertions it includes have indeed been proven wrong.
Other allegations in the dossier, however, are still being investigated. According to a recent CNN report, moreover, US intelligence officials have now corroborated some of the dossier's material. And this corroboration has reportedly led US intelligence officials to regard other information in the dossier as more credible.
Importantly, the timeline of known events fits with some of the more serious alleged Trump-Russia misconduct described in the dossier. And questions about these events have not been fully answered, including the sudden distancing of Trump associates from the campaign and administration as the events and Russia ties became public.
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The dossiers allegations of Trump-Russia ties and conspiracy
The dossier was compiled by veteran British spy Christopher Steele, who was hired to investigate Trump's ties to Russia by the Washington, DC-based opposition research firm Fusion GPS. Steele developed a network of sources while working on
An American consultant named Paul Manafort, who was mentioned throughout Steele's dossier, served as Donald Trump's campaign manager until August 2016. He is said to have close ties to Ukraine and Russia.
change "definitely came from Trump staffers."
$12.7 million for Manafort for his work
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Michael Flynn: A trip to Moscow, a distraction from Ukraine, and secret phone calls
According to the dossier, a Kremlin official involved in US relations said that Russia attempted to cultivate US political figures by "funding indirectly their recent visits to Moscow."
What happened
In December 2015, Flynn, then recently retired from the Defense Intelligence Agency, traveled to Moscow to speak at a gala celebrating the 10th anniversary of state-sponsored news agency Russia Today.
Flynn later told The Washington Post that he had been paid to speak at the gala, where he was photographed sitting next to
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Carter Page, a was an early foreign policy adviser to Trump. Page also served as an adviser " rel="noFollow" target="_blank"on key transactions" for Russia's state-owned energy giant Gazprom before setting up his own energy investment fund, Global Energy Capital, with former Gazprom executive Sergei Yatesenko.
the President was so keen to lift personal and corporate Western sanctions imposed on the company, that he offered Page and his associates the brokerage of up to a 19 percent (privatised) stake in Rosneft."
The dossier says that Pageexpressed interest" in the offer but was "noncommittal." It also says that Page promised that "sanctions on Russia would be lifted" if Trump were elected.
What happened
Page's extensive business ties to state-owned Russian companies were investigated by a counterintelligence task force set up last year by the CIA, according to several media reports. The investigation, which is reportedly ongoing, has examined whether Russia was funneling money into Trump's presidential campaign — and, if it was, who was serving as the liaison between the Trump team and the Kremlin.
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Sergei Millian: From touting Trump to downplaying ties
Sergei Millian, a Belarus-born businessman who is now a US citizen, founded the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce in 2006. He has described himself as an exclusive broker for Trump's family business, the Trump Organization, with respect to real-estate dealings in Russia.
What the dossier says
One of the dossier's sources, "
The Kremlin recruited "hundreds of agents" both in Russia and in the US who were either "consciously cooperating with the FSB or whose personal and professional IT systems had been compromised," the dossier says, citing "a number of Russian figures with a detailed knowledge of national cyber crime."
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"Many were people who had ethnic and family ties to Russia and/or had been incentivized financially to cooperate," the dossier says. Source E allegedly told his compatriot that agents were compensated by "consular officials in New York, DC, and Miami," who issued "pension disbursements to Russian émigrés living in the US as cover...tens of thousands of dollars were involved."
In return for this effort, the dossier says, Putin wanted information from Trump on Russian oligarchs living in the US, Source E said. The same source is quoted in the dossier as saying
"Unlike in Russia, these [dealings] were substantial and involved the payment of large bribes and kickbacks which, were they to become public, would be potentially very damaging to their campaign."
What happened
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"Source E," according to recent reports by the Wall Street Journal and ABC, is the Belarus-born businessman Sergei Millian, the founder of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce (RACC) who became an American citizen after arriving in the US 15 years ago.
Millian described himself in an interview with Russian news agency RIA Novosti last April.
Whereas Millian told RIA that he had been in touch with the Trump Organization as late as April 2016, he said in an email to Business Insider that the last time he worked on a Trump brand project was "
Millian, on his LinkedIn page, says he is the Vice President of the World Chinese Merchants Union Association. He wrote last April that he traveled to Beijing to meet with a Chinese official and the
Millian has also worked with Rossotrudnichestvo
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