Andrew McCarthy: Triangulating Manafort -- Obama, Clinton and Ukraine

It is in connection with Paul Manafort that we encounter some genuine collusion targeting the 2016 campaign: willful collaboration among foreign governments, the Obama administration, and the Clinton campaign.

Just a week after the campaign introduced Carter Page as a Trump foreign policy adviser, it announced that Manafort had been brought on board, too. The consultant was an old political hand, experienced managing the rough-and-tumble of a convention fight.

Manafort had longstanding, lucrative political consulting (and other business) arrangements with Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs who had Kremlin ties. These arrangements had already been spun into a narrative of political corruption in 2007 and 2008 by Glenn Simpson — then a Wall Street Journal scribe. In 2016, as the Fusion GPS impresario, Simpson would pull these articles off the shelf to help weave the Russia-gate tale.

In February 2014, the Ukrainian Euromaidan uprising finally forced the flight to Moscow of Manafort’s client, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. With American attention intensifying as tensions boiled over in Kiev, Manafort reentered the FBI’s investigative cross-hairs, as did other American political consultants who did work that benefitted the Party of Regions.

Yanukovych’s abdication delighted the Obama administration, which was quick to back the new administration of President Petro Poroshenko. Kiev became so dependent on Washington for desperately needed financial support that, by threatening to withhold funds, Vice President Joe Biden pressured Poroshenko into firing Viktor Shokin, one of his top prosecutors. Shokin just happened to be investigating a natural gas company called Burisma, which just happened to have placed Hunter Biden, the vice president’s son, on its board of directors.

While the Veep pushed the International Monetary Fund to grant Ukraine a $17.5 billion loan package, Burisma lavishly compensated Hunter’s law firm, to the tune of more than $3 million over an eighteen-month span. A lot of money? Sure, but it’s chump change compared to the Chinese government’s $1.5 billion infusion in a joint investment fund with Hunter Biden while Vice President Biden, administration point-man on China issue, turned a blind eye to Beijing’s aggression in the South China Sea.