Trump’s campaign manager in 2016 [March to August], Paul Manafort, has a critical tie to US security issues in Ukraine and Russia, going back to 2005, though it’s not part of the trial that ended for him today. Manafort got hired in 2005 by Ukraine’s Party of Regions which, the next year, harassed and drove out US Marines from Ukraine, during our Operation “Sea Breeze” exercise with NATO.
In 2016, only a couple of internet/print outlets dug out the story — but mainstream media never told voters of the attack on our Marines in 2006 by the Party of Regions in Ukraine, at the time Manafort was its advisor.
Lt. Colonel Tom Doman’s introduction to Ukraine, at 4 a.m. on May 27, 2006, was not a warm one.
"We had rocks thrown at us. Rocks hit Marines.
Buses were rocked back and forth. We were just trying to get to our base."
Doman and his 112 reserve Marines and sailors were boarding the buses after dark, with backup from Ukrainian special forces, to get to a compound where they would lay the groundwork for Sea Breeze 2006, a larger international training exercise set to involve 3,500 troops from the U.S., Ukraine, and 12 NATO partner countries. But hundreds of protesters seemed to have come out of nowhere to confront them.
The Marines ended up hemmed in by angry locals in Feodosia, a Ukrainian resort city on the Black Sea. "We had people jeering us and protesting against us until we basically left the country," Doman says. The Americans couldn’t go outside; they couldn’t reach their supply ship in the town’s port. Some protesters wielded what Col. Bill Black, the Marines’ commanding officer, jokingly called "Ukrainian cocktails" — plastic bottles filled with diesel fuel.
The story of the 2006 attack on US Marines instigated by the Party of Regions, and the employment by the Party of Regions of image-maker Paul Manafort, was reported by the fusion internet site (recent URL has changed to this) in August 2016, and re-issued in August 2017 at taskandpurpose (a military-oriented site). But top mainstream outlets and broadcasters failed to alert US voters to the Operation Sea Breeze debacle that occurred during Manafort’s employment.
The Times of London got close to the heart of it, in the depths of an article about payments to Manafort:
From The Times
The senior Ukrainian prosecutor alleges that in 2006 Mr Manafort orchestrated a series of anti-Nato, anti-Kiev protests in Crimea led by Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Russian Party of Regions — now designated a criminal organisation. The protests forced planned Nato exercises there to be cancelled. No charges were pursued because of a lack of evidence after Crimea was annexed. Mr Manafort did not respond to a request for comment.
The memo says: "It was his political effort to raise the prestige of Yanukovych and his party — the confrontation and division of society on ethnic and linguistic grounds is his trick from the time of the elections in Angola and the Philippines. While I was in the Crimea I constantly saw evidence suggesting that Paul Manafort considered autonomy [from Ukraine] as a tool to enhance the reputation of Yanukovych and win over the local electorate."
Mr Yanukovych laid the groundwork for Russia’s annexation of the peninsula, which Donald Trump has now suggested he would recognize.
The US media covered payments to Manafort by the Party of Regions, but mostly overlooked the physical harrassment launched against NATO forces and the US Marines. The Trump campaign headed off the bigger story by letting go of Manafort in August as soon as the “black ledger” payments to him by Party of Regions came to light.
The Times of London also wrote, “The report, leaked to The Times, sets out legal options for prosecuting Mr Manafort in Ukraine for "conspiring with a criminal organisation" and "inciting ethnic hatred and separatism".
Manafort was hired by the Party of Regions in 2005 to rehabilitate the image of the former Prime Minister of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych (see timeline in Washington Post). Yanukovych was Putin’s anti-NATO puppet in Ukraine, and regained office in 2010. However, a popular uprising overthrew him in 2014, and Yanukovych fled to Moscow.
The exact role of Manafort in the Sea Breeze incident is probably difficult to prove in court 12 years after the event. In fact, the Ukraine government suspended its cooperation with the US Department of Justice and special counsel Robert Mueller earlier this year — for fear of offending the White House.
Also, Manafort’s role in the events of 2006, if provable, may be outside time limit for the statute of limitations.
So don’t be surprised at all if Manafort’s actual operations in the politics of Ukraine are not central to the charges brought against him. You may be tempted to think it’s not so relevant.
However, it looks like Trump’s hire in 2016 of the anti-NATO campaign staffer — during the height of his election campaign — was an early window into Trump’s foreign policy after his electoral college win, and his subsequent 2018 surrender in Helsinki to Putin.
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postscript — Manafort should not be pardoned. His anti-NATO activities going back more than a decade is enough reason to preclude a pardon. His transgressions against the nation extend beyond tax and banking violations.