Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Jan 28, 2019 1:56 pm

seemslikeadream » Thu Jan 24, 2019 11:49 am wrote:
Remember:Paul Manafort installed Yanukovych as Putin puppet in Ukraine, then did the same in 2016 with Trump.


Manafort did not "install" Yanukovych, he managed his 2010 campaign. Yanukovych came up as the hand-picked successor of the post-Soviet Ukrainian president from 1991 to 2004, Leonid Kutschma. Y. appeared to win the 2004 election. but was ousted after the Orange Revolution forced a second vote. Then he won the 2010 election, legitimately, and did some interesting things. He hired the opposition leader, Yulia Timoshenko, as a minister, and had her negotiate an energy deal with Russia. Then he imprisoned her on charges that the deal was too friendly to the Russians. She was condemned as "pro-Russian," which works well in (western) Ukrainian politics. He spent three years trying to arrange an economic association deal with the EU. Political consultant Paul Manafort, funded by oligarch Pinchuk (a funder of the Clinton Foundation), was the lobbyist and point-man in the dealings on that behind the scenes. Because the EU would have restricted trade with Russia, Moscow pressured Y. to join their customs union instead, and threatened to charge higher prices for fuel if Ukraine signed with the EU. The EU-IMF then came up with a horrible final offer of only $5 billion in loans, 2/3 of which would go straight into debt service, while Russia offered $15 billion in loans at far better conditions. With the state in dire financial straits, overnight, and against Manafort's advice, Y. rejected the EU deal and accepted Moscow's. Then, overnight, the Euro-Maidan protests began in November 2013, and were backed by three major opposition parties. It was from then that Y. came to be identified solely as "pro-Russian" in the Western corporate media. Eventually he would flee the country and seek asylum in Russia.

(Manafort of course also did not "install" Trump. He was campaign chair for a couple of months until he was fired on August 17, when the campaign was at its low point. Bannon then took over and got the win. Of course, before Bannon and the Mercers, no one ever "ran" the Trump campaign other than the old guy rambling aggressive trash at various podiums around the country and deploying his Angry Thumbs on Twitter, and the corporate media that bestowed such generous free airtime continuously to his shows starting in 2015.)

For a thorough view on the current political situation in (western) Ukraine as seen by an honest-to-god leftist sociologist in Kiev, follow the link below to the interview transcript I have posted. Here's my intro to it:

JackRiddler » Mon Jan 28, 2019 12:13 pm wrote:.

Okay, here's a long interview transcript with sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko, who is also of the endangered left in Ukraine, with a lot of straight talk about the present nature of the Kiev state. If the right-wing extremists are a small minority, then only in a context where extreme nationalist ideology and xenophobia as well as oligarchic control and harsh neoliberal policy have long been normalized among the major parties, and where everyone remotely leftist-seeming has been labeled as treasonous and pro-Russian. The Communist Party is banned. Worse, the right-wing extremists and straight-up Nazi battalions are the only organized and readily violent force on the street, largely deputized within the police and military. They act with impunity to enforce their ideas of purity and social conformity through terror, assault and murder. Things are very bad for LGBT, independent journalists and anyone who can be associated as insufficiently nationalist, vaguely Jewish, and above all "pro-Russian" whether that is true or not. This small minority are the spearpoint of the events and the poison in a long-ago poisoned system, and have been since they took over as the vanguard of the Maidan protests in 2013, which were initially popular but dominated by right-wing parties. Right-wing, avowedly nationalist parties, all of them at least rhetorically anti-Russian, comprise almost the entirety of electoral politics in the Ukraine. Each is sponsored or competes more or less opportunistically for the favor of given oligarchs. Unless Poroshenko can come up with some favorable manufactured crisis, it looks like 2019 will finally bring Yulia Timoschenko's turn at the throne.

Full transcript of interview posted at
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=41098&p=669253#p669253

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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 28, 2019 2:06 pm

why are you double posting?

once is not enough for you? I know there is a warning when a double post is going to happen why did you go ahead with that double post?

maybe I'll try that :yay

Image



These failed redactions show Manafort had a meeting with Kilimnik in Madrid, gave him campaign polling data, and discussed a Ukrainian peace plan with him - then lied about all of it. Very normal contacts between a US presidential campaign manager & a Russian intelligence asset

NEW: Paul Manafort's attorneys failed to properly redact their filing. They reveal that Mueller alleges Manafort "lied about sharing polling data with Mr. Kilimnik related to the 2016 presidential campaign". Konstantin Kilimnik has alleged ties to Russian intelligence.


Things we learned today from Manafort's lawyers' redaction errors: Manafort is alleged to have met in Madrid w/Kilimnik; shared polling data with him; and discussed a Ukraine peace plan w/him more than once. Is that the same peace plan that Cohen delivered to Flynn in Jan 2017?

MANAFORT’S REDACTION FAIL TELLS TRUMP THAT MUELLER CAUGHT HIM LYING ABOUT HIS RUSSIAN HANDLER, KONSTANTIN KILIMNIK

Manafort Shared Trump Campaign Data With Russian Associate, Prosecutors Say

"He owed us a lot of money. And he was offering ways to pay it back"—Viktor Boyarkin on #Manafort. Yet another Russian spy with leverage over the Trump campaign. This corroborates earlier reports of "private briefings" to Putin pal Deripaska…who was just gifted sanctions relief.

Boyarkin did more than collect Deripaska's debts. He worked w/ Manafort since 2006—"the year Deripaska asked both of them to help redraw the map of Eastern Europe." Manafort has consistently worked for Putin/Russia's interests & against US interests. In 2016, on Trump campaign.

Why A Powerful Russian Oligarch Was Furious With Paul Manafort

SCOOP: It appears KONSTANTIN KILIMNIK set up a lobbying firm in Washington, DC, Incorporation Date: Feb 19, 2015, using Legalinc Corporate Services.

Ukrainian politician behind controversial peace proposal to appear in Mueller probe

JOSH MEYER05/14/2018 05:11 PM EDT

A lobbying campaign by led by Paul Manafort and Rick Gates promoting former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych has caught the attention of Robert Mueller.
Ukrainian politican Andrii Artemenko’s testimony could help special counsel Robert Mueller’s team fill in the gaps on the peace plan. | J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
KIEV — A Ukrainian politician who communicated with Trump associates about a controversial plan to resolve Ukraine’s conflict with Kremlin-backed rebels said Monday that he has been called to testify before a grand jury connected to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

Mueller Seeks 70 Blank Subpoenas in Manafort Case

Why would Manafort begin collaborating with Wikileaks even before Trump? Ukraine.
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 28, 2019 2:53 pm

Former Trump aide approved 'black ops' to help Ukraine president

Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort authorised a secret media operation on behalf of Ukraine’s former president featuring “black ops”, “placed” articles in the Wall Street Journal and US websites and anonymous briefings against Hillary Clinton.

The project was designed to boost the reputation of Ukraine’s then leader, Viktor Yanukovych. It was part of a multimillion-dollar lobbying effort carried out by Manafort on behalf of Yanukovych’s embattled government, emails and documents reveal.

The strategies included:

• Proposing to rewrite Wikipedia entries to smear a key opponent of the then Ukrainian president.

• Setting up a fake thinktank in Vienna to disseminate viewpoints supporting Yanukovych.

• A social media blitz “aimed at targeted audiences in Europe and the US”.

• Briefing journalists from the rightwing website Breitbart to attack Clinton when she was US secretary of state.

Manafort’s Ukraine strategy anticipated later efforts by the Kremlin and its troll factory to use Twitter and Facebook to discredit Clinton and to help Trump win the 2016 US election. The material seen by the Guardian dates from 2011 to 2013.

Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating claims of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, has indicted Manafort on multiple counts. Manafort is accused of “laundering profits” from his lobbying work in Ukraine, carried out over a period of a decade for Yanukovych and his political party.

Viktor Yanukovych greets supporters during a campaign rally in Kiev in 2010.
Viktor Yanukovych greets supporters during a campaign rally in Kiev in 2010. Photograph: Efrem Lukatsky/AP
Mueller also accuses Manafort of hiring retired European politicians to lobby on behalf of Yanukovych, and paying them more than €2m (£1.74m, $2.45m) via offshore accounts.

The documents reveal another surreptitious operation to influence international opinion. In 2010 Yanukovych defeated his rival Yulia Tymoshenko in presidential elections. The following summer Ukrainian prosecutors arrested Tymoshenko and put her on trial. This provoked severe criticism from the Obama administration and the EU, which accused Yanukovych of locking up Tymoshenko for political reasons.

In 2011 Manafort approved a clandestine strategy to discredit Tymoshenko abroad. Alan Friedman, a former Wall Street Journal and Financial Times reporter, based in Italy, masterminded this project. Friedman has previously been accused of concealing his work as a paid lobbyist.

Also involved were Rick Gates, Manafort’s then deputy, and Konstantin Kilimnik, another senior Manafort associate who the FBI believes has links to Russian military intelligence.

In July 2011 Friedman sent Manafort a confidential six-page document titled Ukraine - A Digital Roadmap. It laid out a plan to “deconstruct” Tymoshenko via videos, articles and social media. Yanukovych deferred to Manafort, who gave the project the go-ahead, sources in Ukraine’s former government say.

Friedman’s proposed operation was ambitious. It included producing anonymous videos attacking Tymoshenko and comparing the opposition leader to a drunk Boris Yeltsin. “The social media space offers great opportunities for guilt by association,” Friedman wrote in the document.

He continued: “We know that video exists of Tymoshenko uttering some of her outrageous claims in court … The video can be floated into the social space to reinforce the impression that she is at best reckless and unstatesmanlike and at worst malicious, defamatory and antisemitic.”

An anonymous video attacking Yulia Tymoshenko.
An anonymous video attacking Yulia Tymoshenko, produced by FBC Media. Photograph: Youtube
Twitters users, including “those ‘known’ to us”, could retweet hostile content. The “roadmap” included a website, blogposts and “blast emails”, sent out to a “targeted audience in Europe and the US”. One section was called “Black Ops”. It said: “This could include Wikipedia page modification to highlight [Tymoshenko] corruption and trial and modify the tone of the language being used.”

Friedman worked with Eckart Sager, a one-time CNN producer. Emails show they liaised closely with “Paul”, who in turn briefed Yanukovych’s chief of staff, Serhiy Lyovochkin. Lyovochkin declined to comment. He appears in correspondence as “SL”.

“He was under the radar,” one source said of Friedman. “Alan kept a low profile. Without Paul’s authorisation Alan would never have got a contract with the [Yanukovych] government.”

Friedman’s company FBC Media was retained on a “rolling contract”. It was paid around €150,000 every three months, sources in Kiev suggest. The money was deposited in an offshore account in Seychelles, they allege. Often the payments were late, prompting Friedman to complain, they add.

Quick guide
Paul Manafort Ukraine connections: who's who?

Contacted by the Guardian, Friedman said these earnings were “declared”. He confirmed his company worked for Ukraine from late summer 2011 on what he called “a public relations and country profiling project”. He said: “It was not a secret or covert plan. We had PR people proposing interviews and features to newspapers very openly.”

Journalist Alan Friedman, pictured in Rome.
Journalist Alan Friedman, pictured in Rome.

Photograph: Cosima Scavolini/Splash News
He said its goal was to promote the Ukraine government’s then policy of moving closer to a partnership agreement with the EU. “Our aim was to keep a steady communication going in favour of dialogue between Brussels and Kiev. That was our message.

“We never supported a pro-Moscow stance and had already ended our relationship when the Ukrainian president abandoned closer ties with Europe.”

Asked whether he had registered with the US Department of Justice, Friedman said he had never worked as a lobbyist for Ukraine. He added: “I never registered as a foreign agent because I never was one.

“I was a communications guy, doing PR media strategy work in Europe for a client, like dozens of London PR companies that work for a variety of governments.”

The documents show Friedman reported directly to Kiev. In spring 2012 he told the foreign minister, Kostyantyn Gryshchenko, he had “generated dozens of positive op-eds/interviews/articles for print and TV” and “disseminated positive news stories” to nearly 2,000 publications.

Key to this strategy was a fake thinktank, the Center for the Studyof Former Soviet Socialist Republics (CXSSR), set up with Manafort’s backing. Friedman used it to publish dozens of positive stories about Yanukovych, many of them authored by a “Matthew Lina”.

Lina’s comment pieces criticising Tymoshenko and Obama’s state department ran on the conservative US website RedState. Friedman told Manafort his editorial team ghostwrote an article by Yanukovych published by the Wall Street Journal.

He claimed credit for a Tymoshenko profile written by the Journal’s Matthew Kaminski. Kaminski said Friedman was never a source, “or even someone that as far as I can remember I had any contact whatsoever with”.

In April 2012 Friedman sent another “highly confidential” two-page document to Manafort. It set out plans to launch a “special website” entitled The Tymoshenko Files. The site would purport to belong to Inna Bohoslovska, a Ukrainian deputy and Tymoshenko critic.

In fact, Friedman would “discreetly prepare, implement and maintain” the site, the document said. It would include “ghost-penned” blogs and “a quasi-novella serialisation”. Asked about the website, Friedman said he had never written “any content”.

Rick Gates attends a court hearing in Washington DC.
Rick Gates attends a court hearing in Washington DC. Photograph: Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images
Emails seen by the Guardian show a regular pattern of interaction between Manafort, Friedman, Gates, Kilimnik and Ukrainian officials. Gates, who went on to work with Manafort on the 2016 Trump campaign, wrote several messages. In February Gates admitted conspiracy and lying to the FBI, and agreed to cooperate with Mueller.

At the time Kilimnik was the Russian manager of Manafort’s Kiev office. Kilminik is understood to be “Person A” in Mueller’s latest indictment, filed last week. It says the FBI believes Kilimnik has ties to Moscow’s GRU spy agency, and adds that Gates was aware of this. Kilimnik denies a connection. Friedman confirmed he had met Manafort and Gates but said he had done so “because the client asked me to”.

Manafort’s media operation included attacks on Clinton. In October 2012 Gates emailed Manafort and Friedman, flagging a piece written by the journalist Ben Shapiro. The Breitbart article criticised Clinton for her public support of Tymoshenko, who had recently made an electoral pact with the far-right Svoboda party.

The article cited a Jewish “leader” who accused Clinton anonymously of creating a “neo-Nazi Frankenstein”. Gates wrote: “Gentlemen – Here is the first part of a series of articles that will be coming as we continue to build this effort. Alan, you get full credit for the Frankenstein comment.”

The alleged use of offshore accounts is likely to interest the FBI. Manafort is accused of concealing more than $75m earned from his work in Ukraine.

Yanukovych’s attempts to woo western leaders ended in October 2013 when he accepted a bailout from Moscow. He fled to Russia after anti-government protests. In 2015 Friedman wrote an authorised biography of Silvio Berlusconi. Manafort continued to work for Yanukovych’s party up until he joined Trump’s campaign. Manafort denies wrongdoing and has said he will fight Mueller’s charges.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... -president
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 28, 2019 2:54 pm

How Paul Manafort Helped Elect Russia's Man in Ukraine

By the account of his lawyer, Paul Manafort went to work in Ukraine in 2005 with the most spotless of intentions. “[He] represented pro-European Union campaigns for the Ukrainians,” the attorney, Kevin Downing, said in a statement. “And in the course of that representation he was seeking to further democracy and to help the Ukrainians come closer to the United States and to the E.U.”

But that’s not how U.S. diplomats saw it at the time. A U.S. embassy cable sent from Kiev to Washington in 2006 described Manafort’s job as giving an “extreme makeover” to a presidential hopeful named Viktor Yanukovych, who had the backing of the Kremlin and most of Ukraine’s wealthiest tycoons. His Party of Regions, the cable said, was “a haven” for “mobsters and oligarchs.”

Making things harder for Manafort were the candidate’s rough manners and criminal past, which had dimmed his chances of winning elections. Oafish and inarticulate, Yanukovych had served jail time in his youth for theft and battery. He also had a hard time speaking Ukrainian – the national language – as he had grown up in the Russian-speaking province of Donetsk. Yet Manafort accepted the challenge of trying to make Yanukovych electable. The man paying the exorbitant bills for these efforts was an early backer of the Party of Regions, the coal and metals magnate Rinat Akhmetov, who soon began calling Manafort his friend.

Such relationships were nothing new to the American political consultant, who on Monday pleaded not guilty to charges of tax fraud and money laundering brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The indictment was among the first brought down as part of Mueller’s investigation into alleged collusion between Russia and President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Though the charges were not tied directly to Manafort’s work as the chairman of that campaign in the summer of 2016, they showed that his work as a political gun for hire is very much in the spotlight.

Ukraine was by no means the roughest place Manafort ever worked. His roster of clients going back to the 1980s has included Congolese and Filipino dictators, along with a guerilla leader in Angola. But even this range of experience did not make the Party of Regions an easy customer for Manafort. The reputation of its leaders had been stained with blood since at least 2000, when some of Yanukovych’s political patrons were implicated in the murder of Georgy Gongadze, an investigative journalist who was abducted and beheaded that year.

Manafort arrived in Ukraine in the wake of the Orange Revolution, a popular uprising that blocked the pro-Russian Yanukovych from taking power in 2004. One of the leaders of that revolt, an economist named Viktor Yushchenko, fell suddenly ill as his movement for European integration was gaining momentum that fall; doctors determined that he had been poisoned with dioxin, a substance that turned his telegenic face into a mask of green and yellow scars.

Despite the poisoning, Yushchenko’s supporters carried him to victory in the 2004 presidential race, and the reformer put the country on a path to joining the European Union and the NATO military alliance. But these efforts were soon reversed.

With guidance from Manafort and backing from Moscow, the Party of Regions made an astonishing comeback over the next five years, culminating in Yanukovych’s successful bid for the presidency in 2010. Among the first official acts of his tenure was to legally bar Ukraine from seeking NATO membership – a move that effectively granted Russia one of its core geopolitical demands.

For his mastery of political campaigning, Manafort was dubbed a “mythical figure” in the Ukrainian press, and the country’s powerbrokers still give him much of the credit for turning the pro-Russian party around. “I can tell you he’s a real specialist,” says Manafort’s friend Dmitry Firtash, the Ukrainian billionaire and former partner to the Kremlin in the European gas trade. “He won three elections in Ukraine. He knew what he was doing.”

The alleged corruption of Manafort’s employers never made him abandon that job. Once installed in the presidency, Yanukovych began to amass an enormous fortune, easing cronies from his home region of Donetsk into key posts around the country. The President also built an opulent palace for himself outside Kiev, complete with a private zoo, a golf course and a restaurant in the shape of a pirate ship docked in his backyard.

Yanukovych’s political rivals quickly found themselves under arrest. Chief among them was the former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, the gold-braided heroine of the Orange Revolution, who was charged with abuse of office and sentenced to seven years in prison in 2011. “It’s normal practice,” Yanukovych told TIME the following summer, in reference to his jailing of the opposition leader. “The party is powerful. The voters support it. Today the President of Ukraine has the highest ratings of any politician.”

He owed those ratings at least in part to Manafort’s political coaching, which included a new wardrobe for the President, as well as a coiffed hairdo and elocution lessons. But the jailing of Tymoshenko, which U.S. and European leaders denounced as part of a political vendetta, still dealt a severe blow to Ukraine’s reputation in the West. It was Manafort’s job to fix that, too. With money from the Party of Regions and its financial backers, he hired lobbyists in Washington to spin the imprisonment of Tymoshenko as an example of Ukraine’s commitment to the rule of law. “Their job is to say that white is black and black is white,” Tymoshenko’s daughter Eugenia told TIME in 2012.

Such services did not come cheap. After another revolution in Ukraine forced Yanukovych from power in 2014, the national anti-corruption bureau discovered a secret ledger of off-the-books payments from the Party of Regions; Manafort’s name appears in the document 22 times, with payments worth $12.7 million designated for him between 2007 and 2012. The indictment released on Monday in the U.S. claims Manafort and an associate laundered the proceeds of his work in Ukraine through offshore accounts, and failed to pay U.S. taxes on the income.

Through lawyers and in televised interviews, Manafort has denied receiving any illegal payments for his work in Ukraine. His attorneys also denied on Monday that Manafort’s work had advanced Russia’s interests in any way.

But Manafort and his associates have not denied the lucrative side projects that he pursued while working for the Party of Regions. The biggest was an ultimately fruitless plan to purchase the Drake Hotel in Manhattan in 2008. One of the investors he approached for that project was Firtash, an early supporter of the Party of Regions, who says he was promised returns of as much as 50% as part of that deal. “It was partly our money, partly bank loans. That was the scheme,” he tells TIME. “But the deal didn’t go through.”

Details of the Drake Hotel negotiations remained secret until 2011, when Tymoshenko filed a lawsuit in Manhattan claiming that the project was in fact a money-laundering scheme cooked up by Firtash, Manafort and their associates. A judge in New York threw out that case on the grounds that it fell outside the court’s jurisdiction. Firtash, for his part, insists it was part of an effort by Tymoshenko to slander him and his allies in the Party of Regions. “By hitting me and Manafort, she wanted to hit Yanukovych and his electorate,” he says.

What the lawsuit revealed, at a minimum, is how deeply enmeshed Manafort became in Ukrainian business and politics during the decade he spent working for the Party of Regions. Even after the revolution of 2014 turned violent – with police shooting down dozens of protestors in the streets of Kiev that February – the American consultant continued to assist his Ukrainian patrons. He helped the party rebrand itself after it was blamed for the revolutionary bloodshed, which ultimately took more than a hundred lives. After the Party of Regions effectively broke apart that fall, Manafort advised some of its former members on how to win seats in the post-revolutionary parliament.

By that point, there was no longer any question over the party’s allegiance to Moscow. Yanukovych and his closest allies had fled to Russia as the uprising against them intensified, and President Putin guaranteed their security even as he moved to punish Ukraine’s new leaders for turning their backs on the Kremlin. In the spring of 2014, Russia sent troops to occupy and annex Ukraine’s Crimea region. It also sent weapons and fighters to spark a separatist rebellion in Donetsk and other parts of eastern Ukraine, fueling a conflict that killed thousands of people between 2014 and 2016.

Throughout this period, Manafort continued to get regular updates on the crisis from his close associate in Kiev, Konstantin Kilimnik, a dapper and eloquent English-speaker who studied at a Russian military institute. In an interview with Radio Free Europe in February, Kilimnik said that Manafort was open to returning to Ukraine “if there is a serious project that is pro-Ukrainian and can bring peace to this country.”

But as his legal troubles in the U.S. have mounted this year, Manafort’s connections in Ukraine have broken down. Even Firtash, the oligarch who worked alongside Manafort to secure power for the Party of Regions, says he no longer calls his American friend for advice. “If I were to call him now, I’m sure he’d come visit me and we’d sit down and talk,” he says. “But why would I do that? I know what’s going on. I can’t get any help from him now. He can’t help me.”
http://time.com/5003623/paul-manafort-m ... ne-russia/
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 28, 2019 2:58 pm

According to Khara, Yanukovych told him that from now on he would be campaign manager in name only, and that Manafort would in fact be running the show. By that point Manafort had parlayed his experience with the Gerald Ford and and Ronald Reagan presidential campaigns into a lucrative career advising third-world leaders like Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, and Angolan rebel Jonas Savimbi. “He told me about Manafort’s previous success abroad. He believed 100 percent in him and was convinced he could do what needed to be done,” Khara told me.




Ukraine's Ex-President Is Convicted of Treason

Paul Manafort in jail for life

Why Would Paul Manafort Share Polling Data with Russia?

These Are the Ukraine Photos Manafort Doesn’t Want the Jury to See

David VoreacosJuly 27, 2018, 2:49 PM CDT
Bloomberg

Paul Manafort wants the judge overseeing his fraud trial to bar jurors from seeing 51 exhibits detailing his political work in Ukraine, including several involving Tad Devine, a Democrat who ran Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign.

Lawyers for Manafort, President Donald Trump’s onetime campaign chairman, said in a court filing Thursday that the exhibits -- 474 pages in all, including photos -- are the sort of “irrelevant, prejudicial and unnecessarily time-consuming evidence” that will bog down the trial.
Image
viktor yanukovych court
Court records show that Manafort’s firm worked to create positive media images of Yanukovych.
They said Special Counsel Robert Mueller wants to offer evidence that’s irrelevant to Manafort’s tax- and bank-fraud trial, which begins July 31 in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. Paradoxically, the filing made public the exhibits that Manafort wants U.S. District T.S. Ellis III to bar from evidence.

It came as Devine’s firm acknowledged that Mueller’s office had asked him to “assist in the prosecution” of Manafort. Devine’s firm helped Manafort with media consulting in Ukraine, beginning in at least 2010, according to the exhibits filed.

“We have been assured by the special counsel’s office that we have no legal exposure and did not act unlawfully,” according to a statement by the firm, Devine Mulvey Longabaugh Inc. “When the special counsel sought assistance from us in its ongoing investigation, we readily provided it.”

Politico and BuzzFeed first reported Devine’s assistance.

Manafort Charges

Prosecutors say that Manafort, 69, made millions of dollars as a consultant to Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his political party and that he failed to disclose that income or offshore accounts to U.S. tax authorities. They also accuse Manafort of defrauding banks in obtaining $20 million in loans.

Manafort is charged separately in Washington with money laundering, acting as an unregistered agent of Ukraine and obstruction of justice.

At a pretrial hearing in Virginia on July 23, Manafort attorney Thomas Zehnle told the judge that what’s in dispute is whether the money his client made in Ukraine “was actually income, whether that was a loan, things like that.”

The exhibits, which include political strategy memos for Yanukovych and outlines of public relations campaigns, “don’t necessarily go to any of the financial issues that are involved in the case before this court,” Zehnle argued.

‘Absolutely Relevant’

In response to Zehnle at the Virginia hearing, Mueller prosecutor Greg Andres said the documents “go directly to how Manafort made his money,” he said.

When the judge asked Andres how the money got from Ukraine to Manafort, Andres said: “Those bills are paid by Ukrainian oligarchs, a variety of whom are listed on the memos we seek to admit as evidence. They go from Ukrainian oligarchs to a Cypriot entity controlled by oligarchs, which is in a different name.”

Andres said prosecutors seek to use the memos to show “the constant interaction between Mr. Manafort and people in the Ukrainian government, including the oligarchs who are paying them.”

Photo Shoot
Image
viktor yanukovych court
Among the exhibits that Mueller seeks to include, Andres said, are three photographs of Yanukovych at a photo shoot during the creation of commercials.

The prosecutor said that all of the disputed exhibits will help jurors understand the nature of Manafort’s work in Ukraine. “It absolutely is in dispute that Mr. Manafort made money there and that he didn’t pay taxes,” Andres said. The two sides haven’t reached any stipulations on evidence that “he was paid X amount of money, that he was paid through the Cypriot accounts, that he was paid by particular oligarchs.”

The exhibits include an email that Devine sent to Manafort on Feb. 15, 2010, after Yanukovych was elected president. Manafort, he said, ran a “textbook” campaign.
Image
viktor yanukovych court
“You deserve enormous credit for pulling everything together, and for your leadership,” Devine wrote. “It was great to be part of the team.”

‘Most Satisfying’

Manafort wrote that day that after 35 years of working on campaigns, “This one will be at the top of the list of most satisfying.”

The materials included descriptions of the services offered by his firm, Davis Manafort Inc., including “bridging the cultural and information voids” of the West regarding “distant countries.”

Earlier: Democratic Consultants to Get Dragged Into Manafort Trial

Bringing “Western technology and know-how” to those countries helps them to explain their actions, it said.

“This capability has enabled countries to resist populist uprisings, bring credibility to government actions and elections and preserve policies of outgoing regimes,” it said.

Yanukovych fled to Moscow in 2014 after protests against his rule.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... ych-photos


What Exactly Did Paul Manafort Do to Earn That $66 Million?

Ian BatesonNov. 11, 2018

Paul Manafort leaving Federal Court in December 2017. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

When Paul Manafort, onetime Trump campaign manager and influence peddler to dictators, pleaded guilty to failing to register as a foreign agent in September, he averted a trial, and with it, the chance for the public to discover some of the most shady parts of his long and shady résumé, including his overseas work in Ukraine for a pro-Russian Ukrainian government. You need only to look at what he forfeited in order to keep the details of that work a secret — an estimated $46 million worth of cash and real estate, including an apartment in Trump Tower — to get a sense of how truly terrible those details must be.

Had Manafort’s second trial taken place, prosecutors would have described in detail, for instance, how Manafort created a secret “chorus” of high-profile European politicians to persuade Washington not to impose sanctions after the Ukrainian government imprisoned an opposition politician. It was work like this that allowed his firm to collect nearly $66 million between 2010 and 2014. Manafort’s personal income during this time was over $30 million, money he funneled through offshore bank accounts, real estate, and the purchase of a now infamous ostrich leather jacket.

What else did Manafort do to earn such astronomical sums of money? For the past four-and-a-half years, I have been a journalist in Ukraine reporting on the fallout of a revolution and subsequent war. Over the past five months, I talked to Manafort’s former associates, one former president, a former prime minister, and Manafort’s predecessor to try and piece together exactly what Manafort did in Ukraine. The nature of that work doesn’t just shed light on Manafort’s Russia connections — it’s also tremendously important to millions of Ukrainians, since Manafort was shilling to help prop up the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych, a post-Soviet strongman who left his country hollowed out by corruption. The nearly five years since then have been marked by a war that has killed over 10,000 people, and a complete failure of Ukrainian authorities to bring figures from the ancien régime to justice. Yanukovych is currently evading Ukrainian law enforcement by hiding in Russia, which means Manafort’s trial would have been a rare window into the misdeeds of his regime.

According to the detailed plan that Manafort himself presented in 2010, he was paid to execute a “worldwide program to educate and promote” Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych and to ensure that a “2004 scenario” never happened again. It was in 2004 that, after attempting to steal the presidential election, Yanukovych faced popular protests that forced him to concede to a rerun, which he then lost. He ran again in 2010 and won by less than 4 percent in a hotly contested election.

Manafort knew what 2004 meant to Yanukovych because he had been there. According to an interview with Yanukovych’s former campaign manager Vasyl Khara, weeks before the rerun of the election, Khara was summoned to Moscow where Yanukovych was laying low. Three months earlier, Yanukovych’s pro-Western opponent, Viktor Yushchenko, was poisoned with dioxin, which disfigured his face and would cause him long-lasting health problems. Many critics blamed the poisoning on Yanukovych’s Russian backers. In what now seems like foreshadowing, Yanukovych fled to Russia, claiming he feared for his safety.

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According to Khara, Yanukovych told him that from now on he would be campaign manager in name only, and that Manafort would in fact be running the show. By that point Manafort had parlayed his experience with the Gerald Ford and and Ronald Reagan presidential campaigns into a lucrative career advising third-world leaders like Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, and Angolan rebel Jonas Savimbi. “He told me about Manafort’s previous success abroad. He believed 100 percent in him and was convinced he could do what needed to be done,” Khara told me.

After Yanukovych lost the runoff, Manafort was next tasked with reinventing him. Yanukovych, who as a teenager was twice convicted of assault, began slicking his hair back like Manafort, wearing similar bespoke suits, and even acquiring ostrich shoes. Manafort got an American speaking coach for Yanukovych, and his team began writing his speeches, which would now be translated from English, according to court documents.

At the time, Yanukovych was the head of the Party of Regions. Employing Manafort sent a strong signal to Ukrainian politicians looking to unseat him that he had a political future. “Can you imagine? After the disaster of 2004 when he was nowhere and many believed that he was politically dead. All of a sudden he got this political strategist who used to work with Reagan telling him, ‘I believe you can be a political success if you follow my advice,’ ” said Oleg Voloshyn, a former spokesperson for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry who worked with Manafort.

Yanukovych had total faith in Manafort, in part because he believed that the U.S. State Department had brought the protests onto the streets that thwarted his presidential bid using what is termed in former Soviet countries “political technology.” “Yanukovych was sure there was some magic technology that can mobilize people,” said Mustafa Nayyem, the first journalist to investigate Manafort’s role in Ukraine and a current member of Parliament. “He really was sure everything was inspired by the Department of State, and that if you hire Americans, they will help you to fight this war.”

Manafort brought modern disciplined campaign management and message control to Yanukovych’s operation (the same rigor he’d later try to apply to the Trump campaign). He also deployed modern polling, which, according to his former head of polling, he used to hone messages that stoked Ukraine’s pro-Western and pro-Russian regional divides. His messaging discipline extended to Yanukovych’s party operatives; MPs were trained by an American in public speaking.

In the next election, in 2006, Yanukovych’s Party of Regions won the most seats in Parliament, and for a short while, Yanukovych even served as prime minister. The win put Yanukovych back on the political map, and soon he was setting his sights once again on the presidency.

U.S. court documents show how Manafort set to work building Yanukovych’s presidential campaign, drafting strategy memos, filming commercials, and offering his team of U.S. political consultants bonuses if Yanukovych won. The influence was hard to miss. Accepting the nomination at his party’s convention in 2009, Yanukovych took the stage while confetti dropped from above and attendees carried premade portraits of Yanukovych — a perfect mimicry of a U.S. presidential convention, the likes of which Ukrainians had never before seen.

Less than two weeks after Yanukovych won, Manafort was already at work planning how he could offer his guidance to the new president. “I have been managing a public government-relations program on your behalf,” Manafort wrote in a memo released by U.S. prosecutors. “Now, we need to formalize it and have the government pay for the services,” he wrote, suggesting making payment through a dummy private company. Manafort referred to his new group of lobbyists as the “Hapsburg group,” named after one of Europe’s most powerful and oldest royal families. Manafort recruited former Austrian chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer, former Italian prime minister Romano Prodi, and former Polish president Aleksander Kwaśniewski, all of whom lobbied for Ukraine’s interests without indicating that they were in Yanukovych’s pay.

After being elected, Yanukovych’s government brought charges against his defeated opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko. She was convicted of embezzlement and abuse of power and sentenced to seven years in prison. Manafort’s former colleagues say he opposed the move, which Western countries considered to be politically motivated, but nonetheless he was put in charge of the effort to spin the imprisonment abroad. Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates arranged for the firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom to publish a report justifying Tymoshenko’s imprisonment. According to Gates, he and Manafort used an offshore account to “funnel $4 million to pay for the report,” which officially cost only $12,000. “My goal is to plant some stink on Tymo,” Manafort wrote to lobbyists working for him in a message released in court filings.

Another effort involved trying to put pressure on the Obama administration to back Yanukovych by smearing Tymoshenko as anti-Semitic, show prosecutors’ filings from Manafort’s second case in Washington, D.C. Under the scheme, Jewish supporters of Obama, who Manafort refers to as “bama Jews,” were supposed to be convinced to pressure the administration to drop support for Tymoshenko because of her supposed anti-Semitism. “The Jewish community will take this out on Obama on election day if he does nothing,” Manafort wrote to an associate.

Prosecutors claim Manafort also “coordinated privately with a senior Israeli government official to issue a written statement publicizing this story,” and “then, with secret advance knowledge of that Israeli statement, worked to disseminate this story in the United States.” The Israeli Foreign Ministry did release such a statement in 2012, which former Israeli deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon said was unusual both for being published only in Russian and for targeting a specific politician.

These elaborate and costly lobbying efforts were possible due to the backing of Ukraine’s pro-Russia elite. During Manafort’s first trial last summer, Gates testified that the nearly $66 million Manafort received for his work for Yanukovych was transferred from the offshore accounts of Ukrainian oligarchs and government officials to Manafort’s private account. These officials and oligarchs in turn were able to profit from the kleptocracy that Yanukovych established. In court, Gates confirmed that they benefited financially through contracts or ownership of certain companies or percentages of companies. Ukrainian prosecutors believe Yanukovych and his government stole up to $100 billion from the Ukrainian state. Ukraine’s tax authority was equipped with a special soundproof room with transparent furniture (ostensibly to prevent either side from hiding recording equipment) to allow tax authorities to negotiate bribes in secret with individuals owing tax money.

Yanukovych used some of his newfound riches to build a massive 345-acre estate outside of Kiev with a luxury-car collection, golf course, an ostrich farm, and a restaurant housed in a pirate ship that floats in a man-made lake. By 2013, Yanukovych’s system of graft had led Ukraine to the brink of bankruptcy. To shore up his country’s finances, Yanukovych played the E.U. against Russia for aid, in the end spurning an association agreement with the E.U. and siding with Russia. The decision sparked popular protests that left over a hundred protestors dead before forcing Yanukovych to flee the country.

When Manafort became campaign manager for the Trump campaign in March 2016, the American public knew little about his dealings with Ukraine. But then in August 2016, Serhiy Leshchenko, another Ukrainian journalist turned member of Parliament, announced that he had received a copy of the black ledger for Yanukovych’s party that detailed millions in cash payment to Manafort. A few hours after Leshchenko held a press conference to reveal the ledgers, Manafort resigned from the campaign.

But if Ukraine has left its mark on Manafort, Manafort has left his mark on Ukraine. Ukraine is again heading into presidential elections where the U.S.-style campaigns he pioneered have become the norm. Speaking at a forum for presidential candidates, Tymoshenko, who had been freed by the same protests that ousted Yanukovych and is again running for president, dismissed criticisms of her as “fake news” and “propaganda construed by Manafort.” Later, I asked her if she was happy with Manafort’s convictions. She smiled and said, “I never enjoy the problems of other people. I just think that sooner or later the truth always becomes known.”
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/ ... llion.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Feb 19, 2019 8:16 am

Reminder that Roger Stone worked for a Pro Putin Ukrainian politician who was believed to be involved in ordering the grisly execution of a journalist.



Olga Lautman


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A video on Facebook surfaced allegedly showing Russian military equipment close to the border w Ukraine in the village of Pokrovskoye, Rostov Region. There continues to be a sharp concerning increase of military movement by Russia
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https://twitter.com/olgaNYC1211/status/ ... 1542539265




Russian user shares footage showing Russian military equipment amassed near Ukraine border (Video) 01:40, 19 February 2019 WAR 4663 0 The video was reportedly recorded on February 18, 2019. Screenshot A Russian user has shared a recently recorded video showing Russian military equipment amassed in Rostov region near the border with Ukraine.
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"The morning of February 18, 2019. The village of Pokrovskoye, Rostov region, near the border with Ukraine. The military are not concealing from passersby that tanks and equipment are going to Ukraine. It's the so-called 'civil' war in Ukraine ... The Russian leaders are vile, deceitful and totally infamous," Dmitry Karbyshev wrote in captions to the video posted on Facebook. Karbyshev added that two tanks were seen on an open mobile platform on the tracks. Read also Four Ukrainian soldiers wounded in action in Donbas on Monday He wrote in comments that he is a citizen of Russia, born in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. Currently, he lives in Rivne, western Ukraine, with his family as he is married to a Ukrainian woman. He has reportedly returned to Rostov region to look after his old mother. He mentioned Russia's railways company OAO RZD in his Facebook profile as his place of work. The village of Pokrovskoye (about 12,300 residents) is 3 km south-west to the railroad station Neklinovka, Rostov region. It is 65 km from Rostov-on-Don

https://www.unian.info/war/10451052-rus ... video.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Feb 25, 2019 11:15 am

Ex-chief of Ukraine's General Staff detained on charges with treason


– Chief military prosecutor 14:55, 25 February 2019 POLITICS 527 0


Zamana served as Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine from February 18, 2012 to February 19, 2014. Zamana suspected of treason / Photo from UNIAN

Chief Military Prosecutor Anatoliy Matios has announced former chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Volodymyr Zamana had been detained on charges of high treason. "Zamana is suspected of committing a crime under Part 1 of Article 111 of the Criminal Code (high treason) in the wording of 2001. In 2015, the wording of that article was changed to the one with more severe sanctions," Matios said at a press conference in Kyiv on February 25, according to an UNIAN correspondent. Read also Ukrainian prosecutors open case against Medvedchuk on charges of treason According to him, the military prosecutor's office and the investigative unit of the SBU Security Service of Ukraine in the city of Kyiv had already notified Zamana of the suspicion. First reports about Zamana's detention by law enforcement officers appeared on February 25. Press Secretary of Ukraine's Prosecutor General Larysa Sargan confirmed the fact without elaborating on the causes behind the detention. "I can only confirm the fact," she told UNIAN earlier on February 25. Matios claims that Zamana, while in office, disbanded anti-aircraft missile divisions and military air force units, depriving Ukraine of the air defense system. “During his tenure as Chief of the General Staff, anti-aircraft missile divisions armed with the S-300V air defense missile systems were disbanded, namely those were the 874th anti-aircraft missile division, the 137th anti-aircraft missile brigade, the 5001st anti-aircraft missile division, the 281st anti-aircraft missile division of the 208th anti-aircraft missile brigade, 19 military air force units," he said. The 114th tactical aviation brigade was reformatted from the brigade into a squadron, he added. This, according to Matios, deprived the entire country of its air defense, including the Air Force, which is the main striking force in any military conflicts. UNIAN memo. Volodymyr Zamana served as Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine from February 18, 2012 to February 19, 2014.

https://www.unian.info/politics/1045907 ... cutor.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Sep 23, 2019 11:09 am

Judd Legum

1. A massive Facebook Page called "I Love America" — which has 1.1 million followers — is actually run by Ukrainians

Recently, the page has started pushing caustic pro-Trump propaganda

It's the tip of the iceberg


Massive "I Love America" Facebook page, pushing pro-Trump propaganda, is run by Ukrainians


The "I Love America" Facebook page boasts 1.1 million fans, with viral content that reaches more Facebook users than some of the largest media outlets in the United States. A typical post is a celebration of the U.S. military and patriotism.

There are lots of references to "our country" and "our military." Not mentioned is that the page is managed by ten people based in Ukraine. (There is also one manager from Kazakhstan, one from France, and one from the United States.) A website that was previously linked in the "About" section of the "I Love America" page is registered to Andriy Zyuzikov, an online strategist from the Ukrainian city of Odessa.

The "I Love America" page regularly recycles memes used by the Internet Research Agency, the Russian entity that set up phony Facebook pages to benefit Trump in advance of the 2016 election.

While "I Love America," which was established in March 2017, focuses on patriotism, in recent weeks it has used its extraordinary reach to push pro-Trump propaganda.

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These pro-Trump memes are cross-posted from several explicitly pro-Trump pages, with names like "God bless Donald and Melania Trump and God bless America." All of these pages, which were created in the last few months, are managed exclusively by people based out of Ukraine.

But the "I Love America" page is only the tip of the iceberg. There is a complex network of Facebook pages, all managed by people in Ukraine, that collect large audiences by posting memes about patriotism, Jesus, and cute dogs. These pages are now being used to funnel large audiences to pro-Trump propaganda. The pages have also joined political Facebook groups and are active on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

Facebook promised this would not happen again. “In 2016, we were not prepared for the coordinated information operations we now regularly face. But we have learned a lot since then and have developed sophisticated systems that combine technology and people to prevent election interference on our services,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in 2018.

While there is no indication that the Ukrainian network of Facebook pages is backed by any government, they are exposing Americans to a flood of inauthentic and manipulative content related to the 2020 election.

David Carroll, a professor at The New School and an expert in social media, called the existence of the Ukrainian network "troubling" and said it suggests Facebook has "not decided to use their own detection technology to prevent further dissemination by 'inauthentic coordination.'"

Renee DiResta, a technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, told Popular Information that activities of these Ukrainian Facebook pages heightened her concern that "foreign agitators" are "joining political Groups created and inhabited by real Americans."

A Facebook spokesperson told Popular Information that the company does not believe any of the Facebook pages discussed in this article violate its policies, including the policy against "coordinated inauthentic behavior." Facebook defines "coordinated inauthentic behavior" as "when groups of pages or people work together to mislead others about who they are or what they are doing."

Ukrainian "I Love America" page is recycling memes from Russian interference operation

The Mueller Report detailed Russia's efforts, through the Internet Research Agency (IRA), to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. One of the IRA pages was called "Being Patriotic" and amassed over 200,000 followers before it was taken down by Facebook in 2017. The memes posted by "Being Patriotic," however, were archived by researcher Josh Russell.

The "I Love America" page reuses numerous memes that were posted on "Being Patriotic."

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The page, which is the largest known to be recirculating IRA memes, also repurposed IRA content in Facebook videos.

Massive "I Love America" page funneling users to pro-Trump propaganda

While the "I Love America" page was created in 2017, in recent weeks it has cross-posted content from explicitly pro-Trump pages, including "Click Like, if you love Donald Trump as much as we do. TRUMP 2020," "God bless Donald Trump and God bless America," and "God bless Donald and Melania Trump and God bless America." All of these pages, which were created in the last few months, are managed exclusively by people based in Ukraine.

The content posted on these pages is incendiary and frequently includes misinformation. The meme on the left, for example, falsely claims that Hillary Clinton sold access to her email server to foreign governments.

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The remarkable reach of "I Love America"

The "I Love America" Facebook page has a massive reach on the platform that exceeds nearly all U.S. media companies. According to Crowdtangle, a social analytics company owned by Facebook, "I Love America" has more engagement -- likes, shares, and comments -- over the last 90 days than USA Today, one of the largest media organizations in the country with 8 million Facebook followers. Over the same period, the engagement of "I Love America" dwarfs major publications like the LA Times and digitally native outlets like BuzzFeed News. More engagement on Facebook corresponds directly to a bigger reach, and more people seeing the content.

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Using cute dogs and Jesus to recruit new Trump supporters

"I Love America" is part of a complex network of Facebook pages managed by people in Ukraine that cross-post content and, more recently, direct users to pro-Trump propaganda. Some of these pages, including "Like our page if you are proud to be an American" and "Everyone should respect and stand for our American Flag. God Bless," play on similar patriotic themes. But the network also attempts to draw in users with other interests, including cute animals.

For example, the "Cute or Not?" Facebook page, which was established in July 2017, has eight page managers based in Ukraine. (There is also one manager based in Kazakhstan and one in the United States.) Typically, it posts images of cute dogs.

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But recently, "Cute or Not?" also has cross-posted content from "God bless Donald and Melania Trump and God bless America."

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"Cute or Not?" has also cross-posted content from other Facebook pages in the Ukrainian network, including "US Federal Insider."

Ukrainians also operate a page called "I Love Jesus Forever." Most of the posts, as you might expect, are about God and Jesus.

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But the "I Love Jesus Forever" page has also started cross-posting pro-Trump memes from "God bless Donald Trump and God bless America."

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The extraordinary power of the Ukrainian Facebook network

None of the IRA pages identified in the Mueller Report had more than 390,000 followers. The Ukrainian network is much larger, with "I Love America" boasting over a million followers and multiple pages with 400,000 followers or more.

It's not possible, from outside the company, to identify the full scope of the Ukrainian network. But, using "I Love America" as a starting point, Popular Information cataloged pages overwhelming or exclusively managed from Ukraine that cross-posted each other's content. Using Crowdtangle, which catalogs most of the larger pages, it is then possible to get a sense of the scope of the network's reach.

Over the last 90 days, these pages have garnered 30 million engagements on Facebook.

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To put that in perspective, over the same time period, New York Times, typically one of the top five publishers on Facebook, had less than 18 million engagements. The Washington Post, over the last 90 days, has 14 million engagements. The reach of this Ukrainian Facebook network, repurposing IRA memes and cute puppy pics, is as large as the two most prestigious papers in the United States combined.

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The reach of the Ukrainian networks is now being weaponized to boost incendiary pro-Trump content. Although the explicitly pro-Trump pages are still small, one post published to "God bless Donald Trump and god bless America" has over 44,000 shares. It's an extremely impressive number for a small page that was started just weeks ago.

The motivation

Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Grafika, believes that the Ukrainian network of Facebook pages lacks the sophistication to be a government-backed effort. "We're seeing state-linked operators trying harder to hide, reducing their linguistic footprint, masking their technical signals and covering up the identities of the people behind them," Nimmo told Popular Information.

In this case, the location of the page managers was available through a transparency tool that Facebook put into place after the 2016 election. Nimmo believes this operation "looks more like a clickbait group trying to build followers by posting cat photos, horses, and patriotic memes."

Still, the impact on American voters could be the same, especially if the tactics include bombarding Americans with false and divisive political material.
https://popular.info/p/massive-i-love-a ... ebook-page


2. The Ukrainian "I Love America" page is repurposing memes used by the Internet Research Agency, the Russian group highlighted in the Mueller report that interfered in the 2016 election

The big difference is this operation is MUCH BIGGER


https://popular.info/p/massive-i-love-a ... ebook-page


3. "I Love America" is part of a complex network of Ukrainian-run Facebook pages that seek to amass large audiences and then funnel them to rabidly pro-Trump pages.

These include pages featuring cute dogs and Jesus


https://popular.info/p/massive-i-love-a ... ebook-page


4. The reach of this Ukrainian network of Facebook pages is absolutely extraordinary.

Over the last 90 days, just the major pages in this network has as much reach on Facebook than the New York Times and Washington Post COMBINED


https://popular.info/p/massive-i-love-a ... ebook-page


5. Facebook tells me this network of Ukrainians pretending to be American, pushing pro-Trump propaganda DOESN'T VIOLATE ITS POLICIES

The company won't hold itself accountable.

That's why I'm doing this work.

If you value it, sign up for my newsletter http://popular.info

6. Ukrainian pages like "I Love America" and "Cute or Not?" and "I Love Jesus Forever" are now cross-posting content from Ukrainian pages like "Click Like, if you love Donald Trump as much as we do" and "God bless Donald Trump and God bless America"


7. The content on these more explicitly pro-Trump pages is incendiary and frequently false.

For example one of the pages includes a meme stating Hillary Clinton sold access to her server to foreign governments


https://popular.info/p/massive-i-love-a ... ebook-page
https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/11 ... 2859802624
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Sep 23, 2019 4:54 pm

So everything the Russian minor click-bait venture IRA didn't actually do, a Ukrainian version is accomplishing in grand style? Is this what you just posted?
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Sep 23, 2019 5:06 pm

I posted what I posted, you are free to interpret and make generalizations, vague assumptions, any fact in that post that is incorrect let me know and I will talk to Judd and we can go point by point

speaking of Ukraine

the richest man in Ukraine hires new lawyers.......trump's very favorite Fox TV lawyers
Firtash has hired Trump-friendly lawyers Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova

Dmitry Firtash, good friend of Paul Manafort was charged in the Northern District of Illinois as the mastermind of an international titanium scheme in 2014

somebody is trying to get trump's attention


Robert Costa

VP Pence met with Ukraine's Zelensky a few weeks ago in Poland, sitting in for Pres. Trump, who couldn't make the trip. The meeting was in a windowless hotel room. Bolton sat silent, Sec. Perry there, too, as pool reporters were brought int. Zelensky kept bouncing his knees...

A day later, VP Pence took questions at a news conference. Pay attention to this response to a question from AP's @colvinj. Full remarks at the link. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-st ... aw-poland/
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https://twitter.com/costareports/status ... 0414633987



and


Judd Legum

Um, maybe we should be talking a bit more about the EXTRA $140 MILLION that Trump reportedly gave Ukraine a week ago and no one knows why or what the money is for?

Did Trump use taxpayer money to bribe Ukraine to investigate Biden?
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https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw



If you're not asking trump and Giuliani about how they traded weapons for Ukraine dropping its investigation into Paul Manafort, you're missing the story and BOTH are worthy of impeachment. Shout out to @PortlusGlam for breaking this story.

Portlus Glam

The UKRAINE arms scandal isn’t about Biden. It’s about MANAFORT, and how they pressured Poroshenko to *drop those investigations* in 2017-18.

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Rudy & Poroshenko shaking on that #armsforsilence quid-pro-quo should be all anyone is talking about!https://twitter.com/PortlusGlam/status/1175422104776400897

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Rudy Giuliani met with Ukrainian President Poroshenko twice last year amid U.S.-Ukraine arms deal negotiations
After being named an “informal” Cybersecurity Advisor to President Trump in January 2017, Giuliani entered into a “cybersecurity” contract with the Ukrainian government — personally enriching himself while appearing to use his position of influence to help advance Ukraine’s foreign policy goals

Portlus Glam

The vast conflicts-of-interest pertaining to Rudy Giuliani‘s current work for foreign governments has not received adequate coverage by U.S. news media. These conflicts — while serious enough during the transition to disqualify Giuliani from Secretary of State consideration — are now virtually ignored by the press as he represents President Donald Trump in a national security investigation. But it is no coincidence that Giuliani re-appeared on the scene shortly after Michael Cohen was raided — gobbling up the spotlight after being off the grid for all of 2017 and early 2018. The reason is that Cohen, who has extensive and potentially criminal ties to Ukraine, knows exactly what Giuliani has been up to. This includes lucrative “cybersecurity” contracts with the Ukrainian government, meetings with President Petro Poroshenko and other top Ukrainian officials, and payments and gifts from Ukrainian oligarchs under investigation by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

While engaging with foreign governments may appear consistent with Giuliani’s past work, his Ukrainian activities have all occurred since January 2017, when Giuliani was named an “informal” Cybersecurity Advisor to President Trump (“informal” meaning unpaid and therefore not subject to the same ethics requirements of government employees). In an interview with Politico the month he assumed this role, Giuliani stressed “the federal government was far behind the private sector companies” and described his task as “to travel the world to find leading experts and introduce them and their ideas to Trump”. He said he would “stay in the private sector” and “would never use my access — I’m not a lobbyist. I’m not going to do any lobbying. I just do solutions.”


President Poroshenko and President Trump: June 20, 2017

Screen Shot 2019-09-21 at 3.13.02 PM.png


Giuliani’s duel role as “cybersecurity advisor” to President Trump and “cybersecurity consultant” to the Government of Ukraine also occurred during a crucial time period in U.S.-Ukrainian foreign policy negotiations. According to investigative journalist Paul Wood, who famously reported on the Steele dossier in January 2017, a Ukrainian intelligence source disclosed that President Poroshenko had paid Michael Cohen a $400,000 bribe during the spring of 2017. The bribe was allegedly paid to get “face time” with President Trump on his first state visit later that June. Recently, we also learned that after more than a year of negotiation, Ukraine received it’s long-sought Jevelin weaponry in April 2018. In turn, they reportedly ended their investigations into Paul Manafort and fully stopped cooperating with the U.S. Special Counsel’s investigation.

Speculation has swirled that the Ukrainian arms deal was part of a quid-pro-quo between President Trump and President Poroshenko. Mapped against the timeline of Giuliani’s activities in Ukraine, it appears likely he may have served as the backchannel for these covert negotiations.

Private “cybersecurity” contracts with the Government of Ukraine

Per Giuliani’s own website, his firm Giuliani Security and Safety LLC contracted with the city of Kharkiv, Ukraine beginning in May 2017, the same timeframe as the alleged Poroshenko bribe — this despite Giuliani recently telling The Washington Post that his work there only occured in 2018, and which they reported without correction. The city of Kharkiv is known for its Mayor Gennady Kernes’ role as a leading figure in the Party of Regions, the pro-Russian political party that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort worked for.

Under this contract, Giuliani’s team has held at least four meetings with Kharkiv officials — three in Ukraine and one in New York City. The contract between the two parties was facilitated by a company called TriGlobal Strategic Ventures, whose advisory board includes both ex-Ukrainian and ex-Russian government officials and whose offices include branches in New York, Kiev, and Moscow. Under the terms of the contract, Giuliani’s firm was to “provide recommendations for improved Kharkiv security system development.” The four meetings are as follows:

A kick-off meeting in Kharkiv in May 2017. Giuliani didn’t attend, but later traveled to Kiev in June and reportedly met with President Poroshenko.
A second trip to Kharkiv in July 2017, described as prep for an upcoming meeting between Giuliani and Mayor Kernes.
A third trip to Kharkiv in November 2017, in which Giuliani meet with Mayor Kernes and participated in a panel discussion on cybersecurity, before traveling on to Kiev for a meeting with President Poroshenko.
A fourth known meeting in New York City on March 27, 2018, during which Giuliani met with the first deputy mayor of Kharkiv Igor Terekhov.


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Separate from this Kharkiv contract, Giuliani’s firm also appears to have previously negotiated a contract with the capital city of Kiev. During the same November 2017 visit, Giuliani met with Kiev Mayor Vitaly Klichko at City Hall and visited their Capital Data Center. According to the city’s official press release, Giuliani’s firm had “prepared a report on the need to create a municipal police, which would be passed on to the President and the Prime Minister of Ukraine.”


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Giuliani meeting with Kiev Mayor Vitoly Klicko in November, 2017.
Meetings with President Poroshenko and top Ukrainian officials

According to at least one Ukrainian news outlet, during a June 2017 visit to Kiev, Giuliani “met with President Petro Poroshenko, Prime Minister Vladimir Groisman, Kiev Mayor Vitaliy Klichko, and also addressed students with a lecture.” The Foundation hosting this lecture similarly reported on its blog that “besides giving the lecture, Rudy Giuliani met with the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko, the Prime Minister of Ukraine Volodymyr Groysman, the Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko, the Prosecutor General of Ukraine Yuriy Lutsenko, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Pavlo Klimkin as well as young Ukrainian reformers.”


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While no government account or photo evidence has yet been uncovered to corroborate these meetings, they would have occurred between two important events in US-Ukraine relations. First, shortly before Giuliani’s visit in June, President Trump allowed Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin into the Oval Office for a photo-op. The photo was taken on the same day Trump now infamously invited Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak for a sit down meeting at the White House. The rumors of a $400,000 bribe began circulating in Ukrainian media after Trump tweeted about the meetings on May 11, 2017 with the message “let’s make peace.” The alleged June meeting between Giuliani and Poroshenko would also have occurred shortly before Poroshenko’s first visit to the United States on June 20, 2017 — which Paul Wood’s recent article alleges was secured as the result of a substantial bribe to Michael Cohen.

More significantly, Giuliani met again with President Poroshenko during his November 2017 trip to Ukraine. After departing Kharkiv, Giuliani traveled to Kiev for the meeting, and this is documented on the official website of the Ukrainian President and in Ukrainian media. According to the government account, the parties “discussed ways to overcome Russian aggression and the course of reforms in Ukraine” and “noted special importance of Ukraine-USA cooperation in cyber security sphere.”

The timing of the meeting, however, suggests more was discussed. Just one week earlier, on November 14, 2017, the U.S. National Security Council had “greenlight the presentation of a $47 million grant package to the Ukrainian government to purchase American defense arms, including the powerful Javelin anti-tank missiles.” This decision had been made after a nearly year-long debate inside the U.S. administration regarding whether to propose such a sale. A month later, Trump made his first steps towards providing this long-sought lethal aid when he approved the $41.5 million sale of Model M107A1 sniper systems and associated equipment.

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Per Wood’s reporting, the decision to end cooperation with the Mueller investigation actually occurred in November 2017, rather than the April 2018 timeframe New York Times has reported. According to Wood’s source, “Poroshenko returned from Washington and, in August or September, 2017, decided to completely end cooperation with the US agencies investigating Manafort. He did not give an order to implement this decision until November 2017. The order became known to the US government after scheduled visits by Poroshenko’s senior aide to see Mueller and the CIA director, in November and December, were cancelled.”

The eventual approval of the Javelin anti-tank missiles came on March 2, 2018 and were subsequently shipped sometime later in April. Occurring in between these two dates was Giuliani’s fourth meeting with Kharkiv officials under his firm’s “cybersecurity” contract, on March 27, 2018 in New York City. Two weeks later, Cohen’s offices were raided by the FBI, and two weeks following Giuliani assumed the role of Trump’s lawyer.

Paid speeches and private jets courtesy of Ukrainian oligarchs

Over the course of Giuliani’s 2017 visits to Ukraine, the president’s “Cybersecurity Advisor” also met with, was paid by, and/or received gifts from at least three Ukrainian oligarchs — two of whom are reportedly under investigation by U.S. Special Counsel Mueller.

VICTOR PINCHUK

During his June 2017 visit to Kiev to meet with President Poroshenko, Giuliani also gave a speech on “Global Challenges, the Role of the US and the Place of Ukraine” at the Victor Pinchuk Foundation. Pinchuk is reportedly under investigation by U.S. Special Counsel Mueller for a $150,000 donation he gave to the now civilly-charged Trump Foundation in 2015.

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During the Q&A session, Ukrainian media outlets reported Giuliani said the following about his relationship with President Trump (via Google translate): “Yes, I’m friends with Donald Trump for a long time, about thirty years. Yes, I did not want to go into the government, although he invited me. Yes, I’m his advisor. We talked yesterday. What do I advise him? Increase the army, increase military spending. Either you are the strongest, or you lose.”

PAVEL FUKS
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Giuliani also met and was photographed with Russian-Ukrainian businessman Pavel Fuchs, per the oligarch’s U.S. Wikipedia page. It is unclear exactly when and where this meeting took place, although Wikipedia notes that it was July 2017 in New York City — the same month Giuliani’s firm made its second visit to Kharkiv. Fuks has a business history with Donald Trump and Giuliani has been referred to as Fuk’s “personal friend” in Ukrainian media.

ALEXANDER ROVT

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The private plane Giuliani arrived to Kharkiv on in November 2017 is owned by Alexander Rovt, a Ukrainian-American billionaire who is also reportedly under investigation by Mueller. Spruce Capital, a firm funded by Rovt, is reported to have given a $3.5 million loan to Paul Manafort shortly after he left the Trump campaign. Rovt’s plane became notorious in Ukraine after President Poroshenko used it to secretly travel to Spain in July 2016. Poroshenko also used it in April/May 2017 for a vacation to the Maldives — the same timeframe as the reported bribe and Giuliani contract kick-off in Kharkiv.

Conclusions

The research cited in this article is by no means exhaustive, but conclusions can be drawn regarding Rudy Giuliani’s disqualifying conflicts-of-interest, potential criminal exposure, and dangerous intent.

At best, Giuliani used his title as an “Advisor to the U.S. President” for purely personal gain and to the detriment of his own country’s national security. At no time did he contribute to or strengthen the U.S. government’s critical role in protecting American citizens from cybersecurity threats, putting all of us in the vulnerable position we are in today. Regarding his planned “cyber working group” a former senior U.S. official reportedly stated “from what I saw, it didn’t exist.” At worst — and speculatively — Giuliani appears to have been a rogue envoy for Donald Trump, facilitating a year-long negotiation with the Ukrainian Government to trade lethal arms for silence in the Mueller investigation.

National security reporters need to stop sitting on this story. In May 2018, when Giuliani first began making the rounds on cable news again, he clearly stated his destructive strategy in representing Trump. Knowing that the significant criminal conspiracy Donald Trump (and himself) have been involved with will one day lead to impeachment, Giuliani said “to a large extent…what we’re doing here, it is for public opinion, because eventually the decision here is going to be impeach or not impeach.” As a result, every day that Giuliani is on T.V. is another day our news media is intentionally subjecting the American public to abusive gaslighting, and subjecting the Mueller investigation to jury tampering and sabotage.
https://medium.com/@PortlusGlam/rudy-gi ... 662963600c



Politics 9/23/19 10:41am Read time: 2 minutes 75 comments
Trump Admits Discussing Joe Biden And Corruption To Ukrainian President
And the wheels are falling off of Trump's statements as he admits to talking to a foreign power about "investigating" his opponent. That's impeachable.
By John Amato

3 hours ago by Frances Langum
Views: 1214
As Donald Trump was entering the UN earlier today, he admitted his phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was about Hunter Biden, and "corruption", virtually confirming the whistle-blower's concerns.

During a press gaggle Trump went on a tirade against the Bidens, saying what they did was wrong.


A reporter asked if he talked to Ukrainian President about Joe Biden and his son.

Trump said, "Well, you're gonna see because what we are doing is we want honesty."

(Cue the laugh track)

Trump continued, "When we deal with a country we want honesty and I think with the new president you're gonna see much more honesty in the Ukraine. That's what we're looking for."

He said, "We’re supporting a country. We want to make sure that country’s honest. It’s very important to talk about corruption. If you don’t talk about corruption why would you give money to a country that you think is corrupt?"

Trump can discuss corruption all day long with a foreign leader if he so chooses, but not in an effort to smear his political rivals.

Trump said, "One of the reasons the new president got elected is he was going to stop corruption. So it’s very important that, on occasion, you speak to somebody about corruption.”

And with that, he walked away.

And with that, he admitted to doing what a whistle-blower reported to the Inspector General of the intelligence community.


digby
@digby56
And it *does not* require a quid pro quo to be impeachable. It is a gross abuse of power to send his factotum with the message and then *personally* solicit dirt on his opponent from a foreign country

Withholding aid is impeachable too but it is not necessary to prove the case. https://twitter.com/JakeSherman/status/ ... 6098965504
Jake Sherman

@JakeSherman
This episode is so unique because, at the moment, everyone appears to agree to the basic facts: the president asked the leader of Ukraine to dig on his political opponent. The question is do democrats think that requires impeachment.

39
12:28 PM - Sep 23, 2019
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16 people are talking about this

And as Renato Mariotti in Politico says: "Labeling Trump’s alleged conduct as “bribery” or “extortion” cheapens what is alleged to have occurred and does not capture what makes it wrongful. It’s not a crime—it’s a breach of the president’s duty to not use the powers of the presidency to benefit himself. And he invited a foreign nation to influence the 2020 presidential election on the heels of a nearly three-year investigation that proved Russia had tried to influence the 2016 presidential election."
http://dlvr.it/RDjcgl


trump canceled aid to Ukraine 6 days before phone call



I just found out that the same man who wrote Clinton Cash (the bogus story alleging corruption at the Clinton Foundation) is also behind this Hunter Biden story. Why isn't this a bigger angle in stories about Trump blackmailing Ukraine?
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Sep 24, 2019 1:27 pm

:)


Nalyvaichenko said Ukraine should also be interested in a thorough investigation into the “black ledger” that recorded slush-fund payments to Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort.




HOT COLD CASES

Ukraine Likely to Reopen Probe of Hunter Biden Firm: Sources

President Zelensky came to office vowing to fight corruption, and it looks like he’ll open a lot of cases shut by shady prosecutors. But the focus is on Ukraine, not the U.S.

Anna Nemtsova
Updated 09.24.19 1:05PM ET
Published 09.24.19 12:33PM ET

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty
KYIV, Ukraine—The Daily Beast has learned from an influential member of Ukraine’s parliament, from one of the country’s prosecutors, and from a center combating corruption that the government here is likely to pursue the cases that President Donald Trump urged on President Volodymyr Zelensky in a controversial phone call last July. But not the way Trump intends, and not necessarily to the detriment of Trump challenger Joe Biden.

The investigations and possible prosecutions, if they happen, would take place in the context of a new law signed by Zelensky just before his departure for the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where he is expected to meet face to face with Trump for the first time.

In Kyiv, there are widespread hopes that the reforms will help Zelensky, a former comedian who played a corruption-fighting president on television, deliver on his campaign president to clean up Ukraine for real. A new team of independent prosecutors is supposed to re-open investigations of past cases and answer questions about the corruption in post-revolutionary Ukraine over the last five years.

During much of that time, investigations were launched against various powerful oligarchs, then quietly shut down when, it was widely assumed, the prosecutors were paid off. As a result it has been hard to know if the investigations were justified, or merely launched for purposes of extortion.

“We are trying ultimately to re-set the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, to speed up the reform,” Kirill Timoshenko, deputy head of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine, told The Daily Beast on Tuesday. In accordance with the new law, all Ukrainian prosecutors will go through a process of recertification. The number of prosecutors will be cut down from 15,000 to 10,000. Timoshenko said he could not comment on specific cases and could not say more about Zelensky’s agenda for the meeting with Trump on Wednesday.

Valentin Nalyvaichenko, a former head of Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency and a member of Ukraine’s parliament, says he expects the corruption case of the Burisma gas company—two cases were opened and dropped by various prosecutors over the years —to be revisited. Hunter Biden, the son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, was a board member.

Joe Biden is now Trump’s leading opponent in the 2020 U.S. presidential elections, and both Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, have been working to find dirt on Biden in Ukraine.

“Ukraine’s parliament is planning to hold hearings about the various corrupt schemes.”
Nalyvaichenko said his country will be best served by pursuing an investigation related to Burisma’s alleged multimillion-dollar corruption deals, not because of Trump’s pressure but because Ukraine wants to know the truth about its own corruption, whether the founder of Burisma, Ukraine’s ex-minister of natural resources Mykola Zlochevsky from 2010 to 2012, had paid to quash the earlier investigations into the way he acquired gas licenses.

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, Nalyvaichenko said Ukraine’s parliament is planning to hold hearings about the various corrupt schemes. Nalyvaichenko, who is a member of the opposition Fatherland Party, serves in parliamentary group focused on U.S.-Ukraine relations.

“I am going to support President Zelensky’s initiatives to have new investigations by a new team at the law-enforcement agency,” Nalyvaichenko said. This would include inquiries into the actions of previous prosecutor generals, Yury Lutsenko and Victor Shokhin. “I am convinced that Zelensky will say in New York that these are our domestic investigations, we are going to figure them out on our own.” He added, however, “We’d be happy to cooperate with the FBI.”

Prosecutor Sergiy Gorbatyuk investigated the founder of Burisma company, Zlochevsky, for three months in 2016, until Prosecutor General Lutsenko made a decision to drop the probe. First, Lutsenko took the case away from the investigators, then closed it down illegally, Gorbatyuk told The Daily Beast on Tuesday.

“There would not have been any question [about pursuing] such cases today, if Lutsenko did not interfere in the investigations,” the prosecutor said. “I hope that with the change of management at the prosecutor general’s office there will be no illegal interferences and this case as well as other probes will be investigated strictly in accordance with the law.”

“We are going to see some big former decision makers behind bars very soon, I have no doubt.”
— Ukrainian sociologist Irina Bekeshkina

A leading Ukrainian sociologist, Irina Bekeshkina says there is powerful will in Zelensky’s team and a strong social demand to see some former corrupt bureaucrats in jail. “It is not the number of punished criminals but their status that will make the difference and set a good example,” Bekeshkina said. “We are going to see some big former decision-makers behind bars very soon, I have no doubt.”

The Ukraine scandal has rocked American politics, where opponents of Trump have fixed on reports that, at least implicitly, he threatened to withhold vital military aid from Ukraine if Zelensky did not pursue the Burisma case.

Trump has said there was no quid pro quo, but admits that he raised the issue of Burisma, and the Biden connection, in his July 25 phone call with Zelensky as part of a discussion about corruption.

A major part of the Trump narrative is that in 2016 then-Vice President Biden pressed for the resignation of Prosecutor Lutsenko in order to protect his son. That is not the way people in Ukraine remember things. Lutsenko’s reputation for corruption was infamous, and Biden supported the efforts of Ukraine’s reformers to be rid of him.

According to Nalyvaichenko, Lutsenko needs to be investigated further, not least because he has been in communication with Trump’s agents “for vindictive purposes.”

Nalyvaichenko said Ukraine should also be interested in a thorough investigation into the “black ledger” that recorded slush-fund payments to Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

“In a Ukrainian dream scenario, Kiev would want Zelensky to agree with Western leaders on an approach to settling the war in the east.”
“As it turns out, nobody really investigated the case properly,” Nalyvaichenko said. “Officials close to former President Petro Poroshenko mentioned two names of the U.S. citizens. One was Paul Manafort, who lost his job as Trump campaign manager, the other, Larry King, was never talked about again.”

Ukraine previously suspected the well-known television host, Larry King, of accepting $225,000 from the “black ledger” for interviewing a pro-Russian politician in 2011. At the time of the allegations, King hosted the Larry King Now show on RT America, the Kremlin’s propaganda channel. At the time, King did not respond to requests for comment from Ukraine’s Kyiv Post, and as Nalyvaichenko says the allegations faded away.

There are high expectations in Ukraine this week for Zelensky’s meetings on the sidelines of the United Nations. In a Ukrainian dream scenario, Kyiv would want Zelensky to agree with Western leaders on an approach to settling the war in the east. There has been talk here, at least, of a sweeping peace treaty in the works.

Sovereignty is not just a word here, threatened as Ukraine is by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s irredentist ambition to resurrect the Russian Empire. Since 2014, Ukraine has paid with thousands of lives and territory, first during the uprising on Independence Square and during the war that has raged since.

Memories are long in such conflicts, and efforts to help are deeply appreciated. Nalyvaichenko says he has no ill will toward Biden. He remembers the U.S. vice president as one of the “bravest” Ukraine friends coming from Washington during the first and most violent year of war with the Kremlin-backed forces.

“Biden asked me about Russia’s aggression at the time when not many believed in it,” Nalyvaichenko said. He said Ukraine’s intelligence service shared with U.S. officials data they had at the time on Russian military forces fighting in Ukraine.

Nalyvaichenko said Biden did not shrink from denouncing corruption. “He is a man of sharp and fresh thoughts; he had no fear to turn with his face to the government, to our prime minister and top politicians and say: ‘You have corruption at a high level.’”

The executive director of the Center for Combating Corruption, Darya Kalenyuk, said that all of Ukraine’s corruption fighters expect the Burisma probe to be reopened. “The Burisma case has been a systematic problem for years, first Prosecutor General [Viktor] Shokin, then Lutsenko blocked the criminal investigations,” Kalenyuk told The Daily Beast on Tuesday. “The pressure from Joe Biden was really needed, we welcomed it with gratitude, now it is up to the newly formed team of prosecutors to revisit the probe.”

International experts working in Ukraine also have strong memories of Biden’s move to pressure Ukraine to fire the top prosecutor, Victor Shokin, in 2016. “The U.S. law-enforcement community was very supportive of the efforts to oust Shokin at the time, working with civil society,” Donald Bowser, a former adviser on institution building, told The Daily Beast.

In 2016, Bowser’s group advised NABU, Ukraine’s national anti-corruption agency. “For example, a current serving Republican congressman, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, was seconded by the FBI in Kyiv at the time of the push to oust Shokin, he was helping on the anti-corruption efforts.”

Bowser also suggested it was just about time to pay attention to one of the erroneous statements by Trump lawyer Rudolph Giuliani. “Giuliani claims the Anti-corruption Center, ANTAC, was [George] Soros-funded,” he said. “But they were mostly funded by INL [the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement] of the State Department.”

MP Nalyvaichenko welcomed President Trump’s and Vice President Mike Pence’s critical statements about Ukraine’s corruption, but pointed out how important it was for Kyiv to remember its own history, value its old friends, and keep good relationships with all political powers in the United States, Ukraine’s most important strategic partner. “Please understand us correctly—our bipartisan position—U.S. support is very important for us as a state.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/ukraine-l ... rm-sources
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Sep 26, 2019 8:29 am

Trump, Giuliani, and Manafort: The Ukraine Scheme
Murray WaasSeptember 25, 2019, 3:40 pm

Yana Paskova/Getty ImagesFormer Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort leaving his arraignment on multiple felony charges in Manhattan Criminal Court, New York, June 27, 2019
The effort by President Trump to pressure the government of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son had its origins in an earlier endeavor to obtain information that might provide a pretext and political cover for the president to pardon his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, according to previously undisclosed records.

These records indicate that attorneys representing Trump and Manafort respectively had at least nine conversations relating to this effort, beginning in the early days of the Trump administration, and lasting until as recently as May of this year. Through these deliberations carried on by his attorneys, Manafort exhorted the White House to press Ukrainian officials to investigate and discredit individuals, both in the US and in Ukraine, who he believed had published damning information about his political consulting work in the Ukraine. A person who participated in the joint defense agreement between President Trump and others under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, including Manafort, allowed me to review extensive handwritten notes that memorialized conversations relating to Manafort and Ukraine between Manafort’s and Trump’s legal teams, including Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.

These new disclosures emerge as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday that the House would open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s conduct. What prompted her actions were the new allegations that surfaced last week that Trump had pressured Ukraine’s newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Trump’s potential 2020 campaign rival, Biden, and his son Hunter, placing a freeze on a quarter of a billion dollars in military assistance to Ukraine as leverage. The impeachment inquiry will also examine whether President Trump obstructed justice by attempting to curtail investigations by the FBI and the special counsel into Russia’s covert interference in the 2016 presidential election in Trump’s favor.

New information in this story suggests that these two, seemingly unrelated scandals, in which the House will judge whether the president’s conduct in each case constituted extra-legal and extra-constitutional abuses of presidential power, are in fact inextricably linked: the Ukrainian initiative appears to have begun in service of formulating a rationale by which the president could pardon Manafort, as part of an effort to undermine the special counsel’s investigation.

From 2004 to 2014, Manafort had advised President Viktor Yanukovych, who advocated that his country sever ties with the United States and other Western nations, and align itself more closely with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. After Yanukovych fled the country in disgrace in 2014, a ledger was recovered from the burned-out ruins of his Party of Regions. Its records showed that Yanukovych and his political allies had made some $12.7 million in secret cash payments to Manafort. The disclosure led directly to Manafort’s resignation in August 2016 as chairman of the Trump presidential campaign.

The records I have reviewed also indicate that on at least three occasions, Rudy Giuliani was in communication with Manafort’s legal team to discuss how the White House was pushing a narrative that the Democratic National Committee, Democratic donors, and Ukrainian government officials had “colluded” to defeat Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid. (This story has since been debunked as baseless, though that has not prevented Trump, Giuliani, and other surrogates in conservative media from repeatedly pushing the story.)

In particular, the records show that Manafort’s camp provided Giuliani with information designed to smear two people: one was a Ukrainian journalist and political activist named Serhiy Leshchenko, whom Manafort believed, correctly, of helping to uncover Manafort’s secret payments from Yanukovych; another was Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American political consultant and US citizen, whom Manafort suspected, mistakenly in this case, was also behind the exposé. The records also show that Giuliani and attorneys for Manafort exchanged information about the then US ambassador to the Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who Giuliani believed had attempted to undercut his covert Ukrainian diplomacy and fact-finding; the records are unclear as to whether it was Giuliani or Manafort’s attorney who first initiated their discussion about her.

After his arrest in 2017, Manafort continued to encourage President Trump and his lawyers to engage in this effort when they joined Manafort in a joint legal defense agreement. Attorneys are allowed to enter into such agreements in order share information and coordinate legal, public relations, and political strategies—in this case regarding the investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, including that of the special counsel. Federal courts have long ruled that joint defense agreements are legal to protect the due process rights of those under investigation, as long as they are not used by potential defendants to coordinate providing cover stories or false information to prosecutors.

Trump’s dangling of pardons to Manafort and others who might provide damaging testimony against the president to law enforcement agents, such as his former personal attorney Michael Cohen, have been widely reported, both by news media outlets and in the Mueller Report. According to the participant in the joint defense agreement discussions, Manafort was distressed at the uncertainty about whether President Trump would pardon him. There was no formal understanding that Trump would do so, because this would instantly have raised the specter of whether such a pardon might constitute an obstruction of justice.

Instead, Manafort and those around him took the very public efforts by Giuliani to press Ukraine to investigate Manafort’s accusers as a favorable signal that the president might still pardon him after the 2020 presidential election. Trump is famously transactional, and Manafort feared that the president might be leading him on, according to the person who was party to the joint defense agreement communications. Giuliani’s constant touting of the Ukraine issue proved “reassuring” to Manafort, albeit to “a limited degree,” according to this person.

If Giuliani’s own account can be believed, it was while he was looking into the purported Ukrainian collusion to defeat Trump that he stumbled upon Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine. “The reality is I came about this by accident, investigating Ukrainian collusion with Democrats to affect the election,” Giuliani said in an interview with Fox News on May 10.

Giuliani did not add that he was also pressing for Kiev to investigate Manafort’s enemies. As I first disclosed last year in an article for Vox, Manafort encouraged the president and his top aides in this effort from the first days of the administration in early 2017. In recent months, both Trump and Giuliani have intensified those efforts, pressuring Ukraine to investigate not only Leshchenko and Chalupa, but also other Ukrainian government officials, activists, and journalists—and specifically to look into any part they may have had in publishing details of Manafort’s illicit political consulting work in the Ukraine.

This past weekend, Trump acknowledged that he had also encouraged President Zelensky during a July 25 telephone call to have Ukraine’s law enforcement agencies investigate Hunter Biden’s business dealings. The White House has released a memorandum based on notes from officials, not a verbatim record. In it, Trump expressed concern to Zelensky that he was “surrounding [him]self with some of the same people,” an apparent reference to Leshchenko. Trump went on to disparage the Mueller Report, saying, “a lot of it started with Ukraine,” a seeming allusion to Manafort’s problems. And he urged the Ukrainian president to take calls from both his personal lawyer and Attorney General William Barr. Giuliani has admitted to repeatedly pressing the Manafort matter with Ukrainian officials.

The allegations that President Trump improperly pressured the head of state of a foreign government to improperly investigate the son of his potential Democratic opponent in the 2020 presidential race, and even withheld $250 million in military aid to that country, have become grounds for an impeachment inquiry. The new disclosures in this story underscore how this scheme originated in the long-running coordination between Trump, Giuliani, and Manafort to frustrate the Mueller investigation.

*


Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty ImagesThen President-elect Donald Trump conferring with Rudy Giuliani, who later became Trump’s personal lawyer, Bedminster, New Jersey, November 20, 2016
Giuliani’s smear campaign already met with some success. After Giuliani had to cancel a trip to Kiev earlier this year to meet with Zelensky to press the president’s agenda of having Ukraine investigate Trump’s political adversaries, Giuliani blamed Leshchenko for generating the publicity about it. In 2016, Leshchenko had held a press conference in Kiev to publicize the “black ledger” that forced Manafort’s resignation from Trump’s campaign.

On May 10, Giuliani lashed out at Leshchenko, characterizing him as one of several people around Zelensky who were “enemies of the president” and “enemies of the United States.” Without offering any evidence to substantiate this disparagement, Giuliani now claimed that the ledgers had been doctored or forged. He even alleged that Hillary Clinton or the Democratic National Committee were involved in the effort to bring the ledger to light. On Fox News this past Sunday, Giuliani added to his conspiracy theory the claim that George Soros was somehow involved in “Ukrainian collusion.”

Writing in The Washington Post on Saturday, Leshchenko—who had for a time been a member of the Ukrainian parliament—wrote that Giuliani’s accusations had “had a devastating effect on my political career.” “Giuliani’s smear,” he said, “cost me a job in the new administration.” Leshchenko had been an adviser on Zelensky’s team, but facing this onslaught from Trump’s attorney and his media allies, he had felt forced to withdraw in order to avoid creating problems for the Ukrainian president.

Alexandra Chalupa has faced similar attacks, encouraged by Manafort via the joint defense agreement. Chalupa had worked part-time as a political consultant to the Democratic National Committee, and Manafort claimed that she, too, had been involved in bringing the black ledger to light. Her consultancy for the DNC had involved outreach to Ukrainian-American voters, not opposition research; and she had conducted her research on Manafort entirely on her own account. Although Chalupa mentioned what she was doing to colleagues at the DNC, they took no interest in her efforts, and in July 2016 she quit working for the DNC to focus on human rights advocacy. Although she did independently report on Manafort’s work in Ukraine, she played no part in exposing the black ledger.

President Trump and his surrogates, however, had their own motives for attacking Chalupa. After the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian officials was revealed, they used Chalupa’s work to argue that Democrats had engaged in much the same conduct: Chalupa’s outreach to Ukrainian officials, they said, was no different. As I wrote for the Daily in January: “This argument does not stand up to scrutiny but the White House’s efforts were designed to persuade some—especially among the president’s conservative base—to believe that a moral and legal equivalence applied.”

Acting in part on Manafort’s advice, on July 10, 2017, then White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders encouraged reporters to investigate how, she claimed, “the Democrat National Committee coordinated opposition research directly with the Ukrainian Embassy.” Two days later, Fox News’s Sean Hannity began efforts to repeatedly amplify the allegations evening after evening on his show. On July 24, Republicans on Capitol Hill, among them Senator Charles Grassley, of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said it would investigate whether Chalupa’s activity constituted a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (there would be no such finding). On July 25, President Trump himself tweeted: “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump campaign—‘quietly working to boost Clinton.’ So where is the investigation A.G.”

*

Manafort is currently serving a seven-and-a-half-year federal prison sentence of eight felony counts, including money-laundering, tax avoidance, and mortgage fraud. Following those convictions in August 2018, Manafort agreed to cooperate with the Mueller investigation. As part of a plea bargain in which he admitted to additional crimes of witness-tampering and money-laundering, Manafort was guaranteed leniency as long as he were to “fully, truthfully, completely and forthrightly” answer any questions about “any and all matters” the government wanted to ask about.

But Manafort’s cooperation was a ruse. Little more than three months later, in December, the special counsel stated in federal court that Manafort had broken his cooperation agreement by telling prosecutors and FBI agents “multiple discernible lies.” Even more unsettling were disclosures that an attorney for Manafort had been constantly briefing President Trump’s attorneys on what Manafort was being asked and what he was telling the special counsel. Manafort and his attorneys argued that this conduct was legal under his joint legal defense agreement with the president—although many seasoned prosecutors were appalled that this had been allowed to continue.

Harry Littman, a former United States Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, noted at the time in The Washington Post that “the open pipeline between cooperator Manafort and suspect Trump may have been not only extraordinary but also criminal”—potentially qualifying as crimes of obstruction and witness-tampering on both sides. Littman explained:

On Manafort’s and [his defense attorney’s] end, there is a circumstantial case for obstruction of justice. What purpose other than an attempt to “influence, obstruct, or impede” the investigation of the president can be discerned from Manafort’s service as a double agent? And on the Trump side, the communications emit a strong scent of illegal witness tampering (and possibly obstruction as well).

Littman also pointed out that Mueller had the right to compel attorneys for both the president and Manafort to testify about their discussions as part of an inquiry into whether they or their clients had obstructed justice. But Littman noted that “political considerations” might “possibly intercede.” Trump and his allies would criticize Mueller for overreach, he considered, and the then Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker might not permit Mueller to serve subpoenas.

In the end, Mueller did not follow up. Nor have Democrats in the House, who had a similar legitimate right to independently investigate the matter. If they had, they would have discovered that as late as May of this year, Giuliani was in touch with Manafort’s attorneys to discuss how they could keep pushing the “Ukrainian collusion” narrative, as the records shown me demonstrate. In the absence of any branch of government holding them accountable, Trump and Giuliani faced no sanction for doing so. They had good reason, after all, to believe they were invincible.
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/09/2 ... ne-scheme/
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Sep 29, 2019 6:14 am

Michael Cohen has Ukraine info he wants to reveal to Congress: Cohen attorney Lanny Davis
By Sarah K. BurrisSeptember 26, 2019
In a radio interview with Rick Ungar, Michael Cohen’s attorney Lanny Davis indicated the former “fixer” to President Donald Trump has information on Ukraine and he’s ready to talk.

“[Cohen] should be a key witness the way John Dean was to translate this criminal behavior,” Davis told Ungar on his Thursday show. The reference was to the notorious Nixon White House Counsel who became famous for coming forward about wrongdoing. “Michael now becomes a crucial witness as this process unfolds.”

Davis said that he’s approached the committee chairs but that they’ve obviously been busy lately.

“I have written the three Chairs in the last week,” said Davis, “Chairman Elijah Cummings of House Oversight, Chairman Nadler of course, House Judiciary, and Chairman Schiff who we’ve seen on television today, House Intelligence. All three of those gentlemen he cooperated with before he went to prison and he’s ready to do so again.”
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/09/michae ... 8I.twitter
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 01, 2019 6:44 pm

Shimon Prokupecz

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CNN: State Dept inspector general has requested an urgent Hill briefing with relevant committees tomorrow related to Ukraine. The email that went to staff suggested it was urgent. A Congressional aid described the State IG’s request as “highly unusual and cryptically worded.”
https://twitter.com/ShimonPro



:basicsmile

John Hudson

Just as Pompeo warns Dems he won't comply with their requests, the quasi-independent State Department inspector general tells Capitol Hill he'd like to meet tomorrow to "provide staff with copies of documents related to the State Department and Ukraine." From @karoun and I:

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2:37 PM - 1 Oct 2019

The inspector general's office obtained the Ukraine-related documents "from the acting legal advisor of the Department of State,” the letter said. A lot of anticipation about what the goods are
https://twitter.com/John_Hudson/status/ ... 7321711617



Andrew deGrandpre

Inbox -->

"Any effort to intimidate witnesses or prevent them from talking with Congress — including State Department employees — is illegal and will constitute evidence of obstruction of the impeachment inquiry."

House Dems respond to Pomepo:

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Important update -->

5 p.m.: State Department inspector general to meet with Hill committees Weds | The IG requested the mtg “to discuss/provide staff w/ copies of documents related to the State Dept & Ukraine,” according to a letter obtained by The Post

Really interesting that he's meeting committees from both House and Senate (not just House Committees that subpoenaed documents); and that it includes the appropriations committees (not one of the House committees involved in subpoenas).

He’s been caught intimidating & bullying. How fitting.

Image

https://twitter.com/adegrandpre/status/ ... 1966707712


Polly Sigh Retweeted Alex Kokcharov
During their presser last week Trump said he hoped Zelensky could work things out with Putin.

Tonight, protests erupted on Maidan in central Kyiv over Zelensky's backing of the Steinmeier Formula [capitulation to Russia re Donbass] with protestors chanting: “Zelensky out!”

Alex Kokcharov

Another video from the spontaneous #protest at #Maidan in central #Kyiv, #Ukraine tonight.

Protesters chant: “@ZelenskyyUa - out!”
Олександр Аргат

]
12:30 PM - 1 Oct 2019 from Lewisham, London

It was spontaneous. No protest was planned. The protest arose because the announcement of Ukraine agreeing to the Steinmeier Formula on Donbass conflict resolution late in the afternoon. It triggered protests.

Please learn facts before you comment


500 people or so turning up to protest is very easy in Kyiv, a city of ~4 million people. Maidan is in the very centre of the city - when people want to protest they know where to go, no organisation is needed.
a
Love all the right wing Kooks and Putinbots crawling out of the woodwork and saying it’s a “paid protest” with zero proof. They’ll do anything to spread the propaganda... it’s like 2014 again.

I just can't believe the number of misinformed replies from bots on my posts about events in Ukraine. I agree, just like 2014 yet again.

This has Trump-Putin fingerprints all over it (not the protest, the withdrawal). I wonder what didn't make it into the #TrumpUkraine transcripts.

Damn... these people, I’m so sorry they’ve been put in this desperate situation. No thanks to our so called president for holding back much needed aid.

https://twitter.com/AlexKokcharov/statu ... 5062076416


Your Road Map To Understanding The House Probe of Giuliani’s Ukraine Gambit
Tierney Sneed


Rudy Giuliani’s loose lips have caught up with him.

For months, the former New York mayor and current personal attorney to President Trump hasn’t been exactly hiding his globe-trotting effort to dig up dirt on the President’s personal political enemies.

That gambit — thanks to Trump’s own appeal to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky — is now the focus of a House impeachment inquiry that has moved quickly to subpoena Giuliani, and to request documents and depositions from his associates and State Department figures wrapped up in the endeavor.

The House probe was jumpstarted by a whistleblower’s complaint that Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff has described as lawmakers’ “road map.”

Consider this piece your road map to that road map, and your guide to who and what House investigators are looking into, based on the subpoenas and requests they have issued:

The Scheme

Giuliani’s crusade has been geared towards fueling fire around a fabricated claim that Joe Biden, when he was vice president, blocked an investigation into a Ukrainian energy company where his son Hunter sat on the board. In fact, Biden likely encouraged more oversight of the company by helping oust a prosecutor who was widely accused of turning a blind eye to corruption.

The Giuliani subpoena and other subpoenas of his associates point directly at his interest in digging up dirt on the Bidens, the company Burisma and its founder Mykola Zlochevsky.

Image

Investigators are also interested in what Giuliani has been trying to dig up on the investigation into Paul Manafort — the former Trump campaign chairman who is now in prison for financial crimes related to work in Ukraine — in what appears to be an effort to cast doubt on the genesis of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russian probe.

Image

The U.S. Players

Trump and Giuliani weren’t working alone and appear to have American partners, including some of Trump’s other favorite legal freelancers, and perhaps even officials in the Trump administration.

Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing are both mentioned in the Giuliani subpoena. The husband-wife-duo are prominent Mueller critics who represented key players in the Russia probe and were briefly enlisted to represented Trump personally in that investigation, until they dropped out due to conflicts.

They’re now reportedly involved in Giuliani’s Biden opposition research effort (they’ve denied that the President was aware of their efforts) and have been lobbing wild-eyed claims about the impeachment drive on Fox News.

House Democrats are particularly interested in what government officials were doing to further Giuliani’s goals. The whistleblower complaint describes two state department officials — Kurt Volker and Gordon Sondland — as trying to “contain the damage” of Giuliani’s exploits, while Giuliani has claimed that they had in fact encouraged his work.

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The House has requested that Volker, a Ukraine special envoy who resigned on Friday, and Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, appear for depositions.

The Middle Men

Giuliani has reportedly relied on several Soviet-born figures who now live in the United States to broker his connections to Ukraine.

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman— two Florida-based businessmen who were born in Ukraine and Belarus respectively — have both been described as Giuliani’s “fixers.” They have put Giuliani in touch with Ukrainian officials whom they believe can dig up dirt on the Bidens and have also pushed for probes into Ukraine’s role in providing evidence in the Justice Department’s Russia investigation.

The House wants to depose both men next week and also requested from them a set of documents similar to those demanded from Giuliani.

Image

Also in the House’s deposition list is Semyon “Sam” Kislin, an 84-year-old Russian emigre who has described himself as Giuliani’s “ex-advisor.” The Kislin-Giuliani relationship stretches back to the 1990s, when Kislin was donating to Gualiani’s mayoral campaigns, and Kislin also has a link to President Trump’s financial dealings of that era. More recently, Kislin has been trading fraud accusations with a former Ukrainian prosecutor who is key to the conspiracy theories against Biden.

The Ukrainian Side

Not surprisingly, Democrats want access to Giuliani’s records related to the Ukrainian politicians and officials who are the targets of the pressure campaign. Serhiy Leshchenko is a former member of parliament who helped expose the “black ledger” payments to Manafort from Ukraine’s pro-Russian politicians.

Ihor Kolomoisky is a Ukrainian oligarch in President Zelensky’s circle who is being probed by the FBI for his own shady dealings; Giuliani, meanwhile, has accused him of being “super dangerous” and threatening toward Giuliani pals Parnas and Furman.

Image

The Giuliani subpoena lists several other current and former officials swept up in his smear campaign against Biden. Among them: Petro Poroshenko, Zelensky’s predecessor; Yuri Lutsenko, a former prosecutor who has made comments to conservative media figures — only later to retract them — that have helped fuel the bogus Biden allegations; and Victor Shokin, the top Ukrainian prosecutor Biden helped oust in conjunction with other western officials.

Image

Giuliani records related to the mayors of Kiev and Kharkiv — including any contributions to those cities — are also listed in the subpoena.

Image

Then there are the Ukrainian businessmen whose work with Giuliani lawmakers are now interested in.

Image

Pavel Fuks — who was also involved in the Trump Moscow project — was a client of Giuliani’s as he was ramping up his international consulting. Vitaly Pruss is president of the consulting firm TriGlobal (also name-checked in the subpoena), which has had several dealings with Giuliani in recent years.

The Pressure Points

House investigators are interested in several episodes in which Giuliani and Trump may have applied pressure on Ukrainian officials — or their U.S. counterparts — to move forward with an investigation into the Biden.

The July 25 phone call, and other calls and meeting plans with Ukrainian officials, are an obvious focus.

Image

There are references to other allegations in the whistleblower complaint as well: that that Trump withheld military assistance to Ukraine as leverage; that Trump allegedly swapped out Vice President Mike Pence for Energy Secretary Rick Perry in the U.S. delegation sent to the Zelensky inauguration; and that he recalled U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch because she was not deemed loyal enough to Trump’s cause.

Image

There’s also mention of of May 23 White House meeting between Perry, Sondland and Volker.

Sketchy PAC Donations

This wouldn’t be a Trump scandal if there wasn’t also a question about where the money was flowing.

Lawmakers want to see any records pertaining to donations to political election campaigns coming from foreign individuals and those on the U.S. sanctions lists.

Image

House investigators ask Parnas, Fruman and Kislin specifically for records regarding a mysterious $325,000 donation that the Giuliani associates made to the pro-Trump American First PAC in May 2018. The donation is linked to companies owned by Parnas, but the origin of the contribution is unknown, as TPM has previously reported.
Image
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/profile/tierney
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 01, 2019 8:35 pm

More
This document was signed by #Ukraine earlier on Tuesday 1 October, confirming that #Kyiv was agreeing to Steinmeier Formula for the #Donbass conflict resolution:
Image
https://twitter.com/hashtag/kyiv?lang=en


Michael MacKay

Protests are growing in Kyiv against Zelenskyy's surrender to Russia.

If Zelenskyy goes ahead and betrays 5 1/2 years of the heroic armed defence of Ukrainian nationhood there will be a third Maidan and he will be overthrown.

#RussiaInvadedUkraine

Image
https://twitter.com/mhmck/status/1174797544796381184



AlexKokcharov
5h5 hours ago
More
Another #protest rally in central #Kyiv, #Ukraine, happening tonight, against the potential concessions to #Russia over the #Donbass conflict resolution - this time on #Maidan:



Tetyana Retweeted Громадське радіо
Many Ukrainians don't trust so-called "Steinmeir formula" to which Zelenskyy has apparently agreed to today.

Big meeting tonight at the presidential administration in #Kyiv

Tbh, he should've done some video explanation of what it is like he did them during the election campaign

Image
Image
Image

Azov News

2h2 hours ago

National Corps - "NO Surrender!" Protest outside the Presidential Office in #Kyiv after #Zelenskiy announced support for Steinmeier Formula.
Image

Stefan Weichert

4h4 hours ago

Demonstration in #Kyiv against the presidents new deal on #Donbas. “This is not a day of celebration” according to participant, who are afraid of what will happen to other Eastern European countries after this deal that he says has no benefits for #Ukraine but victory for Putin.
Image
https://twitter.com/hashtag/kyiv?lang=en


SCAPEGOAT
Pompeo Pushed Out His Own Ukraine Rep to Squash a Growing Scandal
“Volker was the easier guy to let go,” said one former State Department official. “But just because it is an easy choice doesn’t mean it is the right choice.”

Erin Banco
National Security Reporter
Updated 10.01.19 9:34PM ET
Published 10.01.19 9:00PM ET
EXCLUSIVE
Photo Illustration by Lyne Lucien/The Daily Beast
When President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani appeared on cable news programs last week, he deflected questions about his work in Ukraine and instead hammered home one talking point over and over again: The State Department knew he was trying to dig up dirt on 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

Giuliani waved his phone on air, flashing text messages between himself and State Department representatives, saying it was the department that connected him to a close adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Giuliani’s on-air appearances threw the department into a tizzy, forcing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to try to quell a bubbling internal crisis of confidence, according to three senior U.S. officials. For Pompeo, to solve the problem meant to find someone to blame, and there was only one individual who fit the mold, according to those same sources: former U.S. representative for Ukraine negotiations Kurt Volker.

Volker resigned on Friday. But despite his resignation, the State Department has scrambled to correct course, according to these same U.S. officials, especially after news that Pompeo was on the now-infamous call between President Trump and Zelensky in July. Pompeo had previously denied knowing about it on national television. On top of that, three congressional committees subpoenaed Pompeo for documents related to Trump and Giuliani’s work in Ukraine and demanded that five current and former department officials appear for depositions.

In response, Pompeo tried a time-tested Trump White House strategy: stonewalling Congress. The secretary said Tuesday that Congress was “bullying” career officials and suggested they would not appear for questioning. (The State Department’s inspector general is currently investigating members of Pompeo’s department for pushing career officials out of their posts for perceived political bias.)

The State Department did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Pompeo’s plan appears to have backfired. Despite the secretary’s efforts to block several of his current and former officials from speaking to Congress, Volker is set to go to Capitol Hill on Thursday with the backing of a cadre of current and former diplomats. Some of those diplomats spoke to The Daily Beast and requested anonymity because they feared reprisals from Pompeo and other Trump administration officials.

“I think Kurt definitely felt like he was being pushed out. He really believed in the job and was committed to helping Ukraine work toward a better future.”
— Senior U.S. official who requested anonymity
Now the department is bracing for impact. Current and former State Department officials who spoke to The Daily Beast, some of who are close Volker, said he was forced out of his post. Volker’s interview with Congress could lay bare details of Pompeo’s involvement in the Trump-Giuliani Ukraine saga.

“I think Kurt definitely felt like he was being pushed out,” said one senior U.S. official. “He really believed in the job and was committed to helping Ukraine work toward a better future.”

U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch is also set to sit for questioning with congressional investigators next week. Yovanovitch was abruptly recalled from her position in May following public criticism by Giuliani for her work in the country. And on Wednesday the State Department’s inspector general is headed to Capitol Hill for an urgent briefing with Congress. It’s unclear exactly what the briefing will entail, but Democratic aides told The Daily Beast the State IG said it wanted to meet about documents it obtained from the Office of the Legal Adviser at the department.

The beginning of the end for Volker started when Giuliani outed the Ukraine negotiator’s text messages on national television, officials say. The next day, the State Department got word that major U.S. media outlets were scrutinizing the negotiator’s work and relationships in Ukraine. As the public began to learn more about Volker, Pompeo became convinced that scapegoating his representative would leave the department in a better place politically, especially with Congress ratcheting up its investigation into Giuliani and Trump’s efforts, according to two senior U.S. officials.

One individual familiar with Pompeo’s thinking told The Daily Beast that “it was decision time, I think, for Pompeo.” “It was clear this wasn’t going away, and something had to be done.”

Several U.S. officials told The Daily Beast the former Ukraine negotiator expressed openly that he was not ready to leave his position.

"WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 30: Rudy Giuliani, former New York City mayor and current lawyer for U.S. President Donald Trump, speaks to members of the media during a White House Sports and Fitness Day at the South Lawn of the White House May 30, 2018 in Washington, DC. President Trump hosted the event to encourage children to participate in sports and make youth sports more accessible to economically disadvantaged students. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)"
U.S. Ambassador Roped Into Rudy’s Quest to Smear Biden

House Committees Subpoena Pompeo Over Trump-Ukraine Call
“Volker was the easier guy to let go,” said one former State Department official. “He was never supposed to be in a permanent position and he didn’t hold as much weight internationally as some of the ambassadors. But just because it is an easy choice doesn’t mean it is the right choice.”

Now that Volker is set to appear on Capitol Hill, officials are coming forward, telling The Daily Beast he should never have been let go in the first place. Four current and former State Department officials told The Daily Beast they were worried about how the U.S. would continue to engage internationally on Ukraine without Volker in place.

“Ukraine policy has gone from being an office of one to a national level political scandal, and I don’t think there is an easy way to conduct the state of affairs in that atmosphere,” said another former State Department official. “There’s just a lot happening, and now we’re left without a day to day policy champion because Kurt is gone.”

“Sondland seems like the guy everyone should be looking at.”
— Diplomat who requested anonymity
Several officials said they trusted Volker over other U.S. ambassadors in Europe, including the Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, on engaging with officials in countries like Germany, France, and the United Kingdom on Ukraine policy.

Sondland, who donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, was also involved in conversations with Giuliani about his efforts to investigate the Bidens in Ukraine. Giuliani told The Daily Beast last week that he worked with Volker first before taking part in several conference calls with Sondland. Volker’s resignation raised questions among officials about Sondland and why the ambassador did not face a similar fate.

“Sondland seems like the guy everyone should be looking at,” one diplomat told The Daily Beast. “He was more involved than Volker and has the president’s ear. He follows orders from the White House in a way Volker didn’t.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/mike-pomp ... ng-scandal
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Don’t forget that.
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