Trump/Russia, Trump/Ukraine, Same As It Ever Was Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

Trump/Russia, Trump/Ukraine, Same As It Ever Was

Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 1h

Contemporary Ukraine and Russia are filled with multiple layers of corruption and political intrigue. The totality of their porous and entangled relationship with each other and with the United States over the last 5 years is difficult to summarize or convey simply. But there are broad outlines that are critical to understand and take account of. To put it simply, soon after the 2016 campaign ended, Trump and Co went back into business with the same cast of characters from the former Soviet Union they’d been working with on election assistance and business deals through 2015 and 2016. Only now the goal wasn’t election interference. It was trying to prove the election interference campaign they’d both been part of had actually never happened. Perhaps ‘going back into business’ misstates the matter. It never ended.

The whole 2016 Russian election interference campaign was tightly connected to the events of 2014 in Ukraine – the overthrow of the Russia-aligned Yanukovych government, the Russian seizure of Crimea and the Western sanctions that came in their wake. The campaign was run by Russia but in large part carried out by Russian and Russia-aligned Ukrainian oligarchs who had lost out in the events of 2014 because they were allied with the Russian government and the business interests around it. Fast forward to today and we have a new scandal over the Trump White House using extortion to get the current Ukraine government to intervene on President Trump’s behalf in the 2020 election.

But today and 2016 aren’t two things. They are the same story. Trump and Giuliani and Trump’s entourage teamed up with the people behind the 2016 campaign or their associates to disprove the 2016 campaign had ever happened. If gaslighting is the leitmotif of Trumpism this is the Ur-example. Indeed, the core Trump conspiracy theory – that he and Russia were framed for the 2016 interference campaign by Ukraine and the DNC – was itself first concocted and propagated by Russian propaganda outlets in late 2016 as the outlines of their effort were being reported in the US media.

As is so often the case, the story goes back to Paul Manafort, Trump’s life-on-the-skids 2016 campaign manager. Recent reporting has shown the effort to tar the Bidens went along with and actually originated in an effort to discredit the prosecution of Paul Manafort. Why this was so important and why Trump & Co were so committed to it must remain a topic of speculation – was it to upend the Mueller probe or lay the groundwork for a pardon? But it began with an effort to exonerate Manafort and it quickly enlisted Manafort’s former associates and business partners in Ukraine for the effort. Manafort maintained contact with Trump through the first half of 2017 and his and the President’s legal team had a joint defense agreement with the President’s lawyers that, unbelievably, continued through the period when he was nominally cooperating with the Mueller probe. Whatever the motivation for exonerating Manafort and Russia, it is highly likely he was the person who put Giuliani and Trump with the cast of characters we’re now seeing in headlines each day.

A key example here is Dmitry Firtash, perhaps Ukraine’s most notorious and powerful oligarch, who was a big loser in the overthrow of the Yanukovych government. Firtash was reportedly instrumental in getting Manafort his job working for Yanukovych in the first place back in 2005. They were also business partners in a billion dollar real estate deal that came apart in 2008 because it coincided with the financial crisis. Firtash had to flee Ukraine after the 2014 revolution and he was indicted in the US on corruption charges soon after. He has been living in Austria ever since, fighting extradition to the United States.

The steady stream of affidavits and interviews and other documents which have been hyped by Rudy Giuliani and published in reports by John Solomon mostly or all seem to go back to people working for Firtash or importuned by him. For instance, the affidavit sworn out by the former state prosecutor claiming he was fired for investigating the Bidens was done at the behest of Firtash. Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing, Trump’s on-again, off-again lawyers who routinely appear on Fox News to push these conspiracy theories recently signed on to represent Firtash. The two hustler-pals of Rudy Giuliani who were arrested last week, Lev Parnas and Igor Frumin, happened to be on Firtash’s payroll while also working as part of Trump’s legal defense team and also working for DiGenova and Toensing.

As you can see, the swirl of connections and alliances at work here are byzantine and hard to follow. Certainly everyone has a range of motives. With Firtash himself I assume his primary motive is to curry favor with President Trump in order to get out of under the US criminal charges and extradition proceedings. Many of the other players – like the fired prosecutor Shokin – are simply hustlers and crooks, with no fixed allegiances, who know what Trump wants and are eager to give it to him. But the gist of it all is that from early on in the Mueller probe Trump and Co got into bed with the same swirl of people who were behind the 2016 interference campaign, or their allies and business partners, with a new goal: to prove the interference campaign had never happened, that Trump and Russia had been framed by Ukraine and the DNC. Or to put it another way, that the interference campaign had actually been the handiwork of the campaign’s primary victims. That has continued down until today. Everything that is now driving the White House toward impeachment is just an outgrowth of that continuing effort. It never ended.

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