RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
- Start date
Dorian Breh
Veteran
Gonna need one of you patriots to give cliffs on these silicone valley testimonies today please rep pending
ExodusNirvana
Change is inevitable...
I miss ObeezyTIME's M(e)n of the year: Robert S Mueller III, James B Comey Jr. & Barack H Obama
Facebook is still low balling. They know it. 
Feinstein's letter to Twitter
https://www.feinstein.senate.gov/pu...73C529E06E00530683EA89EE6E.twitter-letter.pdf
https://www.feinstein.senate.gov/pu...73C529E06E00530683EA89EE6E.twitter-letter.pdf
HOLLLYYYYYYY SHIIITTTTT!!!!!!:shakingdamn:
PLEASE for his sake let this not just be a harrods picture...
@DonKnock @SJUGrad13 @88m3 @Menelik II @wire28 @smitty22 @Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @dtownreppin214 @JKFrazier @tmonster @blotter @BigMoneyGrip @Soymuscle Mike @Grano-Grano @.r.
PLEASE for his sake let this not just be a harrods picture...
@DonKnock @SJUGrad13 @88m3 @Menelik II @wire28 @smitty22 @Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @dtownreppin214 @JKFrazier @tmonster @blotter @BigMoneyGrip @Soymuscle Mike @Grano-Grano @.r.
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The Trump Campaign’s Spy-Ties to Moscow Have Been Exposed
By John R. Schindler • 10/31/17 11:45am
Opinion
Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images
Yesterday was filled with legal bombshells for President Donald Trump. As expected, after months of investigation into the White House’s ties to Moscow, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team announced three arrests and indictments. Together, these cases have fundamentally shifted the game in our nation’s capital—very much to the president’s detriment.
The arrest of Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager in the summer of 2016 who secured him the Republican Party’s nomination, was expected by many. For months, rumors had swirled around Manafort, given his longstanding and unsavory ties to Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, compounded by his barely concealed links to Kremlin intelligence, as I reported three months before the November 2016 election.
Manafort has surrendered to the FBI and faces a dozen federal charges relating to financial crimes including money laundering, failing to register as a foreign agent, plus neglecting to report foreign cash to the IRS. These charges are serious and will be difficult for Manafort to beat, leading to speculation that what Mueller really wants is Manafort’s cooperation against Team Trump—which may be the 68-year-old’s only alternative to dying in prison.
Rick Gates, a Manafort protégé and 2016 Trump campaign associate, has also surrendered to the Feds and is facing a raft of charges relating to money laundering. Gates also played a key role in President Trump’s inauguration and pushed the White House’s agenda as a lobbyist until April of this year, when questions about Gates’ ties to the Kremlin made his position untenable.
On cue, the White House protested that they barely know Manafort and Gates—a transparent falsehood—while stating that their alleged crimes have nothing directly to do with the president. The latter may be technically true, but difficult questions lurk regarding why Donald Trump wanted someone as unsavory and Moscow-connected as Paul Manafort to head his campaign, particularly since the longtime swamp denizen Manafort’s links to Eastern oligarchs were an open secret in Washington.
However, the White House’s predicament grew much worse yesterday afternoon, eclipsing the Manafort bombshell, after the Justice Department revealed the deal it’s reached with George Papadopoulos, who was a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. After months of investigation, the FBI arrested Papadopoulos on July 27 of this year on charges that he lied to the Bureau in an interview in January about his ties to Moscow.
As just-released Justice Department paperwork makes clear, Papadopoulos cooperated with the FBI once he was caught in his web of lies, and on October 5 he pleaded guilty to making “a materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement and representation” to Bureau agents about the “timing, extent, and nature of his relationship and interactions with certain foreign nationals whom he understood to have close connections with senior Russian government officials.”
The Papadopoulos saga is quite a wannabe-spy thriller, revealing just how badly the Trump campaign sought to curry favor with the Kremlin—and obtain its help in the 2016 election. The essential facts are clear. In March 2016, after becoming an adviser to the Trump campaign, Papadopoulos met with a mysterious London-based academic of Mediterranean background who claimed to have close links to the Kremlin. This was an effort to gain access to Moscow’s power circles—importantly, after Papadopoulos received go-ahead from the campaign to forge improved ties with Russia, which constituted a major focus of candidate Trump’s foreign policy.
Papadopoulos met “the Professor” in Italy in mid-March 2016, then again in London later that month; on the latter occasion “the Professor” brought along a Russian female, allegedly Putin’s niece, to help facilitate the engagement. Papadopoulos emailed the campaign about the success of this meeting, which responded enthusiastically about what had transpired and on March 31, he participated in a national security meeting in Washington that included campaign principals, with Trump himself present. At that meeting, according to DoJ, Papadopoulos “introduced himself to the group, he stated, in sum and substance, that he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President Putin.”
Thereafter many emails were exchanged between Papadopoulos, “the Professor” and the Russian female about trying to set up meetings between Kremlin machers and the Trump campaign—ideally a photo op between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. That never happened, but during the spring of 2016 Papadopoulos had multiple discussions with these Kremlin representatives, according to the FBI.
Crucially, “the Professor” introduced Papadopoulos to a senior official of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs or MFA. In May and June 2016, the two had multiple discussions via Skype and email about cooperation between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign—all with the approval of senior campaign officials. Just as important, in late April, “the Professor” boasted to Papadopoulos that Moscow was in possession of juicy “dirt” on Hillary, including “thousands of emails.” In other words, the Trump campaign knew about Russian intelligence’s hacking of Democratic emails months before the public found out about it in July 2016, when WikiLeaks, serving as a Kremlin cut-out, dumped 20,000 purloined emails belonging to Clinton and other prominent Democrats on the Internet.
The importance of the Papadopoulos case to the Mueller investigation in terms of national security is obvious and troubling. Already “the Professor” has been identified as Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic resident in Great Britain. Mifsud brushed off the FBI’s accusations of his role in this affair, stating he has “a clear conscience.” So far, the Russian female and the senior MFA official have not been firmly identified, yet in truth it hardly matters since, to any seasoned counterspy, their roles in this hush-hush saga are perfectly clear, no matter who they really are.
This was a textbook Russian espionage operation, presumably run by Moscow’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR. Here, Mifsud served as a cut-out, offering plausible deniability as the Kremlin assessed if Papadopoulos was worth the SVR’s time—which obviously he was. Here “the Russian MFA” is merely a pleasant fiction covering the tracks of the SVR. It’s safe to assume that the Russian female and the “diplomat” were SVR representatives too, since spies—not legitimate diplomats—handle this sort of sensitive matter for Moscow.
Even though very little concrete results came of Papadopoulos’s effort at currying the Kremlin’s favor—indeed this operation appears rather amateurish overall, given that Moscow knows that Western intelligence can intercept emails—it’s certain that the SVR was pleased to have direct access to the Trump campaign.
Above all, this case proves that President Trump’s months of tweeting angrily that the Russian investigation is “fake news” and there’s “no collusion” between himself and Moscow are simply a lie. This morning, the president took to Twitter, as is his custom, and ranted that “Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar.” This is yet another lie, as there’s a picture of the March 31, 2016 campaign national security meeting in Washington, where Papadopoulos is seated just a few feet from Trump. Moreover, the notion that a young campaign staffer would conduct personal diplomacy with Russian spies on behalf of Team Trump without getting go-ahead from his superiors is laughable.
For months, President Trump has insisted that the entire Mueller inquiry is a fraud, and that his campaign had no ties to Russia whatsoever. Now, we know that’s simply untrue. Things are about to get much worse for the White House, especially since the FBI has admitted that Papadopoulos has been cooperating with the Bureau and Team Mueller in their investigation into illicit Russian influence in our nation’s capital.
In particular, his arrest and plea deal were concealed for months so that the FBI could protect Papadopoulos’ role as a “proactive cooperator” for the Bureau. That’s spook-speak for his use as a witting tool of the investigation. Anyone affiliated with the Trump White House who’s talked or met with George Papadopoulos since late July should be aware that whatever was said has been communicated to the FBI—indeed, Papadopoulos was likely wearing a wire that recorded the conversation.
Robert Mueller’s investigation of Donald Trump and his Kremlin linkages entered a new phase yesterday, one from which there will be no return for the White House. Day One of this new phase delivered genuine bombshells, but many more are yet to come. Manafort, Gates and Papadopoulos represent a small piece of a much larger counterintelligence puzzle that the public will learn about in coming months.
John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. A specialist in espionage and terrorism, he’s also been a Navy officer and a War College professor. He’s published four books and is on Twitter at @20committee.
The Trump Campaign’s Spy-Ties to Moscow Have Been Exposed
By John R. Schindler • 10/31/17 11:45am
Opinion
Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images
Yesterday was filled with legal bombshells for President Donald Trump. As expected, after months of investigation into the White House’s ties to Moscow, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team announced three arrests and indictments. Together, these cases have fundamentally shifted the game in our nation’s capital—very much to the president’s detriment.
The arrest of Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager in the summer of 2016 who secured him the Republican Party’s nomination, was expected by many. For months, rumors had swirled around Manafort, given his longstanding and unsavory ties to Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, compounded by his barely concealed links to Kremlin intelligence, as I reported three months before the November 2016 election.
Manafort has surrendered to the FBI and faces a dozen federal charges relating to financial crimes including money laundering, failing to register as a foreign agent, plus neglecting to report foreign cash to the IRS. These charges are serious and will be difficult for Manafort to beat, leading to speculation that what Mueller really wants is Manafort’s cooperation against Team Trump—which may be the 68-year-old’s only alternative to dying in prison.
Rick Gates, a Manafort protégé and 2016 Trump campaign associate, has also surrendered to the Feds and is facing a raft of charges relating to money laundering. Gates also played a key role in President Trump’s inauguration and pushed the White House’s agenda as a lobbyist until April of this year, when questions about Gates’ ties to the Kremlin made his position untenable.
On cue, the White House protested that they barely know Manafort and Gates—a transparent falsehood—while stating that their alleged crimes have nothing directly to do with the president. The latter may be technically true, but difficult questions lurk regarding why Donald Trump wanted someone as unsavory and Moscow-connected as Paul Manafort to head his campaign, particularly since the longtime swamp denizen Manafort’s links to Eastern oligarchs were an open secret in Washington.
However, the White House’s predicament grew much worse yesterday afternoon, eclipsing the Manafort bombshell, after the Justice Department revealed the deal it’s reached with George Papadopoulos, who was a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. After months of investigation, the FBI arrested Papadopoulos on July 27 of this year on charges that he lied to the Bureau in an interview in January about his ties to Moscow.
As just-released Justice Department paperwork makes clear, Papadopoulos cooperated with the FBI once he was caught in his web of lies, and on October 5 he pleaded guilty to making “a materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement and representation” to Bureau agents about the “timing, extent, and nature of his relationship and interactions with certain foreign nationals whom he understood to have close connections with senior Russian government officials.”
The Papadopoulos saga is quite a wannabe-spy thriller, revealing just how badly the Trump campaign sought to curry favor with the Kremlin—and obtain its help in the 2016 election. The essential facts are clear. In March 2016, after becoming an adviser to the Trump campaign, Papadopoulos met with a mysterious London-based academic of Mediterranean background who claimed to have close links to the Kremlin. This was an effort to gain access to Moscow’s power circles—importantly, after Papadopoulos received go-ahead from the campaign to forge improved ties with Russia, which constituted a major focus of candidate Trump’s foreign policy.
Papadopoulos met “the Professor” in Italy in mid-March 2016, then again in London later that month; on the latter occasion “the Professor” brought along a Russian female, allegedly Putin’s niece, to help facilitate the engagement. Papadopoulos emailed the campaign about the success of this meeting, which responded enthusiastically about what had transpired and on March 31, he participated in a national security meeting in Washington that included campaign principals, with Trump himself present. At that meeting, according to DoJ, Papadopoulos “introduced himself to the group, he stated, in sum and substance, that he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President Putin.”
Thereafter many emails were exchanged between Papadopoulos, “the Professor” and the Russian female about trying to set up meetings between Kremlin machers and the Trump campaign—ideally a photo op between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. That never happened, but during the spring of 2016 Papadopoulos had multiple discussions with these Kremlin representatives, according to the FBI.
Crucially, “the Professor” introduced Papadopoulos to a senior official of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs or MFA. In May and June 2016, the two had multiple discussions via Skype and email about cooperation between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign—all with the approval of senior campaign officials. Just as important, in late April, “the Professor” boasted to Papadopoulos that Moscow was in possession of juicy “dirt” on Hillary, including “thousands of emails.” In other words, the Trump campaign knew about Russian intelligence’s hacking of Democratic emails months before the public found out about it in July 2016, when WikiLeaks, serving as a Kremlin cut-out, dumped 20,000 purloined emails belonging to Clinton and other prominent Democrats on the Internet.
The importance of the Papadopoulos case to the Mueller investigation in terms of national security is obvious and troubling. Already “the Professor” has been identified as Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic resident in Great Britain. Mifsud brushed off the FBI’s accusations of his role in this affair, stating he has “a clear conscience.” So far, the Russian female and the senior MFA official have not been firmly identified, yet in truth it hardly matters since, to any seasoned counterspy, their roles in this hush-hush saga are perfectly clear, no matter who they really are.
This was a textbook Russian espionage operation, presumably run by Moscow’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR. Here, Mifsud served as a cut-out, offering plausible deniability as the Kremlin assessed if Papadopoulos was worth the SVR’s time—which obviously he was. Here “the Russian MFA” is merely a pleasant fiction covering the tracks of the SVR. It’s safe to assume that the Russian female and the “diplomat” were SVR representatives too, since spies—not legitimate diplomats—handle this sort of sensitive matter for Moscow.
Even though very little concrete results came of Papadopoulos’s effort at currying the Kremlin’s favor—indeed this operation appears rather amateurish overall, given that Moscow knows that Western intelligence can intercept emails—it’s certain that the SVR was pleased to have direct access to the Trump campaign.
Above all, this case proves that President Trump’s months of tweeting angrily that the Russian investigation is “fake news” and there’s “no collusion” between himself and Moscow are simply a lie. This morning, the president took to Twitter, as is his custom, and ranted that “Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar.” This is yet another lie, as there’s a picture of the March 31, 2016 campaign national security meeting in Washington, where Papadopoulos is seated just a few feet from Trump. Moreover, the notion that a young campaign staffer would conduct personal diplomacy with Russian spies on behalf of Team Trump without getting go-ahead from his superiors is laughable.
For months, President Trump has insisted that the entire Mueller inquiry is a fraud, and that his campaign had no ties to Russia whatsoever. Now, we know that’s simply untrue. Things are about to get much worse for the White House, especially since the FBI has admitted that Papadopoulos has been cooperating with the Bureau and Team Mueller in their investigation into illicit Russian influence in our nation’s capital.
In particular, his arrest and plea deal were concealed for months so that the FBI could protect Papadopoulos’ role as a “proactive cooperator” for the Bureau. That’s spook-speak for his use as a witting tool of the investigation. Anyone affiliated with the Trump White House who’s talked or met with George Papadopoulos since late July should be aware that whatever was said has been communicated to the FBI—indeed, Papadopoulos was likely wearing a wire that recorded the conversation.
Robert Mueller’s investigation of Donald Trump and his Kremlin linkages entered a new phase yesterday, one from which there will be no return for the White House. Day One of this new phase delivered genuine bombshells, but many more are yet to come. Manafort, Gates and Papadopoulos represent a small piece of a much larger counterintelligence puzzle that the public will learn about in coming months.
John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. A specialist in espionage and terrorism, he’s also been a Navy officer and a War College professor. He’s published four books and is on Twitter at @20committee.
Stone Cold
Superstar
They're all more connected to each other than Trump
TOLD YALL. MANAFORT GOT BODIES ON HIS NAME
Ukraine Believes Paul Manafort’s Crimes Go Way Beyond Money Laundering
Ukrainian investigators who helped collect evidence used to indict President Trump’s former campaign chairman also want to look at Manafort’s possible role in a 2014 massacre.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast
MOSCOW—Many of Kiev’s journalists, investigators, and officials felt genuinely happy on Monday when they heard Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, had been indicted on charges of laundering more than $18 million from Ukraine.
Most of the 12 counts of the indictment pulled together by special counsel Robert Mueller’s team spoke about Manafort’s illegal financial deals when he was working for Ukraine’s pro-Kremlin Party of Regions from 2006 onward. It also accused him of “conspiracy against the United States,” since Manafort allegedly used multiple shell companies to hide his money, and never bothered to inform U.S. authorities about the true size of his income.
Manafort had racked up this fortune as an adviser to the infamously corrupt Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled into exile in Russia in 2014. So, to see Manafort brought up on charges and threatened with jail time was considered a triumph for Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity, which overthrew Yanukovych. During the uprising, which centered on Kiev’s central square, the Maidan Nezalezhnosti, more than 100 people lost their lives in 2014.
“It is very important for Ukraine to never see such a phenomenon as Manafort on its soil ever again,” journalist and commentator Ekaterina Sergatskova told The Daily Beast. “He symbolizes the ‘old regime’ of money laundering, corrupt lobbying, dirty scams—the regime that made millions suffer—both in Ukraine and in United States. Manafort served a regime that worked under Russia’s total control—that regime should never come to power in Ukraine again.”
In the past year, Ukrainians have constantly heard sinister news about Manafort. But the investigation conducted in the U.S. raised even more questions for people who want to know how he was advising Yanukovych as political opponents were rounded up and violent attacks mounted against the opposition.
“Manafort served a regime that worked under Russia’s total control.”
— Ekaterina Sergatskova, journalist and commentator
“Well done,” the head of Ukraine’s special prosecutions office, Serhiy Gorbatyuk, told The Daily Beast as he looked through the indictment. “We find item number 22 especially important: It confirms our own investigation was on the right track.”
Paragraph 22 of the indictment says that Manafort and his associate Richard W. Gates III directed the lobbyists they’d retained in Washington to lobby in connection with the roll out of a report commissioned by the government of Ukraine about the trial of Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister of Ukraine who spent three years in prison. The international democratic community, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, supported Tymoshenko in jail, while Manafort and Gates advised Yanukovych about his repressive politics.
Over the past year, as The Daily Beast reported in May, Ukraine’s politicians have cooperated with the FBI while civil society groups and prosecutors have been working hard, conducting several independent investigations into the alleged corruption of Paul Manafort. Members of Ukraine’s parliament, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, prosecutors, and journalists were analyzing the list of 22 Manafort payments in 2007-2012 totaling more than $12 million.
As a result of Ukraine’s cooperation with Western media, the information about the “Black Ledger,” an accounting document found among the Yanukovych papers, exposed corruption in great detail, including some that involved Manafort. As a result, he had to quit Trump’s campaign.
“We hope that with the help of American investigators we’ll find what role Manafort’s friends among the Ukrainian oligarchs… played in money laundering,” prominent Ukrainian journalist Khristina Berdynskykh told The Daily Beast. “We are happy that it’s been proved that our former politicians threw away millions of dollars—it shows the scale of corruption; although we also wonder, of course, why for all these years American authorities have ignored Manafort’s actions.”
Was Manafort backing all the decisions by Yanukovych, including the murders of protesters in Maidan square? Many in Ukraine suspect that was the case.
Manafort returned to Kiev even after the horrible violence on its central square to help re-form the Party of Regions into a new organization. His representatives, including his current lawyer, insist he is innocent of charges in the U.S. indictment and that his role in Ukraine was to encourage pro-European Union democratic government. But investigators in Kiev aren't buying that for a minute.
In March this year The Daily Beast reported that Yevgenia Zakrevskaya, an attorney in the Ukrainian capital, and one of the strongest liberal voices in the country, focused attention on Manafort after text messages between his daughters were hacked and released in February. One of them, from Andrea Manafort to her sister, read “Don’t fool yourself. The money we have is blood money.”
“All Mr. Yanukovych’s allies, supporters of the former regime, should be questioned on this case as potentially responsible for the mass killings during the Maidan protests; including, if the facts get proved, Mr. Manafort,” Ukrainian legal expert Mikhail Zhernakov told The Daily Beast.
The Kremlin’s advisers who advised Yanukovych together with Manafort were also happy about the investigation for their own reasons.
“We feel malevolent joy about Manafort’s arrest,” Sergei Markov, Russia’s spin doctor during the Yanukovych presidential campaign, told The Daily Beast. “We Russians who worked with him in Kiev are gloating, as he was a CIA agent and it is fun to see America investigating its own former agents.”
Markov offered no proof of the CIA allegation, but he did reinforce the argument that Manafort was paid with dirty funds. “Of course Manafort was paid grey money and sent it to offshore accounts—that is what everybody does. Ukraine has always been corrupt.”
Moscow’s mainstream media, meanwhile, continued to deny Russia’s involvement with the U.S. election last year, pushing the story about fake news. On Monday one of the most popular news shows, Vesti, reported that Hillary Clinton paid $6 million for a campaign to discredit Trump. But even in Moscow nobody seemed too enthusiastic about defending Manafort.
At age 68, Manafort has devoted more than a decade of his life to lobbying for Russian and Ukrainian politicians, playing the role of a bridge between Russian oligarchs, the Kremlin, and Yanukovych. What kind of bridge he provided to the Trump campaign and Donald Trump himself remains to be seen. But the Ukrainians who helped the FBI gather key evidence against Manafort are happy to see that their efforts put him on the spot, and may yet land him in jail for a good long time.
Ukraine Believes Paul Manafort’s Crimes Go Way Beyond Money Laundering
Ukrainian investigators who helped collect evidence used to indict President Trump’s former campaign chairman also want to look at Manafort’s possible role in a 2014 massacre.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast
MOSCOW—Many of Kiev’s journalists, investigators, and officials felt genuinely happy on Monday when they heard Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, had been indicted on charges of laundering more than $18 million from Ukraine.
Most of the 12 counts of the indictment pulled together by special counsel Robert Mueller’s team spoke about Manafort’s illegal financial deals when he was working for Ukraine’s pro-Kremlin Party of Regions from 2006 onward. It also accused him of “conspiracy against the United States,” since Manafort allegedly used multiple shell companies to hide his money, and never bothered to inform U.S. authorities about the true size of his income.
Manafort had racked up this fortune as an adviser to the infamously corrupt Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled into exile in Russia in 2014. So, to see Manafort brought up on charges and threatened with jail time was considered a triumph for Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity, which overthrew Yanukovych. During the uprising, which centered on Kiev’s central square, the Maidan Nezalezhnosti, more than 100 people lost their lives in 2014.
“It is very important for Ukraine to never see such a phenomenon as Manafort on its soil ever again,” journalist and commentator Ekaterina Sergatskova told The Daily Beast. “He symbolizes the ‘old regime’ of money laundering, corrupt lobbying, dirty scams—the regime that made millions suffer—both in Ukraine and in United States. Manafort served a regime that worked under Russia’s total control—that regime should never come to power in Ukraine again.”
In the past year, Ukrainians have constantly heard sinister news about Manafort. But the investigation conducted in the U.S. raised even more questions for people who want to know how he was advising Yanukovych as political opponents were rounded up and violent attacks mounted against the opposition.
“Manafort served a regime that worked under Russia’s total control.”
— Ekaterina Sergatskova, journalist and commentator
“Well done,” the head of Ukraine’s special prosecutions office, Serhiy Gorbatyuk, told The Daily Beast as he looked through the indictment. “We find item number 22 especially important: It confirms our own investigation was on the right track.”
Paragraph 22 of the indictment says that Manafort and his associate Richard W. Gates III directed the lobbyists they’d retained in Washington to lobby in connection with the roll out of a report commissioned by the government of Ukraine about the trial of Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister of Ukraine who spent three years in prison. The international democratic community, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, supported Tymoshenko in jail, while Manafort and Gates advised Yanukovych about his repressive politics.
Over the past year, as The Daily Beast reported in May, Ukraine’s politicians have cooperated with the FBI while civil society groups and prosecutors have been working hard, conducting several independent investigations into the alleged corruption of Paul Manafort. Members of Ukraine’s parliament, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, prosecutors, and journalists were analyzing the list of 22 Manafort payments in 2007-2012 totaling more than $12 million.
As a result of Ukraine’s cooperation with Western media, the information about the “Black Ledger,” an accounting document found among the Yanukovych papers, exposed corruption in great detail, including some that involved Manafort. As a result, he had to quit Trump’s campaign.
“We hope that with the help of American investigators we’ll find what role Manafort’s friends among the Ukrainian oligarchs… played in money laundering,” prominent Ukrainian journalist Khristina Berdynskykh told The Daily Beast. “We are happy that it’s been proved that our former politicians threw away millions of dollars—it shows the scale of corruption; although we also wonder, of course, why for all these years American authorities have ignored Manafort’s actions.”
Was Manafort backing all the decisions by Yanukovych, including the murders of protesters in Maidan square? Many in Ukraine suspect that was the case.
Manafort returned to Kiev even after the horrible violence on its central square to help re-form the Party of Regions into a new organization. His representatives, including his current lawyer, insist he is innocent of charges in the U.S. indictment and that his role in Ukraine was to encourage pro-European Union democratic government. But investigators in Kiev aren't buying that for a minute.
In March this year The Daily Beast reported that Yevgenia Zakrevskaya, an attorney in the Ukrainian capital, and one of the strongest liberal voices in the country, focused attention on Manafort after text messages between his daughters were hacked and released in February. One of them, from Andrea Manafort to her sister, read “Don’t fool yourself. The money we have is blood money.”
“All Mr. Yanukovych’s allies, supporters of the former regime, should be questioned on this case as potentially responsible for the mass killings during the Maidan protests; including, if the facts get proved, Mr. Manafort,” Ukrainian legal expert Mikhail Zhernakov told The Daily Beast.
The Kremlin’s advisers who advised Yanukovych together with Manafort were also happy about the investigation for their own reasons.
“We feel malevolent joy about Manafort’s arrest,” Sergei Markov, Russia’s spin doctor during the Yanukovych presidential campaign, told The Daily Beast. “We Russians who worked with him in Kiev are gloating, as he was a CIA agent and it is fun to see America investigating its own former agents.”
Markov offered no proof of the CIA allegation, but he did reinforce the argument that Manafort was paid with dirty funds. “Of course Manafort was paid grey money and sent it to offshore accounts—that is what everybody does. Ukraine has always been corrupt.”
Moscow’s mainstream media, meanwhile, continued to deny Russia’s involvement with the U.S. election last year, pushing the story about fake news. On Monday one of the most popular news shows, Vesti, reported that Hillary Clinton paid $6 million for a campaign to discredit Trump. But even in Moscow nobody seemed too enthusiastic about defending Manafort.
At age 68, Manafort has devoted more than a decade of his life to lobbying for Russian and Ukrainian politicians, playing the role of a bridge between Russian oligarchs, the Kremlin, and Yanukovych. What kind of bridge he provided to the Trump campaign and Donald Trump himself remains to be seen. But the Ukrainians who helped the FBI gather key evidence against Manafort are happy to see that their efforts put him on the spot, and may yet land him in jail for a good long time.
ExodusNirvana
Change is inevitable...
OH shyt!!!!!!!
Yo these motherfukkers are MORONS!!! They like them dumb lil nikkas in Chicago live streaming rapes and murders and shyt because they're too dumb to realize how easy they can get caught.
Assange is a dead man walking
