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