off-guardian | After dragging the country through three years of Russiagate which
never panned out, the Democrats appear to be scoring yet another own
goal. Even a near brush with war against Iran does not seem to have
impacted Trump’s favorability, which could have been seen as a reversal
of his campaign pledges to end America’s forever wars that were arguably
a significant factor in his unlikely victory.
It was Trump’s rhetoric as a peace candidate suggesting rapprochement
with Russia which made him a target of the political establishment and
intelligence community, who subsequently blamed his shocking win on
still-unproven allegations of election interference by the Kremlin.
Since he took office, Trump has done nearly everything short of
declaring war on Moscow to appease the bipartisan anti-Russia consensus
in Washington but to no avail. One such step was the decision to provide
military aid to Ukraine amid its ongoing war in the eastern Donbass
region against Russian-speaking separatists, a move the Obama
administration decided against because of Kiev’s rampant corruption.
Trump’s predecessor tapped his Vice President, Joe Biden, to head up
an anti-corruption drive in Ukraine who instead used the opportunity to
personally enrich his family by landing his son, Hunter, a job on the
executive board of the country’s largest private gas company, Burisma
Holdings.
Biden led the U.S. role in the 2014 coup d’etat in Ukraine which
overthrew the democratically-elected government of Viktor Yanukovych
after he turned down a European Union Association Agreement for an
economic bail-out from Russia that was the flashpoint for the subsequent
Donbass war.
Contrary to the Trump-Russia ‘collusion’ narrative, one figure who
tried to lobby Yanukovych into signing the pro-austerity treaty was none
other than Paul Manafort, the future Trump campaign manager indicted
during the Russia probe for failing to register as a foreign agent while
consulting for the deposed Ukrainian president.
Manafort’s influence went against Russian interests in favor of the
EU and was years before Trump was ever a candidate, but this did not
stop the Democrats from later misconstruing it as evidence he was a
backchannel to the Kremlin. Meanwhile, Biden’s hand in the junta was
revealed in an infamous leaked phone call
between Victoria Nuland, Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for
European and Eurasian Affairs, and Geoffrey Pyatt, then-U.S. Ambassador
to Ukraine.
Nuland, who is the wife of leading neoconservative figure Robert Kagan, also spilled the beans
that the U.S. invested as much as $5 billion dollars on regime change
in Kiev when we were led to believe the Maidan was a spontaneous,
popular revolt.
Shortly after the putsch, Hunter Biden joined the board of directors
at Burisma despite having no experience in Ukraine or the energy sector.
The embattled fracking company was founded by a notorious oligarch
and corrupt minister from the Yanukovych era, Mykola Zlochevsky, yet who
unlike the former did not have to flee to Russia and curiously escaped
prosecution in a money laundering case under the new Western-friendly
regime — did he obtain immunity with Hunter Biden’s appointment?
When the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, reportedly
began to investigate the energy firm, the elder Biden did not just
blackmail the post-Maidan government of Petro Poroshenko into sacking
him by threatening to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees but openly bragged about it on camera:
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