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