It was fine when Manafort did it.

So, they changed their minds when it was Biden's son?

Well, of course they did.

/Ukraine is not an adversary. Manafort worked for Yanukavich, who was a Putin puppet. He never reported his earnings as a foreign agent.

Trump's Gotta Go!

These fucks need to get better at swiftboating

And unlike Trump, Biden intends to continue producing his tax returns. Trump, on the other hand, is suing Congress to stop them from getting his returns. And Trump lied about not having a business deal with Russia (Trump Tower Moscow). Biden has had no business deals with Russia, ever.

All this story shows is that Trump's campaign is still conspiring with a foreign country (Ukrainian prosecutors) to damage his political rival.

Mahalo nui loa!

ETA.. Two Tweets courtesy of highplainsdem from down thread..

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

Kinda like when media feel compelled to quote a climate chsnge denier every time they do a story on how climate change is fucking us up.

There is no "other side" to truth, for fuck's sake.

Syncophants...moved on to the kid...and such irony considering Trump's behavior.

Last edited Thu May 2, 2019, 01:51 AM - Edit history (1)

RW media for a while, trying to make something of the Obama administration insisting the Ukraine government get rid of a corrupt general prosecutor (equivalent to our attorney general).

The actual facts, from Foreign Policy, October 30, 2016:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/10/30/what-will-ukraine-do-without-joe-biden-putin-war-kiev-clinton-trump/

And just as an offside...there are advantages to nominating someone whose children are too young to have embarrassing issues or scandals.

I don't take anything that grown up bat boy says to be truth.

Biden.

To be his partner in sleeze. Christy less likely to commit crimes.

Still think Rudy responsible or at least involved in that late announcement about reopening Hillary investigation.

Tad Devine worked in Ukraine years before he joined Bernie's campaign and that's quite a big deal here.

Kind of interesting that this is not.

before he started working for Sanders.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-bernie-sanders-ad-man-who-played-paul-manaforts-game/2018/08/01/0df78c18-95c7-11e8-a679-b09212fb69c2_story.html

That would also be the year that,

Tad Devine works for Putin. I.e. in the mueller report, bernie and trump were both explicitly supported by russia. Add that into the lack of bernie voting on sanctions, anti-nato, pro-nato 2.0 with russia. Devine was to sanders what manafort was to trump. Am I getting that right?

And Jill Stein was the punter, calming our fears that the election results were legit with her half assed recount.

Tad Devine are about. This looks like a deliberate obfuscation to deflect from Bernie’s relationship with him at a time when Paul Manafort was conducting criminal operations attacking our elections here. Tad Devine and Paul Manafort both ran the opposition campaigns against Hillary....

“worked in Ukraine”...

Honestly, I'm not obsessed with this whole Devine thing like many here seem to be. I just did a little googling about it and from what I gather he made a bunch of money on a campaign in the Ukraine for a couple years with Manafort (it seems a lot of Dem political strategists were making $$$ in the Ukraine at the time). And then later he testified against Manafort.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, high-powered political operatives who found themselves drawn to Tymoshenko and Yanukovych remunerative cage match included not only Manafort and Devine, but Democratic super-lobbyist Tony Podesta and Clinton strategist Mark Penn on the pro-Yanukovych side, and Paul Begala and David Axelrod’s firm, AKPD Message and Media, on Tymoshenko’s. Nor did the trend stop after Yanukovych assumed power and began jailing his rivals: a Reuters article from 2013 reported that pro-Yanukovych groups had paid two of their Washington representatives $1.46 million, with $900,000 going to the Podesta Group. “A lot of people are making a lot of money off Ukraine’s political competition,” Bruce Jackson, president of the Project on Transitional Democracies, told Reuters at the time.

what the issue was. I see you skipped over everything about the 2016 campaign...so you probably have a good idea already. I already brought up the opposition campaigns against Hillary.

1. I skipped over it because I thought this thread was about Ukraine stuff.
2. I don't have a good idea about his involvement in the opposition campaigns against Hillary. As I said above, I've not been obsessed about it as others have. All I remember is DU going ape-shit about the Devine and Manafort connection.

Feel free to educate me.

As if just working in Ukraine was the subject, when that wasn’t it.

Now you are saying “Devine Manafort connection”.

Seems like you know enough to try and deflect now.

Same thing, right? I'm not trying to deflect anything. They both worked on the campaign in the Ukraine.

What I don't know about (and am still trying to understand) is your statement that "Tad Devine and Paul Manafort both ran the opposition campaigns against Hillary...." Are you saying they cooperated in this venture?

that is how it ended up here

in the middle (politically and geographically), stupid shit like this can be used to convince them that there is something shady about the candidate.

to speak out.

The RW distortions that I've seen are trying to portray this as Biden somehow being given the right to threaten to withhold $1 billion from Ukraine just to stop an otherwise blameless prosecutor from investigating a company that Biden's son had some involvement with. You'd never know from the RW coverage that Shokin was corrupt and other governments as well as Ukrainians, including their parliament and other prosecutors working with him, wanted him out. President Obama apparently told Biden to make it clear the US would use what leverage it had, and now this action to stop corruption is being treated as corruption.

But of course everything is upside down in Trumpworld.

Two tweets from Legum, starting with this one (text of both below):

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

Talking Points Memo (subscription normally needed, but it's also on their RSS feed):

Link to tweet

smearing Hunter Biden.

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

His actions through the years are indications to me of a troubled fellow in the shadow of a favored son and an accomplished and admired Dad.

I think he is troubled -- not bad. His behavior is a problem for Joe and the campaign. This deal may be perfectly legit -- but it looks bad. That's all it takes. Just ask Hillary.

Wouldn't matter except Joe is a DEMOCRAT.

Biden: You've seen my taxes. i have no connection with any foreign entiey. My son is not my campaign manager...nor will he be advising me on the WH.

Show me your taxes MF45.

While covered in slime, they claim everyone does it when the other side burps.

who has been involved in nasty deals overseas and I think the current legal investigations may have info on Giuliani.

Biden addressed this as vp. Although it was reported at the time it occurred, mostly people did not notice or care.

The big story is the number of Republicans with money ties to Russia and I think it will be coming out.

“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recalled telling Poroshenko.

“Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations event, insisting that President Obama was in on the threat.

https://www.cfr.org/event/foreign-affairs-issue-launch-former-vice-president-joe-biden

But now Biden's running for president, Trump is terrified of him, and some people see a way to twist this old incident into a fake scandal to try to hurt Biden and curry favor with Trump.

Recognize it for what it was, strong foreign policy, and move on

perceived benefit of their chosen candidate, this should end.

that this was some kind of conspiracy to protect Hunter Biden. Credible media outlets had been ignoring this story while RW media and professional smearmongers like John Solomon were hyperventilating over it, so I was sorry to see the NYT give it front-page coverage.

hit piece on Neera Tanden.

Now he’s doing Rudy Giuliani’s bidding and using Ukrainian dirt to try to smear Biden.

I’m not sure what team Vogel plays for but it ain’t America.

Link to tweet

1. Biden, as vice president, demands that Ukraine and its prosecutor general do a better job in fighting corruption in the country (which is a sad fact of Ukrainian and former Soviet life)

2. The prosecutor general at the time ends up stepping down.

3. One of the few corruption cases that the prosecutor general had been pursuing at the time was into a company which had Joe Biden's son Hunter as one of many of its corporate board members.

4. That case ends up being dropped, but the new prosecutor general eventually reopens it.

5. Nowhere is Hunter Biden accused of doing anything wrong at all other than happening to be one of many board members on this company being investigated.

6. Rudy Giuliani is a pathetic joke and a huge asshole.

7. Ditto Donald Trump and Bill Barr.

That's it. That's all there is.

This is just of those convoluted Whitewater non-scandal scandals that Republicans will latch onto to smear an opponent, even as their own president sits in office thanks to the single most egregious foreign interference in US History and even after he has repeatedly sought to obstruct the investigation into that interference.

Also, again, Giuliani, Barr and Trump are all pathetic jokes and huge assholes.

Remember what swift boating IS. Kerry was a hero of the swift boat, his troops loved him, he saved lives. But by the time it was over, he was a traitor while Bush was a hero for defending Alabama.

They did stuff to Clinton and Obama too. How did they survive? Swift and aggressive responses, that's how. Not hoping it will go away.

Joe are you paying attention?

It's not about fact checking, because some of the dumbest crap ends up becoming a big deal, but how you respond.

Seems to me the way to go is to quickly deflect, turn it into a positive, then pivot to a more substantive issue. I've seen Pete do this, but I haven't seen Biden do it as effectively. It's still early, so time will tell.

So of course everyone else has fatal flaws and Biden has no weaknesses at all.

He claimed he was non-political, doesn't watch FOX, and hadn't voted for Trump, but he repeated all of the standard anti-Hillary crap.

I wondered where he'd gotten this. Now I know. This is how they roll and, sadly, too many people who think they're non-political, swallow it hook, line and sinker.

This is from Oliver Bullough -- read more about him here, in an NPR interview

https://www.npr.org/2019/05/01/719001286/moneyland-reveals-how-oligarchs-kleptocrats-and-crooks-stash-fortunes

and I found his thread because it was linked to by ThinkProgress reporter Casey Michael, one of many journalists criticizing Vogel for his foolish story.

I found the Casey Michael tweet because it was a reply to one of Vogel's tweets attempting to defend his story.


Bullough's take starts with this tweet -- full text of the thread below:

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

I see a lot of denial here. I won't spell it out for you because I want to save my hides for when we get deeper into the primary, but it isn't rocket science.

BRING. IT. ON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Make our day, n’est-ce pas?

Those of you promoting this should be ashamed.

Crooked dealings does he want to draw attention to
CORRUPTION?

a right-wing meme that the Tumpy squad is concocting. We should be aware of it, yes. So we can be prepared to call it for what it is: another propaganda smear to weaken our candidates, in this case Joe Biden.

Mr. Lutsenko denied any political motivation in reopening the case.




You believe that I've got a bridge to sell.

What a bunch of chowderheads over at the Trump campaign.