Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani has kept up a steady flow of communication with the imprisoned Paul Manafort through the former Trump campaign chairman’s lawyer, seeking to further the rightwing talking point that Ukrainians interfered in 2016 to help Hillary Clinton.
A happy byproduct of this narrative would be muddying the charges against Manafort.
Giuliani told the Washington Post that their conversations have centered around the infamous ledger uncovered by the Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, which included a payment to Manafort that touched off his legal problems.
Giuliani is trying to reshape investigations into Manafort as a feature of a Ukrainian attempt to derail the Trump campaign in favor for Clinton’s. This has long been a convenient digression for Trump allies trying to shift attention off of Russia’s meddling in the election on his behalf.
According to a New York Review of Books report, this is how the whole smear campaign against Joe and Hunter Biden started in the first place: with President Donald Trump and Giuliani molding a pretense for a Manafort pardon.
