There’s your collusion. Manafort had Kilimnik pass the polling data to Oleg Deripaska.
From the Times …
Mr. Manafort asked Mr. Gates to tell Mr. Kilimnik to pass the data to Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who is close to the Kremlin and who has claimed that Mr. Manafort owed him money from a failed business venture, the person said. It is unclear whether Mr. Manafort was acting at the campaign’s behest or independently, trying to gain favor with someone to whom he was deeply in debt.
I’d spent a bit of time putting together a piece explaining what we already knew about Manafort’s efforts to use the campaign to get right with Deripaska. (That’s an hour I won’t get back.) We already knew that in July 2016 he’d had Kilimnik offer Deripaska “private briefings” on the state of the campaign. So it was not much of a stretch to think that he’d given Kilimnik the polling data for the same reason. But it appears we don’t have to speculate. He passed it on with those specific instructions.
