#konstantin kilimnik

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Drew Sheneman, Newark Star-Ledger

* * * *

What is it about Republicans and Russian spies?

LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV

FEB 21, 2024

Guess what:  A Russian spy has been spreading lies about the Democratic candidate for president through his connections with senior Republican officials.  Oh, my goodness, can that be true?  Where did I put my fainting couch? 

This time the Russian spy is Alexander Smirnov, a serial liar and fabricator who has been making up stories on behalf of Russian intelligence about Democrats, chiefly Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and feeding them to senior Republican Party government officials.  Last week, he was charged with just that – lying to the FBI that Joe Biden and his son Hunter each sought $5 million bribes from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma to fix an investigation into the company by Ukraine’s corrupt prosecutor general.

Let’s leave aside for the moment the fact that this tired lie about the Bidens and Burisma and bribes was shopped around way back in 2018 and 2019 in the run-up to the 2020 election.  Those were the days when the likes of Rudy Giuliani and Konstantin Kilimnik and Dmytro Firtash were running around trying to get “dirt” on the Bidens, and the infamous “perfect phone call” was made to Volodymyr Zelenskyy when Donald Trump, then the President of the United States, tried to extort the Ukrainian president into opening an investigation into the very thing that Smirnov is charged with lying about these five or six years later.

Oh goodness, I’m barely three paragraphs into this piece about what happened with Russian spies just yesterday and already I’m spinning down a rabbit hole we’ve been going down ever since a certain New York real estate magnate decided he would run for president as a Republican in 2015. 

Here’s a handy-dandy flashback with a few of the players we’ve met along the way:

Remember Marina Butina? She was the Russian FSG bombshell who infiltrated the National Rifle Association on behalf of Russian intelligence and spread money around and had a wild affair with a Republican political operative named Paul Erikson and took a bunch of NRA officials and Republican politicians to Moscow to meet with her phony “gun rights” organization called “Right to Bear Arms” that she established in a country where there is no right to bear arms.

Remember George Papadopoulos?  He was the Trump campaign “foreign policy adviser” who was running around London in 2016 meeting with a Russian intelligence agent named Joseph Mifsud, who was setting him up with meetings with another Russian intelligence agent, Leonid Reshetnikov, who ran some kind of Russian intelligence front called the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies.  Mifsud, who disappeared and has never been seen or heard from again, was the guy that Papadopoulos met in Rome, or somewhere, who out of the blue told him that Russian intelligence had “dirt” on Hilary Clinton, including “thousands of emails” that belonged to her.

The name Konstantin Kilimnik ring a bell?  I know it gets confusing, because I already mentioned him about the whole Burisma thing, but Konstantin was the Russian intelligence guy who had worked with Paul Manafort in Ukraine when Manafort was running campaigns for Ukraine’s pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych, who after being deposed by the 2014 Ukrainian revolution fled back to – you guessed it – Russia.  Anyway, Konstantin was the guy connected to a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, to whom Manafort owed something like $14 million.  The minute Manafort was appointed manager of Trump’s campaign, he emailed his pal Konstantin asking him how they could use the Trump campaign to “get whole” with Deripaska.  So, Manafort ends up meeting with Konstantin in New York City while he was running Trump’s campaign and shared campaign information and polling data with him.  Why Manafort was giving this highly secret political information to a Russian intelligence agent, well, that was never explained, but it does kind of bring up what “get whole” could have meant.  Manafort went on to be indicted for various financial crimes, for which Trump pardoned him.  Konstantin was indicted for obstruction of justice, and hell, even little honey-pot Marina Butina was indicted and spent a year behind bars in the U.S. before she was deported back to Russia and greeted as a returning hero by Russian intelligence.

That’s just a smattering of Russian intelligence agents with connections to prominent Republicans over the last eight to ten years, and what do you know?  Here comes Alexander Smirnov peddling tired old lies about the Bidens and Burisma, and this time who’s listening to him?  Oh, nobody but the two House Republican goofs in charge of the so-called impeachment investigation of President Biden, James Comer and Jim Jordan.  And what are they investigating Biden for?  Oh, let’s see…taking bribes from Burisma!

Now, having read all that history about the other Russian spies Republicans were listening to, involved with, giving information to, getting information from, and committing financial crimes with, what kind of a guy is Smirnov?  Let’s just let the DOJ motion tell us in their explanation to the court in Nevada about why Smirnov needs to be in pretrial detention:

“First, he claims to have contacts with multiple foreign intelligence agencies and had plans to leave the United States two days after he was arrested last week for a months-long, multi-country foreign trip. During this trip, the defendant claimed to be meeting with foreign intelligence contacts. Those foreign intelligence agencies could resettle Smirnov outside the United States if he were released.”

Oh, by the way, Smirnov was arrested as he got off the flight from his multi-country trip “meeting with foreign intelligence contacts.” 

But it gets better.  Smirnov has lived in Las Vegas but has no business there.  “Instead, he claims to have a ‘security business,’ that is registered in California,” according to the DOJ memo.  He lives with a girlfriend “who does not appear to even know what he does.”  What does he do for money?  His bank records do not “reflect that he is in the ‘security business,’ as he claims.”  Instead, his bank records “show large wire transfers from what appear to be venture capital firms and individuals.”

That gives him enough money to escape the country any time he wants to, according to the DOJ.  How much money, you may ask?  Oh, not too much.  Smirnov “has access to more than $2.9 million, and his wife/girlfriend (he refers to her both ways) (hereafter “DL”) has access to more than $3.8 million.”  According to the DOJ, those “funds are available to him because most of the money in DL’s account originated with Smirnov and she pays his personal expenses out of her account.”

Because most guys running around making international trips to multiple countries who have no visible means of support besides large money transfers from “venture capital firms and individuals” have millions of dollars in bank accounts in their names and in the names of their wife/girlfriends.

Are you able to follow this insane narrative?  This is the guy the House Republicans have been relying on as their chief source of information about supposed $5 million bribes to both Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.  This is the crap they want to impeach Biden for?  Smirnov, the star of his own private season of “Get Smart,” has been telling Comer and his buddies that Hunter Biden was taped making phone calls about the bribes in a hotel in Kyiv that was “wired” by Russian intelligence and “under control of the Russians.”

Only one problem:  Hunter Biden not only has never been in that hotel, he has never been in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Prosecutors told the judge in Nevada that Russian intelligence is still using the Kyiv hotel to record “prominent Americans” in order to provide “kompromat” in the 2024 election.  “Thus, Smirnov’s efforts to spread misinformation about a candidate of one of the two major parties in the United States continues,” the DOJ memo concludes.

Ummmmm…isn’t this the kind of stuff that was happening back in 2016 in London and Rome and even Moscow when “operatives” for Trump’s campaign were meeting with Russian intelligence agents who were peddling “dirt” on Hillary Clinton?  And Marina Butina was gamboling around with NRA officers and escorting them to Moscow and shacking up with Republican campaign operatives while she was employed as “special assistant” to Aleksandr Torshin, who was Acting Chairman of the Senate of the Russian Federation and a close pal of Putin.

With all the Russians and all the intelligence agents and all the meetings with Republican officials of one kind or another and all the secrets and lies passed between them all the way up to and including the campaign chairman of the Republican nominee for president, here is a simple way to understand it. 

It’s the same playbook Trump has used his entire life.  Get caught doing something, anything, and immediately accuse your opponents of the same thing or worse.  Charge after charge of sexual harassment and assault?  Hmmm, let’s see…how about a Pizza joint where pedophile Democrats are trafficking children out of the basement?  In business up to your neck with Russians and taking money from foreign governments?  Find some goofball with two or three foreign passports and bank accounts full of funny money traveling around the world meeting with Russian intelligence officials and get him to accuse the Bidens of taking bribes.

What Donald Trump has always called the “Russia hoax” was never a hoax at all.  It was real, and it is continuing, and it now reaches into the United States Congress and is driving the movement there to impeach President Biden for things he never did, but ironically, for stuff Republicans have been doing for at least a decade.

So where is the big Biden impeachment investigation right now, after the fourth or fifth witness they’ve advertised as “the one” falls apart in a spectacular hail of indictments and DOJ memos alleging all kinds of Russian hanky-panky?  Well, Comer and Jordan have their committee staffers purging the name “Smirnov” from anything with their fingerprints on it.  Seems like they’ve got their work cut out for them.

[azspot]

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).

JHeather Cox Richardson

[misfitwashere]

June 28, 2024 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 29

There is huge news today: in the case of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron defense doctrine that underpins the administrative state. 

I am putting that down as a marker because I’ve had a very busy week of travel and writing (the paperback edition of Democracy Awakening is coming out in October and I am working on a new afterword) and I am just too tired to cover it and its history well tonight. 

Instead, tonight I want to make a note of something that has been nagging at me for weeks now: Trump’s focus on 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested by Russian officers in March 2023 and is currently on trial for the trumped-up charge of espionage. The State Department considers him “wrongfully detained,” a rare designation indicating that the person is being held by a hostile government as a bargaining chip. That designation means the U.S. government will do all it can to secure his release. 

At least three times now, Trump has interfered with those negotiations by vowing that Russian president Vladimir Putin will release Gershkovich for him and him alone. He said it in last night’s CNN debacle, where he also made a big deal out of the idea that Putin will do it as a favor, without an exchange of money.  

He said something else last night in his slurry of words that jumped out. Somewhere in his discussion of Putin’s invasion of eastern Ukraine in February 2022, Trump said: “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.”

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.

In last night’s debate, Trump insisted that Putin never would have invaded Ukraine on his watch (although Putin in fact continued his 2014 assault during Trump’s term, and Trump tried to withhold support for Ukraine). 

After Russia invaded Ukraine again in 2022, Jim Rutenberg published a terrific and thorough review of this history in the New York Times Magazine, pointing out that Putin’s attack on Ukraine looked different with this history behind it. Once Biden took office in 2021, the many efforts of the people around Trump, including most obviously Rudy Giuliani, to influence Ukrainian politics through their ties to the White House were over. 

“Thirteen months later,” Rutenberg wrote, “Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian frontier.” Once his troops were there, Putin claimed he had annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, two of which were specifically named in the Mariupol Plan, and instituted martial law in them, claiming that the people there had voted to join Russia.   

Last night, Trump claimed that the Ukrainians are losing the war and described how sad it was that their country is being destroyed (without mentioning that it is Putin’s unprovoked war that is doing that damage). He also significantly exaggerated how much money the U.S. has contributed to Ukraine’s defense. 

That misrepresentation lines up with Putin’s offer of Friday, June 14, 2024, in a “peace proposal” to Ukraine: Ukraine would give up Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, including far more territory than Putin’s troops occupy, in exchange for a ceasefire. Putin said, “If Kyiv and the Western capitals refuse it, as before, then in the end, that’s their…political and moral responsibility for the continuation of bloodshed.” He also demanded an end to all sanctions and that Ukraine abandon its plan to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). (Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky rejected the plan and noted that there is no reason to think Putin will stop his land grab once his forces regroup.) 

So when Trump last night said about the 2022 invasion, “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream,” it sounded as if he had been in on the Mariupol Plan. And when he talked about how the war needed to end, especially in light of Putin’s recent “peace” plan, it sounded as if perhaps he still is. 

And he promised, yet again, that he and he alone could get Gershkovich released.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Our former President and the presumptuous GOP candidate is a Russian agent. An agent of our enemy. Isn't that the definition of treason?

[thoughtportal]

Durham’s characterization of the meeting—that it had nothing to do with Clinton—lined up with what the Trump camp first claimed when the meeting was revealed a year afterward, in 2017. At that time, Trump Jr. issued a false statement dictated by his father that insisted the conversation had focused “primarily” on the adoption of Russian children by Americans. That was a phony cover story. Later on, when more information came out, even the elder Trump conceded that the point of the meeting was to gather negative information on Clinton from a foreign adversary. “This was a meeting to get information on an opponent,” Trump said. Yet years later, Durham was still pushing the original disinformation about the meeting propagated by Trump and his allies. 

In a subsequent exchange with Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), Durham misled the committee about another key element of the Trump-Russia scandal. McClintock observed that the “central charge in the Russia collusion hoax was that Trump campaign operatives were in contact with Russian intelligence sources.”

Replying to that remark, Durham said, “There was no such evidence.”

That’s not true.

While running Trump’s campaign in the summer of 2016, Manafort had regular contact with Konstantin Kilimnik, a former Manafort employee in Ukraine who has been repeatedly identified by US government officials as a Russian agent. 

In a detailed, bipartisan 2020 report, the Senate Intelligence Committee, then chaired by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, called Kilimnik “a Russian intelligence officer.” A year earlier, the Mueller report said, “The FBI…assesses that Kilimnik has ties to Russian intelligence.” The US Treasury in 2021 declared Kilimnik was a “known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf.” The department added, “During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, Kilimnik provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy.” In 2018, Mueller indicted Kilimnik on charges of obstruction of justice. 

[maddyaddy]

You are now aware that pro-Russian Ukrainian people's deputies Andrii Derkach and Oleksander Dubinsky worked with Rudy Giuliani to manufacture the Hunter Biden Burisma shit that Republicans in Congress continue to peddle to this very day.

You are now aware that Trump advisor Paul Manafort provably had a long working relationship with Russian spook Konstantin Kilimnik and worked with him to subvert the 2016 election.

[gabrielesanzone123]

[arpov-blog-blog]

..."Did Durham lie?

John Durham was supposed to be the great Trump hope — the anti-Mueller, who would blow the lid off something something something. His years-long probe ended with multiple courtroom humiliations and a damp squib of a report.

His testimony before a House committee yesterday didn’t go any better. He stumbled, hedged, and made it clear that he didn’t really know much at all about the Rusia probe. Here’s Jonathan Chait:

Durham seemed to be unaware of the major factual elements of the alliance between the Trump campaign and Russia. This ignorance came through in several awkward exchanges with Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee panel. Eric Swalwell asked Durham about how Trump “tried and concealed from the public a real-estate deal he was seeking in Moscow.” This was a deal, described in the Mueller report, in which the Russian government promised Trump several hundreds of millions of dollars in profit at no risk to himself to license a tower in Moscow. The proposed payoff, and Trump’s public lies at the time about it, gave Russia enormous leverage over his campaign. Durham replied, “I don’t know anything about that.”

There was a lot more like that.

When Adam Schiff asked Durham if the Russians released stolen information through cutouts, he replied, “I’m not sure.” Schiff responded, “The answer is yes,” to which Durham reported, “In your mind, it’s yes.” When Schiff asked Durham if he knew that, hours after Trump publicly asked Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails and release them, Russian hackers made an attempt to hack Clinton emails, Durham replied, “If that happened, I’m not aware of that.” When asked if Trump referred to those stolen emails more than 100 times on the campaign trail, Durham answered, “I don’t really read the newspapers and listen to the news.” And when Schiff asked Durham if he was aware that Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, passed on polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian intelligence agent, at the time Russia was conducting both a social-media campaign and the release of stolen documents to help Trump, Durham replied, “You may be getting beyond the depth of my knowledge.”

David Corn isn’t having it. He writes, “John Durham Just Made False Statements to Congress.”

“The Manafort-Kilimnik connection — which the Senate Intelligence Committee report characterized as a ‘grave counterintelligence threat’ — is one of the most serious and still not fully explained components of the Trump-Russia scandal. “It is inconceivable that Durham is unaware of this troubling link.”

Corn walks through Durham’s other false statements, including his account of the infamous Trump Tower meeting in which Don Jr. hoped the Russians would provide dirt on Hillary Clinton.

This meeting signaled to Moscow that the Trump camp was receptive to Russian endeavors to intervene in the election to boost Trump’s chances, and Schiff expressed surprise that Durham found it insignificant. “Are you really trying to diminish the importance of what happened here?” he asked. Durham answered: “The more complete story is that they met, and it was a ruse, and they didn’t talk about Mrs. Clinton.” That is not true.  The report produced by special counsel Robert Mueller notes that the Russian emissary, a lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya, did discuss Clinton: “Participants agreed that Veselnitskaya stated that the Ziff brothers [an American family investment firm] had broken Russian laws and had donated their profits to the DNC or the Clinton Campaign. She asserted that the Ziff brothers had engaged in tax evasion and money laundering in both the United States and Russia.” (There was no evidence that Ziff Brothers Investments had engaged in wrongdoing.) The Mueller report points out that Trump Jr. zeroed in on this: “Trump Jr. asked follow-up questions about how the alleged payments could be tied specifically to the Clinton Campaign, but Veselnitskaya indicated that she could not trace the money once it entered the United States.” The report quotes a participant in the meeting recalling “that Trump Jr. asked what they [the Russians] have on Clinton.” Durham’s characterization of the meeting—that it had nothing to do with Clinton—lined up with what the Trump camp first claimed when the meeting was revealed a year afterward, in 2017. At that time, Trump Jr. issued a false statement dictated by his father that insisted the conversation had focused “primarily” on the adoption of Russian children by Americans. That was a phony cover story. Later on, when more information came out, even the elder Trump conceded that the point of the meeting was to gather negative information on Clinton from a foreign adversary. “This was a meeting to get information on an opponent,” Trump said. Yet years later, Durham was still pushing the original disinformation about the meeting propagated by Trump and his allies. 

As Hayes Brown notes, Durham’s testimony was “a far cry from when the former president was promising that Durham’s probe would reveal ‘the crime of the century’.”

Instead, Durham said in his opening statement that his report “should not be read to suggest in any way that Russian election interference was not a threat; it was.” And when it came to Mueller himself, Durham didn’t hold back in his praise. “Our object, our aim, was not to dispute Director Mueller,” Durham said. “I have the greatest regard, the highest regard for Director Mueller. He is a patriot.” That’s again not what Trump’s most ardent devotees would like to hear coming from the man who they expected to expose Mueller’s role in the “witch hunt” against Trump."

[globalbuzz]

Special Counsel Durham's Testimony Raises Concerns of Misleading Congress

John Durham, the special counsel appointed by former Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate the FBI's handling of the Trump-Russia scandal, recently testified before the House Judiciary Committee. However, his testimony has raised questions about potential false statements and misrepresentations. Let's examine some key aspects of his testimony. Durham's primary task was to uncover evidence supporting former President Donald Trump's claims that the Russia investigation was a politically motivated conspiracy orchestrated by his opponents within the Deep State. However, after a four-year investigation, Durham failed to produce significant evidence to support these claims. He secured guilty pleas from some individuals, such as an FBI lawyer who tampered with an email for a surveillance warrant, but he did not prosecute any high-ranking FBI or Obama administration officials as Trump and his allies had hoped.

Special counsel John Durham is sworn in during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation. During the committee hearing, House Republicans hailed Durham as a hero, despite significant criticism of his final report. However, both Democratic and Republican committee members questioned Durham's statements, suggesting that he either lacked familiarity with essential facts or intentionally attempted to mislead Congress and the public. One notable exchange occurred when Representative Adam Schiff asked Durham about the infamous Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016. The meeting involved Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and a Russian lawyer who claimed to have damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Durham dismissed the significance of the meeting, suggesting that people receive similar information all the time. However, this characterization contradicted the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller's report, which documented the discussion of Clinton-related matters during the meeting. In another exchange with Representative Tom McClintock, Durham denied the existence of evidence supporting the central charge of the Trump-Russia collusion allegations, namely, that Trump campaign operatives had contacts with Russian intelligence sources. However, substantial evidence, including contacts between Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnik, a former Manafort employee identified as a Russian agent by US government officials, contradicts Durham's claim. Durham's misleading statements raise concerns about the true purpose of his investigation. Did he conduct an unbiased inquiry, or did he employ the government's resources to bolster Trump's baseless claims about the Russia scandal? His false statements to Congress regarding crucial facts further undermine his credibility and warrant scrutiny, potentially necessitating a separate investigation into his conduct. Overall, the testimony of John Durham before the House Judiciary Committee has left many questioning the integrity and impartiality of his investigation. The inconsistencies and misrepresentations in his statements cast doubt on the validity of his findings and his commitment to the truth. Read the full article

[nedsecondline]

Putin Was Waiting on 'Wink' From Donald Trump To Seize Ukraine: Author

Written correspondence between former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort and Kremlin aide Konstantin Kilimnik discussed Putin claiming part of Ukraine, saying that a “wink” from the Republican former president was needed to “make this work,” former Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann has said. Speaking with PBS’ Firing Line and host Margaret Hoover, Weissmann said this was “such a clear…

[xtruss]

Trump Said He Might Have Let Russia “Take Over” Parts of Ukraine. Fox News Edited It Out.

That’s what Russia secretly asked for in 2016.

— Dan Frieman, Senior Reporter | Politico | March 12, 2023

Donald Trump greets Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and President Vladimir Putin on July 7, 2017. Mikhail Klimentyev/AP

Last week, Donald Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that he could have stopped the invasion of Ukraine by allowing Russia to “take over” parts of Ukraine.

“I could have negotiated. I could’ve made a deal to take over something,” Trump said in a radio interview Monday. “There are certain areas that are Russian-speaking areas, frankly, but you could’ve worked a deal.” The Daily Beast reported last week that Hannity left those newsworthy remarks out of excerpts of the interview that he played that night on his primetime show.

What seems most notable here is that Trump is explicitly saying he might have given Russian president Vladimir Putin something the leader has sought since 2016.

The deal Trump said he could’ve “worked” sounds a lot like the “peace plan” that Konstantin Kilimnik, who the Senate Intelligence Committee described as a “Russian intelligence officer,” pressed on Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign chief, in a secret meeting in August 2016 at a New York City cigar bar. The two men continued to discuss the plan until 2018, according to Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Manafort famously gave Kilimnik some of the Trump campaign’s polling data to pass on to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who was known to be close to Putin. What gets less attention is what else happened in the same meeting. Kilimnik also asked Manafort to seek Trump’s support for a plan to end fighting between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists, along lines highly favorable to Russia. The idea was to create an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving the Kremlin sway over a valuable industrial area, along with continued control of Crimea, which Russian troops seized in 2014. Kilmnik later said in an email to Manafort that the plan needed only “a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push)” from Trump if he won in 2016.

Remember: Russia was helping Trump through its hack and leak of Democratic emails. (Kilimnik himself “may have been connected to the hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election,” the Senate Intelligence Committee report said.) The Trump campaign—both Mueller‘s investigation and the Senate’s found—worked to capitalize on Russia’s leaks. That makes Trump’s comments especially interesting. Andrew Weissmann, a Mueller deputy who prosecuted Manafort, later wrote that the plan for an autonomous republic outlined to Manfort by Kilimnik was the “quo” Putin wanted for the “quid” of assisting Trump against Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton.

It seems all of this fell through. We do not know exactly what Manafort did after the Kilimnik meeting. Manafort agreed in 2018 to cooperate with Mueller, but that deal fell apart after prosecutors learned Manafort had continued to lie to them about the “peace plan,” among other things. Manafort was evidently working to stay in Trump’s good graces in a bid to receive a pardon. He later got one. As a result, exactly what Manafort may have told Trump about the proposal remains uncertain. Manafort has claimed he never mentioned the autonomous republic to Trump. And no clear evidence has emerged showing otherwise.

But the explosion of the Russia scandal in the media after Trump won may have been more important, too. Trump, as he himself often complained, was hampered in his dealings with Putin by all the public scrutiny. Left to his own devices, would Trump have given Russia the autonomous region they asked for in 2016? Or would Trump, if he’d won a second term and was freed from ever again facing voters again, have given Putin what he launched a war to seize? Maybe more importantly, what will Trump do if wins again in 2024?

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jack Ohman, Sacramento Bee

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 18, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUL 19, 2024

Paul Manafort walking onto the floor of the Republican National Convention yesterday illustrated that the Republican Party under Trump has become thoroughly corrupted into an authoritarian party aligned with foreign dictators. 

Manafort first advised and then managed Trump’s 2016 campaign. A long-time Republican political operative, he came to the job after the Ukrainian people threw his client,Viktor Yanukovych out of Ukraine’s presidency in 2014. Yanukovych was backed by Russian president Vladimir Putin, who was determined to prevent Ukraine from turning toward Europe and to install a puppet government that would extend his power over the neighboring country. Beginning in 2004, Manafort had worked to install and then keep Yanukovych and his party in power. His efforts won him a fortune thanks to his new friends, especially Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. Then in 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in what is known as the Revolution of Dignity. 

Yanukovych fled to Russia, and Putin invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia itself and also on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in United States territories. These sanctions crippled Russia and froze the assets of key Russian oligarchs.

Now without his main source of income, Manafort owed about $17 million to Deripaska. By 2016, his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone was advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, and Manafort stepped in to remake it. He did not take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking Kilimnik how “we” could use the appointment “to get whole,” and he made sure that the Russian oligarch to whom he owed the most money knew about his close connection with the Trump campaign.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election explained at least one answer: Manafort and Kilimnick “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 Yanukovych…elected to head that republic.” The report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.”

This policy was the exact opposite of official U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine. Russia worked to help Trump win the White House, and immediately after his election, according to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, 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. The email went on to say 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.”

The investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia slowed the consummation of this plan, and strong bipartisan support for Ukraine threw a monkey wrench into the works, prompting Trump’s cronies to try to smear Ukraine as the country that interfered in the 2016 U.S. election, a story that began to come out during Trump’s first impeachment hearing. Biden’s election meant an abrupt end to Russia’s quiet absorption of Ukraine’s eastern region, and in February 2022, Putin simply invaded the country and then claimed that the people there had voted to join Russia. 

Trump seemed to bring this back up at a CNN event in June in which, referring to Putin’s invasion of eastern Ukraine in February 2022, he said: “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.” Trump has said he has a plan for “peace” in Ukraine that will stop the war in a day. 

Republican vice presidential pick J.D. Vance is wildly inexperienced for such a position, but he has been staunchly in favor of ending U.S. assistance to Ukraine and was the pick of that party faction. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov cheered Vance’s nomination, saying: “He’s in favor of peace, he’s in favor of ending the assistance that’s being provided and we can only welcome that because that’s what we need—to stop pumping Ukraine full of weapons and then the war will end” Russia needs this sort of help, for just this week Ukraine forced it to remove its last remaining patrol ship from occupied Crimea (when the 2022 invasion began, it held most of its 74 Black Sea Fleet warships at ports there). 

Manafort was convicted of a slew of criminal charges for his work with Ukraine and obstruction of the investigation into the connections between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, and was serving a seven-year sentence when Trump pardoned him in December 2020. Now he is back at the center of Trump’s MAGA Party. 

Before 2016 the Republican Party stood staunchly against Russia, and getting Republican voters to forget that history required adopting the argument of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who is aligned with Putin and Trump, that democracy has ruined the United States. In this argument, the central principle of democracy—that all people must be equal before the law, and have a right to a say in their government—destroys a country by making women, people of color, immigrants, members of religious minorities, and LGBTQ+ individuals equal to heteronormative white men and permitting them to influence government. In place of democracy, they want to impose their version of Christianity on the nation, banning abortion, rejecting immigrants, and curtailing the rights of gender, religious, and ethnic minorities.

Josh Kovensky and John Light of Talking Points Memo picked up that in his speech at the Republican convention last night, Vance pushed back against President Joe Biden’s traditional idea that America is an idea, tying it instead to a place and a people. As Kovensky and Light note, this is “a somewhat-quiet, somewhat-obvious dog whistle, gesturing toward the idea there are, as some on the far-right contend, ‘heritage Americans,’” native-born Americans who have a deeper understanding than newcomers of what this country means. That view of nationhood is commonplace elsewhere, Kovensky and Light note, but its absence in the U.S. “has long made our country exceptional.” 

This nationalist concept is at the heart of MAGA attacks on immigrants, which were in full display at the convention yesterday. From the podium yesterday, Thomas Homan, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for Trump’s first two years in office, told undocumented immigrants: “You better start packing to go home.” Trump has promised to round up 11 million migrants (although he claims there are 18 million) currently living in the U.S., put them in camps, and deport them. There were actually preprinted signs at the convention for attendees to wave, which they did with apparent enthusiasm. The signs said: “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” 

The convention has also emphasized its opposition to women’s rights. Trump, who has proudly claimed responsibility for the Supreme Court’s overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing abortion as a constitutional right, walked out last night to the song “It’s a Man’s World.” By focusing on the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which gives Congress the power to enforce it, as the protector of “Life,” the Republican platform covertly endorses a national abortion ban. 

Their rejection of democracy requires a strongman at the head of the government, and in Milwaukee that man is Trump, who will be the first convicted criminal nominated for president by a major party. He was convicted for trying to tip the 2016 election by hiding payments to an adult-film actress after they had sex, in order to keep the story from voters. 

Conference attendees are honoring Trump with large bandages on their right ear as a tribute to an injury he sustained in a shooting attempt on Saturday, although—and this is very weird—there has been no information about that injury aside from his own comments and those of his inner circle, a lack the press seems willing to ignore despite their deep interest in every piece of medical information from President Biden. As he did at his criminal trial in Manhattan, Trump keeps nodding off to sleep at the convention. 

The theme of the party has been unity, but that unity depends on everyone lauding Trump. Gone are the establishment Republicans that ran the party before 2016; even longer gone are the traditional Republicans who were chased out of the party in the 1990s as “Republicans in Name Only” because they believed government had a role to play in the economy and did not see tax cuts as the solution to everything. In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch wrote: “Here in Milwaukee, the political pundits finally saw the thing they’ve been pleading for—unity—and what that really looks like. It looks a lot like Jonestown,” where a cult leader took the lives of his followers in 1978.

In 1959, veteran Robert Biggs wrote to Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had led the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, asking the president to make “direct statements” that would give people the confidence to “back him completely.” Americans needed “more of the attitude of a commanding officer who knows the goal and the mission and states, without evasion, the way it is to be done.” 

Eisenhower answered that “in a democracy debate is the breath of life. This is to me what Lincoln meant by government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’” 

“[D]ictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems—freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning…tremendous complex and difficult questions,” Eisenhower wrote. “But while this responsibility is a taxing one to a free people it is their great strength as well—from millions of individual free minds come new ideas, new adjustments to emerging problems, and tremendous vigor, vitality and progress…. While complete success will always elude us, still it is a quest which is vital to self-government and to our way of life as free men.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[astronality]

Paul Manafort & Konstantin Kilimnik

Today, the Senate revealed an intelligence report in regards to the meddling of the 2016 election. Paul Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnik were the masterminds behind the scenes and sort of partners in crime. Based on the two charts, these two share a lot of similarities with Neptune heavily afflicted. The corruption is real, folks!

Paul Manafort:

Sun Opposite Neptune (deception, wishful thinking, victimizing)

Venus Opposite Neptune 

Mars Opposite Neptune

Konstantin Kilimnik:

Mercury Opposite Neptune (drugs, lies, etc)

Venus Opposite Neptune 

Mars Opposite Neptune 

Other similarities:  Mercury Conjunct Venus, Venus Conjunct Mars, Venus Trine Pluto 

[misfitwashere]

Letters from an American

July 18, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Jul 19, 2024

Paul Manafort walking onto the floor of the Republican National Convention yesterday illustrated that the Republican Party under Trump has become thoroughly corrupted into an authoritarian party aligned with foreign dictators. 

Manafort first advised and then managed Trump’s 2016 campaign. A long-time Republican political operative, he came to the job after the Ukrainian people threw his client,Viktor Yanukovych out of Ukraine’s presidency in 2014. Yanukovych was backed by Russian president Vladimir Putin, who was determined to prevent Ukraine from turning toward Europe and to install a puppet government that would extend his power over the neighboring country. Beginning in 2004, Manafort had worked to install and then keep Yanukovych and his party in power. His efforts won him a fortune thanks to his new friends, especially Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. Then in 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in what is known as the Revolution of Dignity. 

Yanukovych fled to Russia, and Putin invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia itself and also on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in United States territories. These sanctions crippled Russia and froze the assets of key Russian oligarchs.

Now without his main source of income, Manafort owed about $17 million to Deripaska. By 2016, his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone was advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, and Manafort stepped in to remake it. He did not take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking Kilimnik how “we” could use the appointment “to get whole,” and he made sure that the Russian oligarch to whom he owed the most money knew about his close connection with the Trump campaign.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election explained at least one answer: Manafort and Kilimnick “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 Yanukovych…elected to head that republic.” The report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.”

This policy was the exact opposite of official U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine. Russia worked to help Trump win the White House, and immediately after his election, according to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, 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. The email went on to say 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.”

The investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia slowed the consummation of this plan, and strong bipartisan support for Ukraine threw a monkey wrench into the works, prompting Trump’s cronies to try to smear Ukraine as the country that interfered in the 2016 U.S. election, a story that began to come out during Trump’s first impeachment hearing. Biden’s election meant an abrupt end to Russia’s quiet absorption of Ukraine’s eastern region, and in February 2022, Putin simply invaded the country and then claimed that the people there had voted to join Russia. 

Trump seemed to bring this back up at a CNN event in June in which, referring to Putin’s invasion of eastern Ukraine in February 2022, he said: “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.” Trump has said he has a plan for “peace” in Ukraine that will stop the war in a day. 

Republican vice presidential pick J.D. Vance is wildly inexperienced for such a position, but he has been staunchly in favor of ending U.S. assistance to Ukraine and was the pick of that party faction. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov cheered Vance’s nomination, saying: “He’s in favor of peace, he’s in favor of ending the assistance that’s being provided and we can only welcome that because that’s what we need—to stop pumping Ukraine full of weapons and then the war will end” Russia needs this sort of help, for just this week Ukraine forced it to remove its last remaining patrol ship from occupied Crimea (when the 2022 invasion began, it held most of its 74 Black Sea Fleet warships at ports there). 

Manafort was convicted of a slew of criminal charges for his work with Ukraine and obstruction of the investigation into the connections between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, and was serving a seven-year sentence when Trump pardoned him in December 2020. Now he is back at the center of Trump’s MAGA Party. 

Before 2016 the Republican Party stood staunchly against Russia, and getting Republican voters to forget that history required adopting the argument of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who is aligned with Putin and Trump, that democracy has ruined the United States. In this argument, the central principle of democracy—that all people must be equal before the law, and have a right to a say in their government—destroys a country by making women, people of color, immigrants, members of religious minorities, and LGBTQ+ individuals equal to heteronormative white men and permitting them to influence government. In place of democracy, they want to impose their version of Christianity on the nation, banning abortion, rejecting immigrants, and curtailing the rights of gender, religious, and ethnic minorities.

Josh Kovensky and John Light of Talking Points Memo picked up that in his speech at the Republican convention last night, Vance pushed back against President Joe Biden’s traditional idea that America is an idea, tying it instead to a place and a people. As Kovensky and Light note, this is “a somewhat-quiet, somewhat-obvious dog whistle, gesturing toward the idea there are, as some on the far-right contend, ‘heritage Americans,’” native-born Americans who have a deeper understanding than newcomers of what this country means. That view of nationhood is commonplace elsewhere, Kovensky and Light note, but its absence in the U.S. “has long made our country exceptional.” 

This nationalist concept is at the heart of MAGA attacks on immigrants, which were in full display at the convention yesterday. From the podium yesterday, Thomas Homan, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for Trump’s first two years in office, told undocumented immigrants: “You better start packing to go home.” Trump has promised to round up 11 million migrants (although he claims there are 18 million) currently living in the U.S., put them in camps, and deport them. There were actually preprinted signs at the convention for attendees to wave, which they did with apparent enthusiasm. The signs said: “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” 

The convention has also emphasized its opposition to women’s rights. Trump, who has proudly claimed responsibility for the Supreme Court’s overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing abortion as a constitutional right, walked out last night to the song “It’s a Man’s World.” By focusing on the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which gives Congress the power to enforce it, as the protector of “Life,” the Republican platform covertly endorses a national abortion ban. 

Their rejection of democracy requires a strongman at the head of the government, and in Milwaukee that man is Trump, who will be the first convicted criminal nominated for president by a major party. He was convicted for trying to tip the 2016 election by hiding payments to an adult-film actress after they had sex, in order to keep the story from voters. 

Conference attendees are honoring Trump with large bandages on their right ear as a tribute to an injury he sustained in a shooting attempt on Saturday, although—and this is very weird—there has been no information about that injury aside from his own comments and those of his inner circle, a lack the press seems willing to ignore despite their deep interest in every piece of medical information from President Biden. As he did at his criminal trial in Manhattan, Trump keeps nodding off to sleep at the convention. 

The theme of the party has been unity, but that unity depends on everyone lauding Trump. Gone are the establishment Republicans that ran the party before 2016; even longer gone are the traditional Republicans who were chased out of the party in the 1990s as “Republicans in Name Only” because they believed government had a role to play in the economy and did not see tax cuts as the solution to everything. In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch wrote: “Here in Milwaukee, the political pundits finally saw the thing they’ve been pleading for—unity—and what that really looks like. It looks a lot like Jonestown,” where a cult leader took the lives of his followers in 1978.

In 1959, veteran Robert Biggs wrote to Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had led the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, asking the president to make “direct statements” that would give people the confidence to “back him completely.” Americans needed “more of the attitude of a commanding officer who knows the goal and the mission and states, without evasion, the way it is to be done.” 

Eisenhower answered that “in a democracy debate is the breath of life. This is to me what Lincoln meant by government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’” 

“[D]ictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems—freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning…tremendous complex and difficult questions,” Eisenhower wrote. “But while this responsibility is a taxing one to a free people it is their great strength as well—from millions of individual free minds come new ideas, new adjustments to emerging problems, and tremendous vigor, vitality and progress…. While complete success will always elude us, still it is a quest which is vital to self-government and to our way of life as free men.”

[dragoni]

Quickie Summary

Manafort was communicating / working with Russians and people inside the Trump Administration after he resigned in 2016, after he was indicted by Mueller in 2017 and while he was in prison awaiting trial in 2018  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Manafort was getting people “appointed in the administration” via an intermediary after he quit

Quickie refresher to help set the context of the reporting.

“Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner pushed for Trump to hire Paul Manafort“

“I’ve got a crook running my campaign”, Donald J Trump  

Manafort resigned (fired) from the Trump campaign on Aug. 19, 2016.

Russian GRU Agent Konstantin Kilimnik worked for Manafort

Manafort gave Trump polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik to help pay off his $19 million debt to Oleg Deripaska, Putin’s favorite Oligarch

Manafort worked for Oleg Deripaska,

Oleg Deripaska was one of the 24 Russian officials and Oligarch’s who’s funds were frozen by the US government for interfering in the 2016 election!

Who is Manafort’s Trump insider? Ivanka? Jared?

On 28 May 2018, according to Tuesday’s filing, Manafort was sent a text message by an associate, who asked: “If I see POTUS one on one next week am I ok to remind him of our relationship?” Manafort allegedly replied: “Yes” and “even if not one on one”.

Manafort helping Oleg Deripaska get his money back!

The office of Robert Mueller, the special counsel, said in a new court filing that Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnik communicated between August 2016 and March 2018 about a topic that Mueller’s team blacked out from public view.

But an exhibit included with the heavily redacted court filing showed that Manafort worked on a Microsoft Word document titled “new initiative for peace” in February 2018 as part of his continuing discussions with Kilimnik.

in a separate court filing last week that he stands accused by Mueller of discussing a “Ukraine peace plan” with Kilimnik “on more than one occasion” – and then lying about it when questioned by investigators.

The allegations, if confirmed, would mean that Donald Trump’s campaign chief was working on a plan to settle Russia’s conflict with Ukraine on terms favourable for the Kremlin while the Russian government was interfering in the 2016 US election to help Trump.

The GRU #ButHerEmails

Kilimnik, 48, trained at a university connected to Russia’s military intelligence agency, formerly known as the GRU, which allegedly spearheaded the Kremlin’s effort to disrupt the 2016 election.

Mueller has previously said that Kilimnik was described as “a former Russian intelligence officer with the GRU” by Rick Gates, Manafort’s deputy on the Trump campaign.

Buy American. Hire American.

Mueller alleges that Manafort lied when he said he had no communication with members of Trump’s administration after they entered office in January 2017. Tuesday’s filing said Gates told investigators Manafort boasted that month that he was getting people “appointed in the administration” via an intermediary.

Never forget. Russian Oligarch’s are Putin’s Soft Power Generals

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

to help yourself understand the Mueller investigation, read this novel

“This novel” being, of course, a stack of court documents filed in the course of the investigation.

Hear me out.

This isn’t to trivialize or sensationalize an ongoing existential threat to western democracy. Precisely because it is not a fucking game, I think it’s really important for people to get new ways into this story. Because it still seems alarmingly common for even generally well-informed people to throw up their hands and say “well, the right says ‘no collusion!’ and liberals say ‘he’s a Russian agent!’ but the partisans all seem really worked up, I guess the truth is somewhere in between/it must not be as big a deal as they think.”

Maybe sometimes that’s motivated reasoning or sheer ignorance. But it’s also possible that “this Rusher thing with Trump and Russia” is unusually resistant to understanding as a conventional news story. We want our news to be solid, with “hard facts.” Maybe this is more like gas. Like gas, it always takes up as much space as it’s allowed. On slow news days it can expand to envelop everything else; unrelated dramatic events can compress it down to almost nothing. And you can’t get a grip on gas.

This whole bizarre situation is genuinely unprecedented in American history, which is perhaps why special prosecutor Robert Mueller has been doing something unusual in issuing a series of speaking indictments. Remember, a bill of indictment is basically a list of the crimes that a prosecutor has convinced a grand jury that someone has probably committed. Prosecutors are smart to keep these minimal, because every fact they allege in their indictment, they damn well have to be ready to prove. A speaking indictment means that the prosecutor is saying more than they have to say. In a case like this – which deals with a lot of sensitive information, and implicates people who haven’t yet been charged or even interviewed – that’s even trickier, because there’s a lot it has to avoid.

Generally, when a person makes their own job harder, they’re doing it for a reason. And I think at least part of the reason here is that the special prosecutor’s office is trying to tell the American public a story. Our minds can comprehend dramatic plot lines more easily than the seedy, fact-heavy, choppily-paced web of a real criminal conspiracy. There’s a narrative logic to the pre-election events described in the most notable speaking indictments in the order we’ve seen them, moving relentlessly closer in time, space, and relationship to Donald Trump on Election Day, 2016.

So if you’re frustrated or baffled by what you catch of this story in the news or on your Facebook feed, it’s not because you, personally, can’t understand it. You might just need a new angle of approach. If you are a movie person, I can recommend the documentary Active Measures (Hulu, iTunes). If you’re more of a reader, these documents, in this order, can be read like an epistolary novel – specifically, a pulpy, beach read-y spy thriller.

Part I: United States of America v. Paul J. Manafort, Jr. and Richard W. Gates III

Part II: United States of America v. Internet Research Agency, et al

Part III: United States of America v. Paul J. Manafort, Jr. and Konstantin Kilimnik

Part IV: United States of America v. Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, et al

Part V: United States of America v. Michael Cohen (a)(b)

Part VI: United States of America v. Roger Jason Stone, Jr.

TO BE CONTINUED [probably]…

I’m serious. Download the pdfs onto your e-reader – remember to make a note of the order! – brew yourself some tea, and turn off pop-up notifications for a while. (Don’t get too hung up on figuring out who “Organization 1″ or “Person 2″ are - sometimes it’ll be obvious, but don’t worry if it’s not. You can just treat the big tables like illustrations: look and see what they’re about, but you don’t need to read every line to get the gist. You can also skip the last page or so if you start hitting headers like “statutory allegations” or “substitute assets.” There’s no post-credits stingers.)

These aren’t all the documents that have been filed in court by the special counsel, let alone in related cases, and I doubt even the courts have heard the whole story yet. Most of the documents related to former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn are still redacted. Maria Butina was charged by a different prosecutor’s office just as she was about to make a run for it, but her infiltration of the National Rifle Association could quite possibly be Chekhov’s gun. And it doesn’t even mention the UK spinoff! But I think they’re the ones that are, intentionally, useful to someone who wants to understand.

Still skeptical? Recap/analysis below.

Part I: United States of America v. Paul J. Manafort, Jr. and Richard W. Gates III

The first indictment of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort took its focus far away from, and several years before, the main story, deep into a 2010 election in Ukraine which ominously foreshadowed the 2016 election.  Manafort, an old friend of Stone, a Trump Tower resident, and the employer of his co-defendant Rick Gates and of future Sanders consultant Tad Devine, ran the campaign of a buffoonish businessman who was in hock to the Russian government. Their strategy relied heavily on exacerbating ethnic tensions within Ukraine and seeding skepticism about international alliances, as well as a vicious smear campaign of his opponent, an accomplished public servant who would have been the nation’s first woman president. Manafort’s candidate took office, was exactly as bad as his opponents believed he would be, and had his opponent imprisoned and tortured – but was eventually forced to release her and flee the country for Russia.

Part II: United States of America v. Internet Research Agency, et al

The Internet Research Agency indicted Russian nationals who worked on the propaganda campaign, spending over a million dollars a month to manipulate American public opinion from a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg. The action starts in 2014 and picks up in 2016, but still takes place a continent away. It deliberately stays away from the hacking and dumping of Democratic party emails, and pointedly does not accuse any Americans of committing crimes.

Part III: United States of America v. Paul J. Manafort, Jr. and Konstantin Kilimnik

An installment with a foot in both worlds indicted Manafort and a Ukraine-based co-conspirator, while also showing Manafort’s corruption of a respected American law firm. This part shows us how Trump’s campaign manager – both his dirty politics and his illicit money – moved from Ukraine to the United States, set in the same time frame as Part II.

Part IV: United States of America v. Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, et al

Then another indictment did name the Russian military intelligence officers who stole Democrats’ emails in the spring of 2016, and traced their cooperation with “Organization 1,” which released those emails. This moves the story closer in time to the election, and shows the stolen data moving west from Moscow to Julian Assange’s hideout in London before being dumped on the American public.

Part V: United States of America v. Michael Cohen (a)(b)

The next installment targeted Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen, a New Yorker like Trump. Cohen pleaded guilty to hiding what appears to have been early 2016 real estate negotiations for a property in Moscow, and of committing apparently unrelated crimes to affect the election illicitly by covering up the candidate’s affairs in the weeks before the election. The Southern District of New York – filing at the same time and in clear cooperation with the special prosecutor, but not working directly for him – overtly said it could prove Trump’s complicity in crimes. Trump is tagged “Individual 1.”

Part VI: United States of America v. Roger Jason Stone, Jr.

Currently in the barrel is Roger Stone, a longtime supporter of Trump’s political career and an old business partner of Manafort. Stone has a colorful backstory of extensive wrongdoing, but his indictment is laser-focused on conversations he had with a known Russian intelligence cutout in the summer and fall of 2016, and the crimes and lies he tried to use to hide those conversations. This indictment mentions the Trump campaign by name, and it includes a lot of specific conduct by individuals who are not named but are nonetheless readily identifiable. The document is succinct, clinical, clear as a bell. But it leaves one omission which leaped out screaming at just about everyone who read the whole document.

[A] senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact STONE about any additional releases and what other damaging information Organization 1 had regarding the Clinton Campaign.  

If you’ve taken high school English, you already know the million ruble question. “Was directed”? Who gave that direction? The indictment doesn’t say.

If you’re trying to avoid drawing conclusions the way a newscaster might, you would probably think it was not another senior campaign officer – otherwise, why not refer to them as “Senior Campaign Officer 2”? – but still someone important enough to boss around a senior campaign officer. Maybe if the candidate had adult family members who were not given official positions on the campaign, they would be suspects – though only because they could reasonably be assumed to be speaking for the most likely culprit. The simplest explanation for They-Who-Must-Not-Be-Pseudonymed is the most dramatic one. The candidate is not a senior campaign officer. The candidate is the candidate.

We don’t have all the facts yet. The only thing we can be sure of is that the special prosecutor has, quite deliberately, not yet shown this particular card.

But if you’ve taken high school English, you have a pretty good idea about the answer.

Okay, the genre snob reviewers might say it’s a little heavy-handed. Personally, I’ve always felt that subtlety is overrated.