Buried Lede … all time record
They got the goods, but some editor made them semi bury them.
By Mark Mazzetti, Eric Lipton* and Andrew E. Kramer note that the first shipment of Javelin missiles to Ukraine was mysteriously held up by the OMB until April 2018 when then prosecutor general Yurii Lutsenko froze the investigation of Paul Manafort. This isn’t a scoop. Both events were reported at the time.
To me the odd thing is that the key evidence is reported in the second to last sentence of the article. The two references to April 2018 are separated by Ten (10) paragraphs. In any case, the facts are devastating for Trump
Near the end of 2017, just as the government in Kiev was trying to get final approval from the Trump administration on the sale of the Javelin anti-tank weapons, Mr. Poroshenko’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, had begun freezing cases in Ukraine relevant to the Mueller investigation, including an inquiry tracing millions of dollars that Ukrainian political figures paid to Mr. Manafort.
The other two involved the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, which wrote a report with Mr. Manafort’s help that came to be seen as whitewashing the arrest and imprisonment of a Ukrainian politician.
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No evidence has surfaced of an earlier quid pro quo of making the Javelin missile sale contingent on the halting of investigations relevant to the Mueller inquiry.
Except for the timing which makes it very clear what happened (it was clear at the time, but no one was interested)
Mr. Lutsenko took further steps to slow walk the Ukrainian cases related to the Mueller investigation in November and gave an official order to freeze them in April 2018.
One examined possible money laundering in a $750,000 payment to Mr. Manafort from a Ukrainian shell company. Another scrutinized a Ukrainian politician who signed entries designated for Mr. Manafort in a secret ledger of political payoffs uncovered after the 2014 revolution in Ukraine.
The other two involved the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, which wrote a report with Mr. Manafort’s help that came to be seen as whitewashing the arrest and imprisonment of a Ukrainian politician.
[skip]
the White House Office of Management and Budget briefly held up the weapons sale after the Pentagon and the State Department had both approved it. The reason for the holdup, first reported by The Daily Beast, is unclear.
The logjam eventually broke, and in April 2018 the first of 210 Javelins and 35 launching units were shipped to Ukraine.
The second “April 2018” is in the second to last sentence in the article.
*by the way Mr Lipton is one of two (2) people who have blocked me on twitter. The other is David Sirota (of course). I would congratulate him on a job well done, but I enjoy being blocked.
Trump used these missiles as his carrot for a long, long time.
It goes back further than that. The Ukraine story was an alibi dreamed up during the campaign.
“”The massive document-dump of material from Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian ratfcking that popped on Buzzfeed and CNN over the weekend is far too extensive to analyze thoroughly in one blog, but the overwhelming conclusion to which anyone reading the documents has to arrive is that there no longer is The Russian Story and The Ukraine Story, but only one story—the Russian Ratfcking and Volga Bagmen story—that leads directly to the president*’s 2016 campaign, to his administration*, and, ultimately, to his liability to impeachment and removal from office.
It is plain that the whole enterprise by which the Russian ratfckers would be shielded from suspicion by having that suspicion instead cast upon Ukraine—the fantastical theory that lay behind the president*’s extortionate demand of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—was a crucial part of the strategy by which the Russian ratfckers would assist the president*’s 2016 campaign. It was the alibi-in-reserve, and it was deployed.
‘In an April 2018 interview with the special counsel’s office, Rick Gates, who had served as deputy Trump campaign chair and had long been Paul Manafort’s right hand, told investigators that after the campaign learned the DNC had been hacked, Manafort pushed the theory that Ukraine, not Russia, had orchestrated the attack. It’s a conspiracy theory that’s persisted in right-wing circles, even after the US Intelligence Community concluded Russia was involved, and one that Trump brought up in his July 2019 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
In a written memorandum of the July call released by the White House, Trump at one point says to Zelensky, “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike… I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has it.”
The documents also present a strong case that limiting the impeachment inquiry, and rushing it to a conclusion, likely will guarantee that we get only half of the story, at best. For example, the revelation in the documents that Konstantin Kilimnik dreamed up the Ukraine diversion not only hauls us again into The Many Lives of Paul Manafort, but also it shows the vast parameters of what should be investigated until every bit of it is unearthed. If that takes us a decade after we are mercifully freed from this venomous ball of snakes in one way or another, then so be it.”
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a29685425/robert-mueller-memos-russia-ukraine-trump/
I don’t have the time, but if you search the 2016 wayback archives for Sputnik (“news” outlet) you’ll probably find the source.