RedBoat

Did Donald Trump Revise the 2016 Republican Party Platform on Ukraine to Suit Putin?

 

This myth recently got a retelling this past January with the NYT reporting that the FBI opened a second counterintelligence investigation under Andrew McCabe's orders against President Trump. McCabe apparently used this 2016 media myth promoted primarily by Chuck Todd at NBCs Meet The Press that summer as a key probable cause for opening a case of treason against the sitting president in May of 2017.

Here's the original story from that year as presented by Politifact:

Did Trump campaign soften platform language to benefit Russia

Notice the prominence of cable TeeVee personalities that read the news and offer half-baked partisan punditry as a side in this little episode of #RUSSIANS! As it turned out this was all wrong.

Here's a recent piece over at Washington Times debunking it:

  

FBI relied on debunked Ukraine GOP convention story to target Trump 

The short of it was the GOP had an initial draft of the platform with US foreign policy items that included some language on supporting Ukraine against Russian incursions etc with military assistance. A delegate hardliner thought that the language wasn't hard right enough on Russia and wanted much more explicit language on EXACTLY what kinds of military commitments a Republican administration should make to Ukraine against Russia.
The RNC running the convention decided to keep the original more general and open ended commitment to Ukraine of the original draft.
This was used by Chuck Todd as proof that Putin was controlling the GOP through his robot Paul Manafort. All because the GOP elected not to go full on neocon lunatic McCain with their campaign platform intended to help get Donald Trump elected.

It was only good and sane convention politics to block neocon nutters from poisoning the GOP platform with extreme Cold War reenactment LARPing by delegates. Later it was the Democrats and their extensions at NBC, MSNBC that became the Cold War LARPers driving yet one more false narrative concocted during their highly partisan 2016 campaign coverage. A myth that eventually gave McCabe cover to launch yet another counterintelligence investigation against a sitting president as a Kremlin plant.

Many Democrats still believe this nonsense to this day and depend on these last little nuggets to keep up their illusion that Russians had any part of the Trump campaign or meddled with American demockracy. They tend to resurface like flotsam every time some Obama hack does a book tour like Andrew McCabe or Michael McFaul needs speaking engagements lined up on "Democracy and American Exceptional Pocket Billiards".

File this under: #NotThisShitAgain