Let’s take this in sequence, because each step matters.
1. Two weeks ago at the GOP convention in Cleveland, the Republican platform was altered to remove any reference to arming Ukraine in its struggles against Russia (which seized Crimea from Ukraine two years ago).
2. This was notable in its own right, as a departure from a bipartisan support for Ukraine. It also attracted attention because of Donald Trump’s general admiration for Vladimir Putin, and because of the specifically Ukrainian business dealings of Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort. His past clients in his PR work had notably included the pro-Russian former Prime Minister of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. In early 2014 Yanukovych fled his country amid protests and is now in Russia.
3. Last Sunday on Meet the Press, Chuck Todd, who was fully aware of this background, asked Manafort whether his campaign had been involved in the pro-Russian platform change. Manafort flat-out and categorically denied it. As reported in TPM (emphasis added):
“Where did it come from then?” Todd pressed. “Because everyone on the platform committee had said it came from the Trump campaign. If not you, who?”
“It absolutely did not come from the campaign. I don’t know who everybody is, but I guarantee you it was nobody that was on the platform committee,” Manafort replied.
When asked once more if anyone on the campaign was involved, Manafort said, “No one, zero.”
I was watching the exchange that Sunday morning and immediately noted the baldness of Manafort’s statements. Shortly afterward, in installment #66 of this Trump series, I said that a claim by Reince Priebus (that he had only recently learned the schedule for Clinton-Trump debates) “cannot be true,” and that Manafort’s claim “is very unlikely to prove true.”
4. A story today in the Washington Post appears to move us from “unlikely to prove true” to plain old untrue. Reporters Steve Mufson and Tom Hamburgerquote platform committee members who say that the change did in fact come at the Trump staff’s behest. For instance:
The Republican platform committee at the party’s convention was one place Trump campaign aides have promoted that view, according to national security experts who were there. They said Trump campaign staffers weakened language that would have called for military support of Ukraine.
“It was troubling to me that they would want to water down language that supports a country that has been invaded by an aggressive neighbor,” said Rachel Hoff, a member of the platform committee. “I think the U.S. should properly come to Ukraine’s aid in that struggle. In the past that would not be considered a controversial Republican position.”
I wrote to Hamburger to confirm that the source of the quote, Rachel Hoff, was also saying explicitly that Trump’s staffers were involved in the change. Hamburger said that indeed she was, and that several other people, unnamed in the story, said the same thing. (He also said that he’d asked the Trump campaign to comment but had not heard back.)
***
Let’s step back and consider what this amounts to. On the same day that a former head of the CIA said that Putin had shrewdly played to Trump’s vanities and made him an “unwitting agent,” members of the Republican party’s platform committee are saying that his campaign manager is flat-out lying about having engineered a pro-Russian policy change that would help his former clients.
There are two other possibilities, of course. One is that members of the platform committee have for some reason decided to lie about the Trump campaign’s role; the other, that all this happened without Manafort’s being aware, so that he was telling Chuck Todd the truth as he understood it. Take your pick. For me, the odds overwhelmingly favor Manafort being involved and then imagining he could bluff his way through a denial, Baghdad Bob-style.
By now, on this 71st step down the long Time Capsule trail of tears, you might think that I would be growing blasé. Not about this one. For any other candidate in any other campaign, what we’ve learned today would be a genuine shock. Even in this campaign, with 94 days to go and “responsible” Republicans still aboard, it should count as news.