Why the
Russian government would try to interfere with the US election to Trump’s favor is is genuinely alarming.
…just one week after Donald’s alarming comments about NATO and his advisers having successfully weakened the Republican Party’s platform with respect to Ukraine, reneging on a promise to provide aid to the Ukrainians in their struggle against Russian aggression.
There have long been questions about some of Donald’s advisers’ ties to foreign governments. In particular, his campaign co-chair Paul Manafort has built a career specializing in working for arms dealers, dictators, and foreign oligarchs. He was “for many years on the payroll of the Putin-backed former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych.”
In April, Franklin Foer wrote an extensive profile of Manafort in which Foer details Manafor’s decades-long relationship with Trump, which has spanned the former’s career of advising tyrants around the globe. In the piece, he recalls the time that Manafort “snookered” John McCain into aiding him in “undermining American policy.”
Manafort’s business partner, lobbyist Rick Davis, was one of McCain’s top advisers. Manafort’s and Davis’ work in Ukraine was so concerning that, in 2008, a staffer on the National Security Council called McCain to ask him to help dial back Manafort and Davis, because, “by promoting enemies of the Orange Revolution, they were undermining American policy.” But McCain had already been taken in by them.
That year, the pair had consulted on behalf of pro-independence forces in the tiny principality of Montenegro, which wanted to exit Serbia and become its own sovereign republic. On the surface, this sounded noble enough, so noble that McCain called Montenegro’s independence the “greatest European democracy project since the end of the Cold War.”
A report in the Nation, however, showed that the Montenegrin campaign wasn’t remotely what McCain described. The independence initiative was championed by a fantastically wealthy Russian mogul called Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska had parochial reasons for promoting independence. He had just purchased Montenegro’s aluminum industry and intended to buy broader swaths of its economy. But he was also doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin, on whose good graces the fate of all Russian business ultimately hangs. The Nation quoted Deripaska boasting that “the Kremlin wanted an area of influence in the Mediterranean.”
Manafort and Davis, who was running McCain’s campaign at the time, manipulated the Republican nominee to lend his support, under the auspices of “Yeah, freedom!” to a geopolitical event designed to enrich Putin and his allies.
And now, two presidential cycles later, Manafort is running Trump’s campaign. Trump is much less politically savvy than McCain, so if McCain could be that easily exploited, Manafort is able to manipulate Trump effortlessly.
Moreover, McCain was not deeply indebted to Russian money-lenders with ties to Putin. As
TPM details, “Trump appears to have a deep financial dependence on Russian money from persons close to Putin. …There is also something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of evidence suggesting Putin-backed financial support for Trump or a non-tacit alliance between the two men.”
That is the result of Trump’s multiple business failures and bankruptcies. Despite relentlessly boasting about his business acumen, which is singularly cited as his qualification for the presidency, he is, in fact, not regarded as skilled and competent by US banks, who refuse to lend to him. So now he must depend on foreign cash to fund his business ventures.
And if Donald Trump is beholden to Putin and his allies, it should alarm the ever-loving bejesus of all of us that Russian government hackers appear to meddling in the US election in order to install Trump.