Imagine the uproar talk-radio show hosts Laura Ingraham, Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh would be whipping up now, if Hillary Clinton’s chief campaign manager had been for years a trusted adviser to Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych, as Donald Trump's Paul Manafort was.
The Vladimir Putin satrap leveraged his Donbas mobster background to defeat, with Kremlin backing, the pro-democracy Orange Revolution and went on to build a kleptocracy underpinned by Russia’s security services, which is believed to have trained the Ukrainian snipers who slaughtered more than 50 Maidan protesters in 2014.
Imagine, too, that it was the Democrat’s White House nominee who considered appointing as her running mate a retired three-star general and former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency who last December bizarrely — and certainly ill-advisedly — chose to be a feted guest at a 10th anniversary gala in Moscow for Russia Today, the virulently anti-American Kremlin propaganda outlet and cheerleader for the Crimea land-grab of Crimea and Putin’s bombing of U.S.-supported Syrian rebels.
What on earth would the talk-radio hosts be saying, if another one of Clinton’s main foreign-policy advisers, like Trump's Carter Page, was a onetime consigliere for Gazprom, the vast Kremlin-run natural-gas monopoly that Putin has used as a major tool in geopolitical energy politics in Europe rewarding countries favorably disposed to Moscow like Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy, punishing and threatening obdurate ones?
That’s the same Gazprom that in 2001 mounted a hostile takeover of the last remaining independent Russian television network, NTV — a takeover characterized by Mikhail Gorbachev as a Putin-directed campaign to establish Kremlin monopoly control of the country's broadcasters.
Throw in as another foreign policy adviser, say, a former State Department aide sitting on the board of Russia’s Alfa Bank, which was accused of violating the UN sanctions regime against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Add a few other elements into the mix. Say Hillary Clinton had for years relentlessly been pursuing multi-million-dollar business deals with the Russians and had courted the country’s oligarchs and the super-wealthy, whose fortunes depend on Putin and the siloviki (Russia’s military-security establishment members} who police the country’s crony capitalism.
It isn’t hard to guess the scale of the hue-and-cry the talk-show hosts would have raised if Hillary Clinton after all of this announced, as Trump did last week, that she wouldn’t necessarily defend the Baltic states from Russian aggression and live up to America’s NATO collective-defense commitments, the ultimate raison d’être of the bedrock Western alliance.
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/289047-exploring-russian-ties-to-the-men-lurking-behind
