Senate committee excuses Bidens contacts with Russian spy in Ukrainian government

John Solomon:

...
In addition to treating him as a valuable political intelligence source, State officials often shared their private insights with Kilimnik, a Ukrainian consultant close to the American lobbyist Paul Manafort, according to numerous communications obtained by Just the News. For instance, Eric Schultz, a former U.S. embassy official in Ukraine who by 2016 had become U.S. ambassador to Zambia, gave his frank personal assessment after President Obama named Marie Yovanovitch to be the new chief U.S. diplomat in Kiev and George Kent to be her top deputy.

"He's ok i think — though yes, very pro-Ukraine," Schultz wrote of Kent in an email from his personal Gmail account in May 2016 to Kilimnik, using mostly lower-case letters. As for Yovanovitch, Schultz added: "she's not (doesn't handle pressure and can be difficult) but then she might be more Russian oriented than you realize. she never learned Ukrainian when she was in kyiv before but speaks good Russian.”
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SchultzKilimnicMay2016.pdf

Ordinarily, such discussions would raise little interest in everyday America. But it turns out Kilimnik is no ordinary contact: The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last week described Kilimnik as a Russian intelligence officer in its final report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
File
SSCIRussiaReportVolume5.pdf

In other words, the State Department and its Kiev embassy were routinely trading information with a man the Senate report now portrays as an asset of a hostile foreign power during a time when Biden, now the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, oversaw Ukrainian policy for the Obama administration.

To the surprise of many, the bipartisan Senate report treats Kilimnik's ties to Trump through Manafort very differently than his dealings with the Obama administration on one of Biden's signature policy issues.

The report concluded Kilimnik posed a "grave counterintelligence threat" to Trump because of the Manafort ties, while Kilimnik's Obama-Biden State Department contacts were dismissed with little concern. "Communications Kilimnik had with the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv and other communications with his associates reveal Kilimnik's longstanding focus on the issue of resolving the conflict in eastern Ukraine," the report said.

In fact, most of Kilimnik's contacts with State were reduced to footnotes and passing sentences in a report that made Kilimnik's ties to Manafort and Trump sound nefarious.

Some intelligence officials interviewed by Just the News expressed surprise at the disparate treatment.

"The Senate report does not give a complete picture to the Obama-era State Department contacts where information was shared two ways with Kilimnik and Manafort," said a U.S. intelligence source directly familiar with Russia intelligence and Kilimnik's dealings with State. "Either this is as serious for State as it was for Trump and there needs to be a damage assessment, or the Senate report is overstating the concerns about Kilimnik for political effect."...

I suspect the Democrats on the committee wrote this part of the report and the Republicans on the committee did not question them.  But with Biden as the candidate the issue does need to be raised and dealt with.  This assume Biden has the cognitive ability to remember the conersations.