So, catching up on my news reading for today, came across this:
Politico: Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire
This is a very long article. I'll be quoting parts of this story.
A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.
Merkel, who has served as an election observer in Ukrainian presidential elections dating back to 1993, noted theres some irony in Ukraine and Russia taking opposite sides in the 2016 presidential race, given that past Ukrainian elections were widely viewed in Washingtons foreign policy community as proxy wars between the U.S. and Russia.
A daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who maintains strong ties to the Ukrainian-American diaspora and the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, Chalupa, a lawyer by training, in 2014 was doing pro bono work for another client interested in the Ukrainian crisis and began researching Manaforts role in Yanukovychs rise, as well as his ties to the pro-Russian oligarchs who funded Yanukovychs political party.
In January 2016 months before Manafort had taken any role in Trumps campaign Chalupa told a senior DNC official that, when it came to Trumps campaign, I felt there was a Russia connection, Chalupa recalled. And that, if there was, that we can expect Paul Manafort to be involved in this election, said Chalupa, who at the time also was warning leaders in the Ukrainian-American community that Manafort was Putins political brain for manipulating U.S. foreign policy and elections.
That was not an uncommon view at the time, and, perhaps as a result, Trumps ties to Russia let alone Manaforts were not the subject of much attention.
That all started to change just four days after Chalupas meeting at the embassy, when it was reported that Trump had in fact hired Manafort, suggesting that Chalupa may have been on to something.
Telizhenko recalled that Chalupa told him and Shulyar that, If we can get enough information on Paul [Manafort] or Trumps involvement with Russia, she can get a hearing in Congress by September.
Chalupa confirmed that, a week after Manaforts hiring was announced, she discussed the possibility of a congressional investigation with a foreign policy legislative assistant in the office of Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), who co-chairs the Congressional Ukrainian Caucus. But, Chalupa said, It didnt go anywhere.
Within a few weeks of her initial meeting at the embassy with Shulyar and Chaly, Chalupa on April 20 received the first of what became a series of messages from the administrators of her private Yahoo email account, warning her that state-sponsored actors were trying to hack into her emails.
Chalupa further indicated in her hacked May email to the DNC that she had additional sensitive information about Manafort that she intended to share offline with Miranda and DNC research director Lauren Dillon, including a big Trump component you and Lauren need to be aware of that will hit in next few weeks and something Im working on you should be aware of. Explaining that she didnt feel comfortable sharing the intel over email, Chalupa attached a screenshot of a warning from Yahoo administrators about state-sponsored hacking on her account, explaining, Since I started digging into Manafort these messages have been a daily occurrence on my yahoo account despite changing my password often.
About a month-and-a-half after Chalupa first started receiving hacking alerts, someone broke into her car outside the Northwest Washington home where she lives with her husband and three young daughters, she said. They rampaged it, basically, but didnt take anything valuable left money, sunglasses, $1,200 worth of golf clubs, she said, explaining she didnt file a police report after that incident because she didnt connect it to her research and the hacking.
But by the time a similar vehicle break-in occurred involving two family cars, she was convinced that it was a Russia-linked intimidation campaign. The police report on the latter break-in noted that both vehicles were unlocked by an unknown person and the interior was ransacked, with papers and the garage openers scattered throughout the cars. Nothing was taken from the vehicles.
Then, early in the morning on another day, a woman wearing white flowers in her hair tried to break into her familys home at 1:30 a.m., Chalupa said. Shulyar told Chalupa that the mysterious incident bore some of the hallmarks of intimidation campaigns used against foreigners in Russia, according to Chalupa.
So all this eventually led to the eventual
NYT article exposing Manafort's cash ties and the Pro-Russian connection and this led to Manafort's quick
resignation, allegedly not working with the campaign anymore. Instead, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway became the campaign heads.
Back to Politico's story:
Clintons campaign seized on the story to advance Democrats argument that Trumps campaign was closely linked to Russia. The ledger represented more troubling connections between Donald Trumps team and pro-Kremlin elements in Ukraine, Robby Mook, Clintons campaign manager, said in a statement.
According to a series of memos reportedly compiled for Trumps opponents by a former British intelligence agent, Yanukovych, in a secret meeting with Putin on the day after the Times published its report, admitted that he had authorized substantial kickback payments to Manafort. But according to the report, which was published Tuesday by BuzzFeed but remains unverified. Yanukovych assured Putin that there was no documentary trail left behind which could provide clear evidence of this an alleged statement that seemed to implicitly question the authenticity of the ledger.
And in an interview this week, Manafort, who re-emerged as an informal advisor to Trump after Election Day, suggested that the ledgers were inauthentic and called their publication a politically motivated false attack on me. My role as a paid consultant was public. There was nothing off the books, but the way that this was presented tried to make it look shady.
True enough, Manafort and Corey Lewandowski were
both seen in Trump Tower soon after Trump won the presidency.
Back to Politico:
Yet Russia seemed to come to the defense of Manafort and Trump last month, when a spokeswoman for Russias Foreign Ministry charged that the Ukrainian government used the ledgers as a political weapon.
Ukraine seriously complicated the work of Trumps election campaign headquarters by planting information according to which Paul Manafort, Trumps campaign chairman, allegedly accepted money from Ukrainian oligarchs, Maria Zakharova said at a news briefing, according to a transcript of her remarks posted on the Foreign Ministrys website. All of you have heard this remarkable story, she told assembled reporters.
And she pointed out that Chaly traveled to the GOP convention in Cleveland in late July and met with members of Trumps foreign policy team to highlight the importance of Ukraine and the support of it by the U.S.
Despite the outreach, Trumps campaign in Cleveland gutted a proposed amendment to the Republican Party platform that called for the U.S. to provide lethal defensive weapons for Ukraine to defend itself against Russian incursion, backers of the measure charged.
We all remember this happening. It was a big thing that was quickly forgotten.
And a final bit from the Politico article:
The Poroshenko regimes standing with Trump is considered so dire that the presidents allies after the election actually reached out to make amends with and even seek assistance from Manafort, according to two operatives familiar with Ukraines efforts to make inroads with Trump.
Meanwhile, Poroshenkos rivals are seeking to capitalize on his dicey relationship with Trumps team. Some are pressuring him to replace Chaly, a close ally of Poroshenkos who is being blamed by critics in Kiev and Washington for implementing if not engineering the countrys anti-Trump efforts, according to Ukrainian and U.S. politicians and operatives interviewed for this story. They say that several potential Poroshenko opponents have been through Washington since the election seeking audiences of their own with Trump allies, though most have failed to do do so.
None of the Ukrainians have any access to Trump they are all desperate to get it, and are willing to pay big for it, said one American consultant whose company recently met in Washington with Yuriy Boyko, a former vice prime minister under Yanukovych. Boyko, who like Yanukovych has a pro-Russian worldview, is considering a presidential campaign of his own, and his representatives offered to pay a shit-ton of money to get access to Trump and his inaugural events, according to the consultant.
As we search for evidence to verify that Trump, his campaign and the Kremlin were in contact during the campaign, stuff like this, with content impacted by material in the dossier are out here sitting in the open, as clear , potentially serious evidence that Trump has been working with Russia all along. Manafort is one big part of this puzzle it seems, to re-quote Politico:
In January 2016 months before Manafort had taken any role in Trumps campaign Chalupa told a senior DNC official that, when it came to Trumps campaign, I felt there was a Russia connection, Chalupa recalled. And that, if there was, that we can expect Paul Manafort to be involved in this election, said Chalupa, who at the time also was warning leaders in the Ukrainian-American community that Manafort was Putins political brain for manipulating U.S. foreign policy and elections.
Dig harder, IC and press. We gotta nail these guys.