Some of us still think the film Bulworth remains a lodestone for the analysis of contemporary politics.
High Holy Days, Batman, the details of the Manafort filing make for some interesting descriptions of how Eastern European disinformation campaigns operate. We’ll know more when Konstantin Kilimnik shows up for an interview on Russian television, saying how he loves Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge.
The new information recounts a melange of deception, chicanery, and skullduggery, with Manafort orchestrating lobbyists, lawyers, and politicians in the United States and around the globe on behalf of the party of Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych (who fled Ukraine for Russia in 2014) and encouraging them all to lie about who was pulling the strings: Manafort and his Ukrainian paymasters. The case is strong, and Mueller’s team seemingly caught Manafort in a multitude of lies. The information basically covers all the charges Manafort faced in both trials. That is, by agreeing to this, Manafort is saying, everything Mueller alleged was true, this was no witch hunt, he got me, I was a big-time criminal.
www.motherjones.com/...
It’s all a “weekend research project” complete with character assassination, and we may yet see some Hail Marys including some key firings from the WH. Will Hurricane Florence be used as cover as key members leave/get tossed.
Kenneth Vogel’s tweet thread below lays out how disinformation hardball works and that operating similar actions in 2016 with the RNC, altering the platform plank on Ukraine don’t seem so far-fetched.
Note that the NY Times anonymous Op-Ed on the adults in charge at the WH has some similar elements considering how it was timed as disinformation to divert from the Woodward book and this latest Manafort trial development.
BAD FOR GREG CRAIG: His white shoe law firm @SKADDEN_ARPS accepted $4M from MANAFORT through overseas accounts to write whitewash report on YANOKOVYCH while privately expressing doubts about the report & also secretly working more broadly for Yanukovych's pro-Russian regime.
DIRTY: MANAFORT orchestrated a scheme to have, "[O]bama jews,” as he described them, pressure the OBAMA administration to support his pro-Russian client YANUKOVYCH by "spreading stories in the US that a senior Cabinet official" was abetting antisemitism by supporting TYMOSHENKO.
BAD FOR @PODESTAGROUP: Emails suggest that the lobbying firm knew all along that their work was for the pro-Russian government of Ukraine, & not a non-profit group, per new info from MUELLER, which calls into question Podesta's basis for not registering under FARA.
PODESTA & MERCURY KNEW: New MUELLER info shows that the firms knew the non-profit they were representing was a front for MANAFORT's pro-Russian client. A Mercury employee said the set-up was "like Alice in Wonderland.” A Podesta employee called it “a fig leaf on a fig leaf.”
When @TheJusticeDept confronted MANAFORT & GATES about their unregistered foreign lobbying back in 2016, they told a series of brazen lies to DOJ's FARA unit, per MUELLER, who methodically chronicled the lies here:
MORE BIG NAMES ENTANGLED IN MUELLER PROBE: 2012 memo from MANAFORT to GATES, KILIMNIK & @alanfriedmanit laying out a "Ukraine Action Plan for Europe & the US" indicates that PR giants @Fleishman & @BMUKNews also worked on Manafort-directed Ukraine effort.
HERE IT IS: PAUL MANAFORT'S PLEA AGREEMENT: including a cooperation section.