It All Goes Back To Manafort, Inc.

HidingTheConstitution
InThePocketsOfAnOstrichJacketVille


I am extremely skeptical of conservative pundit never Trumpers who simultaneously do their best to pretend that the rest of the Republican party is not full of Republicans*.

See, for example, Frum, David.

Still, stopped watches and all that...

Which brings us to a recent NYT column by Bret Stephens in which he laid out the case that Mr. Trump and all who protect him are bent on the total Ukrainianization of everything:

...(Trump is) attempting to turn the United States into Ukraine. The judgment Congress has to make is whether the American people should be willing, actively or passively, to go along with it.

I’ve followed Ukrainian politics fairly closely since 1999, when I joined the staff of The Wall Street Journal Europe. It has consistent themes that should sound familiar to American ears.

The first theme is the criminalization of political differences. Years before Trump led his followers in “Lock Her Up” chants against Hillary Clinton, then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych did exactly that against his own political rival, Yulia Tymoshenko, who was sentenced to seven years in prison on a variety of byzantine charges after she had narrowly lost the 2010 election...


And who was paid millions to put the good Mr. Yanukovych into power so that the oligarchs could keep on plundering on?

Why none other than the very fine man with ostrich jackets and such, Mr. Paul Manafort.

The Guardian's Luke Harding laid out what Mr. Manafort subsequently did to Ms. Tymoshenko, and how he did it, back in the days of Mueller:

...In 2011 Manafort approved a clandestine strategy to discredit Tymoshenko abroad. Alan Friedman, a former Wall Street Journal and Financial Times reporter, based in Italy, masterminded this project. Friedman has previously been accused of concealing his work as a paid lobbyist.

Also involved were Rick Gates, Manafort’s then deputy, and Konstantin Kilimnik, another senior Manafort associate who the FBI believes has links to Russian military intelligence.

In July 2011 Friedman sent Manafort a confidential six-page document titled Ukraine - A Digital Roadmap. It laid out a plan to “deconstruct” Tymoshenko via videos, articles and social media. Yanukovych deferred to Manafort, who gave the project the go-ahead, sources in Ukraine’s former government say.

Friedman’s proposed operation was ambitious. It included producing anonymous videos attacking Tymoshenko and comparing the opposition leader to a drunk Boris Yeltsin. “The social media space offers great opportunities for guilt by association,” Friedman wrote in the document.

He continued: “We know that video exists of Tymoshenko uttering some of her outrageous claims in court … The video can be floated into the social space to reinforce the impression that she is at best reckless and unstatesmanlike and at worst malicious, defamatory and antisemitic.”

Twitters users, including “those ‘known’ to us”, could retweet hostile content. The “roadmap” included a website, blogposts and “blast emails”, sent out to a “targeted audience in Europe and the US”. One section was called “Black Ops”. It said: “This could include Wikipedia page modification to highlight [Tymoshenko] corruption and trial and modify the tone of the language being used.”

Friedman worked with Eckart Sager, a one-time CNN producer. Emails show they liaised closely with “Paul”, who in turn briefed Yanukovych’s chief of staff, Serhiy Lyovochkin. Lyovochkin declined to comment. He appears in correspondence as “SL”...

Which is just another way of saying that the play book political destruction, if updated, is at its core always the same.

Mr. Manafort's old Regan era business partners, long time Republican operatives, Roger Stone and Lee Atwater, likely approve.

OK?



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*Trademark Driftglass.
Tip O' The Toque to the hardest working single shingle poli-blogger in CanuckistanMikitaVille, the MoS, at 'The Disaffected Liberal'.


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