The Case for Impeachment by Allan J. Lichtman

Author:Allan J. Lichtman
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780062696830
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

CHARGES OF RUSSIAN COLLUSION AND BLACKMAIL

A few days after the intelligence community released its findings, the press reported that the community had briefed both President Obama and President-elect Trump on an unverified and unproven dossier filled with explosive accusations. The dossier was compiled as opposition research by Christopher Steele, a former operative for Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency and a Russian specialist who spent two years in the country. Steele’s dossier charged that Russia had gathered compromising sexual information on Trump during his 2013 visit to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant. It claimed that Trump had struck a deal with Putin, agreeing to adopt pro-Russian policies in return for Russian assistance in winning the election. Buzzfeed published in full the unredacted version of the dossier on January 10, 2017.33

Beginning with a jolt—that the “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least 5 years”—the dossier goes on to claim that Putin was using Trump “to sow discord and disunity both within the US itself, but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance which was viewed as inimical to Russia’s interests.” Ultimately, Putin wanted to discard “the ideals-based international order established after World War II,” and return to the “Nineteenth Century ‘Great Power’ politics.”

Steele said that Putin had gathered enough dirt on Trump’s allegedly “perverted” sexual conduct in Moscow to “blackmail” him as president. He had also offered Trump “lucrative real estate” deals in Russia, which “for reasons unknown” Trump had declined. The dossier also said that Russia had a robust cyber-crime operation targeting western governments as its first priority.

Steele charged that “there was a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between them [the Trump campaign] and Russian leadership,” led on the Trump side primarily by Manafort, Page, and others. Trump and the Russians shared “a mutual interest in defeating Democratic presidential candidate Hillary CLINTON, whom President PUTIN apparently both hated and feared.” The quid pro quo from Trump was “to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue and to raise US/NATO defence commitments in the Baltics and Eastern Europe to deflect attention away from Ukraine, a priority for Putin who needed to cauterise the subject.”

The dossier said that Putin valued Trump because he “was viewed as divisive in disrupting the whole US political system; anti-Establishment; and a pragmatist with whom they could do business.” In addition, “Trump also supposedly provided Putin with intelligence regarding “business and otherwise, in the US of leading Russian oligarchs and their families.” In an especially scandalous quid pro quo, Igor Sechin, the head of the Russian oil giant Rosneft, is purported by Steele to have offered Trump via his then-adviser Carter Page, “the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatised) stake in Rosneft” in return for lifting the sanctions against Russia.

Steele said that the subject of payments to Manafort arose at a meeting between former Ukrainian leader Yanukovych and Putin, where Yanukovych admitted to ordering the payments but insisted that he had left “no documentary trail” that “could provide clear evidence of this.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.