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The question is: Told to take this Ukraine Stand by Whom? For what purpose? To what ends?
More importantly, what was the Quo, for this look-the-other-way Quid?
www.dailykos.com/…
Donald Trump is having a very, very bad week. As reports emerge that several of his key advisers, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, met with the Russians the week of the RNC convention, one former adviser has now publicly changed his story to contradict his former boss. Members of the Trump campaign interfered with an RNC delegate proposal to attach language to the official Republican Party platform that would back Ukraine, militarily and otherwise, if Russia tried to invade. You can read the backstory here. It was the only issue the Trump campaign intervened on while delegates were voting on the party’s platform. In a July 31, 2016, interview with George Stephanopoulos, less than two weeks after the push to remove the Ukraine language, Trump said he had absolutely nothing to do with the Ukraine change.
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www.businessinsider.com/...
According to CNN's Jim Acosta, however, Gordon [the Trump campaign’s national security policy representative at the RNC] said that at the RNC he and others "advocated for the GOP platform to include language against arming Ukrainians against pro-Russian rebels" because "this was in line with Trump's views, expressed at a March national security meeting at the unfinished Trump hotel" in Washington, DC.
"Gordon says Trump said at the meeting ... that he didn't want to go to 'World War Three' over Ukraine," Acosta said.
www.dailykos.com/...
They [JD Gordon and presumably other Trump insiders] were directed to do so at a meeting with Donald Trump himself. And who presided over that meeting? Attorney General Jeff Sessions:
Well, well, well.
talkingpointsmemo.com/...
CNN’s Jim Acosta reported on air that J.D. Gordon, the Trump campaign’s national security policy representative at the RNC, told him that he made the change to include language that he claimed “Donald Trump himself wanted and advocated for” at a March 2016 meeting at then-unfinished Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.
Gordon claimed that Trump said he did not “want to go to World War III over Ukraine” during that meeting, Acosta said.
Yet Gordon had told Business Insider in January that he “never left” the side table where he sat monitoring the national security subcommittee meeting, where a GOP delegate’s amendment calling for the provision of “lethal defense weapons” to the Ukrainian army was tabled. At the time, Gordon said “neither Mr. Trump nor [former campaign manager] Mr. [Paul] Manafort were involved in those sort of details, as they’ve made clear.”
Discussion of changes to the platform, which drew attention to the ties to a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine that fueled Manafort’s resignation as Trump’s campaign chairman, resurfaced Thursday in a USA Today story. The newspaper revealed that Gordon and Carter Page, another former Trump adviser, met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the GOP convention.
www.thedailybeast.com/…
Denman says the two men took a copy of her amendment back to their chairs, then made calls on their cellphones. Later, she said the two members of Trump’s team claimed to have called the campaign’s New York headquarters, and that her amendment needed to be changed.
When the language came back up, after consultation with Trump’s staff—and in direct contradiction to Manafort’s insistence to the contrary—the section called merely for “appropriate assistance” to Ukraine.
That change in wording was particularly controversial, given Manafort’s ties to the country. Manafort has previously worked for pro-Putin Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was forced out of the country due to popular demonstrations. Putin subsequently annexed Crimea and encouraged an ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine.
It was also an unusual move for a Trump aide to be hovering over the committee’s deliberations on Ukraine. That’s something that did not occur in other subcommittees, or on very many other issues.
politics.blog.mystatesman.com/…
The Ukrainian people deserve our admiration and support in their struggle, and in their efforts to strengthen “the Rule of Law,” forge a Free Market economy, and expand democratic governance. We therefore support maintaining (and, if warranted, increasing) sanctions against Russia until Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity are fully restored. We also support providing lethal defensive weapons to Ukraine’s Armed Forces and greater coordination with NATO on defense planning. Simultaneously, we call for increased financial aid for Ukraine, as well as greater assistance in the economic and humanitarian spheres, including government reform and anti-corruption.
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But, before that happened, Denman approached Gordon at the side table to ask why he was messing with her platform language and on whose authority.
As Denman recounted the exchange to me:
So (Gordon) said something to the effect that the wording had to be cleared. And I said, `Cleared with who?’
And he said, `Cleared with New York,’ and I thought maybe he was overdoing his assignment and I didn’t quite believe him and I said, `Who are you clearing it with?’ And he said, `New York,’ and I said,`Who are you clearing it with?’
Denman said she pressed Gordon on who he had to clear it with in New York.
He got more specific, but I’ve refused to have a quote on that. He got very specific because I asked him three times.
Gordon said Denman has said that he said he was talking directly to Trump, but Denman said she has quite explicitly not said that. However, as in our conversation, the implication may be plain.
Since this was the “one hill” that the Trump Campaign chose to ‘plant their flag on’, out of all the Platform sub-committees, taking place at the height of the 2016 Presidential Campaign — it does reek of something, perhaps even a direct Quid-pro-Quo, perhaps even with your Election “tweaking” facilitators?
This could be the event that turned mere ‘Facilitators’, into ‘Collaborators’ in the very leaky days to follow. Afterall, at that time those in Trumpworld likely needed only one act of “Good Faith” to demonstrate their willingness to follow-through on all the Putin-backslapping required, in the “I-Love-Wikileaks” days ahead.
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It seems now — that Paul Ryan may be trying to on ‘right side’ of Quid-pro-Quo history, if his latest pro-Investigation statements are any guide:
While the Republican speaker claimed that Russia's alleged meddling didn't affect the outcome of the election — won by U.S. President Donald Trump — he said its actions "cannot be tolerated."
"One thing we know for certain is that Russia meddled in our election," Ryan said. "This is a foreign country trying to meddle within the internal activities of a sovereign country or a democracy."
He stressed the U.S has a responsibility to share the results of the Russia investigation with countries like Estonia, which in recent years has faced aggressive Russian disinformation campaigns along with Baltic neighbors Latvia and Lithuania.
"What we're doing through our investigation process is to figure out exactly what is it they did and how they did it so that we can help, equip and assist our allies to prevent the same kind of thing happening to them," Ryan said.
— www.yahoo.com/...
Afterall, due to his position, Ryan was in-the-know on the suspected Russian Disinformation efforts, long before, most of us in the Voting Public were ever let in on the behind-the-scenes deal:
There was little doubt that this material was coming from the Russian government. As Paul Ryan recently said, "We all knew this before the election. We all knew Russia was trying to meddle with our election." The CIA briefed Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell about the Russian campaign in September. In a U.S. News column published in October, I called on the RNC to renounce their use of these materials and encourage others to join them in doing so. DNC Chair Donna Brazile formally asked RNC Chair Priebus to stop using the materials on three separate occasions. All three times he refused.
So to be clear – the Republican Party of the United States knowingly used materials provided by a hostile foreign power in an American election. It continued to use these materials for months after it was known they were coming from Russia, and for months after they were asked to stop using them by the Democratic Party and even other Republican leaders. It is my own belief, having studied these Russian "active measures" for some months now, that it was the daily use of these materials by the RNC that was the single most important step in mainstreaming their use. Thus the RNC and its leaders were not just complicit in one of the most malevolent foreign intelligence operations to have ever taken place on U.S. soil, but were critical to its success.
— www.usnews.com/...
Other “RNC Co-conspirators” should start calling their Lawyers too. It appears that Paul Ryan has.
Of course the two faces of Paul Ryan could more likely be explained by his other long-term ambitions — instead finally wanting to do the ‘Right Thing’.