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With Russia-Linked Advisor, Greene Parrots Kremlin On 'NATO Nazis'

With Russia-Linked Advisor, Greene Parrots Kremlin On 'NATO Nazis'

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) is once again being heralded as a hero after his impassioned speech on the House floor Thursday, during which he blasted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) for, among other vulgarities, likening NATO to the Nazis.

"She talks about NATO Nazis. Does the minority believe that our allies in NATO, who are trying to defend the people of Ukraine are Nazis? Has it come to this?" Raskin asked on Thursday.

"She said the aid that the taxpayers of America are sending to the people of Ukraine to defend themselves against Vladimir Putin and the Russian army falls into the hands of Nazis. I want to see her proof. Where's her evidence?"

Pointing to an article on Rep. Raskin's remarks criticizing Greene, attorney, professor, and author Seth Abramson shed a great deal of light on the Georgia Republican Congresswoman.

"I wonder how many Americans know Greene did this," Abramson asked, referring to Greene likening NATO to Nazis, "less than 12 hours after the top primetime Kremlin TV program compared NATO to the Nazis."

"I also wonder how many Americans know that one of Greene’s top advisors has been a Kremlin-connected guy for decades," he added.

Probably not many.

Urging people to "Google both those things," Abramson writes: "Greene is advised by a Kremlin-connected individual in the same way that Trump was in 2016—and if you think it’s a coincidence she’s parroting Kremlin propaganda in real time the way Trump did you need to follow golf instead of politics."

He points to a March article at The New Republic titled, "How Republicans Spent Decades Cozying Up to Putin’s Kremlin," that begins: "The man who once worked to connect Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff to Russia is now chief of staff to Marjorie Taylor Greene. Any questions?"

It gets worse.

"Take Ed Buckham, the recently appointed chief of staff for Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene," The New Republic piece continues. "Today, Buckham handles a congresswoman who proudly attends 'white supremacist, antisemitic, pro-Putin' rallies, as Congresswoman Liz Cheney characterized them, and has become renowned for touting conspiracy theories about how the California wildfires were started by Jewish space lasers. On Thursday, when the House of Representatives voted to suspend normal trade relations with Russia and Belarus, Greene, not surprisingly, was one of eight Republicans who voted against it."

Abramson also links to video, and writes: "And here is Kremlin TV calling NATO the world’s 'collective Hitler' just hours before Greene did the same thing while advised by a Kremlin-connected chief of staff. Greene has thrown in her lot with the Kremlin. She wants *election aid* from Russia."

Here's that video, which is subtitled in English:

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet

New Testimony Shows Ukraine Officials Aware Of Hold On US Military Aid

New Testimony Shows Ukraine Officials Aware Of Hold On US Military Aid

Ukrainian officials knew the Trump administration was withholding millions of dollars in military aid well before media reports made the information public, Catherine Croft, the State Department’s special adviser for Ukraine, told Congress during a closed-door impeachment inquiry hearing last month.

A transcript of that testimony, given on Oct. 30 and released Monday, contradicts claims made by Donald Trump and his allies that Ukrainian officials did not know about the freeze on military assistance. Trump has claimed that because Ukrainian officials were unaware of the hold, his efforts to pressure them to investigate his 2020 political rival Joe Biden did not constitute a quid pro quo.

Croft told congressional investigators that “two individuals from the Ukrainian Embassy approached me quietly and in confidence to ask me about an OMB hold on Ukraine security assistance,” adding that this was before the media reported on the hold. Croft also said she was impressed with her Ukrainian counterparts because “they found out very early on or much earlier than I expected them to.”

Croft added that the Ukrainians had incentive to keep the hold secret because “if this [military aid hold] were public in Ukraine it would be seen as a reversal of our policy and would, just to say sort of candidly and colloquially, this would be a really big deal, it would be a really big deal in Ukraine, and an expression of declining U.S. support for Ukraine.”

The House impeachment inquiry is looking into Trump’s efforts to push Ukraine to investigate both Biden and a long-debunked conspiracy about the Democratic National Committee servers, in exchange for crucial aid to the country. In a July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, now at the center of the House impeachment inquiry, Trump explicitly asked for a “favor” and pressed Zelensky to investigate Biden.

Trump has claimed that call was “perfect” and showed he had done nothing wrong, despite the White House’s attempts to initially hide the partial transcript of it in a top secret codeword system accessible only by a few.

Trump and his supporters have previously claimed that the Ukrainians did not know about the military hold, and thus there was no opportunity for extortion. Croft’s testimony rejects that claim, corroborating accounts from others, such as Laura Cooper, a high-ranking Pentagon official, that Ukrainian officials were not only aware of the hold, but worried about the ramifications of such a hold.

In addition to Croft, the House Intelligence, Oversight, and Foreign Affairs committees, which are leading the impeachment inquiry, also released testimony from the State Department’s former special adviser for Ukraine, Christopher Anderson.

Anderson told congressional investigators that pushing foreign countries to investigate individuals went against U.S. policy:

Question: And you felt like anticorruption efforts, writ large, were part of official U.S. policy, correct?

Answer: It was our policy to push—we have specific deliverables on anticorruption that we had developed. Individual investigations were not part of that policy that I was aware of.

Q: And, in fact, advocating for specific investigations was something that ran counter to U.S. policy to root out corruption, correct?

A: As I understood policy at the time, it was contrary, yes.

Other witnesses have testified that an investigation into Biden was a key “deliverable” in Trump’s alleged extortion scheme. Bill Taylor, the top U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told investigators that “security assistance money would not come until the President [of Ukraine] committed to pursue the investigation” into Biden. U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, a key figure in the growing Ukraine scandal, also corroborated the arrangement.

The first public hearings in the impeachment inquiry take place on Wednesday, with both networks and cable news expected to carry the hearings live to millions of Americans.

Croft’s full testimony can be read here, and key excerpts are below:

Catherine Croft Excerpts (PDF)

Anderson’s full testimony can be read here, and key excerpts are below:

Christopher Anderson Excerpts (PDF)

Published with permission of The American Independent.