Konstantin Kilimnik indictment means Mueller has officially tied Russian intelligence to Trump campaign: report

With all the North Korean summit and Donald Trump's spat with Justin Trudeau sucking up all the airtime, some may have missed an important development in the Mueller probe of Russia's interference in the 2016 Presidential campaign.

So explains a new Bloomberg piece analyzing the importance of Mueller's indictment of Konstantin Kilimnik.

In the piece, writer Christopher Strohm argues that the charges against Kilimnik represent a breakthrough in the case because it "links senior officials on President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign to Russian intelligence in a criminal matter."

"This is an alleged Russian spy committing crimes with the former campaign chairman for Trump," former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti told Bloomberg. "When people first thought of the Mueller investigation, this is what people thought would result from it."

Kilimnik, a Russian intelligence asset, is now under the protection of Moscow and unlikely to ever see an American court room.

But that's not the point, former prosecutor Katie Phang told Bloomberg.

"The indictment serves a strategic purpose in raising public awareness about the connections that those who worked on Trump’s campaign had with Russians, and it serves a legal purpose by putting more pressure on Manafort to become a cooperating witness," the story says.

Read the whole story here.