News Analysis by Lee Smith,
RealClearInvestigations
Published Monday, Oct 7, 2019 The Trump-Ukraine whistleblower furor is explained by Trump opponents' fear of the President's determination to get to the bottom of an underhanded years-long campaign arrayed against him - one in which Ukraine always figured heavily, Lee Smith reports for RealClearInvestigations. Smith, a longtime RCI contributor, is the author of a book out this month, "The Plot Against the President." And he's won wide notice and vindication for his against-the-grain skepticism about Trump-Russia collusion - a theory ultimately debunked by Robert Mueller's long and costly investigation. (Examples of Smith's early, prescient reporting for RCI can be foundhere,here,here, andhere.) Now Smith reports the ways Whistlegate -- in which Trump supposedly sicced Ukraine on Joe Biden in return for military aid -- actually looks like Russiagate by other means. Key points: - In both cases, Trump is alleged to have taken or solicited dirt on his Democratic opponent from a foreign power in exchange for favors to that country's government.
- It was understandable that once Trump was cleared by the Mueller Report, the President would urge Ukraine's new leader to investigate Trump-Russia's origins, Smith writes -- because Ukraine always figured in that disproven narrative in major ways.
- Fusion GPS, the Democrat-hired opposition research firm behind the spurious Steele dossier, also circulated two previously undisclosed dossiers on Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and Ukraine.
- Democrats asked Ukraine's leaders to help dig up dirt on Trump and his associates in 2016 and then publicly denounce him.
- When Democrats discovered shady dealings in Ukraine by Manafort, they advanced a narrative that made Trump guilty by association.
- Without evidence, they argued that because one of Manafort's clients, Ukraine's former President Viktor Yanukovych, was supposedly close to Putin, Trump was also in Putin's pocket.
- This narrative ignored Manafort's urging Yanukovych to forge close ties with the European Union instead of Russia.
- It also ignored the fact that the Ukrainian energy company that paid Joe Biden's son up to $50,000 a month was run by one of Yanukovych's allies.
Though many have forgotten it now (and anti-Trump media are loathe to bring it up), the questionable Trump-Manafort-Ukraine argument was advanced by intelligence officials and Clinton operatives through media leaks as a keystone to the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. So the current Ukraine furor looks like old wine in new bottles, Smith concludes. But why the repackaging? Smith answers: "Anti-Trump forces in the government and media are working to vindicate their previous efforts and discredit a forthcoming Justice Department inquiry into the origins of Russiagate by again connecting Trump and a foreign power to a U.S. election." |
