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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsUkraine Scheme Began as Effort to Pardon Manafort
The effort by President Trump to pressure the government of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son had its origins in an earlier endeavor to obtain information that might provide a pretext and political cover for the president to pardon his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, according to previously undisclosed records.
These records indicate that attorneys representing Trump and Manafort respectively had at least nine conversations relating to this effort, beginning in the early days of the Trump administration, and lasting until as recently as May of this year. Through these deliberations carried on by his attorneys, Manafort exhorted the White House to press Ukrainian officials to investigate and discredit individuals, both in the US and in Ukraine, who he believed had published damning information about his political consulting work in the Ukraine. A person who participated in the joint defense agreement between President Trump and others under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, including Manafort, allowed me to review extensive handwritten notes that memorialized conversations relating to Manafort and Ukraine between Manaforts and Trumps legal teams, including Trumps personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.
These new disclosures emerge as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday that the House would open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trumps conduct. What prompted her actions were the new allegations that surfaced last week that Trump had pressured Ukraines newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Trumps potential 2020 campaign rival, Biden, and his son Hunter, placing a freeze on a quarter of a billion dollars in military assistance to Ukraine as leverage. The impeachment inquiry will also examine whether President Trump obstructed justice by attempting to curtail investigations by the FBI and the special counsel into Russias covert interference in the 2016 presidential election in Trumps favor.
New information in this story suggests that these two, seemingly unrelated scandals, in which the House will judge whether the presidents conduct in each case constituted extra-legal and extra-constitutional abuses of presidential power, are in fact inextricably linked: the Ukrainian initiative appears to have begun in service of formulating a rationale by which the president could pardon Manafort, as part of an effort to undermine the special counsels investigation.
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/09/25/trump-giuliani-and-manafort-the-ukraine-scheme/
RockRaven
(14,966 posts)Trump gives away NOTHING for free. He never does anything for anyone unless there is something in it for him.
Midnight Writer
(21,762 posts)This will be an interesting lesson for kids. As long as Trump was totally ruthless and selfish, he moved right up. When he tried to help his buddy out, he got nailed.
Leghorn21
(13,524 posts)how about that