US

Another staff shakeup for Trump and more Russian connections

For the second time since his nomination, Donald Trump has shaken up his campaign staff. He has brought in Steve Shannon, head of the pro-Trump website Breitbart News to be the CEO of his campaign.

This is presumably a rebuke of his campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who has been trying to get Trump to restrain himself and to act more presidential. Shannon, on the other hand, has been urging him to be his true outrageous self, which won him the Republican nomination.

Manafort, however, will remain at his post. Meanwhile, new information is coming out about his connection to Russian authoritarians and their operatives.

Conservative columnist Rich Lowry says that it’s as if Republicans have switched sides in the cold war!

From Rich Lowry, Trump’s Shady Fixer – POLITICO Magazine:

So much for the old accusation that the Republican Party has a “Cold War mentality.” Or if it still does, it has switched sides. . . .

Let’s consider the mind-bending reversals of the norms:

It is the outsider candidate who has a lobbyist at the heart of his campaign. And not the upstanding sort of lobbyist who merely persuades the Ways and Means Committee to bequeath tax loopholes on the likes of General Electric, but a truly sinister influence peddler who, by all accounts, made a mint working at the right hand of a small-time foreign thug and thief (Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych) who was the handmaiden of a big-time foreign thug and thief (Russia’s Vladimir Putin).

It is the candidate of the pro-Western party that traditionally champions strength abroad (i.e., the GOP), who is sending signals he wants to abandon our commitments to NATO and doing all he can to cozy up to a Russia that seeks to advance its interests at the cost of the interests — and the territorial integrity — of our allies.

It is the candidate of right-wing talk radio who has drawn a stirring defense from the left-wing magazine The Nation on grounds that he is the victim of “neo-McCarthyite” and “Kremlin-baiting” attacks.

It is the nationalist who is benefiting from the propaganda of the Russian media and whose prospects of winning the election may depend, in part, on an “October surprise” engineered by Russian intelligence or its associates. . . .

Paul Manafort always seemed like the kind of fixer whose name might turn up on a secret black ledger for off-the-books cash payments in a room with safes stuffed with $100 bills in some Eastern European country — but we didn’t know for sure until The New York Times reported this week that Manafort’s name appeared on just such a ledger for Yanukovych’s party in Ukraine.

According to the Times, the ledger has 22 entries for Manafort, totaling $12.7 million in payments from 2007 to 2012. Since the transparency of cash payments from corrupt, Kremlin-backed political parties doesn’t quite meet the strictures established by the International Accounting Standards Board, there is no proof that Manafort actually received the money.

For his part, Manafort is outraged at the suggestion of anything untoward, just because an apparatchik from a political party whose business model was plundering Ukraine happened — perhaps in a fit of absent-mindedness? in a transcription error? — to write his name nearly two dozen times next to specific money amounts.

What rotten luck. Manafort is prone to such misfortune. Documents establishing his role defending the prosecution of Yanukovych’s rival for the presidency were discovered in — of all places — a box in the sauna of a former leading Ukrainian official.

[Keep reading. . .]

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