Impeachment 101: Trump Joined at the Hip and Controls Others Plus One Truism

Finally, Trump Speaks One Factual Truth

The major story is here from Politico – extensive and very long and detailed (January 11, 2017 – nine days before Trump was sworn into office).

I nitpicked highlights as follows the GOP is milking it for all it’s worth calling it “the DNC-Chalupa Advisor, Hacking, and Hillary Clinton 2016 Election Interference Connection” (my label) with this story headline:

Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire

“Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect (Trump) after quietly working to boost Clinton”

Introduction from the Politico article:

Donald Trump wasn’t the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by officials of a former Soviet bloc country.

Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.

A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the DNC met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in DC in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort, and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

Related: Dirty tricksters in Ukraine worked overtime to get on Trump’s good side with help from this DC lobbying firm – BGR.

The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of DNC emails. 

Russia’s effort was personally directed by Vladimir Putin that involved the country’s military and foreign intelligence services, according to all U.S. intelligence officials who also reportedly briefed Trump last week on the possibility that Russian operatives might have compromising information on the president-elect (Note: the so-called “Steele Dossier”).

At a Senate hearing last week on the hacking, DNI chief, James Clapper said: “I don't think we've ever encountered a more aggressive or direct campaign to interfere in our election process than we've seen in this case.”

There’s little evidence of a top-down effort by Ukraine. Longtime observers suggest that the rampant corruption, factionalism, and economic struggles plaguing the country — not to mention its ongoing strife with Russia — would render it unable to pull off an ambitious covert interference campaign in another country’s election. 

Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko, his administration, and the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, all insist that Ukraine stayed neutral in the 2016 race.

Politico’s investigation found evidence of Ukrainian government involvement in the race that appears to strain diplomatic protocol dictating that governments refrain from engaging in one another’s elections.

Russia’s meddling has sparked outrage from American body politic. The IC undertook the rare move of publicizing its findings on the matter, and President Obama took several steps to officially retaliate. Members of Congress continue pushing for more investigations into the hacking and a harder line against Russia, which was already viewed in Washington as America’s leading foreign adversary.

Ukraine, on the other hand, has traditionally enjoyed strong relations with U.S. administrations. Ukrainian officials worry that could change under Trump, whose team has privately expressed sentiments ranging from ambivalence to deep skepticism about Poroshenko’s regime, while sounding unusually friendly notes about Putin’s regime.

Poroshenko is scrambling to alter that dynamic, recently signing a $50,000-a-month contract with a well-connected GOP-linked Washington lobbying firm to set up meetings with U.S. government officials “to strengthen U.S.-Ukrainian relations.”

Revelations about Ukraine’s anti-Trump efforts could further set back those efforts.

The Ukrainian antipathy for Trump’s team — and alignment with Clinton’s — can be traced back to late 2013. That’s when the country’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, whom Manafort had been advising, abruptly backed out of a European Union pact linked to anti-corruption reforms. 

Instead, Yanukovych entered into a multibillion-dollar bailout agreement with Russia, sparking protests across Ukraine and prompting Yanukovych to flee the country to Russia under Putin’s protection. In the ensuing crisis, Russian troops moved into the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, and Manafort dropped off the radar.

Manafort’s work for Yanukovych caught the attention of a veteran Democratic operative named Alexandra Chalupa, who had worked in the White House Office Public Liaison during the Clinton administration. Chalupa went on to work as a staffer, then as a consultant, for the DNC, and they paid her $412,000 from 2004 to June 2016, according to FEC records.

However, she also was paid by other clients during that time, including Democratic campaigns and the DNC’s arm for engaging expatriate Democrats around the world.

Chalupa is the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who maintain strong ties to the Ukrainian-American diaspora and the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine. Chalupa, a lawyer by training, and in 2014 was doing pro bono work for another client interested in the Ukrainian crisis and began researching Manafort’s role in Yanukovych’s rise, as well as his ties to the pro-Russian oligarchs who funded Yanukovych’s political party.

In an interview, Chalupa told Politico she had developed a network of sources in Kiev and Washington, including investigative journalists, government officials, and private intelligence operatives. 

While her consulting work at the DNC this past election cycle centered on mobilizing ethnic communities — including Ukrainian-Americans — she said that, when Trump’s unlikely presidential campaign began surging in late 2015, she began focusing more on the research, and expanded it to include Trump’s ties to Russia, as well.

Chalupa said she occasionally shared her findings with officials from the DNC and Clinton’s campaign. In January 2016 — months before Manafort had taken any role in Trump’s campaign — Chalupa told a senior DNC official that, when it came to Trump’s campaign, “I felt there was a Russia connection. And that, if there was, that we can expect Paul Manafort to be involved in this election.” 

At the time, she was also warning leaders in the Ukrainian-American community that Manafort was “Putin’s political brain for manipulating U.S. foreign policy and elections.” She also said she shared her concern with Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., Valeriy Chaly, and one of his top aides, Oksana Shulyar, during a March 2016 meeting.

According to someone briefed on the meeting, Chaly said that Manafort was very much on his radar, but that he wasn’t particularly concerned about the operative’s ties to Trump since he didn’t believe Trump stood much of a chance of winning the GOP nomination, let alone the presidency.

That was not an uncommon view at the time, and, perhaps as a result, Trump’s ties to Russia — let alone Manafort’s — were not the subject of much attention. That all started to change just four days after Chalupa’s meeting at the embassy, when it was reported that Trump had in fact hired Manafort, suggesting that Chalupa may have been on to something.

She quickly found herself in high demand. The day after Manafort’s hiring was revealed, she briefed the DNC’s communications staff on Manafort, Trump and their ties to Russia, according to an operative familiar with the situation.

A former DNC staffer described the exchange as an “Informal conversation. Briefing makes it sound way too formal. We were not directing or driving her work on this.” 

Yet, the former DNC staffer and the operative familiar with the situation agreed that with the DNC’s encouragement, Chalupa asked embassy staff to try to arrange an interview in which Poroshenko might discuss Manafort’s ties to Yanukovych.

While the embassy declined that request, officials there became “helpful” in Chalupa’s efforts, she said, explaining that she traded information and leads with them. “If I asked a question, they would provide guidance, or if there was someone I needed to follow up with.  There were no documents given, nothing like that,” she stressed.

Chalupa said the embassy worked with reporters researching Trump, Manafort, and Russia to point them in the right directions.

She added, “They were being very protective and not speaking to the press as much as they should have. I think they were being careful because their situation was that they had to be very, very careful because they could not pick sides. It’s a political issue, and they didn’t want to get involved politically because they couldn’t.”

My 2 cents: Story continues at the links and I stop at this point due to the length. But, based on my selective reading and posting here I see nothing wrong or nefarious with Ms. Chalupa that the GOP and most Rightwing outlets try to twist it to mean. 

To me, she seems like a savvy investigator on the trail of Manafort and is antics and then Trump’s stance with and for Putin (i.e., Trump is was and remains staunchly against the IC announcement that the sole hacking was Russia and Putin’s doing) – the rest is history on this part.

The GOP and their Rightwing outlets are in a word reaching for straws and looking for zebras in the forest – they don’t live there.

More later on this part as the impeachment inquiry moves full speed ahead with one GOP goal: Protect Trump and GOP at all costs.

This story is related and more current from The New Yorker (2019) AND also this story from the Daily Beast (2017).

And Chalupa’s real successful mission here from the Kiev Post – brings her real story into full view – which the GOP will never agree to. 

She should be commended based on this extract: She is credited with getting Paul Manafort fired when he was managing Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. She also warned that Moscow would interfere in the election, but her accurate predictions were ignored at the time.

Thanks for stopping by.