Mueller has charged Paul Manafort with not registering as an agent of a foreign government and failing to disclose the money he made. We all know about the work that Manafort did for Viktor Yanukovych.
But did you know that Robert Mueller flew to Ukraine for a series of pictures with Viktor Yanukovych, along with Barack Obama and the State Department under Hillary and John Kerry? The question becomes, did Mueller pay for his own flight to Ukraine and allow pictures taken with Ukraine’s leader out of the goodness of his heart or was he paid. If he was paid did he register as an agent for a foreign country and fill out the proper tax entries?
For a little back story, Yulia Tymoshenko runs for reelection in Ukraine, she loses, and just like Hillary, Tymoshenko fails to lose gracefully and promises to #Resist. Her victorious opponent, Viktor Yanukovych, throws her in jail for what many claims to be bogus charges [something President Trump has not yet done to Hillary Clinton.]
While she was in jail, guess who pleaded for her release? John McCain. As a matter of fact, John McCain thought the Ukrainian election was of such paramount importance to the United States that he gets the Senate to form a Ukrainian Caucus in order to further Ukrainian interests, of which John McCain is a member.
When she gets out of jail, there’s a push for an investigation into the mishandling of her trial and the charges themselves. So the Ukrainian government, which is still run by the guy she lost the election to, Viktor Yanukovych, hires the law firm of Skadden Arps, specifically Greg Craig [Obama’s former White House Counsel], and a lobbyist, Paul Manafort. Greg Craig’s team of attorneys included Alex Van Der Zwann. Van Der Zwann’s father-in-law is a business partner to the same Oleg Deripaska that is connected to the Clintons and the Obamas, the same Oleg Deripaska that paid for the Steele dossier, the Steele dossier that Manafort’s lobbying partner and McCain’s chief of staff went to pick up in London.
Van Der Zwann is the same guy that Mueller just indicted for lying to the FBI. And Oleg Deripaska is suing Manafort for monies that the Russian oligarch believes Manafort stole from him in a business deal gone bad. And if your head isn’t spinning fast enough from all these connections so far, let me add to it by saying, let us not forget that Paul Manafort was McCain’s campaign manager during McCain’s failed bid to become President of the United States. (Side note: Is McCain holding a grudge? We know he is with Sarah Palin.)
Anyway, due to all the negative publicity stemming from the Tymoshenko debacle, Yanukovych tried to repair his image before the public, so he hires the lobbyist, Paul Manafort, who then hires John Podesta’s lobbying outfit. Their job was to make Yanukovych seem like a really likable guy to the Ukrainian public, so Podesta gets both Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry’s State Department to do photo ops with Yanukovych because, you know, the DNC coffers needed to be filled during election time, so they had to sell Yanukovych as a real class act to the adoring public. Obama even went so far as to declare the Ukrainian election to be free and fair.
But guess who else did photo ops with Yanukovych? Bob Mueller, the same Mueller that’s now prosecuting these very people. Rod Rosenstein’s memo said Mueller was specifically authorized to investigate allegations that Manafort “[c]ommitted a crime or crimes arising out of payments he received from the Ukrainian government before and during the tenure of President Viktor Yanukovych.”
Did Bob Mueller allow these photos to be taken out of the goodness of his heart, or did he monetarily benefit from them? Hmmm, let me think about that one. If Mueller was paid for these photo ops, did he declare these monies? Surely Mueller would not have paid for his own airfare to Ukraine. If somebody else paid for his airfare, did Mueller declare that too? Did Mueller fill out a FARA form? Same questions for all of the others involved, like, Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry’s people. But isn’t it the most interesting of all that all these people who monetarily benefited from this situation are now the very same ones who are behind the prosecution of Paul Manafort?
How do you keep the players straight without a program? It looks a little incestuous to me. Who is going to investigate Mueller?