By Patrick
Donald Trump soldiers on, and has great success so far on his mission to destroy the GOP. After this election, there won't be much left any more, as the Republicans are quickly falling apart.
So who is the Donald working for? "Many people say" that he is secretly working for the Russians. This might actually be quite close to the truth,
For example, the "New York Times" revealed in an already historic story that his current campaign chief Paul Manafort was deeply involved in the corrupt practices of the former Ukrainian pro-Russian party, which was called "Party of Regions."
Excerpt:
The papers, known in Ukraine as the “black ledger,” are a chicken-scratch of Cyrillic covering about 400 pages taken from books once kept in a third-floor room in the former Party of Regions headquarters on Lipskaya Street in Kiev. The room held two safes stuffed with $100 bills, said Taras V. Chornovil, a former party leader who was also a recipient of the money at times. He said in an interview that he had once received $10,000 in a “wad of cash” for a trip to Europe.
A page from the “black ledger,” released by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau. This page does not include Mr. Manafort’s name. “This was our cash,” he said, adding that he had left the party in part over concerns about off-the-books activity. “They had it on the table, stacks of money, and they had lists of who to pay.”
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau, which obtained the ledger, said in a statement that Mr. Manafort’s name appeared 22 times in the documents over five years, with payments totaling $12.7 million. The purpose of the payments is not clear. Nor is the outcome, since the handwritten entries cannot be cross-referenced against banking records, and the signatures for receipt have not yet been verified.
“Paul Manafort is among those names on the list of so-called ‘black accounts of the Party of Regions,’ which the detectives of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine are investigating,” the statement said. “We emphasize that the presence of P. Manafort’s name in the list does not mean that he actually got the money, because the signatures that appear in the column of recipients could belong to other people.”
The accounting records surfaced this year, when Serhiy A. Leshchenko, a member of Parliament who said he had received a partial copy from a source he did not identify, published line items covering six months of outlays in 2012 totaling $66 million. In an interview, Mr. Leshchenko said another source had provided the entire multiyear ledger to Viktor M. Trepak, a former deputy director of the domestic intelligence agency of Ukraine, the S.B.U., who passed it to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau.
There is actually more shocking revelations contained in this important story by the New York Times:
In a recent interview, Serhiy V. Gorbatyuk, Ukraine’s special prosecutor for high-level corruption cases, pointed to an open file on his desk containing paperwork for one of the shell companies, Milltown Corporate Services Ltd., which played a central role in the state’s purchase of two oil derricks for $785 million, or about double what they were said to be worth.
“This,” he said, “was an offshore used often by Mr. Yanukovych’s entourage.”
The role of the offshore companies in business dealings involving Mr. Manafort came to light because of court filings in the Cayman Islands and in a federal court in Virginia related to an investment fund, Pericles Emerging Markets. Mr. Manafort and several partners started the fund in 2007, and its major backer was Mr. Deripaska, the Russian mogul, to whom the State Department has refused to issue a visa, apparently because of allegations linking him to Russian organized crime, a charge he has denied.
Mr. Deripaska agreed to commit as much as $100 million to Pericles so it could buy assets in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, including a regional cable television and communications company called Black Sea Cable. But corporate records and court filings show that it was hardly a straightforward transaction.
The Black Sea Cable assets were controlled by a rotating cast of offshore companies that led back to the Yanukovych network, including, at various times, Milltown Corporate Services and two other companies well known to law enforcement officials, Monohold A.G. and Intrahold A.G. Those two companies won inflated contracts with a state-run agricultural company, and also acquired a business center in Kiev with a helicopter pad on the roof that would ease Mr. Yanukovych’s commute from his country estate to the presidential offices.
So Paul Manafort can comfortably be linked to organized crime in Russia. Pretty amazing indeed. This is the (current) campaign chief for the presidential candidate of the Republican party. If somebody would write something like this in a novel, it would probably be dismissed as "science fiction."
In any case, Donald Trump is losing really, really badly:
Why? Because Trump is a big fat joke - Stephen Colbert totally nailed it two weeks ago:
But there is more. If you want an even more shocking look at the "real Donald", watch this interview with investigative journalist David Cay Johnston, published five days ago:
Donald Trump will apparently receive his first intelligence briefing tomorrow, and Putin-enemy Garry Kasparov had some stinging comments on twitter:
More from Kasparov on this topic today:
However, absolutely nothing is too bizarre these days!
A Republican candidate who is a fan of infamous conspiray theorist Alex Jones?
Who surrounds himself with Putin-loving people?
Also, bizarrly, Trump advisor Michael T. Flynn now claims to that the Russian propaganda channel "Russia Today (RT)"....
...is just like "CNN", and Flynn also seems to have no idea between the difference of a "state-run-network" like RT and a private channel like CNN:
Quote:
PRIEST: Tell me about the RT [state-run Russian Television] relationship?
FLYNN: I was asked by my speaker’s bureau, LAI. I do public speaking. It was in Russia. It was a paid speaking opportunity. I get paid so much. The speaker’s bureau got paid so much, based on our contract.
PRIEST: Can you tell me how much you got for that?
FLYNN: No.
PRIEST: No? Because you don’t want to get your fees out there?
FLYNN: Yeah, I don’t.
PRIEST: What was the gig?
FLYNN: The gig was to do an interview with [RT correspondent] Sophie Shevardnadze. It was an interview in front of the forum, probably 200 people in the audience. My purpose there was I was asked to talk about radical Islam in the Middle East. They asked me to talk about what was going on in the situation unfolding in the Middle East. … The speaking agreement was done before Russian went into Syria, which was actually more interesting to me because … one of my discussions, I talked about the attacks in France … and the negative role that Iran was playing where I thought Russian could actually have a role. The statement that I made was actually: “Russia ought to get Iran to back out of the proxy wars they are involved in,” to include Syria, so we, the rest of the international community, could settle this situation down.
PRIEST: Have you appeared on RT regularly?
FLYNN: I appear on Al Jazeera, Skye New Arabia, RT. I don’t get paid a dime. I have no media contracts. … [I am interviewed] on CNN, Fox …
PRIEST: Why would you go on RT, they’re state run?
FLYNN: Well, what’s CNN?
PRIEST: Well, it’s not run by the state. You’re rolling your eyes.
FLYNN: Well, what’s MSNBC? I mean, come on … what’s Al Jazeera? What’s Sky News Arabia? I have been asked by multiple organizations to be a [paid] contributor but I don’t want to be.
PRIEST: Because you don’t want to be hamstrung?
FLYNN: That’s right. I want to be able to speak freely about what I believe. There’s a lot of people who would actually like to be able to do that but, for whatever reason, they can’t. … I feel pretty passionate about what’s happening to the country
PRIEST: One more thing about Russia …
FLYNN: A lot of people are making this about Russia. Read my book. You’ll see what I say about Russia.
PRIEST: Let me ask about sitting next to Putin … because that’s the symbol.
FLYNN: Yeah, I know, boring.
PRIEST: But did you think about what the optics would be …
FLYNN: Sure. I didn’t have any problem. What I’m looking for is to make sure, in my view, I see a country that has lost respect for another country and if I have any sort of fiber in my body where I can help out to make sure they understand that we have people in our country who aren’t going to apologize for who we are.
We’re not going to act in a soft way for what we believe needs to be done. I was very adamant about what I said. He knows exactly what I said.
Let's give the last word to Garry Kasparov:
Yep, that sounds just like Donald Trump. Or Putin. They are just very hard to distinguish. These are bizarre times indeed.
