Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Election

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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby Belligerent Savant » Thu Sep 19, 2019 10:43 pm

.

seemslikeadream » Thu Sep 19, 2019 9:42 pm wrote:impeachment is happening right now...it started on July 26.. ....try and keep up



You are sorely mistaken if you think I have any interest in following the insipid spectacle on display.

Let the cattle have their cud.
Last edited by Belligerent Savant on Thu Sep 19, 2019 10:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Sep 19, 2019 10:44 pm

but so you do :)

why did you post that Pelosi thing...you don'f follow?
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: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby Belligerent Savant » Thu Sep 19, 2019 10:45 pm

.

Yes, I am here now, aren't I? Posting on this thread, no less!

I've been exposed. I am a closet DU fiend. ;-)
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Sep 19, 2019 10:47 pm

yeah you say you don't follow but you are here telling me that you don't follow, I don't care if you don't follow, continue away not following by telling me that you are not following

you follow the Democratic thread....you post occasionally in it for someone that does not follow

I like following big time criminals, I have many interests

the impeachment of a president does not happen that often


Rudy just confessed to trump’s guilt

Rudy Giuliani


A President telling a Pres-elect of a well known corrupt country he better investigate corruption that affects US is doing his job. Maybe if Obama did that the Biden Family wouldn’t have bilked millions from Ukraine and billions from China; being covered up by a Corrupt Media.
7:54 PM - 19 Sep 2019 from Washington, DC
https://twitter.com/RudyGiuliani/status ... 5988077568



Laura Rozen

wow.
was thinking about the date of Trump call w Zelensky,
July 25.
wondering when Mueller testimony was:
July 24.
Trump felt liberated

and he named ratcliffe for dni a few days later.

After Mueller testimony, Trump realized he had gotten away with it. Like after he fired Comey, when he told the Russians the pressure off


Liberated or freaked out and desperate?

liberated. he got away with it. and he started again

https://twitter.com/lrozen/status/1174888976844541954
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: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby Elvis » Fri Sep 20, 2019 5:52 am

They have a year to knock out Trump before the election, which would be great. Pence vs. Sanders? bwahaha. :)
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Sep 20, 2019 6:26 am

I don't think Pence will be running for dog catcher in 2020, he's up to his albino eyebrows in this Ukraine extortion game.

trump/Barr are threatening to charge the whistleblower now

I want trump impeached in the Congress but I do not want Pence in a position to pardon trump for federal crimes. So either they bother are taken down together or let trump suffer impeachment hearings (not sent to the Senate for conviction) till the end of the year and ALL of 2020 as president...but this extortion plot may not let that happen. Pence can not become president and then appoint a vice-president then have that VP pardon Pence....totally unacceptable.

Ryan Goodman

AP's @colvinj asked Pence a very pointed question on Sept 2, 2019 in Poland:

"Can you assure Ukraine that the hold-up of that money [U.S. security assistance] has absolutely nothing to do with efforts, including by Rudy Giuliani, to try to dig up dirt on the Biden family?"

Pence's reply was NOT a denial. If anything, he referred to Trump wanting the new government to move ahead with process against "corruption." That's the same word Giuliani uses in reference to his (false) Ukraine-Biden conspiracy.

Read Pence's non-response for yourself:


Image
Here's Giuliani referring to Biden-Urkaine allegations as "corruption."
Image
Image

"Mr. Trump is not just soliciting Ukraine’s help with his presidential campaign; he is using U.S. military aid the country desperately needs in an attempt to extort it."

And the link to the WaPo editorial Sept 5, 2019:


Now, recall that when Trump placed a hold on the security assistance to Ukraine it was OVER THE PENTAGON'S OBJECTIONS

Giuliani connects the dots for us. He told @kenvogel:

"I’m going to give them [Ukraine] reasons why they shouldn’t stop it [Biden probe], because that information will be VERY, VERY HELPFUL TO MY CLIENT, and may turn out to be helpful to MY GOVERNMENT.”

https://twitter.com/rgoodlaw/status/1174840835109773312



Now that whistle blower complaint involves Ukraine, important to revisit Pence’s very odd response to question of quid pro quo and Giuliani asked by AP reporter (@colvinj) on Sept 2.

Eagle eye @violagienger spotted and analyzed VP Pence’s reply here:

https://twitter.com/rgoodlaw/status/1174840835109773312


Trump and Giuliani’s Quest for Fake Ukraine “Dirt” on Biden: An Explainer
Vice President Mike Pence was about to finish a routine joint press conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda in Warsaw last week, when he got two astutely specific questions about his meeting the previous day with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy:

“Number one, did you discuss Joe Biden at all during that meeting yesterday with the Ukrainian President? And number two, can you assure Ukraine that the hold-up of [U.S. security assistance] has absolutely nothing to do with efforts, including by Rudy Giuliani, to try to dig up dirt on the Biden family?” Associated Press reporter Jill Colvin asked.

Pence answered the first question directly: “Well, on the first question, the answer is no.” His response to the second question was more interesting. He essentially demurred. But to decode the significance of Pence’s reply, it’s important to understand the recent history of Ukraine and U.S. policy toward the country. From there, we can unpack what’s at the bottom of the Trump-Giuliani efforts.

Those efforts yesterday became the focus of a new joint investigation by three House committees – Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, and Oversight and Reform. In letters to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seeking “any and all” related records and a list of personnel involved, the three Democratic committee chairs outlined a litany of meetings, phone calls, tweets and other threats, including the withholding of the $250 million of security aid the reporter had referenced in the question to Pence.

“President Trump and his personal attorney appear to have increased pressure on the Ukrainian government and its justice system in service of President Trump’s reelection campaign, and the White House and the State Department may be abetting this scheme,” the chairmen wrote.

The Biden “Connection”

The reporter’s questions to Pence struck at the heart of a controversy roiling U.S.-Ukraine relations since even before Zelenskyy’s election win in April. Starting at least late last year, President Donald Trump and his personal attorney and advisor, Rudy Giuliani, have agitated for Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Biden, the current frontrunner in the Democratic presidential race and the candidate they apparently think could be Trump’s biggest rival for a second term.

Trump and Giuliani allege, contrary to evidence, that Biden improperly pressured the Ukrainian government in 2016 to fire then-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in the midst of a corruption investigation of one of Ukraine’s biggest gas companies, Burisma Group. Biden’s youngest son, Hunter, was serving on the company’s board at the time.

But the prosecutor, in fact, was the target of pressure by Ukrainian anti-corruption advocates and a host of international supporters of Ukraine, who argued he should be fired for failing to pursue major cases of corruption. And it was the widely known and publicly espoused position of the U.S. government, across a half dozen agencies, that the prosecutor’s ouster was among crucial anti-corruption measures that the Ukrainian government needed to take to move forward economically and politically. As President Barack Obama’s point man on Ukraine, Biden dutifully relayed those messages at every opportunity.

Yet Trump and Giuliani have turned that real-life scenario on its head, falsely alleging that Biden sought to corruptly influence a Ukrainian prosecutor’s decisions in his son’s favor. The Trump camp’s steady volley of tweets, interviews and supportive articles by pro-Trump authors echoes the persistent Republican accusations against Hillary Clinton related to the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks on Benghazi, Libya, when she was Secretary of State.

At the very least, because of the complexity of the issue and the again-distant locale, the hammering on the Bidens’ roles in Ukraine could at least serve up enough disinformation to confuse American voters about what really is true. The anti-Biden campaign may be designed in no small part to make voters believe that, as disinformation expert Peter Pomerantsev has said of current-day Russian propaganda, “nothing is true and everything is possible.”

Prosecutors General Ousted in Anti-Corruption Drive

Ukraine’s latest popular uprising in late 2013 and early 2014, called the “Revolution of Dignity” or the “Maidan Revolution” after the square in central Kyiv where protesters set up camp for months, ultimately forced out the corrupt and inept government of President Viktor Yanukovych. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s previous political consulting and lobbying work for Yanukovych, an acolyte of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and for Kremlin-connected oligarchs expanded the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia and helped fuel Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Manafort was sentenced in March to 7 ½ years in federal prison for charges unrelated to the election interference but including tax fraud, failing to properly disclose his foreign lobbying work, and obstructing justice by encouraging others to lie to cover his misdeeds.

The 2013-2014 Maidan demonstrations against Yanukovych’s government had been triggered specifically by his decision to renege on an association agreement with the European Union and make a deal with Moscow instead. Ukrainians demanded a European future, not one akin to already-backsliding Russia.

The U.S. government, European leaders and officials of the International Monetary Fund quickly joined Ukrainian reform advocates in pressing the new government of Yanukovych’s successor, Petro Poroshenko, to make sweeping changes, especially in anti-corruption measures. Advocates often referred to the urgency as the country’s “other war” after the military battles it was waging against Russia’s incursions in the east.

But Poroshenko made only slow, reluctant changes that didn’t come close to achieving the kind of clean system of governance and enterprise that Ukraine’s economy needed to attract serious foreign investment.

The most promising anti-corruption development under Poroshenko was the creation of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), an independent agency established at the urging of the United States and the European Union to investigate and prosecute graft. But the bureau’s work was severely hampered by pressure from Poroshenko, his supporters in Parliament, corrupt elements of the security services and the courts, and, most important to the Trump-Giuliani allegations against Joe Biden, from the country’s Prosecutor General.

The Prosecutor General during much of the time Biden was pressing the Ukrainian government to step up anti-corruption efforts was Shokin, appointed by Poroshenko in February 2015.

“Shokin has stood out as the most obvious obstacle to judicial reform,” Swedish economist Anders Åslund of the Atlantic Council wrote in March 2016, when Shokin finally was forced to resign after a vote of no confidence in Parliament. “Most strikingly, Shokin failed to prosecute any single prominent member of the Yanukovych regime. Nor did he prosecute anyone in the current government.”

Shokin has since made comments to journalists that have helped fuel Giuliani’s and Trump’s conspiracy theory about Biden, telling the Washington Post this July that a potential investigation of Burisma and Hunter Biden were “the only motives for organizing my resignation.” Considering the no-confidence vote in Parliament was supported by an overwhelming 289 members, including most of Poroshenko’s party, that seems a far-fetched claim.

In May of this year, Shokin’s successor as prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, told Bloomberg News that there was no evidence of any wrongdoing by the Bidens. What’s more, another former official, Vitaliy Kasko, said Shokin had opened an investigation of Burisma, but that it was long dormant by the time Biden and the U.S. government pushed for anti-corruption measures in Ukraine, including the ouster of Shokin.

Lutsenko also contradicted a claim by Trump supporters that Lutsenko was investigating Burisma. Lutsenko explained to Bloomberg News that he was conducting an unrelated investigation of a different company involving transactions that occurred months before Hunter Biden even joined Burisma’s board in 2014.

“Biden was definitely not involved,” Lutsenko said. “We do not have any grounds to think that there was any wrongdoing starting from 2014.”

New, Powerful Mandate

With his brand new party sweeping the parliamentary elections in Ukraine this July, Zelenskyy has a powerful-enough electoral mandate to “truly clean out the [Prosecutor] General’s Office in ways that could establish it as a model of jurisprudence and not politics,” said former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst during a July 29 discussion at the Atlantic Council. “He could begin a similar process, though it would be harder, with the courts.”

Overhauling the Prosecutor General’s Office and an economic-crimes unit in the security services, and abolishing immunity from prosecution for members of Parliament, are critical steps to advance Ukraine’s economic growth, said Åslund, the economist, at the same event. “It was wonderful to see all these awful, crooked businessmen now being kicked out of the Parliament, which means that they no longer have immunity. They can be sued, and they can be prosecuted.”

Similar reforms are needed in the gas industry, defense manufacturing and customs. While the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) does an admirable job in its counterintelligence mission against external threats and in the war against Russian aggression in Eastern Ukraine, the department that handles economic crimes is “a giant monster,” said Atlantic Council Senior Fellow Adrian Karatnycky. The SBU has 30,000 employees, compared with Britain’s MI-5, which has 4,000, though admittedly not at war, he said.

And Zelenskyy, a former television satirist who played an unexpected president but now is in the position for real, is making quick progress with his party’s unprecedented parliamentary majority.

In a breathtaking move this past week, Parliament voted to take the step that Åslund and so many others had recommended – it stripped itself of immunity from prosecution, meeting a major demand of anti-corruption campaigners. The government is launching a long-awaited anti-corruption court that was established because regular courts are too corrupt or inefficient to handle such cases. Zelenskyy also named respected former Economy Minister Aivaras Abromavicius to chair the supervisory board of UkrOboronProm, the state-run defense-manufacturing behemoth, and ordered a comprehensive audit of the conglomerate. And Zelenskyy has put in place a new prosecutor general to replace Lutsenko, who himself had been criticized for moving too slowly on anti-corruption investigations.

Enter Team Trump’s Backchannel

Despite such sweeping changes that the United States has urged for so many years, Ukraine’s new, reform-minded government now finds itself getting the cold shoulder from its onetime partner. The Trump-Giuliani campaign against Biden includes hardball tactics that put Ukraine’s new, reform-minded government in a particularly tight spot.

In May, Giuliani — who himself has had business interests in Ukraine – planned a trip to Kyiv to pressure President-elect Zelenskyy to investigate the Bidens’ roles in Ukraine. After a public uproar over the impropriety of a key advisor to Trump seeking a foreign government’s help against a potential election opponent, Giuliani canceled the trip.

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Network, which broke the original “Panama Papers” stories, reported that two Soviet-born Florida businessmen Giuliani has publicly identified as his clients, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, are “at the center of Giuliani’s back-channel diplomacy.”

“Since late 2018, the men have introduced Giuliani to three current and former senior Ukrainian prosecutors to discuss the politically damaging information” about Biden, OCCRP reported with BuzzFeed. “The effort has involved meetings in at least five countries, stretching from Washington, D.C. to the Israeli office of a Ukrainian oligarch accused of a multi-billion-dollar fraud, and to the halls of the French Senate.” (Yes, that’s billion with a b, not million.)

The Ukrainian oligarch is Ihor Kolomoisky, who reportedly is close to Zelenskyy and whose television channel hosted the former comedian’s hit show. Their links and Zelenskyy’s hiring of Kolomoisky’s personal lawyer as head of the new presidential administration is giving anti-corruption advocates pause about Zelenskyy’s intentions in office, but so far the new president has taken promising steps. Furthermore, Kolomoisky told OCCRP that Parnas and Fruman wanted him to help set up a meeting between Zelenskyy and Giuliani, but that he (Kolomoisky) angrily rejected the overture and the implication that he was a go-between for Zelenskyy.

Giuliani also continues to tweet regularly, and recently resumed his pressure on the new Ukrainian government via telephone calls and a meeting with a Zelenskyy aid. He also met in New York in late July with Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko, whom he has known since at least 2008 and who is engaged in a power struggle with Zelenskyy over his dual-hatted position in Kyiv. (Voters select the mayor, but Klitschko also has served as head of the city administration, a position appointed by the president. On Sept. 4, Zelenskyy stripped Klitschko of that authority, apparently in a move to restore checks-and-balances in the capital.)

Withholding Aid – Extortion?

Trump is exerting his own pressure from the Oval Office. Despite a July 25 telephone call with Zelenskyy, in which the two heads of state reportedly agreed to a White House visit, no such trip has been scheduled.

And late last month, Trump ordered his administration to review $250 million in U.S. security assistance that helps Ukraine’s military stave off the Russian-backed forces fighting for secession in the country’s east. Politico reported that the aid includes “money for weapons, training, equipment and intelligence support,” and that the U.S. Defense Department continues to support the spending as necessary to keep Russia’s incursions in check. CNN confirmed that “the Pentagon has already recommended to the White House that the hold on military assistance to Ukraine be lifted.” On Sept. 3, Republican senators joined Democrats in a letter calling for the administration to release the funding.

But the previous day, Pence had suggested in his remarks in Warsaw that such a turnabout might be a long way off, suddenly calling on European nations to provide more assistance. It’s an argument that could find receptive ears among American voters long-inclined to question U.S. spending on foreign aid.

“The simple fact is that the United States has carried the load on most of the security investments in Ukraine,” Pence said. “And we have been proud to do that, but we believe it’s time for our European partners to step forward and make additional investments to stand with the people of Ukraine as they assert their territorial integrity and sovereignty.”

With the drama over assistance to Ukraine unfolding alongside Trump and Giuliani’s months-long drumbeat for an investigation into Biden’s role there, the clear impression is that the United States is extorting a partner country for political gain.

Asked directly about such a scenario in Warsaw, Pence didn’t deny it. In fact, his wording could be seen as an implied confirmation.

After answering a simple “no” to the question of whether he and Zelenskyy discussed Biden, Pence continued, almost as a caveat to the denial and with repeated references back to Trump: “But we … discussed America’s support for Ukraine and the upcoming decision the president will make on the latest tranche of financial support in great detail. The president asked me to meet with President Zelenskyy and to talk about the progress that he’s making on a broad range of areas. And we did that.”

“The United States has stood strong with Ukraine and we will continue to stand strong with Ukraine for its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Pence said. “But as President Trump had me make clear, we have great concerns about issues of corruption.”

So, after years of U.S. support to strengthen Ukraine as a potential democratic example in the former Soviet Union, that country finally has a president and a majority of members in Parliament who seem serious about tackling corruption. Is the U.S. president really sending a signal now that he will turn his back on Ukraine because its new leaders refuse an American invitation to corruption?
https://www.justsecurity.org/66101/trum ... explainer/



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Julia Davis

#Russia's state TV names Joe Biden as "Trump's most dangerous rival," host Dmitry Kiselyov says Trump should keep digging in Ukraine for "the sweetest" kompromat of all: "proving that Ukraine—not Russia—interfered in the U.S. elections."
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https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/stat ... 1187470337




A little reminder that a major backer of Ukraine's new president is under FBI investigation.

Billionaire Ukrainian Oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky Under Investigation by FBI
Ihor Kolomoisky, who’s been accused of ordering contract killings and is said to be behind the comic who may win Ukraine’s presidency, is being probed for alleged financial crimes.

Betsy Woodruff
Political Reporter
Updated 04.08.19 3:27AM ET
Published 04.07.19 10:00PM ET
EXCLUSIVE
Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters
The FBI is investigating Ihor Kolomoisky, a Ukrainian oligarch who has sparred with the country’s current president, according to three people briefed on the probe.

The investigators are scrutinizing potential financial crimes, including money laundering, according to the sources, who say the probe is wide-ranging and has been under way for quite some time. Kolomoisky has not been charged with any crime, and a lawyer representing him said he denies any wrongdoing.

“Mr. Kolomoisky categorically denies that he has laundered any funds into the United States, period,” said Mike Sullivan, an attorney with the Ashcroft Law Firm who represents Kolomoisky. “He’s a businessperson. His bank was seized by the government, claiming the bank was on the verge of collapse. That information turned out to be false.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Ohio is involved in the probe, as Kolomoisky has investments there, according to the Kyiv Post.

The oligarch, whose net worth Forbes places at $1.2 billion, lives in Tel Aviv, according to the FT. Law enforcement experts say his residency there could complicate any potential extradition attempt by the United States.

The news comes at a dramatic moment in Ukrainian politics. On March 31, comedian Volodymyr Zelensky won the first round in the presidential election and will face incumbent Petro Poroshenko in a runoff on April 21. Zelensky is famous for starring in a Ukrainian sitcom called Servant of the People, now streaming on Netflix, as a schoolteacher who inadvertently becomes the country’s president.

Kolomoisky owns the TV channel that airs Zelensky’s show, and Poroshenko has called him “a puppet of Kolomoisky.” Zelensky’s ascent, meanwhile, has worried some Western Ukraine-watchers and government officials; the comedian said in 2014 that he would “go down on his knees” to beg Russian President Vladimir Putin to keep his hands off Ukraine, as AFP reported.

Kolomoisky’s reputation is complicated. After the Euromaidan revolution ousted then-President Viktor Yanukovych (known best in the U.S. as a client of Paul Manafort’s), Kolomoisky became governor of an eastern province that bordered territory seized by pro-Russian separatists. He helped fund troops fighting the separatists and, according to The Wall Street Journal, offered a $10,000 bounty for some captured fighters. His efforts won him plaudits.

“He is known for doing things in the gray area,” said Ilya Ponomarev, a Russian politician who voted against the annexation of Crimea and now lives in exile in Kyiv. “On the other hand, he’s the most pro-Ukrainian and anti-Kremlin oligarch. He played a key role in stopping the invasion in 2014.”

Jonathan Brunson, who worked at the U.S. embassy in Kiev and was senior analyst on Ukraine for the Crisis Group, took a different view.

“I think Kolomoisky is super-dangerous,” he said. “He is probably one of the most dangerous oligarchs because he’s one of the ones who’s willing to get his hands dirty.”

Brunson pointed to Kolomoisky’s role in funding the ultra-far-right Azov battalion, a group of Ukrainian fighters alleged to have ties to American white supremacists, per RFE/RL; the State Department has called its political wing a “nationalist hate group,” and human rights workers say it may be a haven for neo-Nazis.

“He was one of the first oligarchs who began to act like a warlord,” Brunson said.

Kolomoisky has a host of enemies. He’s been accused of commissioning contract killings. And in 2016, Ukraine’s central bank nationalized Kolomoisky’s PrivatBank because it didn’t have enough cash. Billions of dollars disappeared from its coffers because it lent so much to Kolomoisky associates, according to the FT. The move was widely viewed in the West as a victory for transparency and good governance, in a country whose politics are impoverished on both counts. It was a flashpoint in Kolomoisky’s relationship with Poroshenko, and many speculate the oligarch backs Zelensky in part because hopes to depose the president who oversaw the takeover of his bank.

Vladislav Davidzon, editor-in-chief of the Odessa Review and previously a correspondent for a TV station Kolomoisky owned, said the oligarch handled the nationalization of his bank in a responsible way.

“When in 2016 the government was ready to nationalize and restructure PrivatBank, which was a tremendous economic liability, there was a serious concern that the irate Kolomoisky would use the bank’s leading position to crater the infrastructure of the Ukrainian banking sector,” he said. “That did not happen. He is a fantastic and picaresque character who by comparison puts about half the villains in James Bond films to shame with his antics.”

Others say the oligarch’s support for Zelensky is an effort at revenge.

“Kolomoisky was just looking for somebody to humiliate Poroshenko, and he found this guy,” Brunson said.

Sullivan, the lawyer who represents Kolomoisky, downplayed his role in Zelensky’s ascent.

“It should come as a surprise to no one that there is serious ongoing corruption in the Ukraine and now the government is at a crossroads in terms of a new election,” he said. “The present regime in the Ukraine is concerned about the potential will of the people in electing a new president. And the current president obviously sees Mr. Kolomoisky as a serious threat to his ability to retain power in the Ukraine. He believes that Mr. Kolomoisky is behind the opposition in Ukraine. It’s the people who are behind the opposition, not Mr. Kolomoisky.”

Anders Aslund, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, put it this way: “Kolomoisky is a complete opportunist. He’s only interested in one thing: money.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/billionai ... ion-by-fbi



Trying To Fill In The Gaps In The DNI Whistleblower Scandal
By Josh Kovensky
September 19, 2019 5:27 pm

Even with new details on the whistleblower complaint that the DNI is withholding from Congress — namely, that it concerns “multiple acts” involving President Trump and a supposed commitment he made to a foreign leader — there is so much we don’t know.

But, a close look at the timeline of events narrows down the possibilities.

Josh Marshall wrote up a potential timeline of events today that provides a useful jumping off point from which to orient ourselves.

Before getting in to the litany of foreign leaders that may be the recipient of Trump’s “promise,” it’s worth looking at the timeline relative to recently departed Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats.

Let’s go back to May. It was then that Trump delegated AG Bill Barr the authority to declassify documents that he received from the intelligence community, without any additional oversight or review.

Coats felt the need at the time to issue a carefully worded statement, saying that the intelligence community “continue” to share “apolitical intelligence” with the rest of the government.”

As time ground on, reporting suggested that Trump was deeply unhappy with Coats. He announced on July 28 that Coats would step down, and began the search for a replacement, announcing on Aug. 8 that Coats’s deputy Sue Gordon would also be departing.

The whistleblower filed the complaint four days later, on Aug. 12.

From there, things descended into apparent lawlessness, which I’ve written about over the past few days.

So, from the perspective of what the complaint is actually about, it’s really the weeks leading up to Aug. 12 that would matter the most. Trump was chomping at the bit to replace Coats and Gordon, who departed the government on Aug. 15.

Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson wrote of his concern about potential future retaliation against the whistleblower in letters released today, suggesting that the whistleblower may not have departed government yet.

Trump had discussions with a number of foreign leaders during the five weeks before the complaint was filed. The Washington Post, citing White House records, reported a list of five:

Qatari Emir Tammim Bin Hamad al Thani on July 9
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte on July 18
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan on July 22
Russian President Vladimir Putin on July 31
Multiple letters with North Korean premier Kim Jong-Un
Trump clearly has serious business with all of those leaders, in some cases involving quite delicate issues. Putin has drawn the most attention for obvious reasons, but alarming conversations could have taken place with any of the others.

But the list above is not comprehensive. Rather, it’s only a list of contacts between the President and foreign leaders that were announced publicly by the White House.

The most interesting phone call during the time period in question may be a July 25 conversation that Trump held with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which the White House does not appear to have acknowledged at the time. The Ukrainian government, however, did provide a readout of the two leaders’ conversation.

I wrote about the phone call here, a couple of weeks ago.

To refresh your memory: Trump, through his attorney Rudy Giuliani, had allegedly been pressuring the Ukrainian government to juice up its investigations into Joe Biden’s son’s activities in Ukraine, and to conduct another probe that would discredit the prosecution of Paul Manafort.

Trump and Zelensky held a phone call on July 25. Let me draw your attention to the language that the Ukrainian side used in its readout:

Donald Trump expressed the conviction that the new Ukrainian authorities would be able to quickly improve Ukraine’s image, concluding the investigation of corruption cases that have stymied cooperation between Ukraine and the USA.

Over the next week, ending around Aug. 2, Giuliani spoke with members of Zelensky’s government, and met with one in Spain about the issue. At the same time this was happening, the Trump administration was withholding $250 million in security assistance to Ukraine that had been appropriated by Congress.

Atkinson felt compelled to inform Congress of the existence of the whistleblower complaint on Sept. 9 — the same day that the House Intelligence Committee opened an investigation into Giuliani pressuring the Ukrainian government into going after Biden while withholding security aid.

It’s totally unclear if this is the phone call and “multiple acts” that are supposedly alleged in the whistleblower’s complaint. Trump spoke with multiple leaders over that time period. There is far more that we do not know than we do know, and it’s worth keeping that in mind as new facts emerge on this story.

We’ll be following this story as it continues to develop, but I’ll leave you with Atkinson’s description of the substance of the complaint, as written in a Sept. 17 letter to Congress released today, emphasizing the seriousness with which he views its contents.

“I set forth the reasons for my concluding that the subject matter involved in the Complainant’s disclosure not only falls within the DNI’s jurisdiction, but relates to one of the most significant and important of the DNI’s responsibilities to the American people.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/tr ... er-scandal


Potential Timeline of Events
Josh Marshall
on March 6, 2018 in Washington, DC.
WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 06: Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats answers questions during a hearing held by the Senate Armed Services Committee March 6, 2018 in Washington, DC. Coats and U.S. Army Lt. Gen. ... MORE
I mentioned in the note below that a number of big things happened around the time this complaint was filed. We don’t know they’re connected. But as we’re piecing this together I wanted to line these events up in chronological order for future reference. I stress again: We don’t know they’re connected.

July 28th: Trump announces Dan Coats will step down as Director of National Intelligence and leave government on August 15th.

July 31st: Trump initiates phone call with Putin. The White House only acknowledged the call after the Kremlin announced it.

August 8th: Trump announces that Sue Gordon, Coats’ deputy who would normally take over as acting DNI, is resigning and will leave her job on August 15th.

August 12th: Whistleblower files complaint with intelligence community Inspector General Michael Atkinson.

August 15th: Coats and Gordon leave government.

August 20th: Trump again calls for Russia to be allowed to rejoin the G7 group of industrialized nations.

August 26th: Atkinson submits whistleblower complaint to acting DNI Maguire. Maguire consults with the Department of Justice which instructs him not to share the information with Congress.

September 9th: Atkinson informed Congress of existence of whistleblower complaint which he had determined met the legal threshold of “urgent concern” without revealing its contents.

September 10th: House Intelligence Committee under Chairman Schiff formally requests whistleblower complaint from acting Director of National Intelligence Maguire, threatens legal action.

As you can see we have three separate progressions, which may or may not be connected: the forced resignations of Coats and Gordon, communications with Putin and the timeline of the whistleblower complaint. One point I will note is that Coats and Gordon remained in government for three days after the complaint was made. But it’s not clear that the complaint would have been shared beyond the IG’s office before they left on August 15th.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/po ... -of-events




Joyce Alene

If this turns out to be what the whistleblower complaint is about & it’s accurate, Trump must leave office immediately. A president can’t offer US aid to a foreign country in exchange for prosecution of a political opponent. Heaven help us if we can’t all agree on that.

https://twitter.com/JoyceWhiteVance
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: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby Belligerent Savant » Fri Sep 20, 2019 8:38 am

Elvis » Fri Sep 20, 2019 4:52 am wrote:They have a year to knock out Trump before the election, which would be great. Pence vs. Sanders? bwahaha. :)



Don't hold your breath. Despite the latest round of frothing at the mouth, this shall pass with no change to the figurehead in chief.

But, of course, we'll receive an avalanche of updates in the meantime strongly suggesting (and clamoring for) that elusive in-term ouster.
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Sep 20, 2019 9:52 am

:)
Thanks for following along, you seem interested

Hopefully you aren’t referencing me with that mouth thing ....I don’t froth but I do follow criminals especially presidents very closely just like I did with George Bush funny that no one ever accused me of frothing at the mouth when I did back then right here at RI!!!

Keep following me as closely as you do, I find it fascinating

Have a lovely day :partydance:

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: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby Belligerent Savant » Fri Sep 20, 2019 12:18 pm

.
Humorous.

I don't follow you closely, actually, but I do visit this board, of course. Tough not to 'see' your content as it's quite pervasive/prolific, particularly with respect to this topic.

It's the equivalent of driving by Times Square in NYC. All those massive, bright billboards/ads attacking the senses. I'm referring principally to much of the content you share here:

Largely MSM-approved, or sourced, data points.

There is value to be gleaned in distilling some of this information, to be fair, if for nothing else than to observe how information is being managed and distributed to the Average American.
Last edited by Belligerent Savant on Fri Sep 20, 2019 12:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Sep 20, 2019 12:19 pm

seeing/following and commenting....be my guest

yes humor it's a good thing, a very good thing, especially when I am reading your replies to me/about me :D

I absolutely find it amusing that what I hear from you is eerily familiar with what I hear about MSM from trump :shrug:

Trump Repeatedly Pressed Ukraine President to Investigate Biden’s Son
Interactions under focus amid whistleblower complaint on U.S. president’s dealings with a world leader

By Alan Cullison, Rebecca Ballhaus and Dustin Volz
Updated Sept. 20, 2019 4:03 pm ET
President Trump in a July phone call repeatedly pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden ’s son, urging Volodymyr Zelensky about eight times to work with Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer, on a probe, according to people familiar with the matter.
“He told him that he should work with [Mr. Giuliani] on Biden, and that people in Washington wanted to know” whether allegations were true or not, one of the people said. Mr. Trump didn’t mention a provision of foreign aid to Ukraine on the call, said this person, who didn’t believe Mr. Trump offered the Ukrainian president any quid-pro-quo for his cooperation on any investigation.
Mr. Giuliani in June and August met with top Ukrainian officials about the prospect of an investigation, he said in an interview. The Trump lawyer has suggested Mr. Biden as vice president worked to shield from investigation a Ukrainian gas company with ties to his son, Hunter Biden. A Ukrainian official earlier this year said he had no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Biden or his son.

After the July call between the two presidents, the Ukrainian government said Mr. Trump had congratulated the new president on his election and expressed hope that his government would push ahead with investigations and corruption probes that had stymied relations between the two countries.
The White House declined to comment. The Biden campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment. Last week, a Biden campaign spokesman said of Mr. Giuliani’s efforts to pressure Ukraine: “This is beneath us as Americans.”
Mr. Trump on Friday defended his July call with Mr. Zelensky as “totally appropriate” but declined to say whether he had asked the Ukrainian leader to investigate Mr. Biden, a former U.S. vice president. “It doesn’t matter what I discussed,” he said.
At the same time, he reiterated his call for an investigation into Mr. Biden’s effort as vice president to oust Ukraine’s prosecutor general. “Somebody ought to look into that," he told reporters.
In recent months, Mr. Giuliani has mounted an extensive effort to pressure Ukraine to do so. He told The Wall Street Journal he met with an official from the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office in June in Paris, and met with Andriy Yermak, a top aide to Mr. Zelensky in Madrid in August. Mr. Giuliani told the Journal earlier this month that Mr. Yermak assured him the Ukrainian government would “get to the bottom” of the Biden matter.
The August meeting came weeks before the Trump administration began reviewing the status of $250 million in foreign aid to Ukraine, which the administration released earlier this month. Mr. Giuliani said he wasn’t aware of the issue with the funds to Ukraine at the time of the meeting.
He said his meeting with Mr. Yermak was set up by the State Department, and said he briefed the department on their conversation later. The State Department had no immediate comment.
The interactions between the president, Mr. Giuliani and Ukraine have come under scrutiny in recent days in the wake of a whistleblower complaint that a person familiar with the matter said involves the president’s communications with a foreign leader. The complaint, which the Washington Post reported centers on Ukraine, has prompted a new standoff between Congress and the executive branch.
Separately, lawmakers have been investigating whether the president or his lawyer sought to pressure the Ukrainian government to pursue probes in an effort to benefit Mr. Trump’s re-election bid.

Mr. Trump is to meet with Mr. Zelensky in person for the first time next week, during the annual United Nations General Assembly gathering in New York.
Michael Atkinson, the Trump-appointed inspector general of the intelligence community, met Thursday morning with the House Intelligence Committee in a closed session to discuss the whistleblower complaint. Mr. Atkinson declined to tell lawmakers the substance of the complaint or whether it involves the president, but he did say it involves more than one episode and is based on a series of events, according to several people who attended or were briefed on the meeting.
Joseph Maguire, a retired Navy vice admiral serving as the acting director of national intelligence, is to appear before both the Senate and House intelligence committees next week about the complaint, though it remains unclear if he will be willing to divulge details about its underlying substance.
Stymied Democrats in Congress continued to mull potential avenues to obtain the complaint. Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said he was considering a lawsuit to obtain the complaint or withholding funding from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Mr. Schiff has accused Mr. Maguire of violating the law by not sending the complaint to Congress, as required under the federal whistleblower statute.
“It’s been very hard for the director of national intelligence to explain why he is the first ever in that position to withhold an urgent whistleblower complaint from Congress,” Mr. Schiff told reporters.
Mr. Maguire’s office consulted the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which determined that the allegation didn’t meet the statutory definition of an “urgent concern” requiring reporting to the intelligence committees, the Justice Department said.
That guidance is binding on the executive branch, legal experts said, and it remains unclear how or whether Mr. Maguire could transmit the complaint to lawmakers now.
Even before the debate over the whistleblower complaint, Democratic lawmakers had begun investigating interactions with Ukraine by the president and his lawyer. Earlier this month, the House Foreign Affairs, Intelligence and Oversight committees sent letters to the White House and State Department seeking records of interactions involving the president and Mr. Giuliani and the Ukrainian government.
Lawmakers are investigating whether there was any connection between the review of foreign aid to Ukraine and the efforts to pressure Kiev to look into Mr. Biden.
In the interview this month, Mr. Giuliani said he had sought in the spring to meet with Mr. Zelensky—at the time Ukraine’s president-elect—and planned a trip to Kiev to pressure the Ukrainian government to pursue two investigations: one into whether Ukraine, under its previous leader, had sought in 2016 to hurt the Trump campaign and bolster his opponent; and another into diplomatic efforts in the country by Mr. Biden, who is currently leading the Democratic presidential field.
Mr. Giuliani ultimately canceled that trip after his plan was made public. Mr. Trump was aware of the planned meeting, he said.
Mr. Giuliani’s criticism of Mr. Biden centers on the then-vice president’s efforts to seek the ouster of former Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, who had investigated a private Ukrainian gas company, Burisma Group, of which Hunter Biden was a board member.
Mr. Giuliani has accused Mr. Biden of acting to protect his son, a lawyer who has been involved in several investment and consulting firms, even though Mr. Shokin had already completed his investigation of Burisma Group before he left office.
Mr. Biden has said he sought Mr. Shokin’s ouster because he wasn’t doing enough to investigate corruption. Other countries had also criticized Ukraine for not appropriately addressing the country’s corruption problems.
Yuriy Lutsenko, Ukraine’s prosecutor general at the time, told Bloomberg News in May he had no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Biden or his son.
In an interview Thursday evening, Mr. Giuliani said he wasn’t aware whether the whistleblower complaint related to Ukraine. But in a Twitter post later that evening, he defended the possibility that Mr. Trump had urged Mr. Zelensky to investigate his potential campaign opponent.
“A President telling a Pres-elect of a well known corrupt country he better investigate corruption that affects US is doing his job,” Mr. Giuliani wrote.
Mr. Giuliani said earlier this month that Mr. Trump likely would raise the Biden matter with Mr. Zelensky when they meet, saying the matter was “on his mind.” A senior administration official said Friday that the two would discuss how to expand energy cooperation and trade ties.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-defe ... 6?mod=e2tw




Image
The president asked a foreign power to help him win an election.

Again.


Dirty Dirty Giuliani
As we always say on Gaslit Nation, from election hacking to information warfare, Ukraine is a laboratory for Russian aggression. Ukraine is an important framework for us in the West to understand the challenges of the 21st century and how best to confront them. If Ukraine can resist Kremlin aggression and confront corruption then so can we. It’s in our best interests to care about what happens there, which is why the E.U. and U.S. have historically been united in their support of a strong, stable, and democratic Ukraine. Things have been playing out differently under Trump with the president’s own lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, encouraging corruption in Ukraine in order to dig up dirt, any conspiracy theory that might stick, against the Democrats.

Now that Manafort is in prison, Giuliani seems to have taken his place, especially in trying to drum up Democratic scandals to distract from Trump’s many investigations, just like Manafort did. Giuliani has been desperately searching for a way to frame Trump’s opponents, like Clinton and Biden, and punish whistle-blowers, like my sister, Alexandra Chalupa, a former DNC consultant, and Ukrainian reformer Serhiy Leshchenko who both tried to warn the public during the 2016 election about Trump’s Kremlin ties.

Like Manafort, Giuliani has his own long history of furthering the Kremlin’s interests. Ironically, just as Manafort worked unpaid to run Trump’s campaign, Giuliani too worked unpaid as Trump’s lawyer in the Russia probe. Apparently both men had other reliable sources of financing. Giuliani has been entrenched in blood money for years, including being hosted in Armenia by a Putin ally, speaking alongside a sanctioned Russian official there for a conference in fall 2018 to strengthen the ties of the Eurasian Economic Union.

What is the Eurasian Economic Union? It’s the Kremlin’s answer to taking on the European Union. It’s an economic union of post-Soviet states that largely have atrocious human rights records like Belarus and Kazakhstan. They’ve tried for years to get Ukraine to join, and Ukraine is like, no thanks, we’re trying to join the E.U. Giuliani’s presence at this conference served the Kremlin’s interests, as does his years of working for pro-Kremlin Ukrainian officials with ties to organized crime. Last September, Democratic Senators, including Elizabeth Warren, wrote a letter to the Department of Justice inquiring whether Giuliani had filed as a foreign agent:

Giuliani’s work on behalf the city of Kharkiv, Ukraine, whose mayor is a member of the Party of Regions is also concerning. The Ukrainian Party of Regions’ connections to the Russian Government and anti-democratic activity are well-documented. Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, who both served in senior roles on the President’s 2016 campaign team, were convicted of or pleaded guilty to criminal acts in part because of their work on behalf of this Russian-backed Ukrainian political party. Mr. Giuliani’s financial connection to the organization, the organization’s close ties with the Russian government, and Mr. Giuliani’s ongoing public advocacy against Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election raises further questions that warrant review.
Giuliani may have even played a role in obstructing justice in the Mueller investigation. During the investigation, Giuliani told CNN he was in contact with Manafort’s attorneys, getting briefed on Manafort’s meetings with Mueller. As the Mueller Report lays out, Manafort had assured Gates that he had spoken to Trump’s personal counsel and they were “going to take care of us.” The word “pardon” was never used, but it didn’t have to be. The question remains: if Manafort had flipped, how many more indictments could there have been? What else would have been revealed? We may never know, because the influence of the president’s own counsel, which includes Giuliani, apparently made a difference.

Oddly, soon after Trump took office, he named Giuliani a top adviser on cyber security. Everyone laughed and made fun of Giuliani for being as relevant to the issue as an AOL CD. Months later, Trump announced a cybersecurity plan with Putin. It was quickly killed following inevitable backlash. As multiple reports have revealed, the Kremlin’s cyberwar continues on our country and threatens our election in 2020. What is "cybersecurity expert" Giuliani doing about this when he’s paid by the same interests furthering these attacks?

There’s an even darker thread to Giuliani’s blood money. He’s also consulted for Bahrain, yet another regime with an abysmal human rights record, Brazil, Turkey, and a shady opposition group from Iran known as the MeK, which has killed Americans, Iranians, served as a private militia for Saddam Hussein, and was labeled a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department. Giuliani himself helped to successfully lobby to get the group’s terrorist label removed, and repeatedly called for the overthrow of Iran’s government. Now that very same shady Iranian opposition group is being used in John Bolton’s obsessive campaign to go to war with Iran, despite U.S. intelligence, just as during the case of Cheney, Bush, and Iraq, insisting there’s no legal basis.

If Trump and Bolton get their Iran war this will be Bush’s invasion of Iraq all over again. Hundreds of thousands of civilians will be killed; business allies of the White House will profit; America’s standing in the world will plummet; and in the chaos and destruction terrorist groups will be born, just like ISIS was born from Bush’s Iraq invasion. One has to wonder whether Trump possibly pardoning a Navy SEAL platoon leader Edward Gallagher who killed Iraqi civilians, as well as a Blackwater contractor who did the same, among other accused war-criminals, is to normalize the type of mercenary he needs for his war with Iran. So when you see Giuliani entertaining cable news pundits on TV or on Twitter, sounding like a shameless conspiracy theorist glued to a recliner in front of Fox News, keep in mind that this is a man with the influence and clear determination to unleash incalculable destruction on the world in exchange for power and profit.

Now we turn back to Ukraine. The country recently elected Volodymyr Zelensky, a popular comic who won the hearts of Ukrainians by playing a school teacher whose viral video ranting against corruption leads to him becoming president. It’s called Servant of the People. That’s also the name of his political party.

Zelensky is a blank slate. During the election he was vague about his positions and his advisers. Now that he’s been sworn-in as president, we’re getting a clearer picture, and so far it’s not promising. Zelensky has appointed as his chief of staff a former top official from the government of Yanukovych, the Putin puppet overthrown in Ukraine’s EuroMaidan revolution. Other Yanukovych ex-officials and allies have returned to Ukraine, having been driven into exile by the revolution, clearly feeling that it’s safe now. Popular anti-corruption reformers are also included in the government, but they may just be window-dressing. Only time will tell.

During the election Zelensky battled allegations that he was a puppet candidate--a revenge candidate--for a powerful oligarch, Ihor Kolomoisky, who busted for massive bank fraud by the outgoing president and driven abroad. That has been confirmed: Zelensky’s new chief of staff is also Kolomoisky’s lawyer. While Kolomoisky has done much good for the country, including financing a private army in the early days of Russia’s invasion, after Ukraine’s own military had been depleted under Yanukovych, Kolomoisky is ruthless and famous for having had an actual shark tank in his office.

Right now, as with any new administration, there’s always a power struggle. The dust still has to settle. But talks of Zelensky’s government potentially holding a referendum, like the Brexit referendum, to let the people vote on how best to address Russia’s invasion, are troubling, especially in a country saturated with oligarch-owned television networks that push their own propaganda. While Ukraine’s outgoing government has cleared up Giuliani’s accusations, namely against Joe Biden, which we’ll go into on this show, corruption runs deep. Giuliani may get lucky yet.

On today’s show, we’re speaking with a longtime Ukraine-watcher, the Russian-American journalist and editor of the literary magazine the Odessa Review, Vlad Davidson, who met last month with Zelensky for about an hour on the campaign trail. Vlad, a longtime friend of mine, shares his impressions of the new president and whether he’ll be up for the job. Our interview took place in early May 2019, in the Ukrainian East Village Restaurant in New York City, where the great filmmaker Sidney Lumet, director of 12 Angry Men, used to hold rehearsals. Vlad himself is a character out of cinema, a young-man who dresses in tweed suits as though he’s been set-designed by Wes Anderson. And he keeps these gorgeous steampunk-like journals filled with collages, sketches, and all sorts of impressions. His intricate journals have been displayed in a gallery exhibit in Odessa. During our entire interview, Vlad sketched in his journal. I just wanted to paint the scene for you of this often entertaining and always enlightening expert on the modern Ukraine as well as on why we here in the West should care about what happens there.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/27051266

MANAFORT’S REVENGE?
Ukrainian Official: Trump is Looking for Dirt ‘To Discredit Biden’

Ukraine officials see no indication Biden or his son broke their laws. If Trump wants them investigated in Kyiv, his government will need to say why and what for.

Anna Nemtsova
Updated 09.20.19 12:16PM ET
Published 09.20.19 9:10AM ET
EXCLUSIVE
Mark Makela/REUTERS
KYIV—Ukraine is ready to investigate the connections Joe Biden’s son Hunter had with the Ukrainian natural-gas company Burisma Holdings, according to Anton Geraschenko, a senior adviser to the country’s interior minister who would oversee such an inquiry.

Geraschenko told The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview that “as soon as there is an official request" Ukraine will look into the case, but “currently there is no open investigation.”

“Clearly,” said Geraschenko, “Trump is now looking for kompromat to discredit his opponent Biden, to take revenge for his friend Paul Manafort, who is serving seven years in prison.” Among the counts on which Manafort was convicted: tax evasion. “We do not investigate Biden in Ukraine, since we have not received a single official request to do so,” said Geraschenko.

His remarks last week came amid widespread speculation that U.S. President Donald Trump had made vital U.S. military aid for Ukraine contingent on such an inquiry, but had tried to do so informally through unofficial representatives, including his lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Giuliani’s adviser on Ukraine, Sam Kislin.

But Geraschenko spoke before the appearance of a Washington Post story on Thursday that implied that an intelligence-community whistleblower may have reported the untoward quid pro quo was put forth directly by Trump in a phone call with Ukraine’s recently elected president last July.

Geraschenko reconfirmed his statements in a phone call on Friday.

The U.S. administration has thus far blocked efforts by Congress to learn precisely what the whistleblower reported, which Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson deemed an “urgent matter” while offering no details. The Post, citing two sources, said the allegation involved a “promise” made to a foreign leader.

Trump spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25 to congratulate him on his election. According to the official readout on Ukraine's presidency website, "Donald Trump is convinced that the new Ukrainian government will be able to quickly improve image of Ukraine, complete investigation of corruption cases, which inhibited the interaction between Ukraine and the USA."

Toward the end of August, the White House reportedly was considering whether to block $250 million to support Ukraine’s military in its war against Russian-backed separatists. On Sept. 12, however, that funding was released, and even increased. Congressional pressure played a role, and it is unclear whether the whistleblower’s reported “promise” allegations, made soon after the Zelensky phone call, did as well. (On Friday, Zelensky’s office announced that he will meet with Trump next week.)

What’s certain is that American and Ukrainian politics are closely connected these days, and on Thursday evening Giuliani admitted he had asked officials in Ukraine to investigate Biden. Giuliani told CNN’s Chris Cuomo in a contentious interview that there is nothing wrong with pressing for an investigation into corruption.

Others might call this whole affair a matter of political—indeed, geopolitical—extortion.

At a minimum, Giuliani’s pressure has been interpreted here as weakening this country’s institutions by pressing them to dig for dirt on Trump’s most important Democratic challenger.

“Both the United States and Ukraine are throwing Biden’s case at each other like a hot potato.”
— Serhiy Leshchenko, former member of Ukraine's parliament

Ukraine’s law-enforcement agencies believe that it is up to U.S. investigators to ascertain, specifically, whether Biden’s son had any missed U.S. tax payments on income from Ukraine.

Hunter Biden actually took a job with the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holding in 2014 and worked there for five years, then quietly quit in April, soon after his father announced his presidential candidacy. It is unclear how much money Burisma paid Hunter Biden in total. Whatever it was, he may rue the work, given the political cost.

Ex-MP Serhiy Leshchenko, the Ukrainian pro-Western politician and corruption fighter, has been in the epicenter of the scandal since Giuliani mentioned his name as one of “the enemies of Donald Trump and the USA.” The Trump attorney continued to criticize Ukraine’s leadership by saying that Ukraine’s president “is surrounded by people who are the enemies of the president [Trump] and people who are clearly corrupt.”

Any word of criticism pronounced by such influential Americans may be damaging to careers here. As a result of Giuliani’s statements, Leshchenko has lost a promising role on Zelensky’s team. “Both the United States and Ukraine are throwing Biden’s case at each other like a hot potato, pushing each other to begin investigating Biden,” Leshchenko told The Daily Beast on Tuesday. “I totally understand, and I don’t want to be in the way, since Zelensky clearly does not want to quarrel with Trump. The United States is our main strategic partner and I value that.”

Earlier this month, President Zelensky publicly thanked Trump for releasing the military aid vital for his country. Zelensky spoke at the annual Yalta European Strategy conference, which this year had a symbolic title: Happiness Now.

Ukraine elected Zelensky and his supporters in parliament by a landslide earlier this year, largely in response to the alleged corruption of his predecessor and amid hopes the former comedian-turned-politician could end the war with separatists that has killed more than 13,000 people.

To bring an end to the carnage, Zelensky needs strong international support. He hopes to strike a peace deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin with backing from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron at a so-called Normandy Four meeting later this month.

Russia and Ukraine recently swapped prisoners, a positive sign, but Zelensky has offered no clues on possible concessions. He demands, as did his predecessor, that Russia return the annexed Crimean peninsula to Ukraine, a non-starter for Putin.

The Trump administration eventually released $390 million in military aid to Ukraine, $140 million more than the amount Kyiv had expected before the administration suspended the funds for “review” last month.

GLIMMER OF HOPE
Russia and Ukraine Swap Prisoners in a Victory for Diplomacy

Anna Nemtsova

“For now, we would like America to support us more, and not only with money but also with the newest weapons in our war against the aggressor, the Russian Federation,” Geraschenko, the adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, told The Daily Beast. “We want a status as NATO’s special partner, allowing us to buy any weapons in the U.S., including the newest anti-aircraft rockets to defend our country in case Russia decides to attack from the air; our technology is more than 40 years old.”

Zelensky’s team is struggling to overcome war, poverty, and corruption. Clearly, the idea of helping politicians of foreign states win elections is not a part of his public agenda.

“This is a very special stage in Ukraine’s development: We have completely changed this year, our mentality has changed, we realize that the entire world is watching us right now,” Roman Truba, head of the State Bureau of Investigations, said in an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast.

Truba’s agency neither investigated Biden’s son nor Burisma Holding. There were no signs of illegality in Biden’s work in Ukraine, he said. “The State Bureau of Investigations should be an independent institution. I wish we would become as highly qualified, equipped with all modern technologies, and professional as the FBI.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/ukraine-i ... t?ref=home


Trump and Kushner Broke the Law in Meetings with Putin and Saudis
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 7, 2019

CONTACT: Jordan Libowitz | CREW
202-408-5565 | jlibowitz@citizensforethics.org

Trump and Kushner Broke the Law in Meetings with Putin and Saudis

Washington — President Trump and White House officials appear to have violated the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act by intentionally failing to create and preserve records related to meetings with Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un and other foreign government officials, according to a lawsuit filed today by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), National Security Archive (the Archive) and Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR).

The lawsuit details numerous instances, including five meetings between President Trump and Vladimir Putin, when no note takers were present and no official U.S. record of the meetings exists. The administration’s recordkeeping failures extend to Senior White House Adviser Jared Kushner, who in a recent meeting with top Saudi officials excluded State Department officials, thereby avoiding the creation of a record of his conversations.

“It is clear that President Trump and White House officials have gone to great lengths to hold high-level meetings with foreign governments and carry out foreign policy objectives while blatantly ignoring recordkeeping laws and preventing national security officials and the American people from understanding what they are doing,” said CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder. “The absence of records in these circumstances causes real, incalculable harm to our national security and poses a direct threat to transparency for the American public. We’re asking the court to compel White House officials to make and maintain these important records that let the public know what the government is up to and provide a safeguard to our history.”

“The Archive went to court to preserve presidential records when President Reagan tried to junk his email backup tapes in 1989. We have sued every president ever since, Democratic and Republican, to make sure the White House obeyed the records laws,” said National Security Archive director Tom Blanton. “Today, the problem goes beyond improperly shredding records, to the deliberate failure to create the records in the first place.”

“Keeping records of top-level meetings has been part of common-sense diplomatic practice for centuries. Failing to make or keep records damages not only the capacity of history to render judgment in the future, but also of government to pursue the country’s interests in the present,” said SHAFR President Barbara Keys. “It also undermines the principle of government accountability that is the very bedrock of democracy.”

The PRA was enacted to establish public ownership of presidential and vice presidential records, to impose record-keeping requirements on the president and vice president, and to authorize the National Archives and Records Administration to preserve and make publicly available presidential records. In a previous letter to White House Counsel, CREW flagged potential PRA violations coming from the White House and called the administration’s recordkeeping practices a significant departure from accepted archival preservation.
https://www.citizensforethics.org/press ... cords-act/


Seth Abramson

People are forgetting that we previously learned that there was a secret Trump administration effort to get Ukraine to drop its investigation of Paul Manafort, the man whose legal jeopardy Trump once said was the only thing that could bring him down. This Ukraine thing is a saga.
3:26 AM - 20 Sep 2019


1/ Moreover, part of the Right's ludicrous "Spygate" conspiracy theory sees Ukraine secretly helping Clinton during the '16 election, so Trump (and allies like Giuliani) have engaged in a *third* secret course of conduct with Ukraine involving trying to prosecute Hillary Clinton.


2/ And lest we forget, in January '17 Michael Flynn and Michael Cohen were involved in a plot to negotiate sanctions relief for the Kremlin through a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian politician. A Special Counsel could investigate all four of these criminal Ukraine incidents in great depth.

3/ A Trump-Ukraine Special Counsel would have a great deal of work to do investigating the following linked matters:

1 The Trump conspiracy to destroy Biden
2 The Trump conspiracy to destroy Clinton
3 The Trump conspiracy to aid Putin
4 The Trump conspiracy to aid Manafort

4/ And s/he would also investigate the following:

Obstruction relating to any of the foregoing four Trump conspiracies

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Almost like he's engaged in all the same behaviors again, but now has no chance of getting off by saying he didn't know better.

5/ The evidence is there: Giuliani admitted his role in two of the plots on TV last night; Trump admitted his intent to commit such crimes (bribery, obstruction, illegal solicitation of foreign donations) to ABC; and the whistleblower is a known witness the FBI needs to talk to.

6/ I'd always wondered what lawless former lawman Giuliani got up to after he was done criming in the October 2016 "Trumplandia" scandal involving illegal, election-shifting FBI leaks to the Trump campaign. Thanks to @PortlusGlam, we even have a graphic that starts to explain it:


7/ "GSS" stands for "Giuliani Safety & Security." Remember when president-elect Trump was about to name Giuliani his Cybersecurity Czar? We can now see that that was an attempt to bring Rudy's crime spree *into the White House* and make it easier to conduct in a clandestine way.
https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status ... 2197262336




Take Back your Country-#impeachTrump

Spent last night re-reading parts of #HouseofTrumpHouseOfPutin Here is a thread of some memes made from the book which meticulously details the ascent of the Russian mafia in America. (@craigunger) If you haven't read a must read. #impeachTrump #IndictTrump #RussianAsset
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"a man who would leave the country all but defenseless and otherwise inadvertently to do the bidding of the Kremlin" @realdonaldtrump @POTUS #HouseofTrumpHouseofPutin @craigunger @olgaNYC1211 #impeachTrump #IndictTrump #RussianAsset #SOSAmerica

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At the end of the book @craigunger lists the fifty-nine people. #RussianAsset in the @whitehouse @realdonaldtrump - #impeachTrump #indictTrump

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https://twitter.com/safeagain1/status/1 ... 1638188032
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.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Sep 20, 2019 6:16 pm

MOB

SHAKING DOWN FOREIGN LEADER
DEMANDING COOPERATION WITH HIS PERSONAL LAWYER
8 TIMES DEMANDING FOREIGN COUNTRY TO ENGAGE WITH U.S.
ASKING/DEMANDING FOREIGN LEADER TO INVESTIGATE POLITICAL OPPONENT


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The U.S is deploying troops to Saudi and Arabia and UAE ..

Proof Of Conspiracy by Seth Abramson

This is literally covered in the first Chapter : THE RED SEA CONSPIRACY

[b]Trump is deploying U.S troops to the Middle East, no he is NOT doing it to distract from the Whistleblower story, this was a long game hatched on a Yacht in the middle of Red Sea in 2015...
[/b]


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Aubrey Belford

Since the Giuliani-Trump-Ukraine thing is kicking up again, you need to read our @OCCRP story on what really lies behind it all:

>$500k in mysterious political contributions by Ukraine-linked businessmen, and a secretive, global back channel campaign

https://twitter.com/wendysiegelman?lang=en


Meet the Florida Duo Helping Giuliani Investigate for Trump in Ukraine
by Aubrey Belford and Veronika Melkozerova 22 July 2019
Credit: Edin Pasovic/OCCRP

Two Soviet-born Florida businessmen — one linked to a Ukrainian tycoon with reputed mafia ties — are key hidden actors behind a plan by U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s personal attorney to investigate the president’s rivals.

Trump’s attorney, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, said in May that he planned to visit then-incoming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to win support for probes into potentially damaging claims raised by senior Ukrainian officials.

Among them was the misleading contention that Trump’s main 2020 Democratic rival, Joe Biden, improperly pressured Ukraine’s government to fire a top prosecutor; that American diplomats in Ukraine had exhibited pro-Democrat bias; and that local officials conspired to undermine Trump’s presidential campaign and help Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Giuliani set off a firestorm in the conservative media by promoting the allegations.

“We’re not meddling in an election; we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do,” he told the New York Times.

The claims he was pressing have since largely been debunked, but remain politically potent as the next U.S. elections approach.
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Igor Fruman with U.S. President Donald J. Trump. Credit: Campaign Legal Center
Within days of announcing the planned trip to Ukraine, Giuliani called it off amid a storm of criticism that he was inappropriately interfering in U.S. relations with a foreign country. His efforts in Ukraine, however, have continued.

At the center of Giuliani’s back-channel diplomacy are the two businessmen, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who Giuliani has publicly identified as his clients.

Until now, the men have escaped detailed scrutiny. But a joint investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and BuzzFeed News, based on interviews and court and business records in the United States and Ukraine, has uncovered new information that raises questions about their influence on U.S. political figures.

Both men were born in the Soviet Union and immigrated to the United States. Parnas came with his family at the age of four. Fruman first arrived as a young adult in the 1980s, but later moved to Ukraine and established a series of businesses. Both now live in South Florida.

Since late 2018, the men have introduced Giuliani to three current and former senior Ukrainian prosecutors to discuss the politically damaging information.

The effort has involved meetings in at least five countries, stretching from Washington, D.C. to the Israeli office of a Ukrainian oligarch accused of a multi-billion dollar fraud, and to the halls of the French Senate.

Parnas and Fruman’s work with Giuliani has been just one facet of their political activity.


Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Credit: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0
Since early last year, the men have emerged from obscurity to become major donors to Republican campaigns in the United States. They have collectively contributed over half a million dollars to candidates and outside campaign groups, the lion’s share in a single transaction that an independent watchdog has flagged as a potential violation of electoral funding law.

The men appear to enjoy a measure of access to influential figures. They’ve dined with Trump, had a “power breakfast” with his son Donald Jr., met with U.S. congressmen, and mixed with Republican elites.

Months before their earliest known work with Giuliani, Parnas and Fruman also lobbied at least one congressman — former U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican — to call for the dismissal of the United States’ ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch. She stepped down a year later after allegations in the conservative media that she had been disloyal to Trump.

While setting up meetings for Giuliani with Ukrainian officials, the men also promoted a business plan of their own: Selling American liquefied natural gas to Ukraine to replace Russian imports disrupted by war.

In a series of interviews, Parnas said he and Fruman weren’t paid by anyone for their work in Ukraine and that he and his partner have done nothing illegal.
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Parnas and Fruman meet with the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and Republican fundraiser Tommy Hicks Jr. in Beverly Hills in May 2018. Credit: Deleted Facebook post
“All we were doing was passing along information,” he said. “Information coming to us — either I bury it or I pass it on. I felt it was my duty to pass it on.”

He said their political activities were motivated by sincere conviction that they had uncovered wrongdoing that should be investigated.

“We’re American citizens, we love our country, we love our president,”he said.

The men make for unlikely back-channel diplomats. Parnas, 47, is a former stockbroker with a history of unpaid debts, including half a million dollars owed to a Hollywood movie investor. Fruman, 53, has spent much of his career in Ukraine, and has ties to a powerful local businessman reputed to be in the inner circle of one of the country’s most infamous mafia groups.

Giuliani and Fruman didn’t respond to multiple requests for interviews or to written questions. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Kenneth McCallion, an ex-federal prosecutor who has represented former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko in U.S. court, said that Parnas and Fruman were “playing with fire” by lobbying in the United States and Ukraine without registering as foreign agents.

“Trump has either authorized Giuliani to engage in private diplomacy and deal-making, or even worse, remains silent while Giuliani and his dodgy band of soldiers of fortune engage in activities that severely undermine U.S. credibility and are contrary to fundamental U.S. interests,” McCallion said.

‘It Opened Giuliani’s Eyes’

Parnas and Fruman’s work with Giuliani has largely centered on efforts to connect the president’s personal attorney with current and former senior Ukrainian prosecutors believed to hold information harmful to Trump’s rivals.

In late 2018, Parnas and Fruman organized a Skype call between Giuliani and Viktor Shokin, who served as Ukraine’s prosecutor general until he was dismissed by parliament in 2016 amid allegations he was blocking anti-corruption efforts.

Parnas and Giuliani visited the French Senate building, where Giuliani attended a meeting that included Nazar Kholodnitsky, the head of Ukraine’s Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, according to social media posts and interviews. (Kholodnitsky has faced calls to step down after wiretaps in his office last year allegedly caught him interfering in corruption cases.)

By the new year, Parnas said, he and Fruman had also connected Giuliani with Shokin’s replacement as top prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko. The Ukrainian official and Giuliani met in New York in January and again in Warsaw the following month.

“[Lutsenko] brought documentation, verification. It opened Giuliani’s eyes,” Parnas said.

“The Weather and General Issues”

On May 21, following President Zelensky’s inauguration, Giuliani joined Parnas for another discussion that Parnas said included allegations of pro-Clinton interference by Ukrainian officials.

Parnas and Giulani visited the French Senate building, where Giuliani attended a meeting that included Nazar Kholodnitsky, the head of Ukraine’s Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, according to social media posts and interviews. (Kholodnitsky has faced calls to step down after wiretaps in his office last year allegedly caught him interfering in corruption cases.)

Kholodnitsky said his encounter with Giuliani was “probably a coincidence.”

“I recognized his face, but I couldn’t identify who he was [at first],” Kholodnitsky said. “To communicate with such a person about the weather and general issues was an honor for me.”

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Shortly after their February meeting in Poland, both Lutsenko and Giuliani began airing a series of allegations in the U.S. media.

In March and April, the online publication The Hill published a series of opinion pieces largely based on an interview with Lutsenko. The articles relayed the allegations about the Bidens, and went further.

Lutsenko also claimed that officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv had worked with Ukrainian law enforcement to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election by coordinating the disclosure of the so-called “black ledger,” a document that appeared to detail millions of dollars in secret payments from Ukraine’s former ruling party to Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign manager. Some of those payments were later verified to be real.

The revelation of the black ledger in 2016 contributed to Manafort’s resignation from the Trump campaign, and helped lead to his prosecution and conviction by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Since then, prominent Trump supporters have used allegations that the ledger’s disclosure was motivated by anti-Trump bias to cast doubt on the origins of Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

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Ukrainian General Prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko. Credit: Vadim Chuprina, Creative Commons
Lutsenko also told The Hill that Yovanovitch, who was still the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, had handed him a “do not prosecute” list at their first meeting. The Hill characterized the claim as evidence that Yovanovitch was favoring Democrats in the middle of a presidential election because the purported list contained the names of supposed Democrat allies in Ukraine’s parliament and civil society groups.

The State Department has forcefully rejected the claims. In a statement, the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv told reporters: “The allegation of a ‘do not prosecute’ list is an outright fabrication. Such allegations only help the corrupt.”

Still, the allegations caught like wildfire in U.S. conservative media, and were amplified by Giuliani in a series of interviews with cable news and newspapers.

Trump called claims that Ukrainian officials had helped Clinton’s candidacy “big” and “incredible” in an April interview with Fox News, and said that he would leave it to Attorney General William Barr to decide whether to look into them. Barr announced a probe into the origins of the Mueller investigation — in which Manafort’s Ukrainian work became a focus — the following month.

Parnas said he expected all the information he and Fruman had helped advance to become an important part of Barr’s inquiry, and that it would dominate the debate in the run-up to the 2020 election.

“It’s all going to come out,” he said. “Something terrible happened and we’re finally going to get to the bottom of it.”

Debunked But Not Dead

Experts have largely dismissed most of the allegations raised by the prosecutors and relayed by Giuliani as being at best unfounded, and at worst deliberate disinformation.

Both Shokin and Lutsenko are widely viewed among Ukrainian reformers as lacking credibility, and civil society groups have accused them of covering for suspects in major corruption cases.

Joe Biden had indeed pushed for Shokin’s dismissal, threatening that the U.S. would withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees if he remained.

“I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recounted in a 2018 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”

However, Biden was not alone in his disdain for Shokin. The former top prosecutor was dismissed by parliament after a chorus of criticism by European diplomats and international organizations, and even street protests calling for his resignation.

Local anti-corruption activists had become convinced Shokin was quashing investigations into Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, and other oligarchs, said Daria Kaleniuk, the director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, a Ukrainian transparency group.

“Shokin was not dismissed because he wanted to investigate Burisma,” Kaleniuk said. “Quite the contrary. He was dismissed because of a lack of willingness to investigate this particular case as well as other important cases involving high-level associates of [ousted former President Viktor] Yanukovych.”

As for Lutsenko, Kaleniuk said his claims were likely motivated by a desire to hold on to his job as top prosecutor with the incoming Zelensky administration, as well as to find friends in the United States government, where he has long been viewed as toxic.

“He wanted to become a person with whom people in the United States wanted to talk, and then probably he found Giuliani and found a sexy story that fit into the Giuliani agenda,” Kaleniuk said.

Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma, however, still raises eyebrows in Ukraine. The younger Biden’s paid tenure on Burisma’s board came at a time the company and its owner faced multiple corruption investigations. He was likely hired simply to impart his famous last name, Kaleniuk said.

“I think [working for Burisma] was wrong from an ethical point of view,” she said.

In a statement, Hunter Biden defended his previous position on Burisma’s board, saying he worked to help reform the company’s “practices of transparency, corporate governance and responsibility.”

“At no time have I discussed with my father the company’s business, or my board service. Any suggestion to the contrary is just plain wrong,” Biden said.

There is also no known documentary evidence that U.S. officials had worked with Ukrainians to release the black ledger.

Though Giuliani’s visit was canceled and many of his claims debunked, the allegations emerging from Ukraine remain very much alive in the lead-up to the 2020 U.S. election.

The accusation that Yovanovitch had exhibited political bias was reported to be behind her stepping down as ambassador in May.

Lutsenko and Shokin did not respond to requests for interviews. Reporters were unable to reach Yovanovitch.

From the Black Sea to Boca

The previous business dealings of both Parnas and Fruman raise serious concerns about their newfound access to senior American political figures.

A resident of upscale Boca Raton, Parnas once ran an electronics business that was successfully sued for its role in a fraudulent penny stock promotion scheme. He has also worked for three brokerages that later lost their licenses for fraud and other violations. He has never been personally charged.

Court records also show that judges have awarded a series of default judgements against Parnas for multiple unpaid debts. These include over $500,000 he owes to an investor in a Hollywood movie that he had promoted but was never made. He has also been sued a dozen times over the last decade for failing to pay rent on various Palm Beach County properties and has been evicted from two homes.

Fruman’s backstory is even more colorful.

The Ukrainian city of Odesa is a center of both tourism and organized crime. Credit: Aubrey Belford

His network of businesses extends from the United States to the city of Odesa, a Ukrainian Black Sea port notorious for corruption and organized crime.

Reporters found that Fruman has personal ties to a powerful local: Volodymyr “The Lightbulb” Galanternik, a shadowy businessman commonly referred to as the “Grey Cardinal” of Odesa.

Galanternik is described by local media and activists as a close associate of Gennadiy Trukhanov, the mayor of Odesa who was shown in the late 1990s to be a senior member of a feared organized criminal group involved in fuel smuggling and weapons trading.

Galanternik also owns a luxury apartment in the same London building as the daughter of another leader in the gang, Aleksander “The Angel” Angert, OCCRP has previously reported.

Vitaly Ustymenko, a local civic activist, describes Galanternik as an overseer of the clique’s economic domination of the city.

“[Galanternik] is not ‘one of the’ — he is actually the most powerful guy in Odesa, and maybe in the region,” Ustymenko said.

investigations/Galanternik-Fruman-Miami.jpg
New Year's 2016 in Florida. From left: Yelyzaveta Naumova, Natasha Zinko, Volodymyr Galanternik, Igor Fruman. Credit: Instagram
Fruman’s recent ex-wife, Yelyzaveta Naumova, is the self-declared best friend of Galanternik’s wife, Natasha Zinko, according to her Instagram posts. Galanternik and Zinko also celebrated the New Year in 2016 with the Frumans in South Florida, according to a photo posted online by an acquaintance of Fruman.

Galanternik’s name is seldom tied directly to his businesses. Instead he operates via a network of offshore companies and trusted proxy individuals. But there are signs that either Fruman or his long-standing local partner, Serhiy Dyablo, may have a business relationship with Galanternik via two Odesa firms (see box).

Fruman’s Odesa Ties

Ukrainian records show what appears to be overlap between the web of businesses belonging to Fruman and his partner Dyablo and Galanternik’s empire.

Companies linked to Fruman include a New York-registered business, F.D. Import & Export. In Ukraine, Fruman jointly established a series of companies with Dyablo. Largely grouped under the brand name Otrada, the companies include a hotel, apartment buildings, a series of luxury boutiques, and a beach club on Odesa’s shoreline called “Mafia Rave.” Fruman is listed on Otrada Luxury Group’s website as its president and CEO.Fruman, Dyablo, and F.D. Import & Export previously held controlling stakes in many of these companies, but local registry documents show those holdings are mostly now under the ownership of Fruman’s ex-wife Naumova, Dyablo’s wife Inna, and a 74-year-old woman, Lyudmila Kalmykova.

Kalmykova appears to be a proxy shareholder. A reporter who visited several of the Otrada businesses found that employees had never heard of her, instead identifying Dyablo as their boss. Her relationship with the other shareholders is unknown, although members of Dyablo’s family are among her relatively low number of Facebook friends.

On paper, Kalmykova is in business with two long-standing business partners of Galanternik.

The two Galanternik partners are co-owners, along with Kalmykova, of a warehousing company on the outskirts of Odesa. One of those partners is also a co-owner, along with Kalmykova and another person, of a property development company that is registered in the same Odesa building as several of Fruman and Dyablo’s companies. That company began winding up in early July.

Reporters were unable to reach Kalmykova for comment.

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In an interview, Parnas said that Fruman and Galanternik knew each other through their wives, but said there were no business connections between the two men.

Galanternik and Fruman did not respond to written questions. Neither Dyablo nor Naumova responded to multiple requests for interviews.

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Igor Fruman (in black) and Lev Parnas (in blue) meet at the Kyiv Hilton on May 17, 2019. Credit: Aubrey Belford
“Where is the money coming from?”

Parnas and Fruman’s work with Giuliani was just one part of a broader foray into U.S. politics.

In 2018, the men made hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to Republican causes while enjoying VIP access to party and Trump administration circles.

Filings with the U.S. Federal Election Commission (FEC) show that Fruman and Parnas spread their money widely.

Fruman kicked off the effort on Feb. 20, giving $2,700 each to two pro-Trump groups, Trump Victory and Donald J. Trump for President.

Less than two weeks later, Fruman and Parnas attended a fundraiser for Trump’s re-election at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.

This was followed by a several-month-long spree of donations — of a total value of at least $576,500 — to campaigns including the successful 2018 Senate bid of former Florida governor Rick Scott, and the re-elections of Texas Representative Pete Sessions and South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson. All are Republicans.

The lion’s share of these donations, however, was just one $325,000 payment, made on May 17, 2018, to America First Action. The group is one of the largest pro-Trump Super Political Action Committees (commonly known as Super PACs), a kind of outside campaign organization that is allowed to raise unlimited funds in support of a candidate, but is barred from working directly with their campaign.

That payment was declared as coming from a Delaware company, Global Energy Producers LLC, set up by Fruman and Parnas just weeks before as part of their plan to sell gas to Ukraine.

The donation is subject to an ongoing complaint to the FEC by the Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group, alleging the company is likely a shell intended to hide other donors.

Parnas said the complaint was unfounded. “We have a real business,” he said.

Parnas said the contributions were designed to get the attention of key lawmakers at a time he and Fruman were launching their gas export business. “We’ve got a business. We just want to get recognized,” he said.

However, Parnas and Fruman’s plans to sell American gas to Ukraine has so far not borne fruit. In response to inquiries, Naftogaz, Ukraine’s natural gas monopoly, said that Global Energy Producers has not participated in any tenders to sell gas to Ukraine and has concluded no contracts. The company’s website contains only a countdown timer that has already reached zero.

The donation ascribed to Global Energy Producers in fact came from the bank account of another company belonging to Parnas. Days earlier, that company had received a wire transfer of $1.26 million from the trust fund of a Florida lawyer who specializes in real estate, court records show.

Parnas said that money came from the sale of a Florida condominium, but did not provide documents to back up his claim.

Within months of Parnas and Fruman’s six-figure donations, and even as their work with Giuliani began, allegations emerged in a public lawsuit in Florida that they had jilted an early investor in their Ukraine gas venture.

Felix Vulis, the head of Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation, a firm owned by a trio of Kazakhstani oligarchs, asserted that Parnas and Fruman had failed to repay a two-month $100,000 loan he had given to Global Energy Producers earlier in the year. The two men had boasted about their relationship with Guiliani and other influential figures while asking for the loan, according to the complaint.

Vulis has yet to be paid, according to his lawyer, Robert Stok.

The men said “they had all this influence,” Stok said. “They said Trump and his associates were going to back their company. That they had direct access to the White House.”

Tony Andre, a Florida lawyer who has been trying to collect the $500,000 movie deal judgement against Parnas, also expressed astonishment at what he sees as the businessman’s brazenness.

“Someone takes a half million dollars from you and he’s hanging with the president and the president’s lawyer,” Andre said.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “Where is the money coming from?”

Dinner with the President

Amid their donation spree, Parnas and Fruman took part in an impressive series of meetings with senior Republicans.

On or about May 1, 2018, while staying at the Trump International Hotel in the U.S. capital, both men had dinner with the president in a meeting documented by Parnas in a now-deleted Facebook post.
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Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman’s 2018 dinner with President Trump. Credit: Deleted Facebook post
Later that month, the two men had a “power breakfast” in Beverly Hills with Donald Trump Jr. and Tommy Hicks Jr., who has since become co-chair of the Republican National Committee, according to a now-deleted Facebook post by Parnas. At the time, Hicks was head of America First Action, which had received the men’s $325,000 donation in the same month.

Parnas also had meetings in May on Capitol Hill with several Republican congressmen.

Among them was Sessions, the Texas Republican, according to a now-deleted May 9 Facebook post by Parnas. In a meeting also attended by Fruman, the two men urged the dismissal of the United States’ ambassador in Kyiv, Marie Yovanovitch.

On the same day that Parnas posted pictures of the meeting, Sessions wrote a private letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calling for Yovanovitch’s dismissal.

Parnas said he and Fruman told Sessions that Yovanovitch was disloyal to the president and questioned whether she should serve. “She was bad-mouthing our president about getting impeached,” said Parnas.
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Lev Parnas meeting with then-Texas Representative Pete Sessions in May 2018. Credit: Deleted Facebook post
Sessions, however, said he had been the one to bring up concerns about Yovanovitch with Parnas and Fruman, but that he could not remember when or where the discussion took place.

“I do know both these gentlemen,” Sessions said. “They are Republicans. They are people who have an interest in foreign affairs. They have a strong interest in America not backing away from Ukraine.”

The next month, Parnas and Fruman donated a total of $5,400 to Sessions’ unsuccessful 2018 re-election campaign, FEC records show.

Yovanovitch stepped down this May following a flurry of negative stories about her in the conservative media, which included the publication in The Hill of a leaked copy of Sessions’ letter. The press blitz also included frequent reference to Lutsenko’s inflammatory allegations against the ambassador.

The Yovanovitch Fallout

Ambassador Yovanovitch’s departure from Kyiv was politically charged.

According to the State Department, her rotation in Ukraine had simply ended. But Congressional Democrats and veterans of the diplomatic corps have said she had become a partisan target who was pulled from her job two months early.

The affair hurt the United States’ relationship with Ukraine, said Nina Jankowicz, a Global Fellow at the Kennan Institute.

"[Yovanovitch’s retirement] was a clear indication Trump was using Ukraine as a political football and that he wasn’t concerned about its democratic future,” Jankowicz said.

“To take the word of a corrupt foreign prosecutor general over a career diplomat — one who has served both Republicans and Democrats — is an affront to the Foreign Service and undermines the credibility of our diplomats everywhere.”

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Given Parnas and Fruman’s relationships with senior Ukrainian officials and their business interests in the country, their lobbying against a U.S. ambassador raises questions about their compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

The act requires Americans operating on behalf of a foreign entity in the United States to declare their work to the Department of Justice. Parnas and Fruman did not do so.

Their lobbying of Sessions raises “the thorniest red flag,” said Ron Oleynik, a Washington attorney who advises clients on FARA compliance. “That, to me, is clearly trying to influence an office of the United States toward Ukraine.”

Parnas, however, said they acted on their own accord.

“I just kept hearing [about Yovanovitch] from different people,” he said.

Introduction to an Oligarch

After setting up meetings between Giuliani and Ukrainian prosecutors, Parnas and Fruman set their sights on connecting with Ukraine’s new president, former television comic Zelensky.

As Zelensky stormed to a landslide victory in the April election, Parnas and Fruman flew to Israel to meet Ihor Kolomoisky, a Ukrainian oligarch who is alleged to have stolen $5.5 billion from the country’s largest private bank. Earlier that month, the Daily Beast reported that Kolomoisky, who is a key Zelensky backer, was under FBI investigation for financial crimes.
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Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. Credit: Valentyn Ogirenko, Reuters
Fruman and Parnas were introduced to the oligarch by Alexander Levin, another pro-Trump Ukrainian-American businessman, on the pretence that they wanted to talk about their plan to sell gas to Ukraine, Kolomoisky said in an interview.

However, once inside the meeting, the two men told Kolomoisky that they wanted his help getting in touch with Zelensky, in order to help set up a meeting between Giuliani and the president-elect.

Offended, Kolomoisky said, he then stormed out of the meeting.

“I told them I am not going to be a middleman in anybody’s meetings with Zelensky,” Kolomoisky said. “Not for them, not for anybody else. They tried to say something like, ‘Hey, we are serious people here. Giuliani. Trump.’ They started throwing names at me.”

In response to inquiries, Levin said of Parnas and Fruman: “I met these gentlemen for the first time in March of 2019. I have no information about what they have done in the past, or what they have done since they met with me. I plan no involvement with them in the future.”

“I broke no laws and any suggestion otherwise constitutes slander.”

Despite the debacle in Israel, Parnas and Fruman continued their efforts to connect Giuliani with Zelensky. By mid-May, in the lead-up to Zelensky’s inauguration, both men were in Kyiv, staying in the city’s Hilton as they set up appointments around town.

The official reason for Giuliani’s visit was to give a paid speech for American Friends of Anatevka, a New York-based charity run by Fruman that supports the reconstruction of a Jewish village outside of Kyiv that was the setting of the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” The meeting with Zelensky was intended to take place on the sidelines of the event.

Though Giuliani cancelled his trip, Parnas and Fruman managed to hold meetings with two figures close to Zelensky: Serhiy Shefir, who has since been appointed as an aide to the president, and Ivan Bakanov, now acting head of Ukraine’s secret police. The meetings failed to lead to a meeting between Giuliani and Zelensky.

The two men also held a meeting with Ukraine’s national gas monopoly, Naftogaz, in order to pitch their plan to sell liquified natural gas (LNG) to the country, company spokeswoman Aliona Osmolovska confirmed in response to reporters’ questions.

“Among other initiatives, we had meetings with a number of potential suppliers of LNG. In this context, we have been approached by Mr. Parnas and Mr. Furman [sic], and met them,” Osmolovska wrote.

While Parnas and Fruman were in Kyiv, Kolomoisky, who had just returned from years of exile abroad, gave an impromptu interview to a local media outlet where he denounced the men as “scammers” and said he would take them “into daylight soon.”

Giuliani responded quickly. In a series of tweets, he labeled Kolomoisky a “notorious oligarch.”

“This is real test for President [Zelensky],” Giuliani tweeted. “Will [Kolomoisky] be arrested?”

Parnas and Fruman responded by filing a criminal complaint with Ukrainian police, alleging that Kolomoisky had threatened their lives. They also lodged a defamation suit against the oligarch, their lawyer Alina Samarets said.

Giuliani personally joined at least one call to discuss the case, Samarets said.

Despite these setbacks, Parnas told reporters that his and Fruman’s work in Ukraine would continue.

“It’s all going to come out.”
https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations ... in-ukraine
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: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Sep 20, 2019 10:02 pm

.

Since as described it's an open-and-shut violation by Trump,* with the evidence recorded, and since of course it is likely that Hunter Biden was engaged in corrupt dealings (like everyone else involved in the Ukraine mess), I like this one on the hope of destroying the president and the current head of the "opposition" party, clearing the way for a new politics in this country. But I also had the same hope for Mena, 9/11 and the WMD lie (since both ops had post-facto legitimation by establishment Democrats), and most recently, of course, Epstein.

* However routine such machinations may be; caught is caught, stupid is stupid.

.
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: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Sep 20, 2019 11:06 pm

trump sent Pence in his place to Poland a few weeks ago where he talked to Zelensky Botlon sat silent in the room :)

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?
Image
https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw
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: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby BenDhyan » Sat Sep 21, 2019 1:09 am

More to the whistleblower story..

Missing piece to the Ukraine puzzle: State Department's overture to Rudy Giuliani

By John Solomon, opinion contributor — 09/20/19

When I was a young journalist decades ago, training to cover Washington, one of my mentors offered sage advice: When it comes to U.S. intelligence and diplomacy, things often aren’t what they first seem.

Those words echo in my brain today, as much as they did that first day. And following the news recently, I realize they are just as relevant today with hysteria regarding presidential lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s contacts with Ukraine’s government.

The coverage suggests Giuliani reached out to new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s team this summer solely because he wanted to get dirt on possible Trump 2020 challenger Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s business dealings in that country.

Politics or law could have been part of Giuliani’s motive, and neither would be illegal.

But there is a missing part of the story that the American public needs in order to assess what really happened: Giuliani’s contact with Zelensky adviser and attorney Andrei Yermak this summer was encouraged and facilitated by the U.S. State Department.

Giuliani didn’t initiate it. A senior U.S. diplomat contacted him in July and asked for permission to connect Yermak with him.

Then, Giuliani met in early August with Yermak on neutral ground — in Spain — before reporting back to State everything that occurred at the meeting.

That debriefing occurred Aug. 11 by phone with two senior U.S. diplomats, one with responsibility for Ukraine and the other with responsibility for the European Union, according to electronic communications records I reviewed and interviews I conducted.

When asked on Friday, Giuliani confirmed to me that the State Department asked him to take the Yermak meeting and that he did, in fact, apprise U.S. officials every step of the way.

“I didn’t even know who he (Yermak) really was, but they vouched for him. They actually urged me to talk to him because they said he seemed like an honest broker,” Giuliani told me. “I reported back to them (the two State officials) what my conversations with Yermak were about. All of this was done at the request of the State Department.”

So, rather than just a political opposition research operation, Giuliani’s contacts were part of a diplomatic effort by the State Department to grow trust with the new Ukrainian president, Zelensky, a former television comic making his first foray into politics and diplomacy.

Why would Ukraine want to talk to Giuliani, and why would the State Department be involved in facilitating it?

According to interviews with more than a dozen Ukrainian and U.S. officials, Ukraine’s government under recently departed President Petro Poroshenko and, now, Zelensky has been trying since summer 2018 to hand over evidence about the conduct of Americans they believe might be involved in violations of U.S. law during the Obama years.

The Ukrainians say their efforts to get their allegations to U.S. authorities were thwarted first by the U.S. embassy in Kiev, which failed to issue timely visas allowing them to visit America.

Then the Ukrainians hired a former U.S. attorney — not Giuliani — to hand-deliver the evidence of wrongdoing to the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York, but the federal prosecutors never responded.

The U.S. attorney, a respected American, confirmed the Ukrainians’ story to me. The allegations that Ukrainian officials wanted to pass on involved both efforts by the Democratic National Committee to pressure Ukraine to meddle in the 2016 U.S. election as well as Joe Biden’s son’s effort to make money in Ukraine while the former vice president managed U.S.-Ukraine relations, the retired U.S. attorney told me.

Eventually, Giuliani in November 2018 got wind of the Ukrainian allegations and started to investigate.

As President Trump’s highest-profile defense attorney, the former New York City mayor, often known simply as “Rudy,” believed the Ukrainian’s evidence could assist in his defense against the Russia collusion investigation and special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report.

So Giuliani began to check things out in late 2018 and early 2019, but he never set foot in Ukraine. And when Ukrainian officials leaked word that he was considering visiting Ukraine to meet with senior officials to discuss the allegations — and it got politicized in America — Giuliani abruptly called off his trip. He stopped talking to the Ukrainian officials.

Since that time, my American and foreign sources tell me, Ukrainian officials worried that the slight of Giuliani might hurt their relations with his most famous client, Trump.

And Trump himself added to the dynamic by encouraging Ukraine’s leaders to work with Giuliani to surface the evidence of alleged wrongdoing that has been floating around for more than two years, my sources said.

It is likely that the State Department’s overture to Giuliani in July was designed to allay fears of a diplomatic slight and to assure the nascent Ukrainian administration that everything would be okay between the two allies.

The belief was that if Zelensky’s top lawyer could talk to Trump’s top lawyer, everything could be patched up, officials explained to me.

Ukrainian officials also are discussing privately the possibility of creating a parliamentary committee to assemble the evidence and formally send it to the U.S. Congress, after failed attempts to get the Department of Justice’s attention, my sources say.

Such machinations are common when two countries are navigating diplomatic challenges and, often, extracurricular activities with private citizens are part of the strategy, even if they are not apparent to the American public.

So the media stories of Giuliani’s alleged political opposition research in Ukraine, it turns out, are a bit different than first reported. It’s exactly the sort of nuanced, complex news development that my mentor nearly 30 years ago warned about.

And it’s too bad a shallow media effort has failed to capture the whole story and tell it to the American public in its entirety.

It’s almost as though the lessons of the now debunked Russia-Trump collusion narrative never really sunk in for some reporters. And that is a loss for the American public. The continuing folly was evidenced when much attention was given Friday to Hillary Clinton’s tweet suggesting Trump’s contact with Zelensky amounted to an effort to solicit a foreign power to interfere in the next election.

That tweet may be provocative but it’s unfair. The contacts were about resolving what happened in the last election — and the last administration.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/462422-missing-piece-to-the-ukraine-puzzle-state-departments-overture-to-rudy

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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Sep 21, 2019 9:34 am

this is an international crime family disguised as a government and it must be stopped

THIS IS NOT POLITICS

we can't have a unitary executive (Bill Barr you picked the wrong guy for this one ) run by an international crime family

I hope no one is forgetting Goolinani and 9/11 and now trump is sending troops to Saudi Arabia

Goolinani is no fucking hero, he is a fucking piece of shit


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.

Share this image!!
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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


Josh Dawsey

Ukrainians were upset they couldn’t get POTUS meeting & lost hundreds of millions in foreign aid. POTUS & Rudy delivered a message: Probe Biden and matters that help us. Aid and meetings have returned. Giuliani says Ukraine has promised to look into it.
https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson?ref_s ... r%5Eauthor



AND he was trying to get Manafort out of jail

1/ Worth noting that Giuliani emissary to Ukraine is none other than Semyon Kislin, a contributor to Giuliani's mayoral campaign in the 90s.
Ex-advisor of Rudy Giuliani comes to Ukraine due to investigation against Poroshenko
In 2018, Sam Kislin was banned from entry to Ukraine due to the “necessity to protect the economic interests” of the country
https://112.international/politics/ex-a ... 42637.html

Craig Unger


2/As I reported in #HouseofTrump, FBI files asserted that Kislin was tied to the infamous Russian mobster Vyachslav Ivankov. Trump's ties to Kislin dated back to the late 70s when he bought 100s of TVs from him for the Grand Hyatt. https://twitter.com/craigunger/status/1 ... 4550452225

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3/ Kislin's alleged ties to Russian Mafia notwithstanding, Trump got him to assist in issuing mortgages for condos in Trump World Tower

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4/Kislin partner Tamir Sapir played a key role in bailing out Trump by partnering w Bayrock and helping fund the ill-fated Trump SoHo. Meanwhile, Kislin was a significant contributor to Giuliani who appted him to NYC's Economic Dev't Corp.
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https://twitter.com/craigunger


trump is owned by an international mob family

Sam Kislin started with an electronics store in Manhattan, a favorite place for Soviet diplomats, KGB agents and members of the Politburo. In 1976, Kislin and another emigrant from the USSR, Tamir Sapir, managed to sell 200 TV sets to Trump Commodore Hotel on credit for 30 days.
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A colleague of Mogilevich, Dietmar Claudot: "Felix Sater from Bayrock counted Seva Mogilevich, Mikhas and Japonka to his friends. It is possible that it was Sater who helped organize the very meeting of Trump representatives with Mikhais and Mogilevich in the hotel "Ukraine""
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viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40179&p=655124&hilit=Sam+Kislin#p655124

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just like he promised payback for helping him win the presidency

let 's not forget Manafort is a scumbag also

fun times

this is Kellyann's husband talking

So it appears that the president might have used his official powers — in particular, perhaps the threat of withholding a quarter-billion dollars in military aid — to leverage a foreign government into helping him defeat a potential political opponent in the United States.

If Trump did that, it would be the ultimate impeachable act.


Trump has done plenty to warrant impeachment. But the Ukraine allegations are over the top.


By George T. Conway III and
Neal Katyal
September 20 at 7:56 PM
George T. Conway III is a lawyer in New York. Neal Katyal, a law professor at Georgetown University, previously served as the acting solicitor general of the United States.

Among the most delicate choices the framers made in drafting the Constitution was how to deal with a president who puts himself above the law. To address that problem, they chose the mechanism of impeachment and removal from office. And they provided that this remedy could be used when a president commits “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

That last phrase — “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” — was a historical term of art, derived from impeachments in the British Parliament. When the framers put it into the Constitution, they didn’t discuss it much, because no doubt they knew what it meant. It meant, as Alexander Hamilton later phrased it, “the abuse or violation of some public trust.”

Simply put, the framers viewed the president as a fiduciary, the government of the United States as a sacred trust and the people of the United States as the beneficiaries of that trust. Through the Constitution, the framers imposed upon the president the duty and obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” and made him swear an oath that he would fulfill that duty of faithful execution. They believed that a president would break his oath if he engaged in self-dealing — if he used his powers to put his own interests above the nation’s. That would be the paradigmatic case for impeachment.

That’s exactly what appears to be at issue today. A whistleblower in U.S. intelligence lodged a complaint with the intelligence community’s inspector general so alarming that he labeled it of “urgent concern” and alerted the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Though the details remain secret, apparently this much can be gleaned: The complaint is against the president. It concerns a “promise” that the president made, in at least one phone call, with a foreign leader. And it involves Ukraine and possible interference with the next presidential election. The complaint is being brazenly suppressed by the Justice Department — in defiance of a whistleblower law that says, without exception, the complaint “shall” be turned over to Congress.

We also know this: As he admitted Thursday night on CNN, the president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, has been trying to persuade the Ukrainian government to investigate, among other things, one of Trump’s potential Democratic opponents, former vice president Joe Biden, and Biden’s son Hunter about the latter’s involvement with a Ukrainian gas company.

Trump held up the delivery of $250 million in military assistance to Ukraine, which is under constant threat from neighboring Russia. He had a phone conversation on July 25 with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian government, the call included a discussion of Ukraine’s need to “complete investigation of corruption cases, which inhibited the interaction between Ukraine and the USA.”


So it appears that the president might have used his official powers — in particular, perhaps the threat of withholding a quarter-billion dollars in military aid — to leverage a foreign government into helping him defeat a potential political opponent in the United States.

If Trump did that, it would be the ultimate impeachable act. Trump has already done more than enough to warrant impeachment and removal with his relentless attempts, on multiple fronts, to sabotage the counterintelligence and criminal investigation by then-special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and to conceal evidence of those attempts. The president’s efforts were impeachable because, in committing those obstructive acts, he put his personal interests above the nation’s: He tried to stop an investigation into whether a hostile foreign power, Russia, tried to interfere with our democracy — simply because he seemed to find it personally embarrassing. Trump breached his duty of faithful execution to the nation not only because he likely broke the law but also because, through his disregard for the law, he put his self-interest first.

The current whistleblowing allegations, however, are even worse. Unlike the allegations of conspiracy with Russia before the 2016 election, these concern Trump’s actions as president, not as a private citizen, and his exercise of presidential powers over foreign policy with Ukraine. Moreover, with Russia, at least there was an attempt to get the facts through the Mueller investigation; here the White House is trying to shut down the entire inquiry from the start — depriving not just the American people, but even congressional intelligence committees, of necessary information.


It is high time for Congress to do its duty, in the manner the framers intended. Given how Trump seems ever bent on putting himself above the law, something like what might have happened between him and Ukraine — abusing presidential authority for personal benefit — was almost inevitable. Yet if that is what occurred, part of the responsibility lies with Congress, which has failed to act on the blatant obstruction that Mueller detailed months ago.

Congressional procrastination has probably emboldened Trump, and it risks emboldening future presidents who might turn out to be of his sorry ilk. To borrow John Dean’s haunting Watergate-era metaphor once again, there is a cancer on the presidency, and cancers, if not removed, only grow. Congress bears the duty to use the tools provided by the Constitution to remove that cancer now, before it’s too late. As Elbridge Gerry put it at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, “A good magistrate will not fear [impeachments]. A bad one ought to be kept in fear of them.” By now, Congress should know which one Trump is.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... story.html
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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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