How did this slip by the radar? Maybe too much crap is flushing through the Trump cesspool to keep track. But Paul Ryan was in Prague 3 weeks ago.
Ryan claimed going to Prague was for commemorating US-Czech relations. While there Ryan gave speeches to both Czech Parliament chambers where he spoke against Authoritarianism and Russian influence. He also didn’t meet with President Zeman who is a Putin ally. Which is all sort of strange since he’s enabled Trump’s authoritarianism and is known as an economics guy and not a foreign policy guy.
Oh, and Ryan also spoke with Czech lawmakers to urge extraditing Yevgeniy Nikulin, the Russian hacker.
So is Ryan trying to wash the taint of enabling Trump’s authoritarianism from his hands?
Trying to hide his own knowledge of Russian money entering and subsuming Republican politics? www.newyorker.com/…
Is this an attempt to look legitimate for a 2020 Presidential run?
Did Ryan actually have a hand in extraditing Nikulin?
Or did Ryan get a heads up from rightwing sources in Czech Rep. that the extradition was going to transpire and he high-tailed it over to Czech to make it look like he was involved?
Finally, Ryan spoke with lawmakers to urge the extradition of Russian hacker Yevgeniy Nikulin to the United States.
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For some background on this, yesterday I wrote about the fact that Nikulin was in Prague (not yet jailed) at the time that Michael Cohen allegedly held his clandestine meeting with Russian operatives, specifically to discuss payment of the Russian hackers.
Three days after Ryan’s trip to the Czech Republic, Nikulin was extradited to the U.S. and immediately appeared in Federal District Court in San Francisco. As I noted yesterday, perhaps it is just a coincidence that two weeks later McClatchy reported that Michael Cohen had, in fact, traveled to Prague during the time frame reported by the Steele dossier. Perhaps it’s also a coincidence that two weeks later the Speaker of the House announced his retirement.
To be honest, I have no idea what any of this means. But it is important to keep in mind that Ryan is better known for his ideological commitment to Ayn Rand economics than as a foreign policy expert. It sure looks like he knows that the whole Trump-Russia conspiracy is about to blow up and, as a final act, positioned himself for a 2020 presidential run as the non-Trump candidate. I’ll admit that is pure speculation on my part, so what do you make of all of this? Could it all be just one gigantic coincidence?
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