The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #172859   Message #4204764
Posted By: Stilly River Sage
01-Jul-24 - 10:05 AM
Thread Name: Trump CONVICTED - NO new Trump threads part III
Subject: RE: Trump CONVICTED - NO new Trump threads part III
Today is the last day of this year's Supreme Court session, so it is expected they will release the decision about Trump's claim of immunity (scroll to the bottom). Unless they punt it to next session (beginning first Monday in October).

Meanwhile, Heather Cox Richardson has spelled out the facts behind one of Trump's claims about the Ukraine during the debate (after saying he alone could get Putin to release Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter on trial now). Not sure if this is part of the public content (I paid for her Substack "Letters From An American" after the debate, to get sound information about the context of these political times). I've read the free stuff for quite a while. June 28, 2024 in which she discusses how Trump has today been interfering with negotiations to release Gershkovich, and how Putin's debt to Trump goes back to early planning of the annexing eastern Ukraine, ahead of starting the war.

She says:
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election explained that Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager and then conduit to Russian operatives, in summer 2016 “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having [Viktor] Yanukovych, the Ukrainian President ousted in 2014, elected to head that republic.”

Manafort had helped to get the pro-Russian oligarch Yanukovych into office, and when Yanukovych fled to Russia after the Ukrainian people threw him out, Manafort was left unemployed and in debt to other oligarchs. When he went to work for Trump, for free, he promptly wrote to his partner Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee identified in 2020 as a Russian operative, asking how “we” could use the appointment “to get whole,” and made sure that the Russian oligarch to whom he owed the most money knew about his close connection with the Trump campaign (p. 135).

The Mueller Report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine” (p. 140). The region that Putin wanted was the country’s industrial heartland. He was offering a “peace” plan that carved off much of Ukraine and made it subservient to him. This was the dead opposite of U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine, and there was no chance that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the presidency against Trump, would stand for it. But if only Trump were elected….

And, in November 2016, he was.

According to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, Manafort’s partner and Russian operative Kilimnick wrote that "[a]ll that is required to start the process is a very minor 'wink' (or slight push) from D[onald] T[rump] saying 'he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine' and a decision to be a 'special representative' and manage this process." Following that, Kilimnik suggested that Manafort ‘could start the process and within 10 days visit Russia ([Yanukovych] guarantees your reception at the very top level, cutting through all the bullsh*t and getting down to business), Ukraine, and key EU capitals.’ The email also suggested that once then–Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko understood this ‘message’ from the United States, the process ‘will go very fast and DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration’” (p. 99).

According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018.

There's quite a bit more to this column, if you can open the link.

Once Biden was in office the Trump folks were no longer fiddling in Ukraine affairs, and Putin went ahead and invaded.
Trump was able to dismiss the Mueller Report, with the help of his then Attorney General Barr, who offered a "summary" to the public that had nothing to do with what was actually in the report.

This is something else that Trump should be charged with, but chances are slim it would ever happen. Manafort and a couple of others did go to prison (though Trump pardoned Manafort, who is now working in the background of the Trump campaign.)