This is a breaking-news placeholder, for “what we knew, when” purposes:
- One month ago, the Republican platform was altered to remove any reference to supporting Ukraine in its struggles against Russia (which seized Crimea from Ukraine two years ago).
- Two weeks ago, Donald Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort, whose former PR clients included Victor Yanukovich, the now-deposed, pro-Russian President of Ukraine, categorically denied that he or anyone from the Trump campaign had anything whatsoever to do with this change.
- One week ago, several members of the platform committee began emerging to say: No, that’s not true, the only reason for the change was pressure from the Trump campaign. That is, that Paul Manafort had been lying. The Trump campaign has not addressed the contradictions.
- This evening, the New York Times has a big investigative piece by Andrew Kramer, Mike McIntire, and Barry Meier on Paul Manafort’s involvement in Ukraine. It says, among other things, that secret ledgers “show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau. Investigators assert that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials.” A delicious note is that Corey Lewandowski, the ousted pre-Manafort Trump campaign manager, tweeted out a link to the NYT story.
What does this add up to? At the moment I don’t know. I will say one more time: nothing quite like this has happened before. And with 84 days until the election, there is all the more reason to expect Donald Trump to do what all other post-Nixon nominees have done, and release his tax returns.