"Russian Hacking" Scandal Backfires and Turns Up Traces of Ukrainian Meddling Instead

They were looking for the Russian trace but found a Ukrainian one. In the United States, Trump's being accused of co-operation with Russians during the election campaign. There’s still very little evidence, except for the ridiculous story with some adventurer called George Papadopoulos.

Last spring, he came to Trump's election headquarters and offered his services. Before that, he worked at the candidate Ben Carson’s headquarters. The deserter was taken in. As we already know, Papadopoulos has the ability to speak eloquently about his amazing abilities and connections.

In the summer of 2016, Trump's staff was led by Paul Manafort for a short period of time. Papadopoulos was telling him as well that he could arrange a meeting between Trump and Putin in order to start building their personal relations at that stage. Papadopoulos' argument was that he supposedly knew some Putin’s niece. No one in America wondered if Putin had a niece at all, but her part was convincingly played at the meetings with Papadopoulos in London by some Russian broad. She was introduced to Papadopoulos by a professor from Malta, Joseph Mifsud, a retired diplomat out at feed.

Meantime, Papadopoulos continued to send requests to Russia, no interest was shown in response, and flew to London to meet with the impostress-niece. That’s truly a story for Ilf and Petrov.

It’s clear that nothing worked out with Moscow back then, but now, they are trying to blame Papadopolus’ activity on the Russian front on Trump and his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. Papadopoulos is arrested, he’s cooperating with the investigation.

Manafort comes to the interrogations. Special prosecutor Mueller turned inside out all his Cyprus offshore businesses, found tens of millions of dollars of dirty money and accused him of illegal lobbying in the US. Now, Manafort can spend 80 years in prison. The court hearing is scheduled for May 7.

However, there’s still no connection to the Kremlin, except for Papadopoulos and Putin's pseudo-niece, but Manafort is tightly hooked. Manafort is also charged with his old contract with Russian industrialist Oleg Deripaska. No politics, just business consulting in countries where Deripaska had investments. The contract was over before Manafort started working for Trump, and the Kremlin had nothing to do with that contract.

But for a long time, Manafort’s great interests were connected with Ukraine. And it was its interests in the US that Manafort lobbied. So the Ukrainian trace was certainly found. And indeed, Manafort has had an affair with Ukraine since 2004.

«Yushchenko! Yushchenko!” If you remember, the first Orange Revolution began in Kiev back then. Yanukovych and the pro-American candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, were fighting in the election. The US CIA decided to introduce their man into the competitor's headquarters. They arranged for the Donetsk oligarch, the richest man in Ukraine, Rinat Akhmetov, to make an offer to Paul Manafort.

In early 2005, the then-US ambassador to Ukraine, John Herbst, blesses Manafort and his team to infiltrate Yanukovych's headquarters. Since then, Manafort's employee, Rick Davis, regularly reported to the US embassy on the work at the Party of Regions headquarters, that is, with Yanukovych.

It’s clear that for the sake of higher level of the cover reliability, CIA allows Manafort to charge money for his work, big and even dirty money. Yes, in fact, through the same scheme as it was in Russia in the midst of the 1990s, when thousands of American advisers, the so-called "Chicago boys," sat in different ministries, especially in the Federal Agency for State Property Management. They also took the money here, without hesitating, dirty money. It came with the job.

As for Manafort, his career in Ukraine turned out to be even longer than Yanukovych's career. At the end, he was still trying to advise the opposition bloc in Kiev. Manafort closed his office in the Ukrainian capital just recently, in the spring of 2016.

What’s happening now? Manafort’s been fired from everywhere. The CIA doesn’t need him either. They can quietly write him off, and Petr Poroshenko as well. They didn’t manage to link Manafort and Russia in the investigation. But it worked with Ukraine. Well, it’s fine, nothing important.