Robert Mueller is now probing the debunked claim that Paul Manafort changed the RNC Platform on Russia.
The list of questions special counsel Robert Mueller submitted to President Donald Trumpincluded a query about a controversial change to the Republican party’s convention platform in July 2016 regarding the U.S. providing arms to Ukraine, according to sources familiar with the president’s responses.
This claim was debunked
The original draft of the platform — it has never been released publicly, but an insider shared the relevant passages with me — had strong language on Russia, and in particular on Russian aggression in Ukraine. Warning of “a resurgent Russia occupying parts of Ukraine and threatening neighbors from the Baltic to the Caucasus,” the platform vowed to increase U.S. pressure on a “reckless” Russia.
When the platform committee met before the GOP convention in Cleveland, one delegate out of the 100 on the committee — a Texas political activist named Diana Denman — proposed an amendment. Denman, who came to the convention as a Ted Cruz delegate but later switched her support to Trump, was interested because she had traveled to Ukraine as an international election observer in 1998 and has ever since “kept an eye on the emerging democracies,” she told me in a conversation last March.
At the behest of the Trump campaign, the platform committee took out the throat-clearing introduction and changed Denman’s reference from “lethal defensive weapons” for Ukraine to a pledge to provide “appropriate assistance to the armed forces of Ukraine.” They left intact Denman’s language on NATO, and on continued and possibly tougher sanctions on Russia.
This is insane. Do they really think some slight changes in language is a complete change in the Republican Platform on Russia? Do they really think if the Trump campaign was controlled by Russia that this slight language would be good enough for Vladimir Putin? Mueller is either trying to give Paul Manafort something to flip on Trump about or he is just trying to drag this investigation on.
