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Bears repeating: the Kremlin cares more about throwing the US into political chaos than covering up Trump’s misdeeds. Peskov just confirmed the gist of the Mueller/Cohen plea deal sputniknews.com/russia/2018120…
Peskov rather curiously throws out an intriguing new tidbit: Cohen’s Jan16 email to the Kremlin about the Moscow Project contained a request for a meeting with Putin’s then chief of staff, Sergei Ivanov 2/
Ivanov, a longtime Putin friend/associate from their KGB days in the late 1970s, was arguably the second most powerful person in Russia at the time of the 2016 election 3/
The Mueller/Cohen plea deal indicates that Cohen contacted Peskov to arrange a meeting with an unspecified senior Kremlin figure (undoubtedly this is a ref to Ivanov) 4/
Ivanov has served alongside Putin in several notable roles: deputy FSB director when Putin was the head of the service (1998-1999), head of the Russian Security Council after Putin was elevated to PM (1999-2001), defense minister 2001-2005), deputy PM (2005-2011) 5/
Ivanov, a fluent English speaker, was sacked in Aug 2016 from the chief of staff job for unclear reasons. He has remained close to Putin ever since, incl via a seat on the Russia Security Council, which is somewhat of a latter-day version of the Politburo 6/
Key question: Did Cohen have any form of contact with Sergei Ivanov or members of his team? As is the case with Peskov, there are few people in the Putin circle who are closer to the boss or who are seen as near-peers 7/
As best I can recall, Sergei Ivanov’s name has only cropped up previously in conjunction with the Steele dossieir END/
Addendum/clarification: Sergei Ivanov, not Dmitri Peskov, has long been seen as a near-peer to Putin. That’s part of the reason why he was so conspicuously passed over in the horse race to replace Putin as president in 2008 and lost out to the non-threatening Dmitri Medvedev
