was expected

dear god please

🍿

And kushner was just thrown under the bus. Emails show that manafort reached out to give the banker (the one involved in his bank and tax fraud case) a job with this administration. Kushner said he'd make it happen.
He was aiming to be the secretary of the army. He was already working as an economic adviser for trump's campaign team prior to this. This was also during the time when manafort was no longer "with" the administration due to his ties with russia.

This post was edited by Arsenic_Touch on Aug 14 2018 02:30pm

I swear this was already reported on days or weeks ago. Sounds familiar.

Might've been related to the information that was sealed last week. But this was the first time I heard about specifics.

Just another piece of evidence contradicting the "he only had a limited role for a very short time" argument.

Could the defense think that the prosecution's evidence does not meet the burden of proof?

This has been obvious since before the annexation of Crimea.

Actually, back in '13, I was coincidentally watching a lot of RT and following the Yanukovych Presidency and specifically conspiracy theories about the United States trying to depose him. When he was elected in 2010, he was a pro-Russian president who blocked efforts to bring Ukraine into NATO and the EU. When Euromaidan happened, it was widely distributed by Russian media that U.S. intelligence was behind it due to our push to establish a missile defense system at Russia's front door and to block their access to oil in the Black Sea.

Keep in mind that the Aksyonov-led government in the autonomous Republic of Crimea held an election and the people there, overwhelmingly of Russian ethnicity, voted against becoming part of Ukraine.

At the time it was my position that Russia acted on behalf of the ethnic Russians in Crimea against western propaganda and NATO manipulation. I saw the election of Poroshenko as the propping up of a puppet government in Ukraine by NATO. For that last point, I still do.

Manafort was aligned with the Yanukovych/Aksyonov side. His final departure from Ukraine happened when NATO put its puppet Poroshenko in place in 2014.

So the issue is complex. On the one hand, you do have a political operative who worked directly on behalf of Russian interests in blocking Ukrainian acceptance into the EU and its bid to join NATO. Ukraine taking either of these actions has pretty hefty military and oil/gas economic consequences for Russia. If the U.S. were in the same position, it would have done exactly what Russia did. On the other hand, the U.S. and NATO allies absolutely did interfere in Ukraine to push their own military and oil/gas agenda in the region. In many ways this still looks a lot like the containment policies of the Cold War, as if it never ended and old military brass in the west are still playing the same old game.

So Trump isn't really wrong when he asserts that we aren't so innocent. Russia and the U.S. and E.U. are still deeply engaged in indirect bloc-building and military positioning. I can see legitimate regions for the annexation of Crimea, but also legitimate reasons for the placing of a western friendly puppet at the helm of the Ukrainian government. By legitimate I mean justifiable based on the worldviews and needs of each side of this cold war; not that I am in favor of any of these actions, I just understand them.

But just because I may agree that we need to put a real end to the cold war, end sanctions, and grow economic ties between the entire west (not just the NATO bloc) and Russia to stave off mutually assured destruction, it doesn't mean I agree that it should be done in an infiltrative and traitorous fashion.

This post was edited by inkanddagger on Aug 14 2018 06:02pm

Do you think Manafort was in debt to Russia in some way so that's why he worked on the trump campaign for free? To help elect a russian sympathizer that is Trump?

I'm not sure. I know he would have been upset that he lost his job consulting for the Russian side of the bloc building and consolidating of economic resources. Euromaidan, which was pretty obviously an astroturf by NATO and the west, really screwed him hard. This was his best shot at reclaiming lost territory.