Financial Times Ukraine meddling US election
Russia, Ukraine, US Politics November 23, 2019
Yes, Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election
Meddling in the 2016 US presidential election by Ukrainian politicians and
government agencies did indeed happen. No amount of denial is going to
change that.
By Yasha Levine
This article was originally published at Immigrants as a Weapon. Subscribe
to Yasha Levine's newsletter here.
I know I've written about this before, but I feel like I have to address it
again - seeing how just about every impeachment witness has repeated the
claim that meddling by Ukrainian government officials did not happen in 2016
and that anyone who says otherwise is spreading toxic Russian propaganda.
I've been dipping into these hearings every now and again and've seen this
said over and over. It reminds me of those new age quantum-mind-over-matter
types in the The Secret: Repeat the mantra often enough and convince
yourself it's true and.it is!
Let's start with a fact: Meddling in the 2016 election by Ukrainian
politicians and government agencies happened.
The above is true and no amount of denial is going to change that. What's
more: Ukrainian nationals didn't just meddle on their own, they also worked
with Americans - including Ukrainian-American political operatives on the
payroll of the Democratic Party. Not only did all this happen, it was
written up as fact by establishment papers and outlets as varied as Yahoo,
Politico, and the Financial Times in 2016 on the eve of the election. (See
this by me here.)
The involvement of Ukrainian pols and officials in all of this has never
been secret. It was acknowledged at the time. The principle actors openly
talked and bragged about their exploits in the press. And why not? Back in
2016, no one thought that Trump would win the presidency. So why bother
hiding it?
If the "Ukraine meddled in 2016 is Russian propaganda" claim is right, time
to cancel your subscription to the Financial Times and get the FBI on their
case.
One of the best examples of this is the plot to take down Paul Manafort -
the sleazy Republican political consultant who had long worked in Ukraine
and who headed Donald's Trump campaign.
In 2016, Serhiy Leshchenko, a Ukrainian member of parliament and an
anti-corruption activist (who got embroiled in his own corruption scandal),
coordinated the release of a handwritten ledger. The document purported to
show off-the-book payments made to Manafort from the Party of the Regions -
the political arm of the Viktor Yanukovich, the Ukrainian President who had
been overthrown in a coup-type revolt by a much more western-friendly
political faction. The ledger itself was released by NABU, a Ukrainian
government anti-corruption organization set up as result of prodding by the
Obama Administration and which was run with the backing and financial
support of the FBI.
(As an aside: NABU - which also got embroiled into its own political
corruption scandal - also happens to be at the heart of an internal
Ukrainian political fight that sucked in ex-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.
But that's a different and complicated story. And then there's the weird
angle of the FBI being so closely involved with NABU at a time when this
Ukrainian anti-corruption agency decided to involve itself in an American
election.)
Anyway, Leshchenko - a foreign politician - made clear that his objective at
the time was to kill off Trump's candidacy. That's a direct admission of
meddling. As Oleksiy Kuzmenko has documented so well, Leshchenko repeated
this statement in various ways in both English and Ukrainian over and over
again.
Lev Golinkin explained in the Nation a few months ago that the release of
that ledger by Leshchenko and NABU was an important event - and a direct
intervention in the election. "The story rocked the 2016 election, given
Manafort's position as head of Trump's campaign. The Hillary Clinton
campaign immediately seized on it as proof that Manafort-and therefore
Trump-was tied to Yanukovych and the Kremlin," he wrote. "Manafort was
ousted based on handwritten pieces of paper-the story would've never gone
anywhere without NABU and Leshchenko's vouching for the ledger's
authenticity. That's as direct as it gets."
But three years later, this episode has been wiped from the collective
memory of our media and political establishment. What used to be fact is now
smeared as either a pro-Trump rightwing conspiracy theory or Russian
propaganda - and probably both. But saying that it didn't happen doesn't
change the historical record.
Mark Ames makes a very good point: All this outside meddling didn't swing
the election, but it did help us learn something useful about our own
political process. The hacking of email accounts belonging to the John
Podesta and the Democratic National Committee revealed to Americans the
corruption of the Democratic Party, including the way that the primaries are
run. And leaks about Manafort revealed the corruption inside Trump campaign
(if anyone doubted it in the first place) and ultimately sent a corrupt
scumbag lobbyist to jail for tax evasion.
But this burst of transparency hasn't done much good. Instead of reckoning
with the fundamental rot in our political establishment and our political
culture, all we've gotten is this non-stop selective outrage - a spectacle
that puts Trump and his cronies and a foreign power at the center of
everything that's wrong domestically in America. But the problems are larger
than Trump and they sure are larger than whatever foreign meddling may have
occurred - whether from Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, Israel, or any of the other
foreign and business interests that are constantly jockeying to sway the
world's most powerful empire.
Yasha Levine headshot
Yasha Levine
Yasha Levine is an investigative journalist and a founding editor of The
eXiled Online. His latest book is "Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military
History of the Internet."
