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." |