High-ranking U.S. official sabotaged the Kremlin Report, Aslund alleges

A high-ranking U.S. government official was responsible
for deliberately sabotaging the work of experts in preparing the Kremlin Report
on Russian officials to be targeted for sanctions, reported on Jan. 30 Anders
Aslund, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington. The
Kremlin Report, which was made public by the U.S. State Department on Jan. 29,
was supposed to have consisted of senior foreign political figures and
oligarchs who made their fortune on illicit contacts with the Kremlin, he said.
Among other things, it was supposed to have reported on their assets, net worth
and their closeness to the Putin regime, he said.

Instead, “somebody high up – no one knows who at this
point – threw out the experts’ work and instead wrote down the names of the top
officials in the Russian presidential administration and government, plus the
96 billionaires on the Forbes list,” Aslund reported on his UkraineAlert blog.
“In doing so, this senior official ridiculed the government experts who had
prepared another report, rendering the Combating America’s Adversaries Through
Sanctions Act ineffective and mocking U.S. sanctions on Russia overall. By
signing this list, the secretary of the treasury took responsibility for it.”

As his response to the brewing scandal, U.S. Treasury
Secretary Steven Mnuchin assured the U.S. Congress that the Trump
administration will impose financial sanctions on Russian officials and
oligarchs despite President Trump declining a congressional deadline to do so.
“This should in no way be interpreted as we’re not putting sanctions on anyone
in that report,” Mnuchin told the U.S. Senate Banking Committee at a hearing
the same day. He added that the Kremlin Report is not a substitute for
financial restrictions that Congress mandated in a bill approved in August. The
Trump administration refrained from imposing those mandated sanctions.

Zenon Zawada: If Aslund’s
claims are true, they imply that the Russian elites have agents within the high
ranks of the U.S. government, likely the White House, that are sabotaging the
effort to impose sanctions on their behalf. That would have enormous
implications for U.S. national security. These claims could be used to open a
new investigation into the Trump administration’s alleged ties to Russia.

It’s worth noting that the publication of the
Kremlin Report, and the possible sanctions to follow, are a separate matter
from the sanctions mandated by Congress in August but were not imposed this
week by the Trump administration. The president’s Russia foreign policy team
consists of neo-conservative hawks, including Kurt Volker, National Security
Advisor H.R. McMaster and Defense Secretary James Mattis. So their statements
and actions in the coming days will help to determine whether Russia-allied
saboteurs are working within the high ranks of the U.S. government.