John Solomon has a new revelation regarding the Ukrainian Connection to the Russia Hoax. We know that the Ukrainian anti-corruption bureau (NABU) was set up by the FBI, with continued close ties. Operatives from NABU released two pages from Paul Manafort's "black book" to smear him while he was campaign manager for Trump. Now, in How the Obama White House engaged Ukraine to give Russia collusion narrative an early boost, Solomon provides some of the backstory.
Claiming confirmation from "multiple participants and contemporaneous memos," Solomon describes a WH meeting in January, 2016, that
brought some of Ukraine’s top corruption prosecutors and investigators face to face with members of former President Obama’s National Security Council (NSC), the FBI, State Department and Department of Justice (DOJ).
The ostensible purpose for the meeting was "training and coordination." However, the Ukrainian participants soon realized that the meeting was about a number of sensitive political topics. One had to do with Hunter Biden's involvement in a corrupt Ukrainian venture, but the second had to do with the possibility of reviving a two year old investigation into Paul Manafort involvement with the party of ousted Ukrainian President Yanukovych. The original investigation had been dropped without any charges being brought against Manafort.
Kulyk said Ukrainian authorities had evidence that other Western figures, such as former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig, also received money from Yanukovych’s party. But the Americans weren’t interested: “They just discussed Manafort. This was all and only what they wanted. Nobody else.”
Manafort joined Trump’s campaign on March 29, 2016, and then was promoted to campaign chairman on May 19, 2016.
Here's what interests me. There is talk of targeting Manafort's lobbying firm: "a lobbying firm linked closely to then-candidate Trump." But this meeting was in January, 2016--two to three months before Manafort was associated with the Trump campaign. By all accounts Trump didn't reach out for Manafort--Manafort was pushed on Trump. A White House meeting seems rather over the top for what sounds like simple opposition research. Could there be more to this? Is it possible that Dem operatives were somehow behind maneuvering an unwitting Manafort into joining the Trump campaign? After all, an actual member of the Trump campaign ensnared in supposedly pro-Russian lobbying activities would have a lot more punch than "a lobbying firm linked closely to Trump."
One way or another, Solomon appears to be on to something big. The Russia Hoax narrative was a developed thing already in January, 2016, but to make it really take off there had to be a attention grabbing hook. That hook was Manafort. Coincidence?
Later, of course, Carter Page and Michael Flynn fit right into the Russia Hoax narrative. George Papadopoulos, on the other hand, had to be worked into the setup. But it all seems to lead back to the Obama White House.
Interesting times.
Surely, there is a trail to follow in who first connected Manafort up with the Trump Campaign. I have always wondered how he ended up where he did, and I have also wondered exactly why he was fired. My suspicion on the firing has always been that someone in the DoJ whispered to Trump that Manafort was being investigated and/or had a surveillance warrants in place, but it has always been just that- an unsupported suspicion.
ReplyDeleteFor the longest time, I just assumed he was a bad and careless hire by someone, but the last year has basically led me to the conclusion that there were numerous attempts at entrapment- Mifsud with Papadopoulos, Halper with Page and GP, probably Felix Sater with Michael Cohen/Trump, Hank Greenberg with Roger Stone and Michael Caputo- the list gets long, and when you find out that some of these people were FBI informants in other aspects of their lives, it becomes untenable to assume all of this was coincidental. Manafort being another entrapment ruse wouldn't be surprising to me.
I saw the updates you did on the previous entry- if Gaeta really was Mifsud's handler, and is cooperating, the conspiracy will unravel very quickly. I just hope that tweet was true, but I have my doubts- it sounds too good to be true.
Yancey, I'm at about the same point with you on all this re Manafort--so many of these ops going on that it would seem indefensible not to be suspecious.
DeleteThe standard story is that a Lebanese real estate guy who's a close friend of Trump lined Manafort up with Trump. However, there are other stories that Jared and Ivanka played a role because they didn't like Lewandowski. So the field is pretty open.
Re Gaeta, Sperry has always been a careful journo, so I have to assume that's true. And if Gaeta was Mifsud's handler, but based in Rome, it adds another reason (to the Chris Steele reason) for Gaeta to travel to London--to work on the original setup of Papa-d with Mifsud, who was then in London.
Ukraine's elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, was compelled to flee from Ukraine following the Maidan Massacre, which occurred on February 20, 2014.
ReplyDeleteThe general situation was that Ukrainian nationalists had been conducting street demonstrations against Yanukovych for months. These demonstrations were basically (covertly?) supported by the Obama Administration. Then on that day, some people with guns in the nearby buildings shot at the demonstrators and killed about 50 of them.
The massacre was blamed on President Yanukovych, and eventually he had to flee.
However, there is a continuing dispute about whether the shooters were acting for or against Yanukovych. There is a continuing opinion that the massacre was a deliberate provocation that could be blamed on Yanukovych and cause his removal.
My first paragraph, above, links to a BBC article about that controversy.
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Five days ago, the Consortium News website published an article titled The Buried Maidan Massacre and Its Misrepresentation by the West, written by
Ivan Katchanovski. He teaches at the School of Political Studies and the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa. He held research and teaching positions at Harvard University, the State University of New York at Potsdam, the University of Toronto, and the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. He received Ph.D. from the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Cleft Countries: Regional Political Divisions and Cultures in Post-Soviet Ukraine and Moldova.
Katchanovski has long collected evidence and argued that the Maidan Massacre was done by anti-Yanukovych conspirators in order to remove him from the Presidency.
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If Ukrainian politics indeed become an issue in William Barr's study of the RussiaGate hoax, then I hope that the US Intelligence Community's assessment of the Maidan Massacre might be revealed. Does the US Intelligence Community know for sure who perpetrated that massacre?
More fundamentally, what role did the Obama Administration play in Ukraine's 2010 Presidential election and in the 2014 removal of elected President Yanukovych?
Mike, I read Katchanovski's article the other day at Zerohedge, and I was impressed. That's part of what I had in mind when I wrote:
Delete"Here Jenkins probably gives too much credit to Comey as the evil genius, and not enough to other Intel Community players--especially James Brennan. Still, Libya, Syria, ISIS, Ukraine--all roads lead to Hillary. And they also lead to CIA machinations in collusion with British intelligence--a globalist Deep State. And then there's Brexit, too, which offers a motive for British Deep State willingness to interfere in a US election."
There's a lot more to this than some Watergate style scandal. And it's why I keep saying that our constitutional order is at stake.
The Obama Administration's support for the Ukrainian zealots who strove to remove elected President Yanukovych blew up in the Obama Administration's own face. The Russian-majority regions who had voted for Yanukovych in 2010 retaliated by voting to secede from Ukraine and join Russia -- where there future votes would be respected.
ReplyDeleteMuch of the Obama Administration's hostility toward Paul Manafort was caused by his support for elected Ukrainian President Yanukovych, whom the Obama Administration wanted to be defeated in the 2010 election and wanted to be removed from office in the following years.
When Mueller's thug investigators questioned Manafort, they surely asked him all about his activities in Ukraine when the Obama Administration was trying to remove elected President Yanukovych.
I do not believe the public yarn that Manafort was working primarily as a political consultant to Yanukovych and to his political party. I think that is a cover story and that Manafort was doing primarily something else.
My own speculation was that Yanukovych and his supporters foresaw that they might be overthrown and so they hired Manafort primarily to secretly move their assets abroad and to arrange their political asylum in the West.
Whatever Manafort really was doing in Ukraine, Mueller's investigation has not revealed an explanation -- either through leaks or through the published report.
I think that the US Intelligence Community wants to maintain the secret of Manafort's actual activities in Ukraine. Maybe Manafort was working somewhat for the CIA. Or maybe a full explanation might lead to a revelation of the Obama Administration's meddling in Ukrainian politics.
I'm on the same page with you in basically all of this. I would simply add that I see no impossibility in Manafort doing ALL of this--including the political consulting.
DeleteI was just reading that Svetlana Lokhova, the Russian-born British analyst whom Halper tried to tar as a spy and to link romantically to Michael Flynn, received an email from Christopher Andrew on January 12, 2016 stating that she should save two dates in February for a party to celebrate Mrs. Halper's birthday. She found this odd because she hardly knew Halper, and thought him strange, and didn't know Mrs. Halper at all. Thus, as early as January 12, 2016, the effort to entrap Flynn was active. This date coincides with the January 2016 meeting of the Ukrainian anti-corruption officials at the White House.
ReplyDeleteI'm gonna be fascinated to see what Barr will do with some of these cases: Papa-d, Manafort, Flynn. Manifest injustices have been committed, politicized prosecutions with roots in the Obama administration. It's tangled, but needs to be addressed. The place to start is to examine the predication for the cases.
DeleteAlso, I don't know if you continued to follow it, but Scott Horton finished his dissection of the Mueller Report.
ReplyDeleteNo, I moved on. He wasn't as fast as you were, and life is too short sometimes to wallow in that BS.
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