Tuesday, August 07, 2018
Media misses (or tries to hide) the big takeaway from Rick Gates' testimony
Coverage of Rick Gates’ testimony at the Paul Manafort trial leads the news tonight. Almost all of it is about the titillating aspects — tax evasion, Gates embezzling money from Manafort (!), etc. But the most *significant* aspect of that testimony is not only being ignored, it’s being deliberately hidden.
See the screen cap from tonight’s ABC News, which is the framework we’ve bee presented since we first heard the name Manafort. Let’s face it, if Manafort had been pulling the same financial hijinx while lobbying for the Indian government, or the Israeli or Saudi government, or almost any other government, Mueller wouldn’t have been investigating him, and Manafort and Gates would have still been living high off the hog while free and not paying taxes. It’s only because somehow we’re supposed to believe that this was really about Russia that Mueller got involved.
Well, guess what? As Gates testified today (and as some of us already knew), Manafort wasn’t working on behalf of Russia, even indirectly, at all! In fact, the opposite is true! The one article I found that discusses this aspect of his testimony, was VICE. As seen in the second photo (above), Gates testified about “Engage Ukraine”, which was Manafort’s effort to bring Ukraine under Yanukovych *closer to the EU*! And he even worked, albeit briefly, for the pro-US, pro-EU Ukrainian President Poroshenko, who took power after the coup that overthrew Yanukovych.
The Washington Post article, which headlines Gates’ utterly irrelevant (in this context) extramarital affair, mentions nothing about this aspect of Gates’ testimony, while the New York Times coverage (below) is arguably even worse. They note that Yanukovych (the man the media insists on calling “pro-Russian”) campaigned on a platform of integrating with the EU, and they note that Manafort and Gates worked on his campaign, but separate those two facts by two intervening paragraphs and never tie them together.
Bottom line: Gates’ testimony today confirms that the work he and Manafort did in Ukraine was actually *pro-Western* (and implicitly *anti*-Russian, not pro-Russian as the media leads us to believe every time the story is mentioned).
You can hear more about this on today's episode of Loud & Clear Radio.
You can hear more about this on today's episode of Loud & Clear Radio.
