Paul Manafort, Konstantin Kilimnik and the Ukrainian Peace Plan
Today, Paul Manafort’s lawyers made a filing in which they messed up in the redactions.
We have learned a lot about Weldon and the Ukrainian Peace Plan over the past two years, but we were unaware of Manaforts involvement.
In one redacted part, we learned that Paul Manafort flew to Madrid to speak to Kilimnik about the plan.
We know that this plan was hatched at this conference, but the news that Kilimnik was involved is new.
We know that Kilimnik joined the International Republican Institute in 1995. Bruce Weinrod — also at the Manor College event -was the Director of Foreign Policy for the Heritage Foundation AND on the IRI working Committee for Eastern Europe/CIS at the time.
Grant Stern and I previously reported that Curt Weldon was responsible for the afterword in Edward Lozansky’s book about how to lobby the US for Russian Interests. Bruce Weinrod helped write that afterword.
Weinrod was known in Paul Weyrich’s circle’s as being a solid conservative, and in fact, when the International Republican Institute sent a delegation to Moscow in 1993, he was the only member of the delegation that they considered acceptable.
Paul Weyrich is often considered the father of the modern conservative movement and was a staunch ally of Putin propagandist Edward Lozansky until his death in 2008.
Shortly after inauguration, President Trump’s personal lawyer couriered a back-door Ukrainian “peace plan” to the White House.
This is the story of the drafting of the Weldon-Rovt Ukraine “peace plan” for occupied Ukraine, which became news after President Trump’s personal attorney delivered it to the White House shortly after his inauguration.
Last summer, McClatchyDC revealed that the infamous plan was drafted by none other than Alexander Rovt and Curt Weldon, as a result of this conference.
Andrii Artemenko called it the “Weldon-Rovt Plan.”
Last April, the New York Times reported that Ukrainian Alexander Rovt is an investor in one of the banks under investigation for large loans to Paul Manafort after he got fired from the Trump campaign.
On July 3rd, 2017, I wrote that Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) was Putin’s first favorite Congressman, noting he had attended a conference at Manor College with the Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Artemenko and the New York-based billionaire, Alexander Rovt in February 2016 along with a Republican former Senate staffer and Heritage Foundation alum, the attorney W. Bruce Weinrod.
Artemenko admitted last week that his secretive peace plan was drafted at that Manor College event before he back-channeled it to the White House, bypassing the State Department and his own government.
Here is a video of that meeting:
The following year, Andrii Artemenko brokered a meeting through Trump’s longtime business associate Felix Sater with January 2017 with his personal lawyer Michael Cohen to get the Weldon-Rovt plan into the hands of President Trump’s convicted former National Security Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn.
The meeting caused outrage from Ukraine’s government.
A few months later, Ukrainian officials discovered that Artemenko had obtained Canadian citizenship, and they stripped him of his citizenship and office.
Recently, Natasha Bertrand of The Atlantic broke the news that former Rep. Weldon was under investigation by the Senate Judiciary Committee for his role in the “Ukraine Peace Plan.”
When reached for comment, Trump’s mafia-linked former senior advisor, Felix Sater claimed not to know Curt Weldon and said:
“Artemenko came to me to ask if the plan could be shown to the administration so I arranged a meeting with Michael.”
“I have no idea who worked on the plan,” Sater added.
He continued to say that the Weldon-Rovt plan was actually Hillary Clinton’s plan all along, which doesn’t make sense considering that she was out of office for years by the time Russia invaded Ukraine, and belies his role as a gate-keeper and intermediary in this transaction.
Former Rep. Weldon even went on Alex Jones last year to say the Clintons threatened his family.
It is therefore highly doubtful that anyone related to the Clintons and Weldon worked together on anything.
Weldon is also being investigated for his communications with Cambridge Analytica per a letter from U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote to the now- bankrupt former Trump campaign data vendor owned by billionaire Robert Mercer and former Breitbart Chairman Steve Bannon.
Weldon’s possible ghostwriter
His name is W. Bruce Weinrod.
He’s an attorney with a long history of working with Curt Weldon on Russia, in addition to his help drafting the 40 page “New Times New Beginnings” with former Rep. Weldon.
Russia’s longtime lobbyist, Dr. Edward Lozansky’s 2001 and 2002 World Russia Forum’s entire theme was centered around the 40-page guide that Weinrod wrote with Rep. Weldon.
President Reagan appointed Mr. Weinrod as to the Board of the US Institute of Peace where he obtained Senate confirmation as Chairman of the Research and Studies Committee for six years. He served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the first Bush Administration as both the Defense Advisor to the US Mission at NATO and as Secretary of Defense Representative for Europe, which is the senior Department of Defense position in Europe, under President George W. Bush.
Who is Curt Weldon?
Former Rep. Weldon was the first graduate in Russian studies from West Chester University, a Pennsylvania state-university just west of Philadelphia.
West Chester University is also where he donated his massive congressional archive collection, which contains the manuscript of a book he wrote about how America should’ve cultivated closer relations with the Russian Federation
After diligent requests, I was unable to obtain a copy of these archives because a representative from West Chester stated that they did not have the funding or the manpower to archive the entire collection.
While Rep. Weldon was in the House of Representatives he made it his personal mission to build a better relationship with Russia, which is something everyone who knew him came to know or appreciate.
All of the think tanks and all the major intellectuals set up shop in St. Petersburg when the Soviet Union Fell.
Former Rep. Weldon started a coalition to save the tilt-rotor hybrid airplane and helicopter called the “Osprey” in late 1990, and Donald Trump became a member of his lobbying group according to “The Dream Machine” by Richard Whittle.
Trump purchased an airline in mid-1989, so he likely had both an avid interest “Tilt-Rotor Technology Coalition,” as well as an interest in influencing federal aviation policies.
But Rep. Weldon succeeded in protecting 600 jobs in his home district.
By 2001, Donald Trump publicly reversed course on tilt-rotor aircraft after the Osprey turned into an albatross of bloated spending by the Pentagon, and concerns about the safety of tilt-rotor aircraft persisted then, though the craft are in service today with the US Air Force and Navy.
Trump Campaign foreign policy advisor Richard Burt was on the Board of Directors of Textron, a company that partially developed and produced the Osprey. Burt is also a registered foreign agent for the Russian Nordstream 2 pipeline, a strategic asset the Kremlin wishes to build in the Black Sea, today.
SPLC profiled anti-Muslim former Reagan official Frank Gaffney was also part of the Tilt-Rotor coalition and he held a symposium at his one-man think tank, the Center for Security Policy, along with Weldon, Robert Krieble, and others.
By the end of 1998, Rep. Weldon had visited Russia 17 times, but his policies continued to align with mainstream American vision for the bilateral relationship at the time.
In February 1999, Curt Weldon inserted comments in the congressional register about Alexander Koulakovsky creating a Christian School in Russia.
No one knew who Koulakovsky was at the time except for Jack Abramoff and Tom Delay, who were busy being bribed by Koulakovsky and the Russian Government.
“I was concerned that Abramoff was going to become an agent of influence for the Russian government,” said conservative political operative J. Michael Waller, in a 2006 article about the scandal that caused the House to flip, and that “he would mask that relationship.”
Now, Waller is the Vice President of Government Relations at the Conservative Think Tank, Center for Security Policy.
He personally worked with Weldon on Russia Policy in the mid 90’s.
Waller told me that “Weldon had gone to the dark side,” when he returned to the country in Summer 99 after an 18 month hiatus.
It is very plausible that Russia’s agents compromised Rep. Curt Weldon in 1999 after he radically changed some of his political positions to match the Kremlin’s desires and what sources like Waller believe about him.
A major turning point began when Rep. Weldon’s description to CNN of the major hacking incident perpetrated from Russia against the Pentagon’s computing infrastructure began as a defense of American interests, but his entire public policy suddenly shifted to cooperation after he chaired the Committee investigating the breaches, which turned out to come from the Russian Academy of Sciences.
In mid-March 1999, he made his 18th trip to Moscow, where Weldon discussed missile defense and also the Russian Home Loans project he had proposed with Rep. Charles Taylor (R-NC), coincidentally the first American to own a bank in Russia.
Over the course of the following few months, Weldon organized trips to Russia and Yugoslavia to try and negotiate peace — and the Clinton administration completely undermined him. The Weldon lead delegations met with the Serbian Karic brothers and Victor Chernomyrdin. They told him not to go, and then publicly chastised him for going in April. President Clinton’s Administration denounced his effort as “uncoordinated free-lance” diplomacy.
Immediately after being denounced, Rep. Weldon appeared at a news conference on C-Span in May 1999, about the war in Yugoslavia along with Ed Lozansky, Russian politician Arkady Murashev and Paul Weyrich.
I previously reported that Congressman Weldon wrote the afterword of a book about lobbying the US For Russia’s behalf.
Lozansky and Weldon approached Putin and handed the document to him.
“I am so happy to have someone like him on Capital Hill,” said Dr. Lozansky in a 2002 interview.
The following year, Rep. Curt Weldon would become the first American politician appointed to the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Weldon’s treatise “New Times, New Beginnings” is important because it later became part of suspected Russian agent Edward Lozansky‘s book on Russian lobbying in America that the Russian Foreign Ministry published in 2004.
Read more about Rep. Curt Weldon’s involvement in foreign affairs with Russia and the corruption scandal that ousted him from Congress after twenty years in office here:
This is part of the Grand Old Putin Party, a series of investigative reports co-authored by Grant Stern and Patrick Simpson.
