raydawg
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Manafort’s pro-Ukraine lobbying campaign reached Obama, BidenHUH? We screwed with the election of others? Paul Manafort’s pro-Ukraine campaign reached the top of the White House, with one of the members of his lobbying effort meeting President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in 2013, according to new court documents released Friday.
A member of the so-called Hapsburg Group, which comprised former European politicians Manafort convened as part of his lobbying effort in support of Ukraine’s then-President Viktor Yanukovych, came with a foreign prime minister on May 16, 2013, to meet with Obama and Biden, “as well as senior United States officials in the executive and legislative branches,” according to the court documents.
Alan Friedman, a former journalist based in Europe who helped Manafort launch the group, told Manafort after the meeting that the member of the Hapsburg Group “delivered the message of not letting ‘Russians steal Ukraine from the West,’” prosecutors say.
Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chief, pleaded guilty Friday to two criminal charges from special counsel Robert Mueller to head off a potentially dramatic trial over allegations he violated laws on foreign lobbying. The court documents released Friday say Manafort failed to register as a foreign lobbyist, as required under U.S. law, or disclose a host of meetings, including the one involving Obama and Biden.
The lobbying effort that caught prosecutors’ attention tried to persuade the U.S. government to support Yanukovych, who was at the time under international fire for jailing a rival, former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. U.S. lawmakers had condemned Yanukovych’s actions, and he would later flee Ukraine for Russia after his government’s security forces beat protesters in 2013.https://www.politico.com/story/2018/09/14/manafort-ukraine-obama-biden-824747
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