Trump Campaign Chairman Gets Millions from Putin Stooge

According to a secret ledger found in Ukraine, Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's campaign chairman, received $12.7 million in cash payments:

Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau. Investigators assert that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials.

(The ledger is written in Russian, not Ukrainian, by the way.)

Manafort has acknowledged working for Viktor F. Yanukovych, the corrupt Ukrainian strongman who was ousted by pro-Western parties two years ago. Manafort did the same think for Yanukovych that he's doing for Trump:

Before he fled to Russia two years ago, Mr. Yanukovych and his Party of Regions relied heavily on the advice of Mr. Manafort and his firm, who helped them win several elections. During that period, Mr. Manafort never registered as a foreign agent with the United States Justice Department — as required of those seeking to influence American policy on behalf of foreign clients — although one of his subcontractors did.

It is unclear if Mr. Manafort’s activities necessitated registering. If they were limited to advising the Party of Regions in Ukraine, he probably would not have had to. But he also worked to burnish his client’s image in the West and helped Mr. Yanukovych’s administration draft a report defending its prosecution of his chief rival, Yulia V. Tymoshenko, in 2012. 

Manafort has a long history of selling foreign warlords, tyrants and regimes that abuse human rights to the U.S. government, including Phillipine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Angolan guerilla Jonas Savimbi, Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, Pakistan's ISI agency, and on and on.

Manafort also has ties to offshore shell corporations in the Cayman and Seychelles Islands that laundered money stolen by Ukrainian government cronies.

Trump has raised the ire of many in the Republican Party by praising Vladimir Putin and parroting Putin's Crimean claims. Trump's cronies removed language from the party platform against Russia's actions in Ukraine, though Trump claims he didn't know what they were doing (and foolishly I thought candidates and presidents were supposed to be in charge of these things).

Trump's coddling of Putin's designs in Ukraine and his intimations that he would do nothing if Russia invaded NATO countries are anathema to Republicans: they have built an entire mythology around Ronald Reagan standing up to the Soviet Union.

It makes absolutely no sense for Trump to back away from that history. He sounds like a Russian apologist and a Putin puppet, not the heir to Reagan. Granted, the fall of the Soviet Union had much more to do with Gorbachov's policy of glasnost, the fallout from the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the weakness of the Russian economic system, but at least Reagan was on the side of democracy and freedom. Trump cares nothing about justice and liberty; his only interest seems to be the exercise of naked power.

To all appearances, Trump's strings are being pulled by Manafort, who has long-standing financial and political ties to Russian oligarchs. The Times reports that Manafort's company was still active earlier this year helping the Russian-backed Ukrainian opposition. That would mean Manafort is working on two political campaigns at the same time: Trump's and the enemies of Ukrainian democracy.

Trump himself has connections to Russian mobster and convicted felon Felix Sater. Trump, who says he has such a fabulous memory, claimed in court not to know Sater. Yet here Trump is with him (on the right) at the unveiling of the Trump SoHo in 2007.

The other guy in the photo, Tevfik Arif, was also involved in the Trump SoHo deal. He was recently arrested in Turkey for running a high-priced prostitution ring, in which Eastern European models (the sort of woman Trump favors, like Ivana and Melania) had trysts with wealthy businessmen aboard Kemal Ataturk's yacht.

These are the sort of people that Trump associates with. Trump's history of praising dictators and murders (like the Chinese government that engineered the Tiananmen Square Massacre) show exactly why he should never be president.