then in late december, trump pardoned paul manafort for his crimes. so, big picture, that means manafort effectively got away with whatever it was he was doing with konstantin kilimnik to help trump without ever telling investigators the truth about it. trump effectively rewarded him for not spilling the beans about his work with a russian intelligence officer while he was running trump's 2016 campaign. trump got him off the hook. because he never squealed! that pardon was late december. in february, again, we saw the fbi suddenly slap a $250,000 reward out there for any information leading to konstantin kilimnick's arrest. now we know, as of today, what was going on behind the scenes in the interim was the intelligence community was concluding that kilimnik was not only involved in the russian effort to interfere with the election in 2016, but to also interfere in the 2020 election to try to get trump reelected. this is it is declassified report that just came out today. quote, we assess that president putin and the russian state authorized and conduc

they didn't need to hide it anymore the way with paul manafort.i was willing to do it in the open. part of it is the president had been impeached. he had been acquitted. i think he felt liberated to be quite overt about his efforts to cheat. as we would see with his call to join the secretary of state his promulgation, a big lie, guiliani, following the leader of the boss is working with people with no associations with the kremlin and they were only too happy to do it. >> and warned by u.s. intelligence officials, rudy, stay away from this guy. he is meddling thing. what the russians were meddling is exactly what rudy was selling. now it's on your watch and president biden says putin is a killer. he will pay a price for those efforts. you do have a part of the price in this s1 hr-1 people's act bill that you are trying to get through. there is some election hardping -- security hardening there. putin pulse back the ambassador from the united states in retaliation. what does this mean coming from president biden? is this an escalation against russ

konstantin kilimnik, also named in the report, was a close associate of paul manafort, mr.rump's former campaign chairman. >> this was putin's plan to try to hurt joe biden's candidacy by helping donald trump, by trying to drag joe biden down. and it was done very much with malice of forethought. >> reporter: a report also concludes that china considered trying to influence the election, but ultimately decided against it. jeff pegues, cbs news, washington. >> o'donnell: and late today, the white house said president biden will hold his first formal press conference a week from thursday. job one for today was to sell his covid relief plan and to convince more americans to get their shots. we get more from cbs' ed o'keefe. >> reporter: president biden visited hard hit chester, pennsylvania, today touting his covid relief bill as a lifeline. in add >> reporter: in addition to those $1,400 stimulus payments, the american rescue plan provides billions to fund vaccination centers in underserved communities. >> reporter: but at a vaccination site just four blocks from where the pr

lines the kremlin use at least one of the same people in 2016 donald trump's campaign manager paul manafort he met with the agent of the kremlin and an intelligence agent to provide him with insight campaign polling data and strategic sites at a time russia was engaged in a social media campaign to help donald trump selection. four years later he would be back and they would be pushing out the same narratives. so some consistency clearly russia was not deterred and yet again another consistency that is important the russian interference did not go so far to temper with technology and that's important. itan is notable that china was deterred. i don't know if they had a plan to do so, but nonetheless china was deterred from intervening in the way that russia had. we also see new actors are getting in the business of election interference with iranians maligned activities more of a different scope but pushing out a false operation pounding on - - pretending to be the proud boys threatening dave vendor on - - fr republican to support the president what we can be sure of is that this isn't going

if they had the information they had on paul manafort and didn't dig into it deeper.tact with russians and the fbi didn't look into it, they would have been eviscerated by oversight committees, they would have been eviscerated on cable news, they would have been eviscerated by historians, by editorial boards. again, you stack up the fact patterns and it is hard to find one that durham or anybody is going to be able to criticize saying, well, they really, really shouldn't have opened that investigation against paul manafort. he's just a good guy who is just trying to make his country better. >> joe, this investigation started as a mere administrative review of the origins and the conduct of the russia probe. and it morphed into a criminal investigation. and they did get one prosecution. and fbi lawyer who falsified an email relates to the carter page fisa warrant. but that prosecution came as a result of a referral from the inspector general's office of the department of justice. and that's my biggest problem with this whole durham investigation, is that it's already b

counsel robert mueller's team that probed russian interference in 2016 and secured the conviction of paul manaforthe's also a fox news contributor. good to see you. president biden said last night on abc, if the allegations are true, that andrew cuomo, sexual harassment allegations, should resign and could likely be prosecuted. is he right and two, why do you think the president is weighing in open think now? >> i think, trey, the first question, the easiest question to answer, the last batch of allegations that were made, particularly the very last one by the anonymous staffer in the new york state executive branch that says that there was a grope, where he went in under the blouse, that actually does cross in to sexual assault. what i'd say, what i interpreted the president saying, if stuff like that was proved, which would be criminal, you'd expect there's criminal prosecution. i'd say the same thing about the nursing home stuff. if it turns out that they gave false statements to the justice department about the number of nursing home deaths, you can see about three different ways that that cou

he worked alongside konstantin kilimnik a former associate with 2016 campaign manager paul manafort ande contacts with established u.s. media figures to help produce a documentary that aired in january of 2020 on an american news network which appears to be a reference to the one america news network documentary entitled "the ewe crane hoax." let's bring in nbc news correspondent covering national security and intelligence ken delanian. ken f you can take this conversation a little further in terms of what this assessment, this declassified assessment, tells us about what we've seen happen over the past six months. >> mika, you just did a terrific job of laying out the two biggest take aways from this report. one is, of course, that china did not interfere and that's despite donald trump and many people close to him, many senior officials in the government saying that china was the biggest threat to the election. that was the thing we didn't know. remember, the director of national intelligence john radcliffe, attorney general william barr, national security adviser robert o'brien all t

you know, when donald trump has had his associates get caught up in legal troubles, i'm thinking paul manafortdent has been, well, they only worked for us for a couple months or that was the coffee boy or i was never with them or hardly know who they are and ten pictures come out with that person around the president. if, and it's still an if, there are charges here that involve the former president of the united states, i think it's important for people to know and understand as we report this just how close this relationship is and if some day a member of the weisselberg family pleads guilty, and, again, we're not saying that that is something that's going to happen or that they'll even be charged, it's important for people to know how very close they've been to this with barry, allen weisselberg's son, still or in the process of managing the ice rinks and the carousel at central park and then jack working at ladder capital, who has a lot of the debt that donald trump owns. so, just important figures here, wanted people to understand kind of the flowchart, if you will, at the trump organizat