Russian intel officer flew in for Republican Convention to oversee Donald Trump’s platform change

| 6:55 pm EST March 9, 2017
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Yesterday we brought you yet another name that now must be added to the list of alleged Trump-Russia conspirators: Konstantin Kilimnik. Politico has exposed that Kilimnik had flown in for the Republican National Convention and then bragged about his role in getting the GOP party platform changed in Russia’s favor. But now Rachel Maddow has pieced together that Kilimnik was a Russian intel officer.

Maddow made the connection during her Thursday evening MSNBC program, and oddly enough, she did so by connecting Politico’s latest reporting with an older Politico report on Kilimnik. In a separate development this week, two former Donald Trump campaign aides, Carter Page and J.D. Gordon, are now both asserting that it was Donald Trump himself who personally pushed them to make the GOP platform change.

This all adds up to a newly startling big picture: Donald Trump personally spearheaded the Republican Party platform change to a pro-Russian stance during the Republican Convention, even as three of his campaign advisers were meeting with the Russian Ambassador during the convention, and a Russian intel officer from the Putin-controlled GRU flew in to the convention to personally oversee the entire chain of events.

This now raises so many vital questions that it’s not even clear which should be asked first: Just how important was this GOP platform change to Vladimir Putin that he had two of his top people on the ground in Cleveland to make sure it happened? How inept was the Trump campaign that they needed this much direct adult supervision from the Russians just to change one line of text?

And perhaps most importantly, how can Donald Trump claim not to have known his advisers were all conspiring with Russia, when the conspiracy – including a Russian intel officer mysteriously showing up in Cleveland to work with his team at the convention – was playing out so blatantly in front of him? Trump’s narrow window for plausible deniability about the Russian conspiracy continues to close by the day. Contribute to Palmer Report.