Well, it appears that we're rapidly approaching peak crazy as Trump stews in his Impeachment soup. It’s a train he can’t stop or derail and it’s driving him right over the edge. But this has been a long time brewing, as it appears that origin of his crazy theories about Ukraine go all the way back to the scandals involving Paul Manafort and his connections to Russian-linked oligarchs in Ukraine.
In the months after Trump’s victory in November 2016, he and his allies leaned on a narrative that Manafort was the victim of a Ukrainian campaign to fabricate financial records and release them to the media. Ukraine, they claimed, targeted Manafort in “collusion” with the Democratic National Committee.
Trumpworld began to use these interference accusations to defend the President against allegations of collusion with Russia. And, as time wore on, Giuliani began to investigate the underlying allegai ons themselves.
It’s not clear whether Trump, or other administration officials, took any official actions to pressure Ukraine to manufacture dirt before 2019. But for much of 2017 and 2018, there appears to have been a recognition among both Trump’s allies and officials in Ukraine that Manafort’s downfall was perceived in the White House as having been orchestrated by the Ukrainian government, and was detrimental to the two countries’ relations.
To Trump and his allies, the initial "meddling” by Ukraine in the 2016 election was the release of the Black Ledger which documented that Manafort had received $12 Million in under-the-table cash from former Ukrainian President Yankovich. Trump believes this ledger is fake and was part of an effort by the Ukrainian government intended to take him down.
Continued:
The August 2016 New York Times piece that precipitated Manafort’s ouster was based on a trove of documents known in Ukraine as the “black ledger.” It purports to show documentation of bribes paid out by the political party for which Manafort worked in Ukraine.
But what incensed Trump and his allies was less the allegations themselves than how they came to be. The New York Times cited Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau in its original story as having informed the newspaper that Manafort’s name appeared in the ledger.
That, in turn, has led to allegations from Trumpworld that it was Ukraine which interfered in the 2016 election — not Russia. Ukraine allegedly conspired with Democratic officials to hurt Trump by spreading doctored financial records about Manafort.
Much of this entered the media ecosystem through a January 2017 Politico article.
Citing Andrii Telizhenko, a former staffer at Ukraine’s embassy in Washington, Politico reported on allegations that the country’s D.C. delegation had tried to help the DNC “get enough information on Paul [Manafort] or Trump’s involvement with Russia” to merit a congressional hearing.
And once Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel in May 2017 and his investigation ramped up, Trump’s defenders increasingly began to suggest that Ukrainian attempts to damage Manafort were the real scandal.
The story grows more complicated with the involvement not just of Telizhenko, but also former Ukranian prosecutor Lutshenko, and PM Andrii Derkach who decided that Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau — NABU — who had discovered the Black Ledger was itself corrupt.
Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani has been running around the country talking to Telizhenko, Lutshenko and Derkach loading up with conspiracy theories about the Ledger, and accusations that former Ambassador Yovanovich provided Lutshenko with a "do not prosecute" list of various US-backed companies including George Soros who was allegedly being shuttled $5.3 billion of US funds as part of a massive money-laundering scheme which alledgely included payments to Barisma and Joe Biden.
Of course, this is all a bunch of rubbish that started with Konstantin Kilmnick and Manafort himself.
The Ukraine-hacked narrative has a murkier origin story. In a document release last month, the FBI revealed one notable detail: During an interview with the FBI, Rick Gates, Manafort’s former deputy, recalled that Konstantin Kilimnik, one of Manafort’s business partners with alleged links to Russian intelligence, advanced the narrative that Ukraine had a role in the DNC hack. “Gates recalled Manafort saying the hack was likely carried out by the Ukrainians, not the Russians, which parroted a narrative Kilimnik often supported,” according to an FBI document, which then adds, confusingly, that “Kilimnik also opined the hack could have been perpetrated by Russian operatives in Ukraine.” It is unclear from Gates’s recollection when exactly this statement was made, and how persistently Manafort in turn repeated it.
The Ukraine-hacked conspiracy theory is usually combined with a version of the CrowdStrike conspiracy theory, in which the cybersecurity firm somehow engineered the DNC leak while framing Russian intelligence. Kilimnik, notably, does not appear to have advanced this far more common version of the theory.
Of all the Ukraine conspiracy theories, the Ukraine-owned narrative received the most attention early on. It appears to have originated in the first days of January 2017, both on the far right and the far left, almost at the same time—in response to a Ukraine-related Department of Homeland Security intelligence release and a Ukraine-related CrowdStrike report from late December.
In the wee hours of January 3, Washington’s Blog, a popular, now defunct alt-right site, ran a rambling, 5,600-word piece titled: “Why Crowdstrike’s Russian Hacking Story Fell Apart.” The piece quoted a litany of rumors, and then homed in on Dmitri Alperovitch, a founder of CrowdStrike: “He isn’t serving US interests. He’s definitely a Ukrainian patriot. Maybe he should move to Ukraine.”
The problem with this is that Alperoitch isn’t Ukrainian, he’s a Russian who was born in Moscow, so Crowdstrike isn’t a Ukrainian company, they didn’t have the “real” DNC server and Hunter Biden has nothing to do with it.
This is Trump’s defense strategy, this is what he’s desperately hoping will be brought out to light during his Senate impeachment trial. He wants Hunter Biden to testify, and also Joe Biden — but his favorite witness is Rudy Giuliani who was recently interviewed by NY Magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi and showed up with his fly open and drooled on his sweater.
Over a sweater, he wore a navy-blue suit, the fly of the pants unzipped. He accessorized with an American-flag lapel pin, American-flag woven wallet, a diamond-encrusted pinky ring, and a diamond-encrusted Yankees World Series ring (about which an innocent question resulted in a 15-minute rant about “fucking Wayne Barrett,” a journalist who manages to enrage Giuliani even in death).
[...]
I asked him how he ever trusted Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two Russian associates with a business called Fraud Guarantee who were arrested by the FBI in October. “They look like Miami people. I know a lot of Miami people that look like that that are perfectly legitimate and act like them,” Giuliani said. “Neither one of them have ever been convicted of a crime. Neither one. And generally that’s my cutoff point, because if you do it based on allegations and claims and — you’re not gonna work with anybody,” he said, laughing. “Particularly in business.”
As we sped uptown, he spoke in monologue about the scandal he co-created, weaving one made-up talking point into another and another. He said former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, whom he calls Santa Maria Yovanovitch, is “controlled” by George Soros. “He put all four ambassadors there. And he’s employing the FBI agents.” I told him he sounded crazy, but he insisted he wasn’t.
The best hope for Trump ultimate removal from office is he gets exactly what he’s asking for and Giuliani spill his guts in the well of the Senate to Lindsay Graham, even if McConnell does block all other witnesses because as it turns out the Senate Intelligence Committee has already investigated the links between Ukraine and the 2016 election, they even interviewed DNC consultant Alexandra Chalupa who had gone to the Ukrainian embassy to discuss Manafort. They got nothing.
The Senate Intelligence Committee found no evidence in 2017 that Ukraine orchestrated a systematic effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, Politico reported Monday, citing people with direct knowledge of the investigation.
In the wake of Russia's election meddling, the GOP-led Intelligence Committee reportedly looked into the theory, recently resurfaced by allies of President Trump, that Kyiv also sought to influence the 2016 vote. But the panel halted the probe in the fall of 2017 after an interview with Alexandra Chalupa, a Democratic consultant linked to the Ukraine meddling allegations, bore no significant information, Politico reported.
Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.), reportedly made no other interview requests related to the issue.
The interview with Chalupa had mainly focused on a Politico report from January 2017. In that article, Chalupa has said that the Ukrainian Embassy was "helpful" with her pursuit to expose information about former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. She told the news outlet that she traded information with officials there and that "if I asked a question, they would provide guidance."
On top of all this, it appears that a Russian hacker has confessed to being involved in the DNC hack.
Russian website The Bell, known for a generally critical stance towards President Vladimir Putin and the corruption under his rule, reported Monday that Konstantin Kozlovsky had testified to carrying out attacks at the request of state intelligence organs, notably the FSB (the KGB-successor for which Putin himself had worked in Soviet times).
The testimony is potentially explosive, as it is a first-hand account of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election that directly contradicts Putin’s denials of any involvement. President Donald Trump had indicated after a recent meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vietnam that he believed Putin’s account, rather than the reports of four U.S. intelligence agencies that came to the opposite conclusion.
Kozlovsky had been arrested earlier this year as part of a sweep by Russian authorities into a group of hackers who had stolen over $50 million from Russian bank accounts since the start of 2016 using the so-called Lurk virus. His testimony comes from an Aug. 15 court hearing on whether to extend his pre-trial detention. The website cited Kozlovsky’s own Facebook page for the written transcript, and also an audio recording of the hearing posted on Soundcloud. Fortune hasn’t verified either independently.
This hacker was linked to FSB while the main targets of the Mueller investigation were members of the GRU — both were involved in the hacking of the DNC email systems independently.
Giuliani has nothing. Just phantoms and shadows generated by Kremlin-backed hucksters and criminals like Parnas and Fruman. He’s the gift that keeps on giving.
According to Rotner, all legal niceties aside, it would be worth the effort to put the spotlight on Giuliani because his answers and demeanor would likely damage Trump.
“At a minimum, getting Giuliani to testify would force him to assert the privilege. That alone could be of value. He would be required to testify, on the record and under oath, that his actions in Ukraine were undertaken in the course of legal representation on Trump’s personal behalf—because otherwise, he would have no basis for claiming the privilege in the first place. That testimony, in and of itself, would tie Trump to Giuliani’s actions,” he wrote. “Imagine what it would suggest if one the House managers asked Giuliani, Did President Trump instruct you to inform Ukraine that U.S. aid wouldn’t be released unless and until it announced publicly that it was investigating the Bidens?
And then Giuliani replied, I refuse to answer on the grounds of the attorney-client privilege.”
“That would be . . . not good for Trump,” he added.
“It’s hard to overstate how crucial Giuliani is to the entire Ukraine scandal,” Rotner continued. “Think about it: if Trump’s demands for investigations by Ukraine were in furtherance of U.S. government policy, why weren’t they carried out by the secretary of State, the attorney general, or some other government official? Why were they carried out by a lawyer hired by Trump to defend him personally?”
And Trump is betting the farm on him which is a bad bet since a new MSN Poll indicates that 55% of likely-voters support his removal from office.
As Congress left town following the approval of two articles of impeachment against Trump, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi declined to send those articles to the Senate amid concerns about Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s impartiality, and Trump retired to his Florida resort to rant about the process on Twitter, support for impeachment in MSN’s daily tracking poll spiked.
As of Christmas day, 55 percent of likely voters said they support Trump’s impeachment and removal from office — matching a previous high set in October — versus 40 percent who opposed it, the lowest opposition recorded in the poll.
That isn't just his impeachment, that’s his removal by the Senate. Nixon resigned when the demand for his Impeachment reached 58%.
Here are the rest of this week’s events in the endless Trump-Corruption Scandal.
December 20th —
December 21st —
December 22nd —
December 23rd —
December 24th —
December 25th —
December 26th —
December 27th —
- Prosecutors indicate they want a harsher sentence for Michael Flynn.
- Trump hastily brushes off questions about whether he learned about the Ukraine conspiracy from Putin at the G-20 while he continues to push the right-wing to reveal the Ukraine whistle-blower, and he has a bright new lie about disposing broken fluorescent light bulbs. Trump also went golfing today [and is about to break Obama’s two-term record for golf in one term], and attacks Pelosi "demanding fairness” in the Senate Trial. [That’s bad how?] He also has a list of stodgy white guys in line to replace Pompeo if he jumps ship for a Kansas Senate seat. National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien and Mulvaney top the list.
- A Congolese woman seeking asylum died in custody of CBP at the US-Mexico border.
- CIA veterans slam the Durham investigation for targeting former CIA head John Brennen.
- Talk of GOP Senators Murkowski, Tillis, Earnst, Collins, McSally, Gardner and Alexander pushing back against McConnell’s rigged show acquittal for Trump begins to grow.
- Marco Rubio accuses Fox News Contributor Sara A. Carter of “informational warfare” for writing on her personal blog 18-months ago that she saw no problems with the Carter Page FISA Warrant. [IG Horowitz actually said the warrant was legitimate and valid too, even with the mistakes.]
- The whistle-blower’s attorney calls for Senator Marsha Blackburn to be removed from the Senate Whistle-blower protection caucus after she made comments claiming Lt. Col Vindman was his “handler”, claiming he or she is “not at real whistle-blower” and asking if he was a “democratic operative.”
- Navy Seal who testified against Eddie Gallagher shreds Trump for pardoning a man his fellow soldiers called “Evil” for murdering unarmed civilians.“When you look at politicians getting involved in military justice — whether it’s a congressman from San Diego or the president — with their involvement, it isn’t justice,” the witness said. “It’s political when shooting civilians and executing prisoners shouldn’t be.”
- Joe Biden confirms that he will not testify before the Senate if subpoenaed for Trump’s impeachment trial. [Say what?]
- Federal Reserve study reveals that Trump’s tariffs have backfired causing job losses and higher prices. “We find that the 2018 tariffs are associated with relative reductions in manufacturing employment and relative increases in producer prices,” concluded Fed economists Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce, in an academic paper.
- Radio host Don Imus dies and is widely noted as a racist and a misogynist. [Who the fuck didn't know that?]
- Sarah Toce of The New Civil Rights Movement writes that Pelosi has achieved a masterstroke by making Trump squirm on the hook of Impeachment.
December 28th —