***Breaking*** Report: Ukraine Dirt Scandal Began As Search For Manafort Pardon Rationale

[ffr]

Report: Ukraine Dirt Scandal Began As Search For Manafort Pardon Rationale



The effort by President Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani to dig up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden began as something else — a search for a rationale to pardon former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, the New York Review of Books reported Wednesday.

The report was based off of records provided by someone who’d participated in Trump and Manafort’s joint defense agreement, according to NYRB. The records include notes of conversations that included Giuliani, who’s led the charge for dirt in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Per the report, Trump and Manafort’s legal teams had at least nine conversations related to the effort, aimed at providing a pretext for a pardon. The conversations ranged from the early days of Trump’s presidency to as recently as May.

Per the report, Manafort’s team provided Giuliani with information to smear two people:

One of them, Serhiy Leshchenko, is the former parliamentarian, journalist and activist who publicized the secret “black ledger” of off-the-books payments from former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych’s political party that led to Manafort’s ouster from the Trump campaign.

The second, Alexandra Chalupa, is a Ukrainian-born DNC consultant who researched Manafort during the 2016 elections but, contrary to what NYRB reported that Manafort believed, was not involved in the ledger revelation.

“Acting in part on Manafort’s advice,” the report said, then-White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders also pressed reporters to cover “the Democrat National Committee coordinated opposition research directly with the Ukrainian Embassy,” a task conservative outlets took up. - TPM

I continue to believe that the best way to see this Ukraine collusion/extortion isn’t as a new effort, a reckless effort to get yet another country to intervene in US elections. It’s really much more a continuation of the Russia story, an effort to discredit the Mueller probe, spring Manafort and turn fire on Democrats and the “Deep State.”

...to really understand how we got here this is more an Empire Strikes Back sequel type thing, umbilically connected to the original story and one that makes no sense without it. - Josh Marshall

Sounds like Fox News and other RW media outlets were enlisted to carry tRump's water, shape the narrative that Democrats are the enemies of the United States, all the while Trump and his cabal made away with another election victory in 2020.

[Ninga]

1. Ohhhh shivers down my leg...to think..Manafort now knows he is truly really fucked, cause ya

know it was a desperate clutch play by trumple and the Ghoul that has backfired royally.

[cannabis_flower]

2. Alexandra Chalupa

That's a real name? Are there any Nacho Grandes or Beef Tacos in this story?

[awesomerwb1]

4. Hilarious

[Claritie Pixie]

9. I don't think that's funny. Sorry.

[Anon-C]

3. Paulie you are a friend indeed.

v

[customerserviceguy]

5. That had occurred to me yesterday

but I felt it was too far-fetched to mention here.

False equivalency for Hunter Biden and Paul Manafort. It may still happen.

Look for Trump to issue blanket pardons for everyone who's ever worked for him on his way out the door.

[wiggs]

6. Of course one phone call is just the tip of the iceberg. One tree out of the whole forest. One

transgression out of dozens, maybe hundreds. A paragraph out of an entire novel. One lie out of thousands. One example of cheating out of a whole lifetime of scamming, cheating, and corruption.

Everyone knows this, really. We know who he is. Let's talk about it ALL and see where it goes. Hopefully dem leaders won't forget the big picture and the context. It's really all one story with inter-related chapters going back years. IMO telling the overall story is critical to convincing the public that one or two paragraphs are valid and accurate. Even if only a couple of articles of impeachment are chosen to vote on, nothing keeps dem leaders from mentioning and discussing, as background, all the other misdeeds...all the other chapters and paragraphs. Pretty soon, the volume and types of misconduct will sink in. Not everyone is engaged with these issues...but if they are part of very serious and highly visible impeachment hearings and discussions...then we might get somewhere.

For instance...If one of the articles of impeachment has to do with hiding records of calls on secret servers out of range of oversight and just submitting a highly edited version of the call, let's also talk about Kushners attempt to set up a secret server as backchannel to the Kremlin...and let's talk about use of personal phones by WH staff...let's talk about hiding information about meetings and phone calls from the public by repeatedly lying about them...let's talk about improper claims of privilege and about the many examples of denying material legally owed to congress...let's talk about Barr's attempt at a fake summary of Mueller...let's talk about Trump's fake memo about the Trump tower meeting.... Etc. Etc. Etc.

[erronis]

7. Yup. Just one tiny branch of a much bigger forest of treason. Get the (R)epuglicons, all of them.

[Pepsidog]

8. Maddow reported on this recently. This post puts in context her reporting. But this info will only

confuse an already mentally brain dead public.