Now, I admit, I do not watch Fox News and/or Infowars and therefore am not current on the latest paranoid theory for defending Trump, but listening as long as I could to Devin "Midnight Run" Nunes rambling on about how the Ukrainians were "out to get" Trump in 2016, I am calling âbullshitâ.
Let us be clear, whatever happened in 2016, it utterly irrelevant to the extortion and bribery by THIS administration against the NEW Ukrainian government.
But travel with me now back to 2016.... When then candidate Donald J. Trump had appointed the now incarcerated Paul Manafort as his "Campaign Manager"; Mr. Manafort's previous "employment" being as an advisor to a Putin allied President of the Ukraine.
The legacy of corruption in the Ukraine is directly tied to its years as a Soviet client state. The division of spoils by Oligarchs was as corrupt in the Ukraine as it was in Russia and the other former soviet ârepublicsâ. Even today, Russia is easily the most corrupt government on earth, its President, a life-long public servant, is one of the richest men on the planet, if not the richest. You do the math.
But this was not a secret to the Ukrainian people, seeking a government based on âlawâ and ârightâ and âDemocracyâ.
In 2014, the people of Ukraine had, by mass public protests, removed the corrupt pro-Russian, anti-NATO administration then in power. Dozens of Ukrainians had died in these protests which ultimately resulted in the Russian sponsored and armed "separatists" in the Russian speaking Donbass region beginning a still ongoing civil war in the Ukraine.
By 2016, the infamous "black ledger" which implicated Manafort in the theft of millions from the Ukrainian people had become public knowledge and he had been forced to resign.
But not before he had pushed through the removal of supporting military aid to the Ukrainians from the Republican Party Platform, that largely symbolic relic of our political past. In the tsunami of Russian interference in our election, this went virtually unnoticed, except by the Ukrainians. They had a vital interest in it.
And while this all was prior to our becoming aware of the countless meetings, contacts with Russian intelligence operatives and Putin allied oligarchs then underway, it was also common knowledge of Trumpâs seemingly bizarre fondness for all things Putin.
His oft repeated praise of Putin for have called him "brilliant" (itself a laughable misunderstanding of the meaning of "brilliant" to the Russians... simply meaning showy and ostentatious), his bewildering criticism of NATO, countless business dealings with Russian oligarchs and the like, were, at the time, Â astonishing, as I even commented on at the time.
Now, it is in THIS environment certain that "pro-Western" Ukrainian politicians, etc.., were highly critical of Trump and his alliances, given that Russia was in active war with an independent Ukraine and had indeed already seized Crimea by naked military force.
To hear "Midnight Run" Nunes quote these criticisms of Trump as evidence of a "Ukranian conspiracy" to influence the 2016 campaign is to re-write history (to borrow a patented phrase from Tesla) in a "ludicrous mode".
We KNOW who interfered in the Election of 2016. Russian responsibility has been clearly cited by all the intelligence agencies of our Government (and other Western Democracies). A dozen Russian intelligence officials have been indicted by the Justice department for it. The bi-partisan Senate Intelligence committee report explicitly concluded that the Russian government was responsible.
And two years and many millions of dollars later, the Mueller report documents the Russian attack in painful detail.
Everyone who has testified in these hearings has dismissed this allegation of a Ukrainian conspiracy as absurd. Conversely, all those brave Trump supporters who claim to espouse it, will not say so under oath.
Like picking up a pile of garbage to find all kinds of vermin and rot to be found there, this investigation continues to uncover all manner of corruption, big and small which uniformly characterizes this administration, this President.
The recently resigned(sic) Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, personally gives the new incoming âanti-corruptionâ President of the Ukraine a list of âsuggested energy advisorsâ, made up of major Republican donors. By remarkable coincidence, within a week, the Ukrainians awarded a drilling lease to one of these donors despite the bid being substantially lower than the other bidder.
So much for fighting corruption. The Ukrainian people have put high hopes into their new leader and government and deserve better from us than the petty Trumpian corruption now running rampant through our government, but they are dealing with a powerful military adversary and canât afford to be ⊠honest.
At some point, even the most die-hard Republican will have to acknowledge that whomever they thought they were supporting, this âsad, embarrassing wreck of a human beingâ, as George Will described him, is what they got when they elected Trump.
After allâŠ. âThis is America. This is the Country I have served and defended, that all my brothers have served, and here, ârightâ matters.â (LTC Alex Vindman).
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