OPEN-SOURCES TIMELINE-ORGANIZED OUTLINE OF UKRAINE CORRUPTION INTERFERENCE CONNECTED TO HUNTER BIDEN, 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, AND 2019 ICIG ‘WHISTLEBLOWER’ ACTIVITY

PART ONE

2008 ------------------------------

KLEPTOCRACY ASSET SEIZURES GET ...SLUSHY

After the Obama Justice Department launched its Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative a decade ago to prosecute corruption in other countries, the State Department, Justice Department and FBI outsourced some of its work in Ukraine to groups funded by Soros. The Hungarian-American businessman is one of the largest donors to American liberal causes, a champion of the U.S. kleptocracy crackdown and a man with extensive business interests in Ukraine.

“No one is confident that this will work perfectly,” said Kenneth Hurwitz, senior legal officer with the Open Society Justice Initiative. “But that’s still better than if the U.S. didn’t try.”

FINANCING POLITICAL ACTIVISM OFF THE BOOKS

The misuse of settlement slush funds was one of the Obama Administration’s worst practices, which it used to end run Congress’s constitutional spending power...

...a new loophole for advancing its liberal agenda – legal settlements. These proceedings are not subject to the budget or appropriations processes, and new bureaucracies, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), are using them to great effect to fund leftist activist groups. So how does it work? For example, when the Department of Justice (DOJ) files suit against a bank for defrauding customers, instead of actually prosecuting executives or decision-makers who perpetrated the fraud, DOJ simply extracts an enormous settlement from the company - in some instances, billions of dollars. As part of the settlement, DOJ will require that the defendant donate large sums of money to outside groups, many of which are partisan activist organizations. Oftentimes DOJ will work with the new big government institutions created by the Obama Administration, such as the CFPB, to determine their own private wish list for how the money is spent. This amounts to a DOJ slush fund – hundreds of millions of dollars operating outside the system. Make no mistake – this is not an attempt to defend those who misled and defrauded the American people. If those activities occurred, then the perpetrators must and should be punished. However, as a recent study by the U.S. House Judiciary and Financial Services Committees has shown, while the perpetrators are taking a financial hit, at the same time and through the same process third-party activist groups are being enriched. Approximately $880 million dollars have been directed to these groups in just the past 20 months, with nothing but the Obama Administration’s partisan whims to determine where it’s going. As DOJ and other agencies operate outside of the budgeting system, there is no transparency and no accountability for how those dollars are spent. These deals are being made by the federal government on behalf of the American people, but the American people have no real way of knowing what all is going into them.

Although the DOJ claims it's perfectly lawful to bypass the Treasury Department since the banks are voluntarily donating, Frank agues that bypass of the department "subverts the legislative branch’s essential spending power." Not to mention, critics have suggested the "voluntary" donations come attached with incentives and pressure.

2012 ------------------------------

CORRUPTION MEANS WHATEVER THEY SAY THEY WANT TO SEIZE

The Magnitsky Act, co-sponsored by Senators John McCain and Ben Cardiff, was signed into law by Obama in December 2012. The Act barred Russian officials suspected of human rights abuses from entering the United States, allowed for their U.S. assets to be frozen, and prohibited financial transactions with U.S. financial firms.

USA TAXPAYER-FINANCED ACTIVIST COLLABORATION

One key U.S. partner was Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC), which received 59 percent (or $1 million) of its nearly $1.7 million budget since 2012 from U.S. budgets tied to State and Justice, and nearly $290,000 from Soros’s International Renaissance Foundation, according to the group’s donor disclosure records.  

The U.S.-Soros collaboration was visible in Kiev. Several senior Department of Justice (DOJ) officials and FBI agents appeared in pictures as participants or attendees at Soros-sponsored events and conferences.

One attendee was Karen Greenaway, then the FBI supervisor in charge of international fraud cases and one of the lead agents in the Manafort investigation in Ukraine... Greenaway recently retired, and Soros’s AntAC soon after announced she was joining its supervisory board.

MAKING MONEY ‘INVESTIGATING CORRUPTION’

George Soros had invested billions in Ukraine before the conflict broke out 2014, and was one of the primary players in the conflict with his nemesis Vladimir Putin. “With his Open Society Foundations, Soros was not only instrumental in helping bring down the government in Kiev, he also stands to make a sizeable profit out of Ukraine, especially thanks to his close ties to the new Poroshenko government.

Documents posted online by Open Society Foundations show that after U.S. officials scored some early successes in corruption cases in Ukraine, such as asset forfeitures, AntAC requested to receive some of the seized money.

2013 ------------------------------

In June, Jim Comey is named to Bill Browder's Board of Directors of Hermitage Capital Management (HSBC).  Browder is the founder and CEO of HSBC. Nine months later, Comey resigns from HSBC to become Director of the FBI.”

COLOR REVOLUTION

The Ukrainian antipathy for Trump’s team — and alignment with Clinton’s — can be traced back to late 2013. That’s when the country’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, whom Manafort had been advising, abruptly backed out of a European Union pact linked to anti-corruption reforms. Instead, Yanukovych entered into a multibillion-dollar bailout agreement with Russia, sparking protests across Ukraine and prompting Yanukovych to flee the country to Russia under Putin’s protection. In the ensuing crisis, Russian troops moved into the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, and Manafort dropped off the radar.

On November 30 and December 1, 2013, riot police violently dispersed and severely beat numerous peaceful demonstrators in Kiev protesting Yanukovich’s rejection of a political and trade agreement with the European Union. Police detained some of the protesters and beat them in custody.

2014 ------------------------------

Violent clashes between police and street fighters, who intermingled with protesters, killed over 100 people between January 19-21 and February 18-20, including some police, and injured many more. Police used rubber bullets, tear gas, and live munitions against protesters and street fighters armed with bats, firearms, and improvised explosives. At least 98 people were killed between February 18-20, including dozens by sniper fire presumably from Ukrainian security forces, although several former officials later claimed that Maidan organizers orchestrated the shooting.

DNC POLITICAL OPPOSITION RESEARCH

Alexandra Chalupa had worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison during the Clinton administration, went on to work as a staffer, then as a consultant, for Democratic National Committee. The DNC paid her $412,000 from 2004 to June 2016, according to Federal Election Commission records, though she also was paid by other clients during that time, including Democratic campaigns and the DNC’s arm for engaging expatriate Democrats around the world. A daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who maintains strong ties to the Ukrainian-American diaspora and the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, Chalupa, a lawyer by training, in 2014 was doing pro bono work for another client interested in the Ukrainian crisis and began researching Manafort’s role in Yanukovych’s rise, as well as his ties to the pro-Russian oligarchs who funded Yanukovych’s political party.

According to a report in the Kyiv Post, “Chalupa said she first came across Manafort after she organized a meeting with then-U.S. President Barack Obama’s National Security Council and leaders of Ukrainian-American organizations in January 2014, to brief the White House about the Euromaidan Revolution that drove President Viktor Yanukovych from power on Feb. 22, 2014.”

BIDEN TAKES POINT

President Obama named Biden the administration’s point man on Ukraine in February 2014, after a popular revolution ousted Russia-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych and as Moscow sent military forces into Ukraine’s Crimea territory.

In February, extra-legal, so-called self-defense units, aided by Russian security forces, seized administrative buildings and military bases across Crimea and installed a pro-Russian leadership. Following an unrecognized referendum on Crimea’s status, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Crimea’s leadership signed agreements claiming to make Crimea and the city of Sevastopol part of the Russian Federation. Ukraine’s authorities and most international actors declared the referendum unlawful, and there was no lawful transfer of sovereignty to Russia

KLEPTOCRACY ASSETS IN ACTION...

Frank White Jr. was bribed to arrange meetings so that corrupt family members of PM Najib Razak could meet President Obama. As a result of the meetings, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were rewarded with “donations” raised by Mr. White himself, which could have been money stolen from Malaysian taxpayers.

Because Mr. White has also raised funds for President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, those stolen money from 1MDB could have flown – either directly or indirectly – to Obama and Clinton.   It is believed that through Mr. White, whose sister is married to a cousin of First Lady Michelle Obama, President Obama was “controlled” and has resulted in the 2014 decision of a historical first visit to Malaysia by a U.S. president in over 50 years. Subsequently, Mr. Obama golfed with the Malaysian prime minister in Hawaii at Christmas time in 2014.

NEO-NAZIS ARE ‘OUR GUYZ’ NOW

The Obama administration has vehemently denied charges that Ukraine’s nascent regime is stock full of neo-fascists despite clear evidence suggesting otherwise. Such categorical repudiations lend credence to the notion the U.S. facilitated the anti-Russian cabal’s rise to power as part of a broader strategy to draw Ukraine into the West’s sphere of influence. Even more disturbing are apologists, from the American left and right, who seem willing accomplices in this obfuscation of reality, when just a cursory glance at the profiles of Ukraine’s new leaders should give pause to the most zealous of Russophobes...

Even more disconcerting has been the emergence of phone intercepts between high-ranking U.S. and Ukrainian officials which make it look as if the U.S. was basically, in the words of Princeton’s Stephen Cohen, “plotting a coup d’état against the elected president of Ukraine.” In other words, the U.S., in addition to providing moral support, may have paved the way for extremists to seize power in Kiev. Such a development would counter the American right’s condemnation of Obama for not “engaging” in the world. The real problem is actually the administration’s over-engagement in this case — as in meddling in the affairs of another state and trying to rearrange its domestic political machinery to suit Washington’s agenda. This gambit has backfired in a number of ways.

Some Western observers claim that there are no neo-Nazi elements in Ukraine, chalking the assertion up to propaganda from Moscow. Unfortunately, they are sadly mistaken. There are indeed neo-Nazi formations in Ukraine. This has been overwhelmingly confirmed by nearly every major Western outlet. The fact that analysts are able to dismiss it as propaganda disseminated by Moscow is profoundly disturbing. It is especially disturbing given the current surge of neo-Nazis and white supremacists across the globe. The most infamous neo-Nazi group in Ukraine is the 3,000-strong Azov Battalion, founded in 2014. Prior to creating Azov, its commander, Andriy Biletsky, headed the neo-Nazi group Patriot of Ukraine, members of which went on to form the core of Azov.

MEDIA MATTERS FOR UKRAINE

The Ukraine Crisis Media Center was founded in March 2014 by the Ukraine government and George Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation to give reporting on the Ukraine conflict the ‘correct’ spin. Soros has founded media lobby groups all over the world modeled on Media Matters for American, which he founded with John Podesta after the Lewinsky scandal...

Internal memos from Soros’s umbrella charity organization, Open Society Foundations, describe a concerted strategy of creating friendships inside key government agencies such as State, DOJ and the FBI that can be leveraged inside the countries Soros was targeting for anti-corruption activism. “We have broadly recognized the importance of developing supportive constituencies in order to make headway in tightening the global web of anti-corruption accountability,” a Feb. 21, 2014, memo states. “We first conceived of this in terms of fostering and helping to build a political environment favorable to high-level anti-corruption cases.” That same memo shows Soros’s organization wanted to make Ukraine a top priority, starting in 2014, and planned to use the Anti-Corruption Action Centre as its lead

CONT.

OPEN-SOURCES TIMELINE-ORGANIZED OUTLINE OF UKRAINE CORRUPTION INTERFERENCE CONNECTED TO HUNTER BIDEN, 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, AND 2019 ICIG ‘WHISTLEBLOWER’ ACTIVITY CONT.

PART TWO

2014 ------------------------------

HUNTER BIDEN GETS A BRAND NEW JOB

According to Schweizer’s book, Vice President Biden met with Archer in April 2014 right as Archer was named to the board at Burisma. A month later, Hunter Biden was named to the board, to oversee Burisma’s legal team.

Between April 2014 and October 2015, more than $3 million was paid out of Burisma accounts to an account linked to Biden’s and Archer’s Rosemont Seneca firm, according to the financial records placed in a federal court file in Manhattan in an unrelated case against Archer.

“Calling Hunter Biden a private citizen ignores the obvious links to the vice president,” Herrera said. “Conflict-of-interest rules should have applied. If Biden is working for the Obama administration on Ukraine, his son should not have been on the board of a company there that could be affected by U.S. policy spearheaded by his father.” The Post also noted that “for more than two decades, [Hunter Biden’s] professional work often tracked with his father’s life in politics, from Washington to Ukraine to China.”...

DON’T ASK DON’T TELL

A spokesperson for the Biden campaign told Politifact that he “learned about his son’s role on the board through media reports and never discussed anything related to this company with his son.” In 2014, spokesman Jay Carney was asked at a White House press briefing if Hunter’s involvement with Burisma created a conflict of interest. “I would refer you to the Vice President’s office. I saw those reports. Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family are obviously private citizens and where they work does not reflect an endorsement by the administration or by the Vice President or President.” Carney said, “But I would refer you to the Vice President’s office.” Hunter has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in his role at Burisma and said he has not discussed the business with his father. “I have had no role whatsoever in relation to any investigation of Burisma, or any of its officers,” Hunter Biden told the New York Times in a statement. “I explicitly limited my role to focus on corporate governance best practices to facilitate Burisma’s desire to expand globally.” He also told the Washington Post that “At no time have I discussed with my father the company’s business or my board service”

STATE FINANCING DISINFORMATION AND PROPAGANDA

In 2014, as part of the Obama Administration’s military encirclement of Russia, the British and the U.S. State Department ran a coup against Viktor Yanukovych, the duly elected President of Ukraine and a client of Paul Manafort. As partisans of maintaining Ukraine’s relationship with Russia battled with the neo-Nazis used by Victoria Nuland and her British friends used as the shock troops in the coup and later installed in the government, Crimea held a referendum, voting, once again, to become a part of Russia. Christopher Steele, the very same author of Trump dirt and the MI6 protégé of Sir Richard Dearlove, provided hundreds of intelligence memos directly to Victoria Nuland, Jonathan Winer, and John Kerry at the State Department to advance the Ukraine coup. Outflanked in in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, the British claimed that this was due to Putin’s superior mastery of “hybrid warfare,” a key component of which was modern information warfare techniques based on social media and press manipulation. It was impossible for the British, in their arrogance, to fathom that anyone would vote against being terrorized or killed by neo-Nazis or remaining associated with Russia. When Crimea voted for the Russian alternative, the arrogant British and American coup masters chalked it up to a Russian “disinformation” campaign.

To counter an alleged Russian advantage (in Hillary Clinton’s words, the Russians were “eating our lunch” when it came to information warfare), in 2014 the British formed the 77th Military Brigade dedicated to advanced propaganda techniques on behalf of NATO and British and American intelligence agencies. This later morphed into the NATO Centre for Strategic Communications, a font of British hybrid warfare operations against Russia... Since 2014, millions of dollars have been spent to pump out endless bilge about the Russian threat while censoring any skepticism, let alone any actual Russian viewpoint of world events. This censorship and propaganda offensive now encompasses every legacy media institution in the advanced sector and, more recently, as the result of Russiagate, all major social media platforms as well.

The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab was the first among many such operations in the U.S. and is actually a part of the NATO Centre for Strategic Communications. It receives major funding from the British government, and now, from Facebook. Again, it is no accident that Dmitri Alperovitch, who used his company CrowdStrike to author the “Russia hacked the DNC and John Podesta” hoax, is also a major player in the Digital Forensics Lab. Now, there are dozens of similar censorship and propaganda operations, including StopFake, PropOrNot, the State Department’s new Global Engagement Center, and multiple offshoots of Mikhail Khordovkovsky’s Institute of Modern Russia.

In September, Kiev authorities opened a criminal investigation into alleged crimes by the pro-Kiev Aydar battalion, which have reportedly included arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, and torture. Armed militants obstructed work of journalists covering the conflict. In some cases, rebels physically assaulted journalists they accused of “biased” reporting. In July, insurgent leaders prohibited journalists from filming in combat zones and public places, threatening them with prosecution before a military tribunal if they did so. Rebels harassed, threatened, beat, and abducted domestic and international journalists.

Ukrainian authorities, citing the “information war” with Russia, took controversial steps restricting freedom of expression. In December 2014, the government’s creation of the Ministry of Information Policy coincided with independent reports of Ukrainian forces’ abuses in eastern Ukraine.

MANAFORT GOES OPPOSITION PARTY

After the fall of Yanukovych's government in 2014, Manafort reportedly took a leading role in creating a new organization from the remnants of the Party of Regions, and rallied Yanukovych allies to rebrand their pro-Russian party into a generally anti-Western voting coalition, according to The New York Times. It was Manafort himself who came up with the party's new name, the Opposition Bloc. "He thought to gather the largest number of people opposed to the current government, you needed to avoid anything concrete, and just become a symbol of being opposed" ...as a result of Manafort's work, the Bloc was able to keep seats in Ukraine's Parliament in the 2014 parliamentary elections.

MANAFORT INVESTIGATION 1.0

FBI Agents interviewed Manafort in 2014 about whether he received undeclared payments from the party of ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, an ally of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and whether he engaged in improper foreign lobbying. The FBI shut down the case without charging Manafort.

2015 ------------------------------

In January, Soros met privately several times with the Ukrainian leadership...

Throughout the year, international and domestic actors struggled to end the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine, but the situation has remained unstable. Parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions remain under de facto control of Russia-backed fighters. All sides in the conflict violated international humanitarian law. Travel restrictions introduced by the government in January 2015 contributed to severe delays in delivery of humanitarian assistance, including medicine, to conflict-affected areas, resulting in a dire humanitarian situation for civilians.

In August, violence broke out in Kiev after the parliament voted to consider constitutional reform giving more autonomy to rebel-controlled areas...

In October, local elections were held in government-controlled territories of Ukraine.

EARLY PRESS KNOCKED BIDEN OUT OF NOMINATION COMPETITION

A 2015 New York Times editorial said that “It should be plain to Hunter Biden that any connection with a Ukrainian oligarch damages his father’s efforts to help Ukraine. This is not a board he should be sitting on.” Steven Pifer also expressed concern to the New York Times in 2015, “It was a mistake for Hunter Biden to join the Burisma board, particularly given that the vice president was the senior U.S. official engaging Ukraine,” Pifer said. “Hunter Biden should have been more mindful of his father’s position.”

2016 ------------------------------

The Magnitsky Act was expanded in 2016, allowing the U.S. Government to sanction foreign government officials anywhere in the world.

THE TEAMS ALL HERE

Chalupa told Politico she had developed a network of sources in Kiev and Washington, including investigative journalists, government officials and private intelligence operatives. While her consulting work at the DNC this past election cycle centered on mobilizing ethnic communities — including Ukrainian-Americans — she said that, when Trump’s unlikely presidential campaign began surging in late 2015, she began focusing more on the research, and expanded it to include Trump’s ties to Russia, as well. She occasionally shared her findings with officials from the DNC and Clinton’s campaign, Chalupa said.

In January 2016 — months before Manafort had taken any role in Trump’s campaign — Chalupa told a senior DNC official that, when it came to Trump’s campaign, “I felt there was a Russia connection,” Chalupa recalled. “And that, if there was, that we can expect Paul Manafort to be involved in this election,”

WHITE HOUSE COORDINATING MEETING

The Obama White House summoned Ukrainian authorities to Washington to coordinate ongoing anti-corruption efforts inside Russia’s most critical neighbor. The January 2016 gathering, confirmed by multiple participants and contemporaneous memos, brought some of Ukraine’s top corruption prosecutors and investigators face to face with members of former President Obama’s National Security Council (NSC), FBI, State Department and Department of Justice (DOJ). The agenda suggested the purpose was training and coordination. But Ukrainian participants said it didn’t take long — during the meetings and afterward — to realize the Americans’ objectives included two politically hot investigations: one that touched Vice President Joe Biden’s family and one that involved a lobbying firm linked closely to then-candidate Trump. U.S. officials “kept talking about how important it was that all of our anti-corruption efforts be united,” said Andrii Telizhenko, then a political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington tasked with organizing the meeting. 

Telizhenko, who no longer works for the Ukrainian Embassy, said U.S. officials volunteered during the meetings — one of which was held in the White House’s Old Executive Office Building — that they had an interest in reviving a closed investigation into payments to U.S. figures...

Telizhenko said he couldn’t remember whether Manafort was mentioned during the January 2016 meeting. But he and other attendees recalled DOJ officials asking investigators from Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) if they could help locate new evidence about the Party of Regions’ payments and its dealings with Americans. “It was definitely the case that led to the charges against Manafort and the leak to U.S. media during the 2016 election,” he said...

THE ‘BLACK LEDGER’ FRAUD

Nazar Kholodnytskyy, Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, said the key evidence against Manafort — a ledger showing payments from the Party of Regions — was known to Ukrainian authorities since 2014 but was suddenly released in May 2016 by the U.S.-friendly NABU, after Manafort was named Trump’s campaign chairman: “Somebody kept this black ledger secret for two years and then showed it to the public and the U.S. media. It was extremely suspicious.”

Kostiantyn Kulyk, deputy head of the Ukraine prosecutor general’s international affairs office, said Ukrainian authorities had evidence that other Western figures, such as former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig, also received money from Yanukovych’s party. But the Americans weren’t interested: “They just discussed Manafort. This was all and only what they wanted. Nobody else.”

CONTINUES

OPEN-SOURCES TIMELINE-ORGANIZED OUTLINE OF UKRAINE CORRUPTION INTERFERENCE CONNECTED TO HUNTER BIDEN, 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, AND 2019 ICIG ‘WHISTLEBLOWER’ ACTIVITY CONT.

PART THREE

2016 ------------------------------

‘JUST DROP IT’

The other case raised at the January 2016 meeting, Telizhenko said, involved Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company under investigation in Ukraine for improper foreign transfers of money. At the time, Burisma allegedly was paying then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter as both a board member and a consultant. More than $3 million flowed from Ukraine to an American firm tied to Hunter Biden in 2014-15, bank records show. According to Telizhenko, U.S. officials told the Ukrainians they would prefer that Kiev drop the Burisma probe and allow the FBI to take it over. The Ukrainians did not agree. Then Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire Ukraine’s chief prosecutor in March 2016

BIDEN’S BOASTFUL CONFESSIONAL

In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. “I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recalled telling Poroshenko. “Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations event, insisting that President Obama was in on the threat. Interviews with a half-dozen senior Ukrainian officials confirm Biden’s account, though they claim the pressure was applied over several months in late 2015 and early 2016, not just six hours of one dramatic day. Whatever the case, Poroshenko and Ukraine’s parliament obliged by ending Shokin’s tenure as prosecutor. Shokin was facing steep criticism in Ukraine, and among some U.S. officials, for not bringing enough corruption prosecutions when he was fired. But Ukrainian officials tell me there was one crucial piece of information that Biden must have known but didn’t mention to his audience: The prosecutor he got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Biden’s younger son, Hunter, as a board member. U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden’s American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts — usually more than $166,000 a month — from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia.

‘YOU’RE FIRED’

Most of the general prosecutor’s investigative work on Burisma focused on three separate cases, and most stopped abruptly once Shokin was fired. The most prominent of the Burisma cases was transferred to a different Ukrainian agency, closely aligned with the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, known as the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), according to the case file and current General Prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko. NABU closed that case, and a second case involving alleged improper money transfers in London was dropped when Ukrainian officials failed to file the necessary documents by the required deadline.

Steven Pifer, a career foreign service officer who was ambassador to Ukraine under President Bill Clinton, told Politifact that “”virtually everyone” he knew in the U.S. government and virtually all non-governmental experts on Ukraine “felt that Shokin was not doing his job and should be fired. As far as I can recall, they all concurred with the vice president telling Poroshenko that the U.S. government would not extend the $1 billion loan guarantee to Ukraine until Shokin was removed from office.”” The European Union also called for him to be fired and celebrated his removal. “This decision creates an opportunity to make a fresh start in the prosecutor general’s office. I hope that the new prosecutor general will ensure that [his] office . . . becomes independent from political influence and pressure and enjoys public trust,” said Jan Tombinski, the EU’s envoy to Ukraine, in a statement at the time.

MANAFORT TRIPS THE SWITCH

Manafort joined Trump’s campaign on March 29, 2016, and then was promoted to campaign chairman on May 19, 2016.   NABU leaked the existence of the ledgers on May 29, 2016

POLITICAL OPERATIVES INFORMATION LAUNDERING

Chalupa also passed the Black Ledger info on to Glenn Simpson at Fusion GPS, who passed them on to staffer Nellie Ohr. Ohr passed the info on to her husband Bruce Ohr, Epoch Times reports. On May 30, 2016, Nellie Ohr sent an email to Bruce Ohr and Justice Department staffers under the subject line “Reported Trove of Documents on Ukrainian Party of Regions’ ‘Black Cashbox.’”

Nellie Ohr told congressional investigators that Serhiy Leshchenko, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, served as “a source of information” and acknowledged that she then used that information in following up and formulating her opposition research. Leshchenko, along with Artem Sytnyk, the director of Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, was responsible for publicly disclosing the contents of the Ukrainian “black ledger,” which implicated Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, to the media. Leshchenko also served as a source for various individuals, including journalist Michael Isikoff and DNC operative Alexandra Chalupa.

Leshchenko had adopted a strong anti-Trump stance, telling the Financial Times in August 2016 that “a Trump presidency would change the pro-Ukrainian agenda in American foreign policy” and that it was “important to show not only the corruption aspect, but that he is [a] pro-Russian candidate who can break the geopolitical balance in the world.” Leschenko noted that the majority of Ukrainian politicians were “on Hillary Clinton’s side.”

Nellie Ohr said she wasn’t aware how the connection between Leshchenko and Fusion was established, or if they were doing work for him, but she did agree that Leshchenko was “a source of information” and acknowledged that she then used that information in following up and formulating her opposition research. Later in Ohr’s testimony, Leshchenko was briefly mentioned once again. She appeared to be very careful with her choice of wording—especially when Manafort’s name came up.

COURT DECLARES INTERFERENCE

A Ukrainian court in December (2018) concluded NABU’s release of the ledger was an illegal attempt to influence the U.S. election. And a member of Ukraine’s parliament has released a recording of a NABU official saying the agency released the ledger to help Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The court noted the material was part of a pre-trial investigation and its release “led to interference in the electoral processes of the United States in 2016 and harmed the interests of Ukraine as a state.”

On April 28, 2016, Chalupa and Isikoff appeared on a panel to discuss their research on Manafort with 68 Ukrainian journalists in a program called the Open World Leadership Center, sponsored by the Library of Congress, which is closely connected to the Soros Foundations.

EMBASSY UNCONCERN

“The investigation into the Anti-Corruption Action Center (sic), based on the assistance they have received from us, is similarly misplaced,” then-embassy Charge d’ Affaires George Kent wrote the prosecutor’s office in April 2016 in a letter that also argued U.S. officials had no concerns about how the U.S. aid had been spent. At the time, the nation’s prosecutor general had just been fired, under pressure from the United States, and a permanent replacement had not been named.

EVIDENCE-SHARING AGREEMENT

In June 2016, the FBI signed an evidence-sharing agreement with the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine

KLEPTOCRACY ASSET SEIZURES COMES FULL CIRCLE

After the U.S. Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch announced on July 20, 2016 that the Justice Department filed lawsuits to seize assets that it said were the result of US$3.5 billion that was misappropriated from 1MDB (1Malaysia Development Bhd), there hasn’t been any meaningful progress ever since, probably because the DOJ was told to drag their feet until the presidential election is over... But the 1MDB lawsuit, already the U.S. largest single action ever brought under the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, didn’t only corrupt US$3.5 billion of the U.S. financial system, real-estate and Hollywood...

According to the Wall Street Journal, businessman Frank White Jr., has benefited from money stolen from 1MDB, a pet project of PM Najib Razak which turned out to be a “Ponzi Scheme” designed to fleece taxpayers’ money to the tune of US$6 billion.

In return for the easy profits, Frank White Jr., founder and CEO of investment firm DuSable Capital Management, used his connection and ultimately escorted Najib’s son, stepson Riza Aziz and Leonardo DiCaprio to the Oval Office where they met President Barack Obama in December 2013. They presented a copy of “The Wolf of Wall Street” – produced using stolen money – to the president...

MANAFORT STEPS DOWN

Documentation regarding the Party of Regions’ Black Ledger “has now seemingly found its way to NABU, the Ukrainian National Anti-Corruption Bureau,” the e-mail stated, citing the source for the Black Ledger documents as former First Deputy Head of the Security Service of Ukraine Viktor Trepak.

Isikoff broke the story on Yahoo on Aug. 18, 2016, one of the first public mentions of purported “collusion with Russia” by the Trump team. Manafort had to step down as Trump’s campaign manager the next day.

“Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau. Investigators assert that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials.” Manafort’s name was reportedly listed in the 400-page ledger 22 times, although his actual signature wasn’t authenticated and any payments made to him remain unverified. The documents implicating Manafort had been released by Serhiy Leshchenko. On March 20, 2017, Leshchenko released another set of documents, this time alleging to show that Manafort took steps to hide payments related to his work for former Ukrainian President Viktor F. Yanukovych. Leshchenko’s documents “included an invoice that appeared to show $750,000 funneled through an offshore account and disguised as payment for computers.”

‘IT’S A FAKE’

Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Konstantin Kilimnik, a regular informer for the State Department, told the U.S. government almost immediately after The New York Times wrote about the ledger in August 2016 that the document probably was fake. Manafort “could not have possibly taken large amounts of cash across three borders. It was always a different arrangement — payments were in wire transfers to his companies, which is not a violation,” Kilimnik wrote in an email to a senior U.S. official on Aug. 22, 2016. He added: “I have some questions about this black cash stuff, because those published records do not make sense. The timeframe doesn’t match anything related to payments made to Manafort. … It does not match my records. All fees Manafort got were wires, not cash.”

THERE IS ANOTHER

Bruce Ohr and Steele worked on their own effort to get dirt on Manafort from a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, who had a soured business relationship with him. Deripaska was “almost ready to talk” to U.S. government officials regarding the money that “Manafort stole,” Bruce Ohr wrote in notes from his conversations with Steele. The efforts eventually led to a September 2016 meeting in which the FBI asked Deripaska if he could help prove Manafort was helping Trump collude with Russia. Deripaska laughed off the notion as preposterous...

STATE DEPT LIES ABOUT PRESSURING PROSECUTORS TO BACK OFF

In the end, no action was taken against AntAC and it remains thriving today. Nonetheless, the anecdote is taking on new significance. First, it conflicts with the State Department’s official statement last week after Lutsenko first mentioned the do-not-prosecute list. The embassy responded that the claim was a fabrication and a sign that corruption is alive and well inside Ukraine.

But Kent’s letter unequivocally shows the embassy did press Ukrainian prosecutors to back off what normally would be considered an internal law enforcement matter inside a sovereign country. And more than a half-dozen U.S. and Ukrainian sources confirmed to me the AntAC case wasn’t the only one in which American officials exerted pressure on Ukrainian investigators in 2016.

2017 ------------------------------

Ukraine has traditionally enjoyed strong relations with U.S. administrations. Its officials worry that could change under Trump, whose team has privately expressed sentiments ranging from ambivalence to deep skepticism about Poroshenko’s regime, while sounding unusually friendly notes about Putin’s regime.

WORRIED THEY BACKED THE WRONG HORSE

Poroshenko is scrambling to alter that dynamic, recently signing a $50,000-a-month contract with a well-connected GOP-linked Washington lobbying firm to set up meetings with U.S. government officials “to strengthen U.S.-Ukrainian relations.”

THE SHOW MUST GO ON

Ukrainian Representative Serhiy Leshenko and Artem Sytnyk, director of Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), presented these ‘Black Ledger’ documents to the public on March 21, 2017 in the Soros-funded Ukraine Crisis Media Center, linking Manafort to illegal kickbacks totaling $12.7 million and even seeking to blame him for the deaths of protestors on Maidan Square 2014. The Ukrainian “anti-corruption” investigators even went so far as to hack the phones and text messages of Paul Manafort‘s daughters.

CONTINUES

OPEN-SOURCES TIMELINE-ORGANIZED OUTLINE OF UKRAINE CORRUPTION INTERFERENCE CONNECTED TO HUNTER BIDEN, 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, AND 2019 ICIG ‘WHISTLEBLOWER’ ACTIVITY CONT.

PART FOUR

2017 ------------------------------

WEISSMANN MEETS THE PRESS

Documents show that Andrew Weissmann arranged a meeting with DOJ and FBI officials and four Associated Press reporters on April 11, 2017, just over a month before Mueller was appointed special counsel... Greenaway also said that Weissmann provided guidance to the reporters for their investigation.  According to Greenaway, Weissmann suggested that the reporters ask the Cypriot Anti-Money Laundering Authority, a Cypriot government agency, if it had provided the Department of Treasury with all of the documents they were legally authorized to provide regarding Manafort. The AP journalists, Chad Day, Ted Bridis, Jack Gillum and Eric Tucker, were conducting an extensive investigation of Manafort, including payments he received through various shell companies set up in Cyprus. Day and Gillum published an article a day after the meeting laying out some of the allegations against Manafort, including that he was listed in a "black ledger" that documented illicit payments from a Ukrainian political party allied with the Russian government...

This certainly sounds like a two-way information exchange, or a quid-pro-quo, if you will.  If grand jury-developed information was provided to the AP reporters, that would be a violation of law and procedure.  And if the reporters were passing along information to law enforcement, that comes close to the line of becoming stooges for the cops – something journalists used to abhor...

The AP writers who Weissmann used are also connected to Glenn Simpson and Christopher Steele...

NEW BOSS, SAME AS THE OLD BOSS

Soros wrote a sizable check from his personal funds in fall 2017 to a new group, Democracy Integrity Project, started by a former FBI agent and Senate staffer Daniel Jones to continue “investigation and research into foreign interference in American elections and European elections.”   Vachon said the group asked Soros not to divulge the size of his contribution, and Soros later learned the group hired Fusion GPS, the same firm that was paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic Party to create the infamous “Steele dossier”

HOW TO USE A HOAX DOCUMENT TO GET A WARRANT

According to documents, the FBI used the “black cash ledger” as a reason to rehash a criminal case against Paul Manafort that was previously dropped in 2014 — the FBI needed search warrants in 2017 to look through his bank records to prove Manafort worked for a Russian-backed political party in the Ukraine.

The FBI received several early warnings that the “black cash ledger” was likely a fake, yet they used it anyway. Mueller’s office was also warned that the document was a fraud...

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team and the FBI were given copies of Kilimnik’s warning, according to three sources...

Mueller’s corrupt lawyers knew that if they used the Manafort document, it would require FBI agents to discuss their assessment of the evidence against Manafort, so they dishonestly skirted this issue by using media reports that cited the “black cash ledger” — even worse, the feds assisted on one of those media reports as a source...

An FBI record of the April 11, 2017, meeting declared that the AP reporters “were advised that they appeared to have a good understanding of Manafort’s business dealings” in Ukraine. So, essentially, the FBI cited a leak that the government had facilitated and then used it to support the black ledger evidence, even though it had been clearly warned about the document.

The FBI and Mueller’s team knew the ledger was a fraud because they never even introduced it to jurors during Manafort’s trial last summer — rather, they just used it to hunt Manafort down, indict him and drag his name through the mud.

2019 ------------------------------

As Biden’s 2020 campaign ramped up over the past year, Lutsenko — the Ukrainian prosecutor that Biden once hailed as a “solid” replacement for Shokin — began looking into what happened with the Burisma case that had been shut down.

RE-OPENING THE CASE

While reviewing the Burisma investigative files, he discovered “members of the Board obtained funds as well as another U.S.-based legal entity, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, for consulting services.” Lutsenko said some of the evidence he knows about in the Burisma case may interest U.S. authorities and he’d like to present that information to new U.S. Attorney General William Barr, particularly the vice president’s intervention. “Unfortunately, Mr. Biden had correlated and connected this aid with some of the HR (personnel) issues and changes in the prosecutor’s office,” Lutsenko said. Nazar Kholodnytskyi, the lead anti-corruption prosecutor in Lutsenko’s office, confirmed to me in an interview that part of the Burisma investigation was reopened in 2018, after Joe Biden made his remarks. “We were able to start this case again,” Kholodnytskyi said. But he said the separate Ukrainian police agency that investigates corruption has dragged its feet in gathering evidence. “We don’t see any result from this case one year after the reopening because of some external influence,” he said, declining to be more specific.

SEE NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL

Kostiantyn Kulyk, deputy head of the Prosecutor General's International Legal Cooperation Department, told me he and other senior law enforcement officials tried unsuccessfully since last year to get visas from the U.S. Embassy in Kiev to deliver their evidence to Washington. "We were supposed to share this information during a working trip to the United States," Kulyk told me in a wide-ranging interview. "However, the [U.S.] ambassador blocked us from obtaining a visa. She didn't explicitly deny our visa, but also didn't give it to us." One focus of Ukrainian investigators, Kulyk said, has been money spirited unlawfully out of Ukraine and moved to the United States by businessmen friendly to the prior, pro-Russia regime of Viktor Yanukovych.

Ukrainian businessmen "authorized payments for lobbying efforts directed at the U.S. government," he told me. "In addition, these payments were made from funds that were acquired during the money-laundering operation. We have information that a U.S. company was involved in these payments." That company is tied to one or more prominent Democrats, Ukrainian officials insist. In another instance, he said, Ukrainian authorities gathered evidence that money paid to an American Democrat allegedly was hidden by Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) during the 2016 election under pressure from U.S. officials. "In the course of this investigation, we found that there was a situation during which influence was exerted on the NABU, so that the name of [the American] would not be mentioned," he said...

Many of the allegations shared with me by more than a half-dozen senior Ukrainian officials are supported by evidence that emerged in recent U.S. court filings and intelligence reports. The Ukrainians told me their evidence includes:

•Sworn statements from two Ukrainian officials admitting that their agency tried to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election in favor of Hillary Clinton. The effort included leaking an alleged ledger showing payments to then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort;

•Contacts between Democratic figures in Washington and Ukrainian officials that involved passing along dirt on Donald Trump;
 •Financial records showing a Ukrainian natural gas company routed more than $3 million to American accounts tied to Hunter Biden, younger son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, who managed U.S.-Ukraine relations for the Obama administration. Biden's son served on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company, Burisma Holdings;

•Records that Vice President Biden pressured Ukrainian officials in March 2016 to fire the prosecutor who oversaw an investigation of Burisma Holdings and who planned to interview Hunter Biden about the financial transfers;

•Correspondence showing members of the State Department and U.S. Embassy in Kiev interfered or applied pressure in criminal cases on Ukrainian soil;


•Disbursements of as much as $7 billion in Ukrainian funds that prosecutors believe may have been misappropriated or taken out of the country, including to the United States.

Ukrainian officials say they don't want to hand the evidence to FBI agents working in Ukraine because they believe the bureau has a close relationship with the NABU and the U.S. Embassy. "It is no secret in Ukrainian political circles that the NABU was created with American help and tried to exert influence during the U.S. presidential election," Kulyk told me. Kulyk's boss, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, told me he has enough evidence - particularly involving Biden, his family and money spirited out of Ukraine - to warrant a meeting with U.S. Attorney General William Barr. "I'm looking forward to meeting with the attorney general of the United States in order to start and facilitate our joint investigation regarding the appropriation of another $7 billion in U.S. dollars with Ukrainian legal origin," Lutsenko said.

THE NEW GUY

A comedian with no political experience raced ahead in Ukraine’s presidential election on Sunday, offering a fresh face to voters fed up with entrenched corruption... Investors are also watching to see if the next president will push reforms required to keep the country in an International Monetary Fund bailout program that has supported Ukraine through war, sharp recession and a currency plunge. Though criticized for being an unknown quantity and light on policy detail, Zelenskiy’s emergence is a powerful challenge to the veteran politician Poroshenko and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who trailed in third place. Just 9 percent of Ukrainians have confidence in their national government, the lowest of any electorate in the world, a Gallup poll published in March showed. Zelenskiy has tapped into this anti-establishment mood, although his inexperience makes Western officials and foreign investors wary. His campaign has relied heavily on social media and comedy gigs of jokes, sketches and song-and-dance routines that poke fun at his political rivals. “This is a battle to change the country, to change the political system. It has completely discredited itself and is not supported by Ukraine’s citizens or by its Western partners,” Zelenskiy’s political consultant, Dmitry Razumkov, told Reuters. “After five years of fighting corruption, we have returned to where we started.”

CORROBORATING EVIDENCE

Ukraine is in the middle of a hard-fought presidential election, is a frequent target of intelligence operations by neighboring Russia and suffers from rampant political corruption nationwide. Thus, many Americans might take the restart of the Burisma case with a grain of salt, and rightfully so. But what makes Lutsenko’s account compelling is that federal authorities in America, in an entirely different case, uncovered financial records showing just how much Hunter Biden’s and Archer’s company received from Burisma while Joe Biden acted as Obama’s point man on Ukraine... The bank records show that, on most months when Burisma money flowed, two wire transfers of $83,333.33 each were sent to the Rosemont Seneca–connected account on the same day. The same Rosemont Seneca–linked account typically then would pay Hunter Biden one or more payments ranging from $5,000 to $25,000 each. Prosecutors reviewed internal company documents and wanted to interview Hunter Biden and Archer about why they had received such payments, according to interviews. Lutsenko said Ukrainian company board members legally can pay themselves for work they do if it benefits the company’s bottom line, but prosecutors never got to determine the merits of the payments to Rosemont because of the way the investigation was shut down.

EMBASSY BLOCKS EVIDENCE DELIVERY

Ukrainians officials have gone public in recent days with their frustrations after months of trying to deliver the evidence quietly to the Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) fizzled. Unable to secure visas from the U.S. Embassy, some Ukrainian law enforcement officials sought backdoor channels, Kulyk said. One of those avenues involved reaching out last fall to a former federal prosecutor from the George W. Bush years, according to interviews. He delivered a written summary of some of the Ukrainian allegations to the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan, along with an offer to connect U.S. investigators with individuals purporting to have the evidence. There was no response or follow-up, according to multiple people directly familiar with the effort.

GIULIANI LEARNS OF ALLEGATIONS

More recently, President Trump's private attorney Rudy Giuliani - former mayor and former U.S. attorney in New York City - learned about some of the allegations while, on behalf of the Trump legal team, he looked into Ukrainian involvement in the 2016 election. Since then, Lutsenko and others have talked with other American lawyers about helping to file U.S. legal action to recover money they believe was wrongly taken from their country. "It's like no one at DOJ is listening. There is some compelling evidence that should at least be looked at, evaluated, but the door seems shut at both State and Justice," said an American who has been contacted for help and briefed on the evidence.

TRUMP DELAYS AID

The US and Ukraine were in discussions about $250 million in military aid to Kiev this summer that had been delayed by the White House. Giuliani said he didn't know anything about the package, but that if Trump had used it as leverage to benefit himself politically in any way he would not have done anything wrong. "The reality is that the President of the United States, whoever he is, has every right to tell the president of another country you better straighten out the corruption in your country if you want me to give you a lot of money. If you're so damn corrupt that you can't investigate allegations -- our money is going to get squandered," Giuliani said...

Trump spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25. There is so far no public evidence that the whistleblower's complaint pertains to this conversation or that there was any abuse of power by Trump. The White House later lifted the hold on aid.

CONTINUES

OPEN-SOURCES TIMELINE-ORGANIZED OUTLINE OF UKRAINE CORRUPTION INTERFERENCE CONNECTED TO HUNTER BIDEN, 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, AND 2019 ICIG ‘WHISTLEBLOWER’ ACTIVITY CONT.

PART FIVE

2019 ------------------------------

STATE DEPT REQUESTED VISITS

The call was preceded by visits between Rudy Giuliani and Ukrainian official Andrei Zermak, at the very request of the State Department, part of a diplomatic effort to repair relations with Ukraine and newly elected president Volodymyr Zelensky. Zelensky has been trying since last summer to hand over evidence of corruption by Americans in Ukraine during the Obama administration. Those efforts faltered when the U.S. Embassy in Kiev failed to issue visas in a timely manner so they could hand over this evidence, and when thereafter Ukraine hired a former U.S. attorney to hand over the evidence to the U.S. Attorney in New York, they got no response. The evidence involved efforts by the Democratic National Committee to pressure the Ukrainian government to meddle in our election, and the payoff to Joe Biden’s (and apparently John Kerry’s) son as well. At each step of the way, Giuliani informed U.S. officials of the discussions.

THE CALL

Minister Vadym Prystaiko was a participant in the discussions between the U.S. and Ukraine and has specific knowledge of the phone call.  Minister Prystaiko says the phone call was long, friendly and covered a variety of important issues.  There was no undue pressure or “coercion” from U.S. President Donald Trump. 

WHISTLING IN THE DARK

CNN reported Thursday that the intelligence community inspector general suggested to the House Intelligence Committee that the complaint raised concerns about multiple actions. He would not say whether those instances involved Trump, sources familiar with the closed-door briefing told CNN. The inspector general, Michael Atkinson, was legally unable to discuss the complaint itself, since Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire has declined to hand it over. Democrats say he is compelled to provide the complaint under whistleblower legislation, and House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said his committee may take legal action if it isn't turned over. The Washington Post on Wednesday said the complaint referenced a "promise" Trump allegedly made to the unidentified leader...

The whistleblower didn't have direct knowledge of the communications, an official briefed on the matter told CNN. Instead, the whistleblower's concerns came in part from learning information that was not obtained during the course of their work, and those details have played a role in the administration's determination that the complaint didn't fit the reporting requirements under the intelligence whistleblower law, the official said.

What is going on here? Some employee at CIA learned of a phone call between President Trump and some foreign leader. This employee did not like what the president said. And because the conversation involved classified information, he called himself a “whistleblower” and informed “former officials,” who took what is now “Whistleblower-gate” to the Washington Post. The anonymous CIA employee also informed another like-minded employee, the agency’s inspector general, who promptly took the allegations to the House Intelligence Committee’s Democrats. In turn, they promptly demanded Trump’s conversation be made public.

INVESTIGATING THE COMPLAINT

A whistleblower complaint about President Trump made by an intelligence official centers on Ukraine, according to two people familiar with the matter, which has set off a struggle between Congress and the executive branch. The complaint involved communications with a foreign leader and a “promise” that Trump made, which was so alarming that a U.S. intelligence official who had worked at the White House went to the inspector general of the intelligence community, two former U.S. officials said. Two and a half weeks before the complaint was filed, Trump spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian and political newcomer who was elected in a landslide in May. That call is already under investigation by House Democrats who are examining whether Trump and his attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani sought to manipulate the Ukrainian government into helping Trump’s reelection campaign. Lawmakers have demanded a full transcript and a list of participants on the call. (read more) Three Democrat-controlled house committees – Foreign Affairs, Intelligence and Government Reform – have announced that they will investigate whether a host of ethical and legal rules have been violated.

A lawyer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence “had contradicted the inspector general and found that the whistleblower complaint did not meet the statutory definition of an urgent concern because it involved a matter not under the DNI’s jurisdiction.” Inspector General Michael Atkinson made it clear when he testified behind closed doors to members of the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday that he disagreed with the lawyer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “Atkinson told lawmakers…he felt the matter was under the DNI’s purview – and also that it was urgent ‘in the common understanding of the word.” According to two people familiar with his testimony, “Atkinson told the committee that the complaint did not stem from just one conversation.” In the three hours of his closed door testimony, Atkinson “repeatedly declined to discuss with members the content of the complaint, saying he was not authorized to do so.”

The house committees’ chairs say they will scrutinise a telephone call between the US president and Mr Zelensky on 25 July, during which Mr Trump allegedly told the Ukrainian president to reopen the Biden investigation if he wanted to improve relations with the US. They claim that Kurt Volker, the US special representative for Ukraine, was told to intercede with President Zelensky by the White House, and they are looking into the activities of Rudy Giuliani, Mr Trump’s personal lawyer. Mr Giuliani urged Mr Zelensky soon after his election to focus on the Biden case, but the Ukrainian president is said to have refused, protesting that he did not want to get drawn into American internal politics. This led to Mr Giuliani cancelling a trip to Kiev, saying he felt that he would be “walking into a group of people that are the enemies of our president … in some cases the enemies of the United States”.

GIULIANI’S HEATED ‘CONFESSION’

During a heated exchange, host Chris Cuomo asked Giuliani diretly “Did you ask the Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden?” “No, actually I didn’t. I asked the Ukraine to investigate the allegations that there was interference in the election of 2016 by the Ukrainians for the benefit of Hillary Clinton, for which there is already a court finding,” Giuliani responded. Cuomo asked him again “”You never asked anything about Hunter Biden? You never asked anything about Joe Biden and his role with the prosecutor?” “The only thing I asked about Joe Biden is to get to the bottom of how it was that Lutsenko, who was appointed, dismissed the case,” Giuliani said. Cuomo pressed the issue, “So you did ask Ukraine to look into Joe Biden?” “Of course I did,” Giuliani said. When asked about his contradicting answer, Giuliani tried to clarify by saying he didn’t ask specifically for Joe Biden to be investigated but asked Ukrainian officials “to look into the allegations that related to my client, which tangentially involved Joe Biden in a massive bribery scheme.”

ENDLESS SMEAR OPPORTUNITIES

Since there is zero chance of any president disclosing the contents of private conversations with foreign heads of state, a standoff ensued. That guarantees endless opportunities for the intelligence community to leak ludicrous tales without substance. These are the empty calories that sustain the ruling class’s 2020 campaign. 

BROAD AUTHORITY

The Washington Post, after a thousand words in a story that speculates on Trump’s dangerous, possibly unconstitutional behavior, includes the following half-sentence: “ [legal experts] also noted that the president has broad authority to decide unilaterally when to classify or declassify information. Not quite. The president’s authority over national security information is more than broad. It is total. All who exercise such authority do so on his behalf and by his leave. That is because any and all foreign intelligence activities—which are subordinate to foreign and military policy in general—are pursuant to the president’s judgment... arguably the most naked, most shameless attempt yet by the deep state to strike a blow at Trump by going to the press with an interpretation of classified information that neither the press nor the public has seen, will not see, and that concerns an activity that, in itself, is perfectly proper and indeed constitutes the president doing his job.

The identity of the person the press claims is a whistleblower is unknown as yet. He, as the Other McCain notes, is almost certainly “a Democrat operative [snip] a perfect example of the ‘Deep State’ problem that Trump’s supporters have been talking about for three years. The bureaucrats seem to believe they should have more influence on U.S. policy than the President himself, if the President doesn’t share their world view.”  As the President observed earlier, all his conversations with foreign leaders are surely listened in on by various members of the intelligence community here and abroad, so the report of a “whistleblower” having access to secretive conversations seems utter bunk. Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, through the agency’s counsel, declined to turn over  the complaint to Congress, indicating it was not “urgent,” a threshold that must be met before turning over such complaints, and that the allegations in the complaint concern “conduct by someone outside the Intelligence Community” and that they involve “confidential and potentially privileged communications by persons outside the Intelligence Community.”  In any event, this leaker (not a whistleblower, in my view) was operating on limited facts...

REFUSING TO FORWARD THE COMPLAINT TO CONGRESS

If you think for a moment that the decision by the DNI not to turn over the leaker’s complaint to Congress was inappropriate, consider this:

1.Article II of the Constitution gives the president sweeping power to conduct foreign affairs, negotiate with leaders of other nations, make demands or offer promises.  The Constitution does not grant the power of review, approval or disapproval to spies or other unelected officials in the executive branch.

2.The ICWPA law defines the parameters of an “urgent concern” complaint as an abuse or violation of law “relating to the funding, administration, or operations of an intelligence activity involving classified information, but does not include differences of opinions concerning public policy matters.”  The president’s conversation with a foreign leader does not seem to fall under this whistleblower definition. 

3.It appears the acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) agrees with this assessment. His agency’s general counsel wrote a letter stating the complaint did not meet the ICWPA definition because it involved conduct “from someone outside the intel community and did not relate to intelligence activity,” according to a report by Fox News. This is why the DNI refused to forward the complaint to congress. 

Despite the paucity of facts, some reasonable observations and conclusions can be drawn.

1 It appears that an American spy in one of our intelligence agencies may have been spying on our own president.  The complaint suggests that this intel agent was listening in on Trump’s conversation with a foreign leader.  Was this person officially asked to listen to the conversation or was he or she secretly listening in? We don’t know.

2 This agent, who is an unelected and inferior federal employee in the government hierarchy, apparently believes that it is his/her job to second-guess the motivation behind the words of the elected president, who is the most superior officer in the U.S. government. 

3 Article II of the Constitution gives the president sweeping power to conduct foreign affairs, negotiate with leaders of other nations, make demands or offer promises.  The Constitution does not grant the power of review, approval or disapproval to spies or other unelected officials in the executive branch. 

4 The ICWPA law defines the parameters of an “urgent concern” complaint as an abuse or violation of law “relating to the funding, administration, or operations of an intelligence activity involving classified information, but does not include differences of opinions concerning public policy matters.”  The president’s conversation with a foreign leader does not seem to fall under this whistleblower definition. 

5 It appears the acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) agrees with this assessment. His agency’s general counsel wrote a letter stating the complaint did not meet the ICWPA definition because it involved conduct “from someone outside the intel community and did not relate to intelligence activity,” according to a report by Fox News. This is why the DNI refused to forward the complaint to congress. 

To put this in plain language, a spy who allegedly spied on the president does not have a legitimate whistleblower complaint against that president under the law.  The ICWPA is a mechanism to report alleged misconduct by members within the intelligence community, of which the president is not.  Yes, the alphabet soup of intel agencies ultimately report to the president, but that does not make Trump a member of that community and subject to its rules of conduct.

CONTINUES

Gold fuckin star man. Disseminate far and wide Pedes!

OPEN-SOURCES TIMELINE-ORGANIZED OUTLINE OF UKRAINE CORRUPTION INTERFERENCE CONNECTED TO HUNTER BIDEN, 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, AND 2019 ICIG ‘WHISTLEBLOWER’ ACTIVITY CONT.

PART SIX

2019 ------------------------------

IN THE OPINION OF THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY INSPECTOR GENERAL

The complaint is likely to have come from an official familiar with the scope of presidential power. And it was signed off as "urgent and credible" by the inspector general -- a Trump appointee -- who thought Congress should know in line with whistleblowing laws.

The ‘whistle blower’ isn’t under the IC whistle blower act of 1998 (I just double checked a comment to that effect elsewhere at TGP —(1) PDJT is not in the IC, (2) was hearsay) and so the antiTrump leaker does NOT have whistleblower secrecy protection under the whistleblower laws.

So how then could the IG

1. accept the leaker/squealer as a ‘whistleblower’?
2. issue a report/statement that it was “concerning” (or words to that effect)?
3. Do anything at all?

The IC IG was the special counsel in the DOJ NSD division from July 2016 (John Carlin & unmaskings) continuing thru Mary McCord and Dana Boente until he became the IG in May 2018.

IG Atkinson totally overlooks Vice President Biden shaking down Ukraine by extortion and threatening to withhold $1 billion in aide unless the prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden was fired. He was not outraged about that or the highest ranking officials in the DOJ, FBI and CIA using false evidence to obtain FISA warrants, unmasking hundreds of innocent Americans and attempting to frame the President of the United States and his family members for a crime he that not only didn’t commit but a crime that never even happened. Why isn’t IG Atkinson investigating any of that?

WHITE HOUSE INVOLVEMENT

According to three CNN sources, the White House and the Justice Department advised the director of national intelligence that the complaint isn't governed by laws covering intelligence whistleblowers. The revelation is the first known evidence of the White House's involvement in the standoff. There may be an argument that the content of the President's communications or an official's impressions of them sent to Congress are subject to executive privilege.

PRESUMPTION OF INNOCENCE

Every American deserves the right to be presumed innocent until evidence is made public or a conviction is secured, especially when some matters of a case involve foreigners. The same presumption should be afforded to Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Devon Archer and Burisma in the Ukraine case.

FIN