Did a recent Senate report vindicate the Mueller investigation? [closed]

Question

Because according to Aaron Mate:

But the plain text of the Senate report contains no concrete evidence to support its conclusions. Instead, with a heavy dose of caveats and innuendo, reminiscent of much of the torrent of investigative verbiage in the Russiagate affair, the report goes to great lengths to cast a pall of suspicion around Kilimnik, much of which is either unsupported or contradicted by publicly available information.

A critical disclosure by the Mueller team during its investigation – but unmentioned in both the final Mueller and Senate reports – directly contradicts the Senate's assessment. After Mueller accused Kilimnik of having unspecified Russian intelligence "ties" in 2017, Manafort's legal team made multiple discovery requests for any communication between Manafort and "Russian intelligence officials." In April 2018, Manafort’s attorneys revealed that the special counsel replied that "there are no materials responsive to [those] requests." The Mueller team's response marked a tacit admission that as of 2019, the FBI did not consider Kilimnik a Russian agent.

In recently unsealed notes from the FBI's collusion probe, Peter Strzok – the top FBI counterintelligence agent who opened the investigation – wrote in early 2017: "We are unaware of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials."

Is all this true? Or is Mate cherry-picking the report?

Answer 1

Did a recent Senate report vindicate the Mueller investigation?

This is begging the question. Does the Mueller report need vindication?

Much of the Mueller report remains redacted, and the article uses that to spin its tale. Presumably the Senate Intelligence Committee had full access to the unredacted report, and additional intelligence, not available to the author. Furthermore, this was a report issued by a Republican-led Senate committee who were fiercely skeptical of the Mueller report.

Or is Mate cherry-picking the report?

Yes, he is focusing exclusively on sowing doubt about a single actor, Konstantin Kilimnik. He ignores that Manafort lied about his relationship with Kilimnik. The article slides the goalposts from “it is illegal for any person to solicit, accept, or receive anything of value from a foreign national in connection with a U.S. election” to requiring that Kilimnik be definitively shown to be a Russian agent.

This is exemplified in "A ‘Valuable Resource’ for the U.S.".

A deep and unresolved tension in the Senate report is that even as it declares that Kilimnik was a Russian intelligence officer, it documents his extensive U.S. government ties and involvement in political efforts hostile to Russian interests.

...

While the Senate report casts Kilimnik's proximity to the Trump campaign during the few months of Manafort's tenure in 2016 as a "grave counterintelligence threat" from Russia, it does not raise any alarm about Kilimnik's longer and deeper involvement with the highest reaches of the Obama U.S. State Department.

There is no tension. The US government is allowed to manage and manipulate foreign agents. A political campaign is not. This is central to the Muller investigation and something which is repeatedly glossed over; the Trump campaign even asking anything of a foreign national is unethical and possibly a crime. Yes, the chairman of a US presidential campaign being in contact with a person known to have strong ties to Russia should rightly raise alarm.

Furthermore, the US government's long and useful relationship with Kilimnik undermines the attempts at the article to cast Manafort's relationship with Kilimnik as harmless.