"Russia conspired with the European Trump'

Buzzfeed has claimed it has tapes secretly recording Russians conspiring with Matteo Salvini's far-right Lega Party in which the Russians are heard to offer large donations into the Italian Party to supposedly, rid Europe of 'liberal democracy'.

Quote:

The six men — three Russians, three Italians — gathered beneath the spectacular painted glass ceiling in the hotel lobby last October had their eyes on history too. Their nominal purpose was an oil deal; their real goal was to undermine liberal democracies and shape a new, nationalist Europe aligned with Moscow. BuzzFeed News has obtained an explosive audio recording of the Metropol meeting in which a close aide of Europe’s most powerful far-right leader — Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini — and the other five men can be heard negotiating the terms of a deal to covertly channel tens of millions of dollars of Russian oil money to Salvini’s Lega party. The recording reveals the elaborate lengths the two sides were willing to go to conceal the fact that the true beneficiary of the deal would be Salvini’s party — a breach of Italian electoral law, which bans political parties from accepting large foreign donations — despite the comfort with which he and Europe’s other far-right leaders publicly parade their pro-Kremlin political sympathies.

In common with most western countries, it is illegal for a political party to receive large donations - or even any donations - from foreign sources in Italy.

Quote:

Salvini — described enthusiastically by the Russians on the tape as the “European Trump” — did not attend the meeting himself, but he was in Moscow at the time. The previous day he gave a speech in which he denounced sanctions against Russia as “economic, social, and cultural folly” before reportedly meeting with the Russian deputy prime minister, Dmitry Kozak, and a powerful member of Putin’s United Russia party named Vladimir Pligin.

With Salvini described as 'The European Trump' one wonders whether Aaron Banks - for the Brexit movement - or Donald Trump is similarly linked.

Certainly there have been strong suspicions of Russian interference in other countries' affairs in recent years. One wonders just how 'deep state' it is. It recalls Donald Trump Junior's and Jared Kushner's alleged Russian meetings and the subsequent Mueller inquiry. The sniff of Russian interference has hung in the air over Brexit ever since Cambridge Analytica procured billions of Facebook accounts to push political propaganda and Us President Trump's refusal to say anything negative about Putin. UK PM Theresa May, conversely, quite openly criticises Putin.

And now we have a supposed 'leak' - in a different news story - of the UK Ambassador in Washington faintly criticising the Trump regime in his confidential diplomatic notes to the UK's Foreign Office giving Trump, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage the perfect pretext to (a) force the Ambassador's, Sir Kim Darroch, resignation and presumably Boris gets to pick his replacement (of a Trump-approved official) as the new UK PM in two weeks' time.

Question: is this a Putin-Trump-Johnson/Bannon/Farage conspiracy to forge a far right anti-liberal establishment in Europe and the USA to undermine western democracy as we know it?


Disclaimer:

Quote:

The Lega leader has vehemently denied ever receiving any foreign money to fund his party.

ibid

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/2LdPjdd