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This broadcast was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: In the wake of the high-profile conviction of former Trump campaign aide Paul Manafort, we present information which greatly fleshes out his dealings with the Ukrainian government of Viktor Yanukovich and the “Hapsburg Group” of European politicians that were working to tease Ukraine from the Russian sphere of influence into the Western orbit.
For purposes of this program, we have nicknamed Manafort “Edwin Manafort,” citing him in the context of the operations of Edwin Wilson, whose exploits we analyzed at length in AFA #4.
Far from being the “rogue” criminal he was reported as being, Wilson was actually operating on behalf of elements of the CIA in his terrorist support operations. Shortly before Wilson’s death, a judge supported that conclusion and Wilson was eventually released from prison.
Far from being a “Russian agent,” Paul Manafort is a U.S. spook who was working with a group of European politicians known as the Hapsburg Group, as discussed in FTR #1008.
A story from BNE Intellinews, since taken down but available via the Way Back Machine, details Manafort’s networking with the Hapsburg Group milieu, providing more details that supplement previous discussion of the relationship.
Most importantly, however, the article provides important information on Manafort’s post-Maidan doings in Ukraine! He spent more time in post-Maidan Ukraine than before the coup.
Even more importantly, the article provides significant details on Manafort’s possible collaborators in arranging the violence that led to Yanukovych’s ouster.
Before discussing the significant details of Manafort and his associates’ possible roles in the violence that led to Yanukovych’s ouster, we present the first part of the article, in order to flesh out the Manafort-Hapsburg networking.
Key points of information include:
- Manafort’s close relationship with Serhiy Lovochkin, a key aide to Viktor Yanukovich and owner of a premier Ukrainian TV station, and his sister Yulia Lovochkina, who owns an airline whose planes ferried Manafort in his dealings with the Hapsburg group.
- The important role of Serhiy Lovochkin and his sister in promoting the EU Association Agreement. It was Yanukovich’s eventual rejection of that agreement that led to the demonstrations that led up to the Maidan coup.
- The dual role played by Hapsburg Group member Alexander Krasniewski, who was ran the EU’s Ukraine Observation Group.
- The profound degree of involvement of Manafort with the Hapsburg Group.
Of paramount significance for our purposes, is the behavior of Manafort, Lovochkin, Lovochkina, Dmytro Firtash and Victoria Nuland.
Noting the profound relationship between Manafort, Serhii Lovochkin, Yulia Lovochkina, the Hapsburg Group and the EU, it is important to evaluate the Manafort/Lovochkin relationship in the context of the Maidan snipers. (In FTR #‘s 982, 993, we noted evidence that the Maidan shootings may have been a provocation. This information will be reviewed in our next program.)
- ” . . . . The private jet flights and personal connections show that Manafort’s partner in this lobbying effort was Yanukovych’s chief of staff Lovochkin. . . . Manafort’s Ukraine engagements actually increased following Yanukovych’s ouster in February 2014. In March to June 2014, he spent a total of 27 days in Ukraine, whereas during the four preceding Euromaidan months, November-February 2014, Manafort only visited Ukraine three times for a total of nine days. . . .”
- ” . . . . Lovochkin is the junior partner of billionaire oligarch Dmytro Firtash . . . . Lovochkin and Firtash together also control Ukraine’s largest TV channel, Inter. . . .”
- ” . . . . Manafort’s continued participation in post-Yanukovych Ukraine also points to his ties to Lovochkin and Firtash. While most members of the Yanukovych administration fled to Russia or were arrested after February 2014, Lovochkin has continued his political career with impunity, despite having served at the heart of Yanukovych’s regime for four years. . . .”
- ” . . . . Euromaidan was triggered by events in Kyiv on the night of November 29, when police violently dispersed a small demonstration of pro-EU students who were protesting after Yanukovych refused to sign the Association Agreement. The violence prompted a huge demonstration occupying the heart of Kyiv on December 1. . . .”
- ” . . . . According to messages between the sisters discussing Manafort’s actions in Ukraine, it was Manafort’s idea ‘to send those people out and get them slaughtered. Do you know whose strategy that was to cause that Revolts [sic] and what not […] As a tactic to outrage the world and get focus on Ukraine.’ Manafort’s daughter called her father’s money ‘blood money.’ . . .”
- ” . . . . The remarks were made by those privy to the deepest secrets of Manafort’s personal life. They evoke the suspicion that Manafort manipulated the Maidan protests and the police violence to influence international opinion. The appearance of the Manafort messages in 2016 reignited speculation in Ukraine that none other than Lovochkin instigated the attack on the students’ demonstration on November 29, 2013, to trigger outrage against Yanukovych. . . .”
- ” . . . . Some of the timeline fits this interpretation: On the day before the police attack, reporters noted Yulia Lovochkina openly fraternising with the students on the Maidan. Lovochkin’s TV crews covered the 4am events closely, and Lovochkin immediately tendered his resignation in protest at the police violence. . . .”
- ” . . . . The next day, Lovochkin’s TV channel played footage of the worst of the police violence on heavy rotation on prime time news. News anchors intoned that Yanukovych had ‘shed the blood of Ukrainian children.’ Whereas the student protests had attracted hundreds, protests on Sunday December 1 against the police violence attracted hundreds of thousands. This was the start of Euromaidan. . . .”
- Of great significance as well, is the maneuvering around a warrant for the arrest of Ukrainian oligarch and Lovochkin partner Dmytro Firtash. The role of Victoria Nuland in this maneuvering is particularly significant: ” . . . . On October 30 2013 — as Yanukovych was wavering over the Association Agreement with the EU — the US issued an arrest warrant for Firtash. The US withdrew the arrest warrant four days later — after US deputy secretary of state Victoria Nuland met Yanukovych in Kyiv, and received assurances that Yanukovych would sign the Association Agreement, Firtash said during extradition hearings in Vienna in 2015 that first revealed the details of the case. But come the Vilnius Summit, Yanukovych failed to sign. The arrest warrant was reissued in March 2014, and Firtash was arrested in Vienna on March 12, 2014. . . . .”
We also review (in the description only) the relationship between members of the Hapsburg family and European integration, the Cold War against the Soviet Union, contemporary Ukraine and the OUN/B.
1a. Beginning the description, we review links of members of the Hapsburg dynasty to the events around Manafort’s dealings with Ukraine, for the benefit of readers.
In FTR #1009, we set forth the collaboration between the U.S. national security establishment and the Hapsburgs, a relationship dating to the immediate post World War I period and cemented in the context of anti-Communism/anti-Soviet activism. Note that Prince Egon Von Hohenloe–who married into the Hapsburg family–was the key go-between in negotiations between U.S. intelligence, Allen Dulles in particular and Walter Schellenberg of SS intelligence.
- Members of the Habsburg dynasty have been involved in the context in which “Edwin” Manafort and the Habsburg Group were operating, in order to ease Ukraine into the Western, rather than the Russian orbit. ” . . . .The most striking example of the trend is the appointment this week of Georg von Habsburg, the 32-year-old-grandson of Emperor Karl I, to the position of Hungary’s ambassador for European Integration. In neighbouring Austria, the traditional heart of Habsburg power, Georg’s brother, Karl, 35, was recently elected to represent the country in the European parliament. In addition to this, he serves as the president of the Austrian branch of the Pan-European movement. . . . .”
- Jumping forward some 14 years from our previous article, we see that a Habsburg princess was anointed as Georgia’s ambassador to Germany. Note that [now former] Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili endorsed her. Saakashvili became, for a time, the governor of the Ukrainian province of Odessa! Note, also, the role of the Habsburgs in the final phase of the Cold War: “. . . . The heirs to the Habsburg emperors helped speed the downfall of the Soviet empire, particularly by arranging the cross-border exodus from Hungary to Austria in the summer of 1989 that punched the first big hole in the iron curtain. . . .”
- Karl von Habsburg has been active in Ukraine for some years before establishing a radio station. Karl von Habsburg is the head of the UNPO. Note the Ukrainian orientation and influence of Wilhelm von Habsburg, in World War I through the World War II eras, as well as his anti-Soviet activism: ” . . . . A military officer by training, Wilhelm supported Ukraine’s independence struggle during World War I. He fought with Ukrainian troops against the Russians, and had schemed and cajoled a myriad of politicians to support his monarchial aspirations. Almost until his death at the hands of the Soviets in 1948 – he was snatched off the streets of Vienna and transported to a prison in Kyiv for working as an agent against the Soviet Union – Wilhelm believed this slice of the family’s empire could be his. . . .”
- Fast-forwarding again some five years from our previous two articles and one year after the EuroMaidan coup we see that actions speak louder than words, and Karl’s new Ukrainian radio station says a lot: “Since 20 January, a truly European radio station [Note this–D.E.] is broadcasting in Ukraine, its main sponsor, Karl-Habsburg Lothringen, told EurActiv in an exclusive interview . . . . Karl Habsburg-Lothringen is an Austrian politician and head of the House of Habsburg. Since 1986, he has served as President of the Austrian branch of the Paneuropean Union. . . .”
- As we noted, “Plan B” for Ukraine might be termed “Plan OUN/B.” Otto von Habsburg formed the European Freedom Council with Jaroslav Stetzko, the wartime head of the Ukrainian Nazi collaborationist government that implemented Third Reich ethnic cleansing programs in Ukraine. The EFC was closely aligned with the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, headed by Stetzko. The ABN, as we have seen in the past, is a re-naming of the Committee of Subjugated Nations, a consortium of Eastern European fascist groups formed by Hitler in 1943.”. . . . The Hapsburg monarchy helped guide the leadership in their former possessions. The Freedom Council was formed by Otto von Hapsburg and Jaroslav Stetzko at a conference in Munich on June 30-July 2 1967, as a coordinating body for organizations fighting communism in Europe. EMP H.R.H. Otto von Hapsburg was honorary chairman of the European Freedom Council, based in Munich, during the 1980s and allied to the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN). . . .”
1b. Most importantly, however, the BNE Intellinews article provides important information on Manafort’s post-Maidan doings in Ukraine! He spent more time in post-Maidan Ukraine than before the coup.
Even more importantly, the article provides significant details on Manafort’s possible collaborators in arranging the violence that led to Yanukovych’s ouster.
Before discussing the significant details of Manafort and his associates’ possible roles in the violence that led to Yanukovych’s ouster, we present the first part of the article, in order to flesh out the Manafort-Hapsburg networking.
Key points of information include:
- Manafort’s close relationship with Serhiy Lovochkin, a key aide to Viktor Yanukovich and owner of a premier Ukrainian TV station, and his sister Yulia Lovochkina, who owns an airline whose planes ferried Manafort in his dealings with the Hapsburg group.
- The important role of Serhiy Lovochkin and his sister in promoting the EU Association Agreement. It was Yanukovich’s eventual rejection of that agreement that led to the demonstrations that led up to the Maidan coup.
- The dual role played by Hapsburg Group member Alexander Krasniewski, who was ran the EU’s Ukraine Observation Group.
- The profound degree of involvement of Manafort with the Hapsburg Group.
Infamous US lobbyist Paul Manafort organised EU luminaries to plead with Brussels to sign off on an Association Agreement with Ukraine without the freeing of jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko in 2012–2013, his flight records, revealed by bne IntelliNews for the first time, show.Manafort organised the lobbying campaign on the orders of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted by mass demonstrations in Kyiv when he eventually failed to sign the deal.
The information backs up allegations made by US special consul Robert Mueller that, as part of the campaign to do an Association Agreement deal, Manafort retained EU “super VIPs” to lobby for Yanukovych.
The flight records also reveal Manafort remained a player in Ukraine after the Maidan revolution until as late as 2015 – only months before he signed up as US presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign manager.
And Manafort’s relationship to a top Yanukovych aide, who turned against his master during the Euromaidan movement, raises questions about the spin doctor’s role in Ukraine’s 2013–14 revolution.
VIP trips
The story starts with a key meeting in Rome in 2013. Flanked by EU elder statesmen, all former heads of their respective states, Yulia Lovochkina, a Ukrainian MP, addressed a select gathering in Rome on the topic of Ukraine’s goal of signing an Association Agreement with the EU.
“Ukraine has made its irrevocable choice and is committed to being a part of Europe, part of the European Union,” she said, referring to plans to sign an Association Agreement with the EU at a summit in Vilnius slated for November 2013. “The president of Ukraine reiterated that he is ready to implement all the necessary measures,” she added.
The date of the Rome meeting was March 6, 2013, and the speaker Yulia Lovochkina was none other the sister of Serhii Lovochkin, Yanukovych’s powerful chief of staff. Despite the assurances of commitment to the EU, less than a year later, Yanukovych’s security forces would massacre 100 pro-EU protestors in the heart of Kyiv. Three days later he fled Ukraine for Russia.
Tymoshenko, leader of Ukraine’s opposition at the time, was languishing in prison. She had lost to Yanukovych in the presidential elections of 2010 – and Yanukovych promptly jailed her in 2011. The international community were outraged, calling her jailing politically motivated and linking her release to the passage of the Association Agreement deal.
All the speakers at the Rome meeting were united by a desire to do the Association Agreement deal, but the undercurrent to their speeches was an insistence that the signing of the agreement and Tymoshenko’s fate were two separate issues, which was in stark contrast to Brussels’ initial line.
In her speech, Lovochkina was explicit: the Association Agreement should be signed independently from Tymoshenko’s case. “It [signing the Association Agreement] cannot be held hostage by a single criminal case […] by the future of Yulia Tymoshenko because it is an issue concerning the future of Ukraine,” she said.
As a representative of the Yanukovych administration, Lovochkina’s line was predictable. But more surprisingly was the support she got from the eminent European VIPs who backed her up. Using a variety of euphemisms, they pushed essentially the same argument: that the issue of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement, and the issue of Tymoshenko’s imprisonment, should be kept separate from each other.
“The question of the destiny of Ukraine and its European future cannot depend on one single case,” Alfred Gusenbauer, former chancellor of Austria, said. “In the case of Tymoshenko it is necessary to look for solutions without making a complicated situation more complicated,” said Alexander Kwasniewski, former president of Poland, who was also the senior partner in the European Parliament’s “monitoring mission” to Ukraine that had been tasked with resolving the impasse caused by Tymoshenko’s imprisonment.
Concluding the conference, Roman Prodi, former prime minister of Italy and president of the European Commission, argued that the European Parliament monitoring mission to Ukraine — run by Kwasniewski — should examine the Tymoshenko case as “the correct framework for a European Union that helps promotes rights, but at the same time does not close off a relationship which is valuable for Ukraine and Europe.”
As the audience applauded the awkward grouping on the podium, one man in the audience may have been particularly happy: US spin doctor Paul Manafort, who had flown to Rome that day with Lovochkina in one of the Lovochkin family’s private jets. Manafort had assembled the speakers sitting in front of him on the podium, and was pulling the strings at the meeting.
Jailing Yulia Tymoshenko
A few months earlier Western leaders and EU officials had made Ukraine’s signing of an Association Agreement conditional on the release of Tymoshenko.
…
Manafort was Yanukovych’s ace in the campaign to win over the west.
In part as a result of Manafort’s lobbying efforts, by November 2013 the EU had agreed to sign the Association Agreement with Ukraine in Vilnius, without having secured Tymoshenko’s release. Instead she was to be allowed to leave Ukraine for medical treatment, exiling her from Ukraine.
This was Manafort’s hour of triumph. But Russian fury at the thought of Ukraine slipping from its grasp meant that it was short-lived. On November 21, 2013, Ukraine’s government announced it would not sign the Association Agreement with the EU on November 28.
The Hapsburg PR
…
On February 28, US Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted Manafort for illegal lobbying. The details of the indictment point to Manafort pulling the strings at the March 6 Rome conference.
Mueller’s indictment states that Manafort “secretly retained a group for former senior European politicians to take positions favourable to Ukraine. The plan was for the former politicians, informally called the “Hapsburg Group,” to appear to be providing an independent assessment of the government of Ukraine actions, when in fact they were paid lobbyists for Ukraine.”
According to the indictment Manafort paid over €2mn to the “super VIPs” from offshore accounts in 2012 and 2013.
While the politicians were unnamed, the indictment specifies a European “chancellor” as heading the group. An initially unredacted document filed on June 13 identified former Austrian chancellor Gusenbauer by name as part of the Hapsburg group.
The document was a memorandum to Manafort authored in June 2012 by Italian-based US journalist Alan Friedman — the man who chaired the March 2013 conference in Rome.
In the memo, Friedman suggested recruiting Kwasniewski to the group. But he noted that Kwasniewski would have a conflict of interests because Kwasniewski was the leading figure in the European Parliament’s monitoring mission to Ukraine.
The monitoring mission was tasked with judging whether Ukraine was fit to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union. A leader of the monitoring to mission could hardly also publicly lobby in favour of Ukraine.
Friedman then suggested to Manafort that Kwasniewski appear at conferences together with Gusenbauer, with conferences planned for Berlin, Rome and Brussels. Those recruited for the group would “take direction from us informally and via Alfred [Gusenbauer].”
“I participated in several international conferences as a speaker and for this reason, like other participants, I have received a honorarium,” Kwasniewski acknowledges. “I have not received any financial gratification from the [Manafort-linked lobbyists] Centre for Modern Ukraine or Mercury, I have never received any suggestions for my contributions from Mr. Manafort, Mr. Friedman or anyone else. In all my political activities I have presented my own opinions,” Kwasniewski added.
In Kwasniewski’s ghost-written account of his activities in Ukraine 2012–2014, he describes having had a “double-hatted role … as Ukraine’s ambassador in Europe and the United States and as ambassador of the transatlantic community in Ukraine.”
“It [the monitoring mission] always kept an eye on its independence and impartiality […] not allowing any side to use the mission for its own purposes […] it is our belief that this independence and impartiality was fully achieved,” European Parliament press officer Sanne De Ryck said.
”Alexander Kwasniewski had a double role, working for Ukrainian oligarchs and the EU […] This creates conflicts of interest, which is indeed problematic,” Stefan Meister, expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations told bne IntelliNews.
Flight-tracking Manafort
bne IntelliNews obtained flight data for Manafort’s Ukraine visits for those years. His flight data made it possible to track his lobbying activities in 2012–2015, in the run-up to the Euromaidan revolution of February 2014 and its aftermath.
The flight data points to intensive Manafort supervision of the “Hapsburg Group” members such as Gusenbauer, Kwasniewski, and Prodi. Manafort frequently flew on the Lovochkin family’s personal jets between Ukraine and Europe to attend their conferences or meet individually.
Manafort’s representative Jason Maloni declined to comment on the flight data. A source close to Manafort, however, argued that he had “consistently advocated for Ukraine to have closer ties to the West.”
Kwasniewski confirmed this. “He [Manafort] was in favour of signing the Association Agreement.”
Yulia Lovochkina acknowledged owning an executive jet business. “Its services were open to everyone on the market,” she said. She also acknowledged flying with Manafort to the Rome conference on one of the planes. She “paid for the ticket herself and had her own agenda for the trip,” she said.
Manafort lost little time after the creation of the Hapsburg group in June 2012. On September 20, 2012, Gusenberg and Prodi spoke at a conference organised by the Otto Renner Institut. Manafort flew to Vienna on its conclusion the following day.
On October 23, 2012, he flew on a one-day trip from Kyiv to Berlin, where the Hapsburg group — including Kwasniewski — were appearing at a conference organised by the Eastern Economy Committee. Kwasniewski confirmed a meeting with Manafort here.
By the end of 2012, the lobbying effort was beginning to pay off. The crowning came on December 18, 2012, when Manafort’s visit to Kyiv coincided with the 11th Cox-Kwasniewski mission visit. Kwasniewski confirmed meeting Manafort on this occasion.
Yanukovych, originally scheduled to be visiting Moscow, cancelled on the Kremlin with no notice to meet Cox and Kwasniewski
In return, Cox and Kwasniewski heaped praise on Ukraine’s then prime minister Mykola Azarov on the occasion of his birthday in an open letter. This was a huge turnaround compared to seven months earlier, when President of the European Council Herman van Rompuy had told journalists that Azarov “should stay at home” instead of visiting Brussels.
The road to Vilnius
The lobbying effort accelerated in 2013, starting with the March 2013 Rome conference. The EU’s Vilnius summit slated for November 2013 was approaching where Ukraine was expected to sign the Association Agreement.
On May 15–17, 2013, Manafort flew again for a weekend in Warsaw and Brussels, returning on a Lovochkin executive jet. In Warsaw he met one-on-one with Kwasniewski. On May 17, Prodi and Gusenbauer were in Brussels for the Ukraine on the road to Vilnius conference.
Two months later, Manafort was again air bound on a Lovochkin plane, on a one day visit from Frankfurt, landing from the US, bound for the Crimea on July 29. He flew back from Crimea to Frankfurt on the same day.
One day before, Russia and Ukraine had jointly celebrated the Soviet-era Navy Day with a shared display of their two fleets that was attended by Putin and Yanukovych. Join manoeuvres displayed the close contacts between the top brass of the two fleets that prefigured Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula only nine months later.
But it was not for Navy Day that Manafort flew to Crimea, together with his assistant Konstantin Kilimnik, one day later. His mission was to bolster Yanukovych’s decision to go for Europe.
Cox and Kwasnievski arrived in Crimea on the same day as Manafort. On the morning of July 30, they were scheduled to meet with Yanukovych in Crimea for another session on Tymoshenko’s fate. Kwasniewski said Manafort did not meet with the monitoring mission in Crimea that day.
But as the pace of events quickened in summer and autumn 2013, Manafort had a series of one-to-one meetings with Kwasniewski in Warsaw, the former Polish president acknowledged.
These culminated in Manafort flying to Warsaw on October 18 — on Lovochkin’s plane — to meet Kwasniewski. Later the same day Yanukovych said he would be ready to let Tymoshenko depart to Germany for treatment, as soon as Ukraine’s parliament passed legislation enabling this.
1b. Noting the profound relationship between Manafort, Serhii Lovochkin, Yulia Lovochkina, the Hapsburg Group and the EU, it is important to evaluate the Manafort/Lovochkin relationship in the context of the Maidan snipers:
- ” . . . . The private jet flights and personal connections show that Manafort’s partner in this lobbying effort was Yanukovych’s chief of staff Lovochkin. . . . Manafort’s Ukraine engagements actually increased following Yanukovych’s ouster in February 2014. In March to June 2014, he spent a total of 27 days in Ukraine, whereas during the four preceding Euromaidan months, November-February 2014, Manafort only visited Ukraine three times for a total of nine days. . . .”
- ” . . . . Lovochkin is the junior partner of billionaire oligarch Dmytro Firtash . . . . Lovochkin and Firtash together also control Ukraine’s largest TV channel, Inter. . . .”
- ” . . . . Manafort’s continued participation in post-Yanukovych Ukraine also points to his ties to Lovochkin and Firtash. While most members of the Yanukovych administration fled to Russia or were arrested after February 2014, Lovochkin has continued his political career with impunity, despite having served at the heart of Yanukovych’s regime for four years. . . .”
- ” . . . . Euromaidan was triggered by events in Kyiv on the night of November 29, when police violently dispersed a small demonstration of pro-EU students who were protesting after Yanukovych refused to sign the Association Agreement. The violence prompted a huge demonstration occupying the heart of Kyiv on December 1. . . .”
- ” . . . . According to messages between the sisters discussing Manafort’s actions in Ukraine, it was Manafort’s idea ‘to send those people out and get them slaughtered. Do you know whose strategy that was to cause that Revolts [sic] and what not […] As a tactic to outrage the world and get focus on Ukraine.’ Manafort’s daughter called her father’s money ‘blood money.’ . . .”
- ” . . . . The remarks were made by those privy to the deepest secrets of Manafort’s personal life. They evoke the suspicion that Manafort manipulated the Maidan protests and the police violence to influence international opinion. The appearance of the Manafort messages in 2016 reignited speculation in Ukraine that none other than Lovochkin instigated the attack on the students’ demonstration on November 29, 2013, to trigger outrage against Yanukovych. . . .”
- ” . . . . Some of the timeline fits this interpretation: On the day before the police attack, reporters noted Yulia Lovochkina openly fraternising with the students on the Maidan. Lovochkin’s TV crews covered the 4am events closely, and Lovochkin immediately tendered his resignation in protest at the police violence. . . .”
- ” . . . . The next day, Lovochkin’s TV channel played footage of the worst of the police violence on heavy rotation on prime time news. News anchors intoned that Yanukovych had ‘shed the blood of Ukrainian children.’ Whereas the student protests had attracted hundreds, protests on Sunday December 1 against the police violence attracted hundreds of thousands. This was the start of Euromaidan. . . .”
- Of great significance as well, is the maneuvering around a warrant for the arrest of Ukrainian oligarch and Lovochkin partner Dmytro Firtash. The role of Victoria Nuland in this maneuvering is particularly significant: ” . . . . On October 30 2013 — as Yanukovych was wavering over the Association Agreement with the EU — the US issued an arrest warrant for Firtash. The US withdrew the arrest warrant four days later — after US deputy secretary of state Victoria Nuland met Yanukovych in Kyiv, and received assurances that Yanukovych would sign the Association Agreement, Firtash said during extradition hearings in Vienna in 2015 that first revealed the details of the case. But come the Vilnius Summit, Yanukovych failed to sign. The arrest warrant was reissued in March 2014, and Firtash was arrested in Vienna on March 12, 2014. . . . .”
. . . . The Firtash connection
The private jet flights and personal connections show that Manafort’s partner in this lobbying effort was Yanukovych’s chief of staff Lovochkin.
Lovochkin said that he had also “always been a strong supporter of the European integration of Ukraine,” but denied that he had supervised Manafort’s lobbying. Kwasniewski confirmed that Lovochkin was in the pro-EU camp.
Lovochkin is the junior partner of billionaire oligarch Dmytro Firtash who made his fortune trading gas via notorious company Rosukrenergo, who had made his fortune trading gas via notorious company Rosukrenergo, that allegedly skimmed off hundreds of millions of dollars for the Russian and Ukrainian elite. Lovochkin and Firtash together also control Ukraine’s largest TV channel, Inter.
Manafort’s continued participation in post-Yanukovych Ukraine also points to his ties to Lovochkin and Firtash. While most members of the Yanukovych administration fled to Russia or were arrested after February 2014, Lovochkin has continued his political career with impunity, despite having served at the heart of Yanukovych’s regime for four years.
Post Yanukovych’s ousting, Manafort may have attended top-level Ukrainian political meetings where the oligarchs decided who would govern.
On March 25 he flew out of Vienna to Kyiv. His visit to Vienna had coincided with a crucial meeting between Petro Poroshenko and Vienna-based Firtash in that city. Lovochkin had also attended the meeting at which Firtash agreed to back Poroshenko for the post of president, rather than former boxer Vitaly Klichko, effectively crowning Poroshenko president.
In November 13, 2014, as details of a new government were being hammered out after the parliamentary elections, the flight data records that Manafort flew from Kyiv to Nice, France, on a private jet with Ihor Tarasiuk, the business partner of Poroshenko’s first deputy chief of staff, Yuri Kosiuk. Tarasiuk denied taking the flight to bne IntelliNews, although he confirmed the personal data provided was correct.
Manafort’s Ukraine engagements actually increased following Yanukovych’s ouster in February 2014. In March to June 2014, he spent a total of 27 days in Ukraine, whereas during the four preceding Euromaidan months, November-February 2014, Manafort only visited Ukraine three times for a total of nine days.
According to the Mueller indictment, Manafort was engaged as lobbyist for Lovochkin’s new party Opposition Bloc, widely regarded as funded by Firtash. This explains Manafort’s long stays in Ukraine during the post-Maidan election campaigns, according to the flight data: one week prior to the presidential elections in May 2014, and one month prior to the parliamentary elections in October 2014.
Manafort’s flight data concludes with a four-week stay in Ukraine through to October 27, 2015. This period coincides with the campaign for regional elections, which cemented Lovochkin’s Opposition Bloc as a dominant force across south and east Ukraine. Only months after the close of electioneering in conflict-wracked Ukraine, Manafort was electioneering in the US, on behalf of the controversial candidate for the world’s most powerful office.
Maidan mystery
Manafort’s flight data sheds no light however on his relationship, if any, to the Euromaidan revolution. Euromaidan was triggered by events in Kyiv on the night of November 29, when police violently dispersed a small demonstration of pro-EU students who were protesting after Yanukovych refused to sign the Association Agreement. The violence prompted a huge demonstration occupying the heart of Kyiv on December 1.
All we have are cryptic messages exchanged between Manafort’s daughters, one of whose phones was hacked in 2016. Manafort confirmed the hack and corroborated some of the messages to Politico.
According to messages between the sisters discussing Manafort’s actions in Ukraine, it was Manafort’s idea “to send those people out and get them slaughtered. Do you know whose strategy that was to cause that Revolts [sic] and what not […] As a tactic to outrage the world and get focus on Ukraine.” Manafort’s daughter called her father’s money “blood money.”
The remarks were made by those privy to the deepest secrets of Manafort’s personal life. They evoke the suspicion that Manafort manipulated the Maidan protests and the police violence to influence international opinion.
The appearance of the Manafort messages in 2016 reignited speculation in Ukraine that none other than Lovochkin instigated the attack on the students’ demonstration on November 29, 2013, to trigger outrage against Yanukovych.
Some of the timeline fits this interpretation: On the day before the police attack, reporters noted Yulia Lovochkina openly fraternising with the students on the Maidan. Lovochkin’s TV crews covered the 4am events closely, and Lovochkin immediately tendered his resignation in protest at the police violence.
The next day, Lovochkin’s TV channel played footage of the worst of the police violence on heavy rotation on prime time news. News anchors intoned that Yanukovych had “shed the blood of Ukrainian children.” Whereas the student protests had attracted hundreds, protests on Sunday December 1 against the police violence attracted hundreds of thousands. This was the start of Euromaidan.
Authoritative chronicler of the Euromaidan revolution Sonya Koshkina, as well as Ukrainian prosecutors, have argued it was anti-EU hardliners who were responsible for attacking the students.
But on the third anniversary of events, November 29, 2016, Ukraine’s interior minister Arsen Avakov told the BBC that “Lovochkin was the author of the dispersal of the [students’] Maidan, and should be in prison, not in parliament.”
Lovochkin denies any role in the attack on the students. “I submitted my resignation because of President Yanukovych’s decision to decline signing the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA) […] and the use of force against peaceful protesters in Kyiv following it,” he said.
What was Lovochkin’s motivation to break with Yanukovych so abruptly over Europe, whether or not he was involved in the violence? According to Koshkina, Lovochkin was “a placeman of Firtash and one of the architects of the regime,” hardly a nationalist or freedom-loving liberal. But in June 2013 the US had indicted Firtash for alleged bribery in India. On October 30 2013 — as Yanukovych was wavering over the Association Agreement with the EU — the US issued an arrest warrant for Firtash.
The US withdrew the arrest warrant four days later — after US deputy secretary of state Victoria Nuland met Yanukovych in Kyiv, and received assurances that Yanukovych would sign the Association Agreement, Firtash said during extradition hearings in Vienna in 2015 that first revealed the details of the case. But come the Vilnius Summit, Yanukovych failed to sign. The arrest warrant was reissued in March 2014, and Firtash was arrested in Vienna on March 12, 2014. . . . .
Well this is awesome: Ivan Katchanovski, a Canadian academic who has been forensically studying the evidence of the Maidan sniper attacks and concluded that much of the sniper fire was coming from Maidan-controlled buildings, has a wonderfully succinct digital multimedia ‘poster’ (an ‘iPoster’) for his work that was presented during the 2018 American Political Science Association conference in Boston. It’s like most academic posters that gives a high level overview of the findings of his research and filled with embedded videos. You can view it Here’s the contents of the poster. Be sure to check out the numerous images and videos included in the actual iPoster online:
“The puzzling misrepresentation of the Maidan massacre, its investigation, and the trial by Western media and governments require further research concerning reasons for such misrepresentation”
That’s a great way to summary his presentation at the end. Because as big as the question is over what actually happened during the Maidan massacre, a much larger question is why almost no one cares about answering that question.
There was another remarkable guilty plea on Friday that manages to tie together Cambridge Analytica, the hacks of the Democrats, Paul Manafort, Konstantin Kilimnik, and Serhii Lovochkin. And it involves someone who as largely been out of this whole story until now: GOP political consultant Sam Patten just plead guilty to a number of crimes and is now a cooperating witness. The crimes include violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) like Paul Manafort. So it should come as no surprise that he worked with Manafort.
And guess who Patten was acting as a foreign agent for: Serhii Lovochkin! Yep. At least in part. Patten formed a consulting company in the US with Konstantin Kilimnik — Manafort’s long-time Ukrainian consulting partner (who previously worked for the International Republican Institute) — and it was through this company that Patten provided services to Lovochkin that he didn’t disclose, hence the FARA violation charge. They also provided consulting services for Lovochkin’s Opposition Bloc in general, earning about $1 million in services. Those services included lobbying US politicians.
Recall how Manafort and Lovochkin were reportedly quite close during Manafort’s time working for Yanukovych, so if Patten formed a consulting business with Kilimnik that suggests Patten and Manafort may have been close. The business was formed in 2015, in the post-Maidan period when Manafort was advising the Opposition Bloc, Patten and Manafort were likely working closely together on this.
The particular services Patten provided Lovochkin that got him into trouble are also quite interesting: Lovochkin wanted to donate $50,000 to Trump’s inauguration and also get tickets to the inauguration. But foreigners were barred from giving money to the inauguration, so Patten got an American to act as a “straw purchaser” to buy four tickets using $50,000 Lovochkin sent to an account in Cyprus. This American used the $50,000 to buy four tickets the next day. The tickets were used by Patten, Kilimnik, Lovochkin, and another Ukrainian. We don’t yet know who that other Ukrainian was.
We also technically don’t know that Lovochkin is the oligarch Patten worked for because he’s not named in the guilty plea. Lovochkin’s office wouldn’t say if it believed he was the oligarch described in the court documents, but in an email it said: “Mr Lyovochkin was indeed invited to the inauguration and had the honor to attend. At the same time, he did not pay for that.” So that looks like an admission.
Patten also plead guilty to lying to the Senate about his foreign lobbying work for the Ukrainians and then later destroying evidence. Patten admitted that he knew he was required to register as an agent for a foreigner but failed to do so after Lovochkin said “he did not want them to” until an unspecified future date. So while Patten’s firm worked for the Opposition Bloc in general, it sounds like Lovochkin, the deputy head of the Opposition Bloc, was the particular oligarch who they answered to when providing these services.
Another service Patten provided was writing op-eds on behalf of his Ukrainian clients and getting them in US media. This included a pro-Trump February 2017 op-ed by Lovochkin that appeared in US News & World Report.
So Patten is already tied to crime that puts Lovochkin in the orbit of Manafort and the Trump team during that critical inauguration period when so many interests were scrambling to get closer to Trump. But there’s also the Cambridge Analytica angle. As the following article notes, Patten’s bio on his website says he “worked with one of London’s most innovative strategic communications companies to introduce new technologies and methodologies” during the 2014 US election, so he was apparently part of SCL’s initial work for the GOP during the 2014 midterms. This included work on micro-targeting. There’s no evidence yet that he worked with Cambridge Analytica’s 2016 work for the Trump campaign.
Patten also admitted to a British academic researcher last year regarding his work at Cambridge Analytica that, “I’ve worked in Ukraine, Iraq, I’ve worked in deeply corrupt countries, and [the American] system isn’t very different.” Recall how SCL/Cambridge Analytica spinoff AIQ was doing consulting work for Ukrainian oligarch Sergei Taruta, who, like Lovochkin, appears to be an Ukrainian oligarch who straddles the East/West divide in the country while generally supporting moving Ukraine towards the West. So it would be interesting to learn if Patten’s work in Ukraine involved services Taruta of Lovochkin.
And here’s the part of Patten’s background that ties into the hacks: Patten apparently played a central role in SCL Group’s 2015 work in Nigeria for then-president Goodluck Johnathan. And as we saw, SCL used an “Israeli team” of hackers to hack Johnathan’s opponent! In other words, Patten has experience running political hacking operations and he gained that experience while working at Cambridge Analytica parent SCL.
Given how he connects up so many of the different aspects of this mess it’s kind of amazing that he was largely off the #TrumpRussia radar up to this point:
“Sam Patten used the money to buy tickets for the oligarch and a Russian associate to Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, according to a plea agreement made public on Friday. The inauguration fund was not allowed to accept money from foreigners.”
That’s the core of the crime Patten is charged with: arranging for the secret payment of foreign funds to the Trump inauguration fund in addition to lying to a Senate committee. And he’s agreed to cooperate with Mueller as part of his plea deal. That has to have Trump and the rest of the GOP freaked out:
And while, on the surface, these crimes might seem relatively insignificant in the context of the larger #TrumpRussia investigation, when you look at who Patten is, his history, and who the foreign oligarch is that he worked for that Patten suddenly starts looking like a potentially central character in this scandal. The fact that this he set up a consulting service with Konstantin Kilimnik to provide consulting services puts him squarely in Paul Manafort’s Ukraine consulting network. Given the ties between Kilimnik and Manafort and the work Manafort was doing for the Opposition Bloc in 2015, we should probably view the Kilimnik/Patten clients as basically Manafort’s clients. And the fact that their services included helping Lovochkin illegally get Trump inauguration tickets gives is an idea of how far Patten was willing to go to please his Ukrainian clients:
And then he lied about this all to the Senate and destroyed evidence, which is pretty interesting given that those services included lobbying senators congress on behalf his Ukrainian clients:
And some of those US lobbying services included get opinion articles for their clients inserted into the US media, including a pro-Trump piece ostensibly written by Lovochkin himself in US News & World Report:
And while Lovochkin’s is never named in the guilty plea, it’s pretty obvious he’s the oligarch Patten was directly working for:
And then there’s Patten’s work for Cambridge Analytica. Work that, by his own admission, included work in Ukraine:
“I’ve worked in Ukraine, Iraq, I’ve worked in deeply corrupt countries, and [the American] system isn’t very different.” What a line.
And as the following article notes, Patten’s work for Cambridge Analytica wasn’t just some random work there. He worked for Cambridge Analytica’s 2014 work in the US elections for the GOP, including work on micro-targeting. And, more importantly, Patten played a central role in SCL’s 2015 work in Nigeria that included the use of an “Israeli team” to hack their client’s opponent:
“Patten worked at the Oregon officer of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group, where he helped the data company develop voter targeting operations ahead of the 2014 midterm elections.”
So in 2014 he was working in SCL’s Oregon office, where he helped the company develop voter-targeting operations. And that included beta-testing of voter micro-targeting that he boasted were “adopted by at least one major U.S. presidential candidate.” Keep in mind that both Ted Cruz and Trump hired Cambridge Analytica so they were both employing these micro-targeting services:
This is, however, no evidence yet that he was working on Cambridge Analytica’s 2016 work for Trump:
Given how controversial that work was it wouldn’t be a shocker if he intentionally left that kind of work off of his public bio. Especially if that work including orchestrating some of the ‘dark arts’ political services Cambridge Analytica was known to offer its clients. Services Patten likely has experience deploying given the lead role he played in SCL’s 2015 Nigerian consulting services that included hiring hackers to hack their client’s opponent:
So that’s the latest twist to emerge from the Mueller investigation.
It’s also imptorant to keep in mind that the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica appears to have been reformed as “Emerdata”, a company offering similar services and with UAE money behind it. Also recall the Saudi/UAE delegation that secretly met at Trump Tower in early August of 2016 offering services very similar to Cambridge Analytica to help Trump win.
So there appears to be a concerted UAE effort to invest in cutting edge Cambridge Analytica-style political dirty tricks operations, which raises the question of how much UAE involvement there may have been in Cambridge Analytica/SCL’s operations in 2015–2016. It’s one of many open questions that remain in this investigation.
So as we can see, Sam Patten is both a man of mystery and potentially a kind of ‘missing link’ in the larger #TrumpRussia investigation. And he’s apparently cooperating with investigators at this point. That’s one helluva guilty plea.
Here’s an interesting fun-fact about Sam Patten, the long-time associate of Paul Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnik who just pleaded guilty to a series a crimes including helping Sergii Lovochkin (Viktor Yanukovych’s former chief of staff) secretly donate $50,000 to Trump’s inauguration fund in exchange for tickets to the inauguration. First, recall how Patten and Kilimnik set up a consulting company in 2015 that consulted extensively for the new Opposition Bloc party. Well, as the following article points out, Patten’s consulting work wasn’t limited to the Opposition Bloc. It turns out Patten worked on the 2015 mayoral campaign of Vitalii Klitschko for mayor of Kiev. Klitschko was, of course, one of the key leaders of the Maidan protests who was elected mayor of Kiev in May of 2014. Don’t forget that the notorious “F*ck the EU” wiretapped call between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt that took place in early February 2014 was a discussion over whether or not Klitschko or Arseniy Yatseniuk should replace Yanukovych. Nuland called for Yatseniuk over Klitschko, but Klitschko was still clearly a prominent enough leader of the Maidan protests that he was one of two people under consideration to lead a post-Maidan Ukraine.
So we have Patten consulting for the Opposition Bloc AND one of the key Maidan leaders a year after the Maidan protests. But get this: it was reportedly Sergei Lovochkin who recruited Patten to work on Klitschko’s campaign. In addition, Lovochkin’s oligarch partner, Dmytro Firtash, also boasted in 2015 that he was involved with Klitshko’s mayoral campaign:
“That venture, first reported by The Daily Beast this week, was a private LLC incorporated in February 2015 called Begemot Ventures International (BVI) with a mission to “build the right arguments before domestic and international audiences.” Kilimnik is listed as the firm’s principal and Patten is listed as an executive, according to company records, and the company is registered to Patten’s office address in Washington. A website for Begemot—which was built almost two years after the company was incorporated—links to Patten’s email for inquiries, but does not list the company’s clients.”
Note how the stated purpose of Patten’s and Kilimnik’s Begemot Ventures International was to “build the right arguments before domestic and international audiences.” Given how the whole “Hapsburg Group” initiative was about shaping international (European and US) opinion of Ukraine’s government and given the close involvement Sergii Lovochkin and his sister had with that effort, you have to wonder if Patten and Kilimnik were involved in some sort of post-Maidan version of the Hapburg Group to continue influencing US and European attitudes towards Ukraine.
Regardless, the fact that Patten and Kilimnik were brought onto the Klitschko’s team by Lovochkin and Firtash adds further weight to the conclusion that Lovochkin (and Manafort) were basically leading a pro-EU faction of Yanukovych’s Part of Regions during that crucial Hapsburg Group period:
“Asked whether Manafort coordinated with Patten and/or Kilimnik on Klitschko’s reelection campaign, a spokesman for Manafort said he had “nothing to add.””
That sure sounds like a quiet “yes” from Manafort’s spokesperson. Given that both Kilimnik and Patten were working for Klitschko it would almost be surprising if Manafort wasn’t working for him too. And wouldn’t that be quite a twist if true.
Just a quick note: that bne Intellinews article by Graham Stack about Paul Manafort’s flight records is currently available on the bne Intellinews site again. So we don’t have to rely on the Wayback Machine for that crucial article.
Rob Goldstone just did an interview. The main topic was of course the role he played in arranging the June 9th Trump Tower meeting. Most of it is a rehashing of what we’ve already heard but there are some interesting new tidbits. For instance, Goldstone reiterates that none of the “dirt” on Hillary Clinton Goldstone offered in his initial emails to Donald Trump, Jr. ever materialized. But he also confirms that Trump Jr. did come into that meeting anticipating — and very happy to accept — “opposition research” on Hillary that he believed was coming from the Russian government.
Goldstone is also open to believing that the meeting could have been a set-up by Russian-intelligence, saying, “I’m willing to believe that I don’t know who wanted this meeting.”
And Goldstone makes a claim that points towards a potentially significant legal risk to Trump, Jr.: Goldstone believe that it wasn’t the initial email he sent to Trump Jr. that secured the meeting. Instead, there were a series of followup calls between Trump Jr. and Emin Agalarov where the actual meeting was worked out. Phone records obtained by the Senate Judiciary Committee show Agalarov and Trump Jr. had three calls days before the meeting, each two to three minutes long, on June 6 and 7, 2016. Goldstone said it wasn’t until after the final call that Trump Jr. sent an email setting a date for the meeting. And yet, during his Senate testimony, Trump Jr. said he did not recall speaking with Agalarov. So it sounds like Trump Jr. may have been caught in a lie while under oath, although saying he “did not recall” could potentially give him some wiggle-room.
Goldstone also said that it was only after the calls between Trump Jr. and Agalarov that Trump Jr. introduced Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort into the discussion and said they would be attending the meeting. And this where a more complete understanding of the history of Paul Manafort could be particularly helpful. Because if, as is widely assumed, Paul Manafort was acting as a Kremlin agent this whole time it doesn’t seem like it would be a very big deal if Paul Manafort attended a meeting where the Russian government offered illicit help to the Trump campaign. If, on the other hand, Manafort was seen by the Kremlin as a pro-Western change agent who has been trying to pull Ukraine out of Moscow’s orbit and into the arms of the EU, suddenly inviting Paul Manafort to the meeting could have been seen as an unacceptable risk.
And that raises a rather fascinating possibility: what if this Russian delegation really was planning involved with Russian intelligence and really was planning on providing some sort of “dirt” on Hillary at that meeting — not necessarily the hacked documents but something — and they had to basically drop those plans because they didn’t trust Manafort. Might that explain why the meeting was apparently such a waste of time according to all the participants? Of course, it’s possible they are all lying and there really was some sort of dirt on Hillary passed to the Trump team during that meeting. But if it panned out the way they all describe it and no real dirt was discussed or handed over during the meeting, and it really was a Russian intelligence operation, the fact that Manafort’s inclusion in the meeting was done at the last minute means it’s worth keeping in mind that Manafort’s profile as a pro-West change agent could have made him a last minute ‘fly in the collusion ointment’ who forced the meeting to devolve into the worthless gathering that all the participants claim it was:
“The British-born music publicist who helped arrange that infamous meeting between senior Trump campaign officials and a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Democrats now believes the meeting could have been a set-up by Russian intelligence, he told NBC News in an exclusive television interview.”
Goldstone is now open to the idea that the whole meeting could have been a set-up by Russian intelligence. Although if you look at his precise wording it’s a pretty vague endorsement of the idea, where he simply says, “I’m willing to believe that I don’t know who wanted this meeting”:
And while Goldstone appears to remain uncertain as to whether or not the Russian government was behind the initial push to set up this meeting, Goldstone makes it clear that Don Jr. thought the Russian government was behind it:
Goldstone then goes to say that he had no direct knowledge the Russian government was behind the meeting, but he assumed that was the case based on the positive coverage the Russian media was giving Trump at the time and the enthusiasm for Trump he witnessed during the 2013 Miss Universe pageant:
Now here’s the part of the interview that could point to potentially serious legal trouble for Trump Jr: Goldstone claims that there were multiple short phone calls between Trump Jr. and Emin Agalarov on June 6 and 7, and it was only after that final phone call that the meeting was schedule. And phone records of these calls were indeed obtained by the Senate Judiciary Committee, but Trump Jr. told the Senate that he did not recall speaking with Agalarov, which seems like a very likely lie. Goldstone also suggests that there’s no way these conversations between Trump Jr. and Agalarov didn’t involve discussions about some sort of Russian government assistance with the campaign since that was supposed to be the entire point of the meeting based on the intial emails:
And then Goldstone points something out that suddenly becomes potentially quite significant in the context of Paul Manafort acting as a pro-Western change agent during his work in Ukraine: It was only AFTER the final call between Trump Jr. and Agalarov that Trump Jr. emailed him to inform him that Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort would be at the meeting. So if Russian intelligence really was behind the meeting, what would the sudden insertion of Paul Manafort into this situation have done to their plans:
Goldstone goes on to point out that the Agalarovs tried to set up new meetings with Natalia Veselnitskaya after the 2016 election and again around the time of the inauguration. Curiously, Goldstone says he did no pursue the meetings and does not believe any took place. So did the Agalarovs asked him to arrange another round of meeting and he refused to do so? If so, that’s odd.
But it’s also worth noting that if Veselnitskaya really was acting on behalf of the Kremlin it’s not like there weren’t plenty of other instances in the post-election period when we have word of the Trump team meeting with Kremlin representatives. Don’t forget that it was during the post-election period when all the ‘back channel’ machinations took place. For instance, there was the December 1, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak during which Jared Kushner reportedly told Kislyak he wanted to set up a secret back channel between the Trump team and the Kremlin. And then all of the subsequent meetings associated with that ‘back channel’. So if the Veselnitskaya team really was requesting new meetings during this time it’s interesting that it apparently wasn’t pursued given the Trump team’s apparent desire for a Kremlin back channel and the fact that Veselnitskaya allegedly acted as back channel earlier:
Finally, Goldstone points out the obvious: that it’s hard to imagine Trump senior was well aware of the Trump Tower meeting:
Don’t forget that it was on June 7, 2016, when Trump Sr. teased that he had a major speech on the corruption of Hillary Clinton coming up. That speech never happened, but a week later the initial reports of the DNC hacks and the subsequent release of hacked documents by “Guccifer 2.0” did start happening.
It’s all a reminder that the circumstantial evidence makes it very clear that the Trump team tried to collude with the Kremlin. Whether or not they did so remains unclear, but they certainly wanted to. And given everything we’ve learned about Paul Manafort and the fact that he was inserted into these secret negotiations at the last minutes, we now have to ask whether or not the presence of Paul Manafort actually complicated those collusion attempts by scaring off the Kremlin. Wouldn’t that be quite a twist.
@Pterrafractyl–
A more probable analysis: this whole thing is horseshit.
Trump’s “Russian dealings” are almost certainly a penetration “op” with spook Felix Sater directing traffic. That Russian intel agents may have attended any Trump-team meetings is consistent not only with counter-intelligence methodology but would be unsurprising simply in light of the fact that Trump was the GOP nominee and might be President.
Remember, when Trump made his call for the Russians to “hack” Hillary’s server, her email account had been taken offline several years earlier for the Benghazi circus.
Hell, it was Hillary Clinton’s State Department (under Barack Obama) that engineered the whole “Reboot with Russia,” that came to an end with Eddie the Friendly Spook’s odyssey.
As far as Family Trump–they are all corrupt and will seek money, assistance and influence wherever they can find it.
Donald, Sr. would fuck a bush if he thought there was a snake in it.
Best,
Dave
Here’s a pair of article that contain some interesting info about how the Hapsburg Group got started and who was behind it: First, recall the recent report about Psy-Group — the Israeli cyber-intelligence/propaganda firm that was apparently hired by the UAE and Saudis to assist the 2016 Trump campaign — and the fact that Psy-Group’s representative, George Birnbaum, got into contact with Rick Gates days after Gates and Manafort joined the Trump team in March of 2016. We are told that Birnbaum contacted Eckart Sager who passed alont Gates’s contact information. We are also informed that Sager is one of the individuals who was illegally contacted by Paul Manafort in what was clearly some sort of witness tampering attempt.
So while it’s certainly tempting to assume that Manafort may have been reaching out to Sager to discuss what they were going to tell authorities about the attempts by Birnbaum to get in contact with Gates over the Psy-Group proposal, it’s probably the case that Manafort was contact Sager primarily over Sager’s involvement with the Hapsburg Group. Because as the following articles makes clear, Sager and partner, Alan Friedman, were deeply involved in setting up the Hapsburg Group and it was apparently all initially Friedman’s idea that he floated to Manafort in 2011.
First, here’s an article from June about how the Manafort team accidentally revealed that Friedman and Sager were the two public relations executives that Manafort secretly reached out to during his witness tampering attempts:
“Court officials inadvertently released a court filing Wednesday that identified two European public relations executives allegedly approached to solicit false testimony to aid Paul Manafort and also revealed names of several senior former European politicians one executive suggested approaching about a secret lobbying campaign for Ukraine.”
Whoops! So the names of the two European public relations executives Manafort reached out to was accidentally made public. And those two PR executives happen to be Alan Friedman and Eckart Sager of FBC Media:
Now, here’s a New York Times article from July that has more information of Alan Friedman’s background and the role he played in the creation of the Hapsburg Group. It turns out Friedman, an American, is both a long-time journalists and a shady businessman. He’s worked for the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and is basically a celebrity journalist in Italy. Throughout much of his journalistic career in recent decades he was also working as a consultant, leading to various conflict of interest issues with his employers.
On June 25, 2011, Friedman wrote a memo to Manafort proposing a strategy to help bolster Yanukovych’s government. Friedman then apparently took the lead in 2012 in actually assembling the team of European politicians.
And as the article notes, when Manafort secretly contact Friedman this year Friedman interpreted that as suborning perjury and informed investigators. So it was Alan Friedman, the guy who came to Manafort with the Hapsburg Group proposal, who apparently got Manafort thrown back in jail for witness tampering:
“But for all his fame and influence in Italy, few had heard of Mr. Friedman in the United States until he helped land President Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in jail.”
So an Italian celebrity journalist, who happens to be an American long-time journalist, was one of the key figures behind the Hapsburg Group:
And it was Friedman who appears to have informed investigators about Manafort’s efforts to secretly contact him. Friedman even told them he considered the message an effort to “suborn perjury”!
That had to be an ‘ouch’ for Manafort.
Interestingly, it sounds like Friedman was able to assemble his Hapsburg Group team by cultivating his prior journalistic sources. Sources like Romano Prodi. So Friedman really does appear to have played a critical role in the creation of the Hapsburg Group. He used the trust sources had in him from previous work as a reporter to turn them into lobbyist for Ukraine:
In 1998, Friedman formed Fact Based Communications. That’s the firm Eckart Sager worked for. And it was this mix of side-businesses that irked his journalistic employers:
And then in 2011, Friedman was caught in a scheme were he apparently paid someone to plant stories in the Italian media claiming that a property Friedman was trying to sell was going to be used as a honeymoon locale by Prince William and Kate Middleton. This raises the question of whether or not Friedman was strapped for cash at this point or just greedy and unscrupulous:
Later in 2011, Friedman got caught working for the Malaysian government to produce television programs without informing the BBC which aired the shows:
And it was that same year, in June 25, 2011, that Friedman apparently approached Manafort about some sort of scheme to bolster the Yanukovych government. Presumably the initial idea was the bolster the Yanukovcyh government’s bid to join the EU trade association, although that’s not entirely clear:
So Friedman appears to be aa rather colorful, albeit somewhat shady, character. And in 2011, the same year he approached Manafort about starting the Hapsburg Group, he was acting extremely shady. In that sense he seems like a natural fit for the Ukrainian initiative.
Still, in that entire review of Friedman, there is no indication as to why on earth he decided to get involved in Ukraine. Which raises the obvious question: did someone else hire Friedman to contact Manafort about setting up this Hapsburg Group initiative? Don’t forget that one of the biggest mysteries about the Hapsburg Group is to what extent it was operating on behalf of EU forces that wanted to see Ukraine join the Trade Association. Not just Ukrainian forces. So learning that Friedman approached Manafort with the idea only backs up those suspicions that the Hapsburg Group really was an international effort. Not just international in terms of who was involved but international in terms of who was behind the idea in the first place.
There was a potential bombshell story regarding Paul Manafort and Wikileaks a day after we learn that the Mueller team is charging Paul Manafort for repeatedly lying to prosecutors after making a plea deal: According to series of anonymous sources to the Guardian, Paul Manafort has held secret talks with Julian Assange on at least three occasions in 2013, 2015, and March of 2016. March of 2016 is, of course, the very same month that the hackers — alleged to be ‘Fancy Bear’/APT28 hackers — started their spearphishing hacking attempts on the DNC servers and the same month Manafort joined the Trump team as Trump’s campaign chairman. Not that Manafort officially joined Trump’s team on March 28, 2016, so the March 2016 meeting with Assange would have almost certainly taken place before that time. Also recall that March of 2016 is the same month George Papadopoulos was approached by the mysterious Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud. So that’s turning out to be a particularly important month in this whole story.
There’s been a lot of focus on sourcing for this story in part because no other outlets have confirmed it. And based on the language of the story it sounds like the sources are people in the Ecuadorian government, although that’s ambiguous. Representatives for Wikileaks and Manafort deny the story.
For the March 2016 meeting, the Ecuadorian staff reportedly did not log this visit as they normally do. The meeting lasted about 40 minutes. The 2013 visit apparently took place a year after Assange sought refuge in the Ecuadoran embassy, according to the article. Keep in mind that Assange entered the Ecuadoran embassy in June of 2012, so assuming that “one year after” timing is accurate, that would place the 2013 visit around mid 2013. Manafort’s association with Assange goes back at least 5 years to 2012–2013, according to sources
No details are given on when the 2015 visit took place, but it’s worth keeping in mind that the initial hack of the DNC’s servers — allegedly by ‘Cozy Bear’/APT29 — took place in May 2015. That hack was unusually ‘noisy’ and atypical for Russian government hackers, according to US cybersecurity officials watching it. And don’t forget that the FBI was made aware of this hack and tried and failed to notify the DNC of this hack starting in September of 2015. Also recall the right-wing operation — run by Barbara Ledeen, Newt Gingrich, and Judicial Watch — allegedly set up to search the dark web for hackers with Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails. So given the fact that the US government was well aware of the hack of the DNC server in 2015 and right-wing operatives were already putting out teams to search the dark web for hacked emails (or hire teams to hack them), we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that Manafort’s alleged meeting with Assange in 2015 included a discussion of hacked emails, either hacks yet to come or hacks that already transpired. It also makes the timing of that alleged 2015 meeting particularly important.
The article also notes that Manafort actually visited Ecuador in 2017 to hold talks with president-elect Moreno, ostensibly to drum up business for some of Manafort’s Chinese clients. But Manafort discreetly brought up the top of Assange’s situation, according to one of the sources. A second source, described as a “senior foreign ministry source” was skeptical that the topic of Assange would have come up. So we know at least one source is a senior member of a foreign ministry, although we don’t know which foreign ministry.
So there’s the obvious big question of whether or not the meetings in 2015 and 2016 actually took place and whether or not hacked emails were discussed. But the 2013 meeting is also quite intriguing given that this was the time when Manafort was working on the “Hapsburg Group” lobbying campaign to convince the EU to allow Ukraine into a trade association with the EU despite Yanukovych’s jailing of Yulia Tymoshenko. And that raises the intriguing possibility that Manafort wanted to use Wikileaks as a means vehicle for discrediting Tymoshenko in the eyes of the EU. At this point this is just speculation, but the timing certainly points in that direction. Don’t forget that Manafort only agreed to cooperate with Mueller right before his second trial, and that was going to be the trial that explored what actually happened with the “Hapsburg Group” scheming.
Josh Marshall also makes an important point to keep in mind about all this: if these meetings did indeed take place, there’s good reason to believe the US and UK governments would have known about these meetings simply because the Ecuadoran embassy in London is going to be under intense surveillance specifically because of Assange’s presence there. Ecuador would also obviously know about these visits, so if the Ecuadoran government was cooperating with the Mueller team and learned that Manafort was being charged with lying to Mueller, releasing this story to the press could be a way for Ecuador’s government to get out ahead of the story.
So while we don’t know yet what lies Manafort told Mueller’s team that brought about this new round of charges, it sounds like those lies may have included lying about multiple secret meetings with Julian Assange:
“Manafort was jailed this year and was thought to have become a star cooperator in the Mueller inquiry. But on Monday Mueller said Manafort had repeatedly lied to the FBI, despite agreeing to cooperate two months ago in a plea deal. According to a court document, Manafort had committed “crimes and lies” on a “variety of subject matters”.”
Yep, this report comes just one day after Mueller charged Manafort with repeatedly lying to the FBI despite a cooperation agreement. The timing is interesting.
The 2016 meeting with in March, according to “a well-placed source”, although the article just says “The visit is tentatively dated to March”. So it sounds like there’s still some ambiguity on which month this meeting actually happened, although it seems like a safe bet that it would have happened before Manafort joined Trump’s team. And while the exact month of meeting is unclear, there are other details from “sources in Ecuador”, like what Manafort was wearing and how long it lasted, along with the fact that Manafort’s visit wasn’t logged. So we have an interesting mix of very specific details, like what Manafort wore to the embassy, with rather vague details about the actual timing of the visit:
The 2013 visit appears to be confirmed by two sources and took place “a year after Assange sought asylum inside”, which would put it around mid-2013. :
And that mid-2013 initial visit would put it right in the middle of the “Hapsburg Group” scheming:
The Guardian also appears to have flight records of Manafort’s travels during this period and those flight records show that when Manafort would travel back and forth between Kiev and the US he would usually fly through Frankfurt but sometimes through London:
It’s not a particularly revealing detail to learn that Manafort was connecting through London when flying to the US, but it’s interesting that the Guardian has access to Manafort’s flight records. Recall how Graham Stack’s crucial reporting on Manafort’s activities during this same “Hapsburg Group” period relied on flight records that revealed Manafort was traveling on planes own by Viktor Yanukovych’s chief of staff Sergii Lovochkin. Did the Guardian get its hands on the same flight records or are the new flight records in the hands of journalists?
Finally, one of the sources speaking with the Guardian asserts that Manafort traveled to Ecuador in May of 2017. The official reason was to hold talks with the country’s president-elect on behalf of Chinese investor clients. And this isn’t in dispute. Manafort’s meeting with Moreno was reported at the time. But according to one of these anonymous sources, Manafort also quietly raised the topic of Assange during this meeting, although a senior foreign ministry source disputes that:
We’ll see if any of the evidence behind these claims emerges. But don’t forget that claims of Manafort visiting the Ecuadoran embassy in London in 2013, 2015, and 2016 are the kinds of claims where there could be video evidence of it somewhere. Between US and UK monitoring who comes and goes in that embassy and the possibility that the sources are coming from Ecuador’s government itself, someone could have video of these trips unless Manafort was secret allowed into the building. Recall how one source claims the 2016 meeting lasted about 40 minutes and Manafort was casually dressed when he exited the embassy, wearing sandy-coloured chinos, a cardigan and a light-coloured shirt. Those kinds of details would suggest there’s video evidence of this floating around somewhere, although it’s possible those details are based on the memory of Ecuadoran embassy staff, especially since the actual month of that 2016 meeting appears to be somewhat in doubt and its only tentatively placed in March of 2016.
But also keep in mind that Manafort is completely denying all of this. So if he was denying this to Mueller, and not just the press, and there really is evidence of these meetings with Assange, that would give us an idea about some of things Mueller is charging Manafort with lying about at this point.
Petro Poroshenko did an interview with NBC News on Tuesday about the situation in the Sea of Azov and there was a fascinating implied threat to President Trump contained in the interview. An implied threat to reopen Ukraine’s cooperation with US investigations into Paul Manafort.
First, recall earlier reports from back in May about how the Ukrainian government basically froze all cooperation with US investigators looking into Paul Manafort’s activities in Ukraine and this was done by the Ukrainian government to please Trump and make him more likely to provide Ukraine with lethal military aid, specifically, the Javelin anti-tank missiles. Also recall how one of the reasons the Ukrainian government likely didn’t want to see Manafort fully investigated is because many people currently in the government would be implicated in those anti-corruption investigations, in particular investigations into the “black ledger”. Well, now that Ukraine is hoping to get naval military aid from the US in response to the Sea of Azov incident, Poroshenko is declaring that Ukraine is once again ready to cooperate with those US Manafort investigations:
“The Ukrainian leader also told NBC News that his country is ready to cooperate with the investigation of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who spent nearly a decade in Ukraine as a consultant to a pro-Moscow political party.”
That sure sounds like a threat to Trump! It’s hard to come up with a different interpretation given the fact that the Ukrainian government was pretty open about cutting off that cooperation before as a means of placating Trump. So this appears to be Ukraine’s carrot/stick with the US as long as Trump is in office: keep starting and/or stopping the Manafort investigation cooperation.
At the same time, it’s entirely possible this is a hollow threat given how an investigation into Manafort could threaten a number of Ukrainian politicians. Related to that possibility is Poroshenko’s claims that he has no idea if Manafort was getting paid directly by the Kremlin:
Part of what that statement somewhat ironic is that the US investigation into Manafort appeared to uncover evidence that Manafort was actually briefly working for Poroshenko’s campaign in 2014 after the Maidan protests led to the downfall of the Yanukovych government. That was the claim made by Manafort’s long-time partner Rick Gates during an August 7th testimony. Gates went on to complain that a $1 million payment for the work in 2014 was “significantly past due”, although it’s unclear whether or not that for work done for Poroshenko and Yanukovych. So we have Gates testifying that, yes, there was consulting work done for Poroshenko in 2014 but we don’t know if the unpaid $1 million was related to that work.
The claim also came up in an March 31, 2014 email to Gates from Tad Devine (who worked for Bernie Sanders’ campaign in 2016). Devine attached a draft agreement for Manafort’s firm to work on Poroshenko’s campaign, and wrote “This proposal anticipates that we will spend a lot of time between now and the election on the ground in Kyiv,” Devine wrote. So it sounds like they got pretty far in the negotiations.
Poroshenko’s administration previously completely denied that it hired Manafort in 2014 or even considered the Manafort proposal in 2014. But on August 8th, a day after Gates’s testimony, the Poroshenko’s spokesperson did confirm that Poroshenko’s top strategist, Ihor Hryniv, did in fact meet with Manafort’s team to year the pitch. But they continue to insist that they never hired Manafort’s team. Hryniv asserts that Manafort was eager to work for Poroshenko and had come prepared with an elaborate strategy, polling numbers, and projections. But Hryniv says that Manafort “did not understand that the country changed after the Maidan” and so they didn’t use his services. :
““We had a meeting, yes, but no relationship” with Manafort’s team, Poroshenko spokeswoman Darya Khudyakova confirmed to RFE/RL by phone on August 8.”
We had a meeting, but no relationship. That was the new stance Poroshenko’s team took after previously denying Manafort’s pitch was even considered:
But despite those shifting denials, Rick Gates appears to have bluntly testified that, yes, Manafort’s team did indeed to consulting work for Poroshenko, although it’s unclear whether or not the unpaid $1 million is related to that work:
Then there’s March 31, 2014 email from Tad Devine that included an attached draft agreement for this work:
But Poroshenko’s top strategist downplays these revelations by admitting that, yes, he did meet with Manafort and heard his pitch. But it was pitch that Hryniv didn’t see as viable for the post-Maidan political environment:
So what was this strategy that Manafort pitches that Hryniv didn’t see as viable in the post-Maidan Ukraine? Well, according to Hryniv in the following article, “Manafort’s strategy was [for Poroshenko] to position himself as the candidate from the west and try to push his competitor out further to the east, and then gain the momentum and use the votes of western Ukraine to win.” Yep, Manafort wanted Poroshenko to brand himself as the “pro-West” candidate, which seems like a pretty reasonable branding given the situation at the time, where the government had literally collapsed following massive protests over the decision to NOT move much closer to the EU. Plus, Poroshenko had positioned himself as a pro-Maidan figure. But Hryniv apparently rejected it. So that’s all something to keep in mind regarding the mystery of the “Hapburg Group” and the fact that Manafort appeared to be acting a change agent trying to move Ukraine into the arms of the West: right after the collapse of Yanukovych’s government, Manafort wanted to run an aggressively ‘pro-West’ campaign for the guy that would replace Yanukovych:
“That strategy that Manafort offered Poroshenko’s team, Hryniv said, would have further divided a country still recovering from a bloody mass uprising that toppled the Russia-backed regime and brought a pro-Western government to power.”
Considering everything that’s happened in Ukraine over the last four years, where the demonization of the ethnic Russian populace and exaltation of viruently anti-Russian neo-Nazi groups like Svoboda and Right Sector has become a grim political reality, it’s kind of remarkable that Poroshenko’s chief strategist was apparently turned off by Manafort’s ‘pro-West’ pitch. But that’s what Hryniv is claiming:
So we still don’t know what, if any, work Manafort actually did for Poroshenko’s 2014 campaign. But it sure sounds like they did some sort of work. Will we eventually find out what work was done now that Poroshenko is offering to reestablish Ukraine’s cooperation in the US’s investigation into Manafort? We’ll see. Although that presumably depends on whether or not the US provides lethal maritime aid, at which point Ukraine will presumably end cooperation with the Manafort investigation again.
Here’s an important followup to the report by The Guardian a few days ago alleging that Paul Manafort personally met with Julian Assange in 2013, 2015, and March of 2016, right before he joined the Trump campaign. Recall how that report was based on multiple anonymous sources and included references to documents by Ecuador’s Senain intelligence agency that were seen by the Guardian. Also recall how, due the nature of the allegations, the US, and UK governments would almost certainly know whether or not the allegations are true given their surveillance of the Ecuadoran embassy in London. The Ecuadoran government would also obviously know if this was true or not. So it was a story based on anonymous sources, one described as a “well-placed source” in the article, and circumstantial evidence suggests those sources were people involved with either the US, UK, or Ecuadoran governments.
Well, it’s been a few days since the story came out and no other publications have confirmed the story, leading to growing speculation that it was all made up:
“It’s not unusual for aggrieved subjects to push back—and while the denials had a noteworthy vehemence, that sentiment was arguably proportionate to the severity of The Guardian’s charges. Credible observers with no skin in the game—for example, the national security blogger Marcy Wheeler—however, also expressed skepticism. In a statement yesterday, The Guardian sought to shore up its story, stressing that it relied on a number of sources and that neither Manafort nor Assange had issued denials prior to publication. The statement could have been stronger, however: “Noticeably missing [was] a line stating that The Guardian is confident in the accuracy of its story,” CNN’s Oliver Darcy noted on Twitter.”
Yep, it’s not just Manafort and Wikileaks who are disputing this story. People like Marcy Wheeler are also raising questions and even the Guardian itself wouldn’t issue a statement confidently backing the accuracy of the story.
And then it got really weird, with Politico publishing an article written by an anonymous ex-CIA agent, “Alex Finley”, who suggests that this was all actually part of some sort of Russian disinformation operation intended to discredit Luke Harding:
Again, recall how there were multiple sources for Harding’s article, including sources described as “well-placed”, and they gave the Guardian Ecuadoran intelligence documents. So unless these sources were anonymous to Harding and his co-author too, it seems rather implausible that Russian spies would somehow be able to orchestrate such a disinformation campaign. And yet that’s what this anonymous former CIA agent suggests may have happened:
“As of this writing, no other news outlet has confirmed the Guardian’s story about Manafort meeting Assange. So is it fake or is it real? If it is real and others confirm it, it would be damning, and many people have an interest in trying to discredit it. On the other hand, if someone managed to dupe Harding and his colleague, it would mean someone was ready to put a lot of effort into discrediting the journalists in order to sow doubt about a wide swath of reporting. In either case, someone has already primed a large audience to dismiss this Manafort-Assange story and any other information that might tie the Trump campaign to Russia. That implies more bad news is coming for Trump and Manafort.”
It’s a valid observation by Alex Finley: If someone really did trick these journalists, they must have put a fair amount of work into it given that the story involved multiple sources and even Ecuadoran intelligence documents.
But then Finley goes on to suggest that it’s actually Russia who tricked Harding and his co-author. The evidence? Well, a lot of Russia news outlets came out skeptical of the story. That’s seriously the evidence:
It’s quite a twist to the unraveling of this story: multiple anonymous sources, who appears to likely be affiliated with either US, UK, or Ecuadoran intelligence, feed Harding this story. No other news outlets pick up on it and it starts looking like it might be disinformation. And then we have an anonymous former CIA agent pen a piece about how it may have been a Russian intelligence disinformation operation and her primary evidence is that Russian media outlets were skeptical of the story.
So it’s looking increasingly like the ‘Paul Manafort met Assange’ story was indeed disinformation. We’ll see. Maybe some sort of follow up story is on the way. Either way, this is clearly a good to reflect on all the other Trump-Russia stories we’ve seen that were also based on anonymous sources that have never been confirmed by more than a single news outlet. For instance, remember the exclusive story in the Daily Beast from March of this year that claimed that “Guccifer 2.0” was actually traced directly back to the GRU when a GRU officer forgot to turn on his virtual private network, and it was all based on anonymous sources? Well, we haven’t seen any follow up or confirmation of that story in any other publications. And don’t forget that Mueller’s indictment of the 12 GRU officers over the hacking operation never actually referenced the ‘evidence’ indicated in that story. Might that story have also been one of these disinformation stories? It’s a question that wasn’t asked at the time the Daily Beast story came out. Can we ask now?
It’s also worth asking what the implications are if this Manafort-Assange story is indeed disinformation and actually came from a Western intelligence agency. That seems like a pretty big deal.
And regarding the possibility that this really was a Russian disinformation operation targeting Harding in order to discredit him, keep in mind that worrying about Russian operations against him is kind of Luke Harding’s specialty, so if the Russians really did pull this off that would be pretty impressive
It certainly seems like clumsy covert tradecraft when an old hand like Paul Manafort risks getting caught on surveillance systems while
visiting Assange at Equador’s London embassy. However Luke Harding is, to say the least, somewhat of a polarizing figure.
From off-guardian.org Sept. 9 2015 a piece entitled “Luke Harding: the hack who came in from the cold”:
“Harding was accused of plagiarism by Mark Ames and Yasha Levine of the eXile for publishing
an article under his own name that lifted large passages almost verbatim from their work.”
Mark Ames @MarkAmesExile tweeted 6 April 2018 “Can anyone explain why Luke Harding — caught plagiarizing when I was in Moscow-
entrusted with so many leaks?”
Off-shore money laundering expert Lucy Komisar replied 7 September 2018 “Harding was not going to reveal that an important Panama
Papers/Mossack Fonseca shell company owner was William Browder who used it to launder Russian profits. As Harding is a Browder acolyte,
that fact stayed hidden.”
Browder himself is a dubious American ex-pat carpetbagger who waded into the corrupt privatization schemes initiated during Boris
Yeltsin’s reign which gave birth to the rise of the Russian oligarchy of gangsters/entrepreneurs. Browder was convicted in absentia of
deliberate bankruptcy and tax-evasion and sentenced to nine years in prison. Komisar has maintained a steady attack on Browder’s
Magnitsky hoax at her website thekomisarscoop.com.
And so having a CIA operative using a pen name (shades of E. Howard Hunt) to defend Harding while pointing the finger once again at
Russia has all the earmarks of Operation Mockingbird redux.
Well that story changed fast: there was a ‘blockbuster’ report earlier this week that initially appeared to demonstrate evidence of the Trump campaign passing polling data to the Kremlin. Specifically, it was a revealed that Paul Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnik allegedly discussed a Ukrainian ‘peace plan’ during a meeting in Madrid in early 2017. It’s unclear if this is the same plane as the ‘peace plan’ Michael Cohen, Felix Sater, Andreii Artemenko, Alexander Rovt, and Curk Weldon were working on (which started in early 2016). Artemenko is claiming that he never met Manafort or Kilimnik and that this must of been a different peace plan. So that would be interesting, albeit somewhat unsurprising, if Manafort and Kilimnik were at least aware of that same ‘peace plan’ and potentially working on it. But it would be pretty notable if they were working on a different plan from the Artemenko plan.
But here’s the big revelation from the report: Manafort and Rick Gates both passed polling data — most of it public data, but some private — to Konstantin Kilimnik in the “spring of 2016”. Keep in mind that “spring” technically begins in March, the same month the ‘Fancy Bear’ phishing attacks started against the DNC. Although “spring” could also be as late as June.
Critically, it was also initially reported that Manafort and Gates asked Kilimnik to pass the information along to Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch who Manafort and Kilimnik previously worked for (before Deripaska accused them of embezzling his money). If true, it would potentially have been evidence of the Trump campaign manager passing the kind of data to a Kremlin oligarch that could have been used for selecting US voters to politically target.
But then there was a correction to the report: it turns out Manafort and Gates didn’t ask Kilimnik to pass the polling data to Deripaska. They asked Kilimnik to pass the data along to Serhiy Lyovochkin and Rinat Akhmetov. And as the article notes, Manafort thought Lyovochkin(Lyvochkin/Lovochkin) and Akhmetov owed him millions of dollars from past services that had yet to be paid.
Recall how Lyovochkin appears to have been Manafort’s key partner within the Yanukovych administration in orchestrating the ‘Hapsburg Group’ lobbying campaign — a lobbying campaign designed to convinced the EU to allow Ukraine into a trade agreement and away from Russia’s orbit — and the evidence that Lyovochkin may have simultaneously played roles in both pushing for the initial government crackdown on the pro-EU protestors and then fomented the public backlash that sparked the Maidan protests.
Also recall how Kilimnik formed a lobbying company with Sam Patten, a GOP political consultant with a recent history of working for Cambridge Analytica’s parent company SCL (he worked for SCL in 2015 on the Nigerian campaign, where SCL hired hackers to use against their client’s opponent). This lobbying business resulted in Patten getting charged with violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) when it was revealed that Lyovochkin was one of his clients and the firm was lobbying on behalf of Lyovochkin’s Opposition Bloc party. And recall how Patten’s and Kilimnik’s 2015 work in Ukraine was for Vitali Klitschko’s mayoral campaign and it was Lyovochkin who arranged for Patten to do that work. So Patten and Kilimnik were consulting for one of the key pro-Maidan figures in 2015 and Lyovochkin was behind that, which is just one of the many pieces of circumstantial evidence that suggests Lyovochkin has been basically working as a pro-Western Ukrainian politician for some time now.
Finally, recall how Kilimnik’s background doesn’t just include his education at a GRU-connected language institute. He also went on to work for the International Republican Institute before teaming up with Manafort to start their Ukrainian consulting work in 2004. It was Rinat Akhmetov, the riches man in Ukraine and the primary financier behind the Party of Regions/Opposition Bloc political parties, who initially wanted to hired Manafort’s services.
So now we learn that Manafort and Gates wanted Kilimnik to pass polling data to Lyovochkin and Akhmetov relatively early on in the 2016 race during the “spring” of 2016 while the primaries were still going on. And based on what we’ve seen about Manafort’s and Lyovochkin’s time working together, they appear to have a close working relationship on covert operations like the ‘Hapsburg Group’ lobbying initiative and the provocations against the Maidan protestors. And we’re also learning that Manafort thought Lyovochkin and Akhmetov owed him millions. Might this polling data have been given to them for the purpose of providing some sort of ‘service’ for the Trump campaign? We definitely can’t rule it out, but if there was some sort of service being provided for Manafort it’s hard to see it being in the service of the Kremlin given Lyovochkin’s background:
“Both Mr. Manafort and Rick Gates, the deputy campaign manager, transferred the data to Mr. Kilimnik in the spring of 2016 as Mr. Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination, according to a person knowledgeable about the situation. Most of the data was public, but some of it was developed by a private polling firm working for the campaign, according to the person.”
So mostly public polling data was passed along to Kilimnik in the spring of 2016, with Lyovochkin and Akhmetov being two of the intended recipients:
Then, we are told that Manafort and Kilimnik met in August of 2016 to discuss some sort of plan for Ukraine and then met several times in early 2017 again to discuss the plan. Artemenko insists that this must have been a different plan:
So it’s worth recalling that, back when we first learned about the Ukrainian peace plan proposal in early 2017, there were reports that there was an alternate deal to abandon the Minsk peace accords that was being put forward by Victor Punchuk, Serhiy Taruta, Vadym Chernysh, and Andriy Yermolayev, the head of Nova Ukraina think tank, which is close to Serhiy Lyovochkin. Might this plan have been the plan Manafort and Kilimnik were discussing?:
“Artemenko is not the only one to suggest an alternative to Minsk. Since December, suggestions to abandon the failed Minsk peace deal have also been made by oligarch Victor Pinchuk, businessman and former governor of Donetsk Oblast Serhiy Taruta, Vadym Chernysh, the minister for the temporarily occupied territories, and Andriy Yermolayev, the head of Nova Ukraina think tank, which is close to Serhiy Lyovochkin, a top lawmaker from the Opposition Bloc and ex-president Viktor Yanukovych’s former chief of staff.”
First, recall that Serhiy Taruta was involved in that bizarre fake congressional hearing and was using the services of Cambridge Analytica-spinoff AIQ to do it.
Was there just one ‘peace plan’ or multiple? And if there were multiple schemes, which ones were Manafort and Kilimnik working on? Is it possible that Manafort and Kilimnik were actually working on a completely different plan from Sater and Cohen? That would be pretty amazing, but given how compartmentalized the lives of these people are we can’t rule it out.
So that all adds some additional mystery in terms of what exactly Manafort was up to. But it’s worth keeping in mind that one of Manafort’s specialties as a political consulting was reading polls. That’s what he did for a living and the ostensible reason he was hired to be Trump’s campaign manager. And his long-time partner in that job was Konstantin Kilimnik. And that points towards one obvious possibility for giving this kind of polling data — most of which was public — to Kilimnik: So Kilimnik could analyze it and give a second opinion. Sure, not being an American would presumably complicate the analysis. But don’t forget that Manafort’s specialty was going into countries he didn’t know and acting as a poll-driven political consultant. So Manafort’s own resume is a testimony to fact that this kind of work doesn’t have to be done by someone very familiar with the country where the campaigning is taking place. Might that have been one of the reasons for handing this data off to Kilimnik? Perhaps, but that still leaves the mystery of why Lyovochkin and Akhmetov would have found it useful, especially since they apparently owed Manafort millions.
Now that the relationship between Paul Manafort and Sergei Lovochkin (Lyvochkin/Lyovochkin) has become a key area of inquiry in the #TrumpRussia investigation following the revelation that Manafort passed polling information in the spring of 2016 to Konstantin Kilimnik and requested that Kilimnik pass the information along to Rinat Akhmetov and Sergei Lyovochkin, it worth noting that the questions swirling around Manafort, Lovochkin, and the twin periods of violence that precipitated the collapse of the Yanukovych government — the December 2013 attack by the Ukrainian security forces on the protesters who emerged right after the pullout of the EU trade agreement negotiations that sparked the Maidan protests and the February 2014 sniper attacks during the Maidan protests — are now questions at the heart of the #TrumpRussia investigation.
Because if Manafort and Lovochkin were engaged in some sort of high-risk gambit in the 2016 campaign, the possibility that the two may have engaged in a high risk regime change gambit in Ukraine two years earlier is obviously highly relevant. And since that high risk regime change gambit in Ukraine appeared to be a pro-EU gambit, that makes the Manafort/Lovochkin coordination in Ukraine a particularly important chapter of history for understanding what Manafort may have been up to in 2016.
Along those lines, given the circumstantial evidence that Manafort and Lovochkin were involved in instigating the initial December 2013 police crackdown on the protestors — evidence in the form of Lovochkin’s television station suddenly giving the protests wall-to-wall coverage sympathetic to the protestors at the same time Lovochkin resigned as chief of staff and Paul Manafort’s daughters hacked text messages claiming that it was her dad’s idea “to send those people out and get them slaughtered. Do you know whose strategy that was to cause that Revolts [sic] and what not […] As a tactic to outrage the world and get focus on Ukraine.” — here’s another interesting piece of evidence: It turns out that one of the two Ukrainian officials who investigators focused on who allegedly gave direct orders for the 2013 crackdown — Vladimir Sivkovych — worked in the Kyiv offices of Paul Manafort’s firm, Davis Manafort:
“Investigations have focused on two officials who allegedly gave direct orders for the purge — one is Vladimir Sivkovych, a former KGB agent who worked with the Davis Manafort firm in Kyiv, and the other is then-Kyiv City Administration Chairman Oleksandr Popov.”
It’s quite an intriguing fun fact: Vladimir Sivkovych, one of the two Ukrainian officials suspected of giving direct orders to attack the protestors in 2013, worked with the Davis Manafort firm in Kyiv.
While it remains unknown who actually gave the order, the other suspect, then–Kyiv City Administration Chairman Oleksandr Popov, appears to have been exonerated and Opposition Bloc Member of Parliament Nestor Shufrich claims the attack couldn’t have happened without Lovochkin and Sivkovych:
Then there’s the claims of Ihor Kolomoisky that Lovochkin as directly responsible. Keep in mind that Kolomoisky, or really any of these figures, isn’t exactly a trustworthy individual on these matters. But note Lovochkin’s rebuttal: he points out that he resigned as Yanukovych’s chief of staff specifically because Yanukovych pulled out of the EU trade agreement talks and because of the attacks on the protestors. It, again, highlights how Lovochkin appeared to be fully on board with the push to shift Ukraine towards a European path. Which, ironically, is part of the circumstantial evidence pointing towards Lovochkin being behind those orders to attack the protestors:
And, of course, there’s the circumstantial evidence of Andrea Manafort’s hacked text messages where she explicitly describes her dad orchestrating some sort of violence against the Ukrainian protestors to grab the world’s attention. We don’t know if he was referring to the 2013 attacks or the 2014 sniper attacks, but she was clearly referring to one of those events:
So there was already a good deal of circumstantial evidence pointing towards Manafort and Lovochkin both playing key roles in instigating the December 2013 attack by the Berkut on the protestors, and we can add Vladimir Sivkovych’s work at the Kyiv offices of Manafort Davis to that circumstantial evidence.
And as the following article about the testimony of Rick Gates notes, Gates explicitly testified that Sivkovych was working for Manfort Davis during his testimony.
The article also gives more information on the group of Ukrainian oligarchs behind the ‘Hapsburg Group’. According to gates, there were six oligarchs involved with the effort, each playing different roles. Lovochkin played the largest role in paying Manafort during the lobbying effort period period. The article notes that U.S. government exhibits show offshore accounts linked to Lovochkin funneling $42,042,307 to Manafort from 2010 to 2013.
There’s Sergey Tigipko. According to Gates, Tigipko was behind the actual financing of the ‘Hapsburg Group’ through a Cyprus firm Tigipko controlled called Dresler Holdings.
Borys Kolesnikov, Ukraine’s former infrastructure minister, initially advising Manafort and Gates to use the Cypriot payment structure.
Andriy Klyuyev, a former secretary of Ukraine’s National Security Council and the brief, final head of Yanukovych’s Presidential Administration, was responsible for financing “polling work” as well as “political campaigns” for the Party of Regions, according to Gates. Government exhibits show payments of $4,190,111 for the work.
Then there’s Victor Pinchuk. According to US prosecutors, Manafort received $5 million from Pinchuk through a Cypriot company called Plymouth Consultants Limited. Recall how Pinchuk is a financier of the Atlantic Council and has been one of the loudest advocates for a ‘New Cold War’ with Russia. Pinchuk still sits on the advisory board of the Atlantic Council. Recall how Dmitri Alperovitch, the founder of CrowdStrike and the leading figure behind the initial conclusion that Russian government hackers were behind the DNC hack, is also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
And there was another rather stunning revelation in Gates’s testimony: according to Gates, in the summer of 2014, the FBI started investigating the Cyprus money-laundering operation used to finance the ‘Hapsburg Group’ efforts. Gates and Manafort were interviewed by the FBI and told them all about it. Inexplicably, the allegations — and admissions — that Manafort and Gates made to U.S. investigators went untouched until 2017. So that’s all part of the context of what the US government knew about Manafort’s work in Ukraine.
So from the prosecution and testimony of Rick Gates we learned a lot more about who was behind Manafort’s work in Ukraine during the ‘Hapsburg Group’ years, figures like Victor Pinchuk in addition to Lovochkin and Akhmetov. We also learn that Gates and Manafort told FBI investigators in teh summer of 2014 about the Cyprus money laundering used to finance the Hapsburg Group but this went untouched by investigators until 2017. And we also got confirmation that Vladimir Sivkovych was indeed working for Manafort Davis:
“Gates testified to a scheme that saw six Ukrainian oligarchs and politicians — Lovochkin, Akhmetov, Sergey Tigipko, Borys Kolesnikov, Victor Pinchuk and Andriy Klyuyev — pay Manafort millions of dollars through Cyprus-located offshores in exchange for “building the Party of Regions.””
It wasn’t just Akhmetov and Lovochkin behind the Hapsburg Group lobbying effort. Oligarchs like Sergey Tigipko, Borys Kolesnikov, Andriy Klyuyev, and Victor Pinchuk were also involved in the financing and planning of the effort. That was all part of Rick Gates’s testimony, in addition to Gates confirming that Vladimir Sivkovych worked at the Kyiv office of Davis Manafort:
Lovochkin paid for the bulk of Gates’s and Manafort’s working for the Party of Region from 2010–2013, with ~$42 million going to him during this period from Lovochkin’s offshore entities. Another $5 million was paid to manafort in 2014 following the Maidan protests for Manafort’s work in forming the new Opposition Bloc:
Sergey Tigipko appears to be the oligarch who actually financed the Hapsburg Group efforst, using a Cyprus firm he allegedly controlled, Dresler Holdings:
Borys Kolesnikov advised Manafort on how to use the Cypriot payment structure, and also appears to have paid Manafort $8.7 million from 2010–2013:
Andriy Klyuyev financed Manafort’s polling work and other payments for “political campaigns” for the Party of Regions, paying Manafort $4.1 million. It’s a reminder that Manafort must have a pretty top notch polling operation in Ukraine, which is worth keeping in mind given that the passing of polling information to Manafort’s Ukrainian clients is now part of the #TrumpRussia investigation. It would be interesting to know how well-staffed that polling operation was in the spring of 2016 after Manafort joined the Trump campaign:
And then there’ Victor Pinchuk, who sits on the advisory board of the Atlantic Council. Pinchuk paid Manafort $5 million, although it’s unclear what services were rendered for that money:
So that’s a more expansive look at who Manafort was working with on the Hapsburg Group efforts. Interestingly, when those efforts failed, resulting in the Maidan protests (possibly sparked by Manafort) and the collapse of the Yanukovych government, Manafort offered to work for Petro Poroshenko’s presidential campaign in 2014. In one sense, tt’s quite a turn of events. But when viewed in the context of the Hapsburg Group, it’s a very logical turn of events:
Poroshenko didn’t end up taking Manafort up on his offer, so Manafort went back to working on the creation of the new Opposition Bloc for Akhmetov and Lovochkin. And it was around this time, in the summer of 2014, that the FBI’s investigation into the assets allegedly stolen by Yanukovych led the FBI to question Gates and Manafort about the Cyprus money-laundering to finance the Hapsburg Group. Gates testified that he and Manafort told the FBI all about this, but the investigation was dropped until 2017:
So that’s all part of what we know about the figures behind Manafort’s work in Ukraine and the Hapsburg Group lobbying effort. Vladimir Sivkovych, one of the two main suspects in ordering the attacks on the protestors in 2013, actually worked at the Manafort Davis Kyiv office. And figures like Victor Pinchuk, a member of the Atlantic Council advisory board, paid Manafort at least $5 million for services. Two facts that have becoming increasingly relevant to understanding the nature of the relationship between Manafort, Lovochking, Akhmetov, and the possible reasons for Manafort’s sharing of US polling data with them in the spring of 2016.
There was a recent piece in the New York Times about the Mueller investigation looking into the surprising number of Ukrainians who ended up ended the Trump inauguration. As we should expect, the investigation also includes a number of questions about basic criminality in how the Trump inauguration fund was operated. Did the Trump Org self-enrich by renting its own properties and services at inflated prices? Was the inauguration fund accepting money from foreigners? Did it accept secret donations? Those are some of the questions investigators are reportedly asking.
Part of what makes this particular angle of the #TrumpRussia investigation potentially very explosive is that Ivanka Trump might be implicated in the decision to overcharge the inauguration fund for the use of Trump properties and services. It’s the kind of crime that is largely independent of any questions of foreign collusion, so it’s sort of ‘low hanging fruit’ legally. How will Trump respond to ‘low hanging’ legal fruit that might implicate Ivanka? We’ll see, but it’s not like Don Jr. is potentially in trouble here. This is Ivanka.
Another part of this story that should be potentially quite explosive is the fact that the Ukrainians who were in attendance that the inaugural parties are the same Ukrainians we’ve seen who don’t appear to be Kremlin cronies but quite the opposite.
Andrei Artemenko is one of the Ukrainian figures who was in Washington during the inauguration. He claims he didn’t attend any of the inaugural festivities and instead met with Republicans to discuss his peace plan. Recall how Artemenko helped found the virulently anti-Russian neo-Nazi Right Sector party. Foreign Policy described Artemenko as “Tall and brawny, Artemenko is a populist politician with ties to the far-right Ukrainian military-political group “Right Sector” and a member of the pro-Western opposition parliamentary coalition led by former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s party. In Kiev, he’s known for being outspoken and politically ambitious.” Also recall how the middle-man who introduced Artemenko to Felix Sater and Michael Cohen was Alexander Oronov, Michael Cohen’s brother’s father-in-law, Alexander Oronov, was a Ukrainian oligarch who co-owned an ethanol company with Viktor Topolov. Topolov and Artemenko are close associates. And that “peace plan” he was negotiating with Felix Sater and Michael Cohen included a scheme for upgrading Ukraine’s nuclear power plants to ween Ukraine off of Russian electricity, with the goal of disconnecting Ukraine from Russia’s power grid by 2025. It’s typically called a “pro-Russian” peace plan because it would have involved the lifting of sanctions, as is the case in the New York Times article below, which ignores the fact that any peace plan, whether or came from pro-Russian or pro-EU forces, would involve the lifting of sanctions. Because of course that would be part of it. Otherwise it wouldn’t be much of a peace plan.
Another Ukrainian oligarch at the inauguration was Serhiy Lyovochkin (Lovochkin/Lyvochkin), the former chief of staff of Viktor Yanukovych. Recall how Lyovochkin was Paul Manafort’s key partner in financing and orchestrating the ‘Hapsburg Group’ lobbying effort, which happened to be an effort to pull Ukraine out of the Kremlin’s orbit and towards the EU by overcoming EU and US opposition to Ukraine joining the EU Trade Association agreement. Also recall how Lyovochkin and Manafort are the two key suspects of being behind the orders for the Berkut to violently crackdown and sweep away the protestors who gathered following the collapse of the EU Trade Association talks in December of 2013. Lyovoshkin’s television station gave the protestors extensive and very sympathetic coverage, helping to spark the broader Maidan protests that culminated the in sniper attacks and the collapse of the Yanukoych government in February of 2014.Lyovochkin was rumored to have considered resigning around this time and was fired by Yanukovitch in January 2014.
So, despite the frequent media characterization of Lyovochkin as ‘pro-Russian’, he’s clearly a pro-EU Ukrainian oligarch and he’s one of the attendees of the Trump inaugural Liberty Ball that investigators are looking into. That includes looking into possible campaign finance money-laundering crimes.
And don’t forget about that recent report about Paul Manafort handing US polling data off to Kilimnik in the spring of 2016. It was initially reported that Manafort asked Kilimnik to hand that data off to Kremlin oligarch Oleg Deripaska but that was later corrected when it was revealed that Manafort had actually asked Kilimnik to hand the polling data off to Lyovochkin and Rinat Akhmetov.
Related to Lyovochkin’s attendance at these inaugural events is the story about GOP consultant Sam Patten pleading guilty to funneling $50,000 to the Trump inaugural fund using an American straw buyer for four tickets. And it was Lyovochkin who paid for the four tickets. That’s how he attended the Liberty Ball. The other three tickets were given to Kilimnik, Patten, and an unknown Ukrainian. Patten formed a consulting company in the US with Konstantin Kilimnik. Both Patten and Kilimnik had previously worked for the International Republican Institute. It was through this consulting company that Patten provided services to Lovochkin that he didn’t disclose, hence the FARA violation charge. Patten also worked at Cambridge Analytica and SCL and played a central role in SCL’s 2015 work the Nigerian government that involved obtaining hacked documents. So Sam Patten is like a GOP dirty tricks specialist who was also a specialist at working with Ukrainian oligarchs, making him perfect for a task like setting up a straw buyer to get Lyovochkin, Kilimnik, and Patten himself tickets to the inaugural events.
One of the other Ukrainian oligarchs who attended the inaugural events that investigators are looking into is Pavel Fuks (Fuchs). Recall how Fuks and is the Ukrainian-Russian oligarch who as a Moscow property developer and was involved with one of Trump’s earlier attempts to build a Trump Tower Moscow back in 2008. He relocated to Ukraine in 2017 and has been sanctioned by Russia. Fuchs is quite close to the mayor of Kharkiv, Gennady Kernes. In May of 2017, Rudolph Giuliani was hired by the city of Kharviv to do some sort of cybersecurity work for the city through his company Giuliani Security. Giuliani was also working on creating “a U.S. office for supporting investment in the city.”
As the New York Times article below points out, Fuks stayed at Trump International Hotel and spent time with Vitaliy Khomutynnik, a Ukrainian MP and wealthy businessman. Khomutynnik had been a Party of Regions member until February 21, 2014, when 28 Party of Regions members left the party after two days of sniper attacks at the Maidan. That group of Party of Regions members that left in the days following the sniper violence created the Revival (Vidrodzhennia) party and Khomutynnik became its leader. These Revival party members were described by one expert as a group of oligarchs aligned with Ihor Kolomoisky, a powerful Ukrainian oligarch who funder of the volunteer battalions including the Azov battalion. So neither Fuks nor Kohmutynnik appear to be particularly Kremlin-aligned these days. According the New York Times article below, Fuks and Khomutynnik talked with Republican Representatives Kevin McCarthy and Ed Royce during the inauguration. McCarthy was the Majority Leader at the time and Royce was head of the House Foreign Affairs committee.
The New York Times article below lists a pair of Ukrainian oligarch who haven’t really shown up in any of the previous #TrumpRussia-related stories: Serhiy Kivalov and Borislav Bereza. Both attended the Liberty Ball, but wouldn’t say how they got their tickets. Bereza claimed he got his tickets free from someone “connected to Illinois,” though he said, “I don’t remember for sure.”
Kivalov is a former Party of Regions parliamentary member who is now part of the Opposition Bloc. Kivalov is known for heading the 2004 elections commission that initially declared Viktor Yanukovych the winner of that election over Viktor Yuschenko, leading to the Orange Revolution protests. Kivalov is also known for sponsoring a 2012 law that made the Russian language (and 18 other regional languages) official languages in the Ukrainian states where a large enough portion of the populace speaks those languages. Kivalov touted the law as being in keeping with the EU’s dedication to supporting minority rights. So Kivalov is clearly in the Party of Regions/Opposition Bloc camp. But as figures like Lyovochkin, Fuks, and Kohmutynnik make clear, that camp has a pro-EU faction and it was this faction that was well-represented at the inaugural events. Is Kivalov also part of that faction? That’s unclear at this point, but it’s quite notable that virtually all of the other Ukrainian politicians at the inaugural events that we know of at this point were appear to be of the pro-EU variety. Of course, as we’ll see in the New York Times article, they are all described as “pro-Russian”, generally by referencing their past associations with the Party of Regions, as is the unfortunate norm across the media in the coverage of this story.
Borislav Bereza is a Ukrainian member of parliament as an independent candidate and a former spokesperson for Right Sector. He’s also Orthodox Jewish which is remarkable given how filled that party is with neo-Nazis, but that might explain why he was chosen as the group’s spokesperson because he’s perfect for whitewashing the nature of the group. There’s a fascinating 2014 interview of Bereza in Tablet magazine where he simultaneously asserts that Right Sector itself isn’t the far right bigoted it’s portrayed as being but is instead a cross-section of Ukrainian society at the same time he acknowledges that the party is filled with anti-Semites and homophobes (that’s quite a cross-section). So Bereza, like Artemenko, is pretty clearly a far right politician associated with one of the most anti-Russian parties in Ukraine, albeit an unusual one. Bereza characterized the ball as “a place where, over a glass of champagne, you are introduced to people who have influence in the new administration of the White House. These are the traditions of the United States,” on Facebook. He also attributed the claims about Ukrainians’ paying for tickets to jealousy from those who were not invited in response to Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko accusing rivals of paying as much as $200,000 for inaugural tickets.
So that’s what we know about the Ukrainians that investigators are looking into regarding Trump inaugural actions. But before we get that New York Times article, here’s a look at a ProPublica report from last month that describes another key area of inquiry by investigators: whether or not there were campaign finance money-laundering crimes committed by the Trump team in order to both self-enrich off of the record amounts of money that was flowing into the Trump inaugural fund and hide the full scope of the donations that were pouring in.
The possible crimes also include obscuring foreign donations. Obscuring foreign money flowing into the inaugural fund is, of course, exactly what Sam Patten engaged in when he set up an American straw buyer to purchase four tickets to the Liberty Ball using $50,000 of Lyovochkin’s money. But as the following article describes, the potential for foreign money secretly flowing into the inaugural funds looks to be potentially much more extensive and Rick Gates, Paul Manafort’s long-time consulting partner in Ukraine and the deputy to the chairman of the inaugural, appeared to be playing a key role. According to some vendors providing services for the inauguration, Gates was asking donors to make donations directly to the vendors. The explanation Gates gave to these vendors was that the inaugural committee had received more money than was initially targeted, and, therefore, he wished to reduce the publicly reported sum raised. So Rick Gates, who worked hand in glove with Manafort during Manfort’s time in Ukraine, was also setting up an inaugural donation back channel in order to hide donations. So in addition to American straw buyers, we know there was a potential back channel available for making effectively secret donations to the inauguration.
As the ProPublica report also points out, the question of whether or not the Trump Organization was self-enriching by overcharging for fees and services (fees like charging exorbitant prices for renting Trump’s properties where the events were held and overpaying for Trump Org staffers involved with the event) could become a true legal nightmare for President Trump. Why? Because Ivanka Trump might be at the center of those self-enrichment decisions. So while many of the questions swirling around the Trump inauguration and the Ukrainian lobbying effort that appeared to be taking place are the kinds of questions that Trump himself might not fear too much because the answers point in the direction of Manafort’s work with the pro-EU faction of Ukrainians, we still shouldn’t be too surprised if Trump starts acting extra insane as the investigation into the inauguration plays out given the Ivanka angle and the fact that Rick Gates apparently led the scheme to hide donations and he’s now a cooperating witness:
“The inauguration paid the Trump Organization for rooms, meals and event space at the company’s Washington hotel, according to interviews as well as internal emails and receipts reviewed by WNYC and ProPublica.”
Imagine that: Having the Trump Organization run the inauguration turned out to be a giant corrupt mess. And Ivanka appears to be at the center of the questions involving the Trump Org’s self-enrichment. But there’s also the question of foreign donors illegally funneling money into the inauguration. It’s a multi-faceted corrupt mess:
And it was none other than cooperating witness Rick Gates who appears to be leading the efforts to secretly direct donations into inauguration. Gate’s strategy was simple: have the donor directly pay the vendors. But there’s a problem with that plan: the vendors now know about it. And some of them are talking:
So how much money was secretly donating to the inaugural funds and secretly embezzled by the Trump Org? We don’t know. But of the record $107 million in reported donations, $40 million remains unaccounted for:
And as the report notes, in a separate, a U.S. lobbyist (Sam Patten) pleaded guilty to helping a Ukrainian businessman and member of Parliament (Serhei Lyovochkin) buy tickets to the inauguration (tickets used by Patten, Lyovochkin, Kilimnik, and an still unknown Ukrainian to attend the Liberty Ball):
And as we’ve seen, when you pan out and look at the bigger picture, the case of Sam Patten’s straw buying isn’t really a separate episode. It’s all part of the larger question of the nature of the Ukrainian delegation that attended the inauguration and the role this pro-EU Ukrainian network may have played in the whole #TrumpRussian 2016 campaign activities.
Now here’s the recent New York Times article that describes that pro-EU faction of Ukrainians who attended the inauguration. Of course, they are all described as “pro-Russian” Ukrainians despite all the evidence to the contrary, so keep in mind all of the evidence to the contrary that doesn’t get mentioned:
“The transition of power in Washington attracted officials and business executives from around the world seeking entree and influence with the new administration. While many parties and other gatherings during that period were open to anyone, packages for more exclusive events organized by Mr. Trump’s presidential inaugural committee started at $25,000 for two tickets to one of the official black tie balls and other events, according to a brochure listing inaugural committee “underwriter benefits.””
$25,000 for two tickets to the official black tie balls and other events. That was the price of getting to mingle with the incoming administration. And it’s a price plenty of Ukrainians were willing to pay. And the fact that these Ukrainians tended to either have a past history of working with Paul Manafort (like Serhiy Lyovochkin) or were engaged in secret negotiations and schemes with Michael Cohen and Felix Sater during the campaign (like Andrei Artemenko) is what made these questions about possible campaign finance crimes involving the inaugural fund the kinds of questions the Mueller team is interested in:
The article notes how Manafort received was paid tens of millions of dollars over the last dozen years by “Russia-aligned Ukrainian interests”. Again, keep in mind that these “Russia-aligned Ukrainian interests” included the Hapsburg Group lobbying effort Manafort was running with Serhiy Lyovochkin to get Ukraine allowed into the EU Trade Association. Also keep in mind that Konstantin Kilimnik spent a decade working for the International Republican Institute (IRI) — a US government-backed think-tank — and even worked for the Moscow branch of the IRI before teaming up with Manafort to work in Ukraine. So when we are reminded that Manafort handed polling data to Kilimnik and asked that the data be given to Serhiy Lyovochkin, that shouldn’t really be seen as an example of Manafort working with “Russian-aligned Ukrainian interests”:
Then the article mentions how it was GOP consultant Sam Patten who found the American straw buyer to buy four tickets for $50,000 using money donated by Lyovochkin. Patten, Kilimnik, Lyovochkin, and an unknown Ukrainian attended the Liberty Ball with those tickets:
There there’s the presence of Andrei Artemenko, who also attended the inauguration and was pushing the peace plan he had been negotiating with Michael Cohen and Felix Sater. Unlike most of the other Ukrainians who attended the inauguration, Artemenko has no history with the Party of Regions or Opposition Bloc. Instead, his history is with Yulia Tymoshenko’s party, the Radical Party, and the virulently anti-Russian Right Sector. In other words, Artemenko is an unambiguously West-leaning Ukrainian politician. Artemenko claims he never actually attended any of the inaugural events that required expensive tickets and instead met with various Republicans to discuss his peace plan:
Pavel Fuks, the Ukrainian-Russian Moscow property developer who worked on teh 2008 attempt to build Trump Tower Moscow (but since fallen out of favor with the Kremlin and relocated to Ukraine), was also at the inauguration and also met with Republicans. Fuks was there with Vitaliy Khomutynnik, the leader of the “Revival” faction of former Party of Regions politicians who broke off from the party in the days following the Maidan sniper attacks:
Then we learn that Serhiy Kivalov and Borislav Bereza were both at the Liverty ball based on ther Facebook posts. They don’t say how they got the tickets. Kivalov is described as a “a Ukrainian lawmaker known for pro-Russian initiatives.” Keep in mind that one of main laws Kivalov is known for is 2012 language law that would have made Russian an official language in states where a large portion of the populace speaks Russian. It’s one of the main accomplishments Kivalov is known for. So when reading that Kivalov is known for pushing “pro-Russian” initiatives, that’s probably a reference to his sponsoring a law that was literally pro-the Russian language, which shouldn’t be seen as the sure-tell sign of a Kremlin stooge in a country where a large portion of the populace speaks Russian. And Bereza is a former spokesperson for Right Sector:
The article notes that, within days of the inauguration, the White House was making inquiries with the State Department and Congress about the easing of sanctions. Interestingly, it quotes Daniel Fried, described as a veteran diplomat who stayed on for the first several weeks of the Trump administration as the State Department’s coordinator for sanctions policy. Recall how Fried expressed a sense of betrayal towards Paul Manafort, claiming that Manafort had for years assured the State Department that Viktor Yanukovych was going to be “the guy” to bring Ukraine into the Western orbit. Manafort obviously failed at this, but keep in mind how the EU made Ukraine a really bad offer that would have condemned Ukraine to intense austerity, with no prospects of eventual EU membership, that Yanukovych ultimately rejected. So it’s kind of hard to blame Manafort for not living up to his promises to the State Department but the fact that he was making such promises were made in the first place tells us a lot about the nature of Manafort’s work in Ukraine:
Finally, the article notes how investigators are also looking into what sort of role Michael Flynn may have played in attempting to reboot the US’s relationship with Russia. While the role Flynn may have played in the peace plan discussions is still unclear, investigators are looking into whether or not Flynn and his business partners may have financial benefited from a lifting of Russian sanctions. The article also notes how a whistle-blower told congressional investigators that Flynn believed that ending the sanctions would allow a business project in he involved in to move forward. That project appears to be a scheme that would have involved partnering with Russia to building and maintain nuclear power plants across the Middle East. Recall how this scheme would have involved Saudi Arabia paying for the bulk of this nuclear power plant construction and was largely and appeared to have been largely pushed by Flynn’s US nuclear industry clients, including ex-US generals, going back to 2015. So when we’re talking about Flynn’s possible involvement in the Ukrainian peace plan scheme and the early moves by the Trump administration to lift Russian sanctions, keep in mind this is tied to a scheme involving Saudi Arabia and US nuclear power companies to enlist Russia in a scheme to build nuclear power plants across the Middle East and capture that emerging market:
And we can’t forget that this this scheme to enlist Russia as a partner in building nuclear power plants across the Middle East is just one of numerous instances where we have Middle Eastern governments getting involved in the 2016 election. Including the crown princes of Saudi Arabia and the UAE offering to help Trump’s campaign win using Cambridge Analytica-style social media manipulation. We also can’t forget that the whole Seychelles “back channel” meeting was coordinated by the UAE and appeared to involve getting Russia to agree to some sort of ‘grand bargain’ that would have realigned Russia more towards Saudi/UAE interests.
In other words, the question of what Michael Flynn may have been secretly up to during the 2016 campaign and during the transition period are questions heavily centered around his work on behalf of his non-Russian clients and questions about what role the Saudi and UAE governments may have played in the 2016 campaign. And that since this whole inaugural mess involves questions about illegal secret foreign donations, that obviously raises a lot questions about possible Middle Eastern illegal secret inaugural donations. Fortunately, it sounds like investigators are looking into that too, so hopefully we’ll eventually learn more about that.
There was a big new update to that New York Times story from last month created when Paul Manafort’s lawyers accidentally filed a legal response to the courts that revealed a bunch of text. Text about Manafort and Rick Gates giving polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik in the spring of 2016 and asking him to give it to their key Ukrainian clients, Sergei Lyovochkin and Rinat Akhmetov. And at this meeting, Manafort and Kilimnik discussed a Ukrainian peace plan.
The updates to this story are pretty significant in some ways. First, we’re learning that the meeting between Manafort, Gates, and Kilimnik didn’t happen in the spring of 2016. It happened on August 2, 2016 in the Grand Havana Room in Manhattan. So instead of the polling data hand off happening during the primaries it happened at the start of the general election after Trump and Hillary got their nominations.
And that date for this meeting, August 2, is raising the question of whether or not it really was Oleg Deripaska who received the polling data, not Lyovochkin and Akhmetov. Recall that the New York Times report last month originally reported Oleg Deripaska as the person he asked Kilimnik to give the polling data to before they corrected the article and named Lyovochkin and Ahkmetov as the recipient.
But it turns out Deripaska’s private jet did happen to make a three hour stop over in Newark right after midnight on August 3, a few hours after the end of the meeting. Many are asking of Kilimnik flew back on Deripaska’s plane. Deripaska denies this and goes as far as claiming that he’s never met Kilimnik, which seems kind of hard to believe given that Deripaska was a client of Manafort and Kilimnik’s services for years. So the shift of the date of this meeting from the “spring” of 2016 to August 2 of 2016 puts it right around the time of a mysterious Deripaska-owned plane trip to the NYC area, rekindling the suspicions that the meeting involved the handover of polling data to a Kremlin connected individual. And as the following Washington Post article describes, the presumed hand off of Trump polling data at that meeting to people that are assumed to be working for the Kremlin has become central to the Mueller team’s investigation. In other words, the Mueller team is either now assuming Deripaska was the ultimate recipient of the polling data or the Muller team is assuming that Lyovochkin and Akhmetov were working with the Kremlin.
Another new piece of information that are leading many to conclude that Deripaska was the intended recipient of the polling data is that Konstantin Kilimnik reportedly contacted Manafort on July 29, 2016, saying he had spent 5 hours talking with the man who had given Manafort “the biggest black caviar jar several years ago,” and that he had important messages to relay to Manafort as a result. The reference to “black caviar” is assumed to be a reference money, and many are concluding that this points further in the direction of Deripaska. The obvious problem with that analysis is that “several years ago” at that time would have been a reference to 2013, which is right in the middle of the ‘Hapsburg Group’ lobbying effort when Lyovochkin and Akhmetov were paying Manafort millions of dollars to manage the secret lobbying campaign to get Ukraine allowed into the EU trade association agreement. Plus, Manafort’s and Kilimnik’s dealings with Deripaska largely ended by 2010 after Deripaska accused them of embezzling his money.
So that “biggest black caviar jar several years ago” comment from Kilimnik strongly points towards reference to Lyovochkin meaning that, once again, we find that one of the clues pointing toward Manafort engaging in collusion with the Kremlin in fact points towards collusion with Lyovochkin and the pro-Western faction of Ukraine’s oligarchy. Plus, there’s been no retraction of the New York Times correction that it was Lyovochkin and Akhmetov, and not Deripaska, who received the polling data.
So is the Deripaska flight to New York the sole basis for the new assessment that Deripaska got the data? Not quite. The change in the date of this Manhattan meeting, from the “spring of 2016” to August 2, has raised questions about the source for last month’s article claiming Lyovochkin and Akhmetov were the real recipients of hte polling data.
But there’s another reason for new suspicions that Deripaska was the recipient of the polling data, although there are big problems with that theory as we’ll see: Marcy Wheeler recently had a post on her emptywheel blog that discussed the transcripts of a court hearing regarding the Mueller prosecution team’s charges that Manafort broke his cooperation agreement by continuing to lie to them released earlier this month. And as Wheeler noted, the redactions in the section of that transcript where prosecutors are talking about the hand off of the polling data might hint at Deripaska being the real intended recipient of the polling data, implying the source for the New York Times report was feeling incorrect information to the reporters when they claimed Lyovochkin and Akhmetov were the recipients. What is the basis for Wheeler’s inference that the redacted name of the polling data recipient was actually “Deripaska”? The number of characters in the redacted name, which is 9. “Deripaska” has 9 letters, “Akhmetov” 8 and “Lyovochkin” 10 letters. So when you combine that with the new revelation about the hand off of the data taking place in Manhattan hours before Deripaska’s plane landed in New York City it’s tempting to conclude that, yes, Oleg Deripaska was the actual intended recipient of that polling data.
But that analysis is flawed in one key way: there are multiple ways to spell Lyovochkin’s last name and some of those variants are 9‑letters (Lyovochkin, Lyvochkin, Lovochkin, Liovochkin). You can find plent of articles spelling his name using any of those four variations, although “Lyovochkin” and “Lovochkin” appear to be used the most. Critically, Lyovochkin himself appears to use the 9‑letter version “Lovochkin”. We can conclude that based on the fact that his personal website is lovochkin.org. There is no lyovochkin.org or liovochkin.org or lyovochkin.org. Only lovochkin.org. In other words, technically we should always be referring to him as Lovochkin, not Lyovochkin.
So if we assume that US courts are using the spelling that Lovochkin himself uses, the 9‑letter redacted name would continue to be consistent with Lovochkin being one of the intended recipients of that polling data. There’s still the questions raised by Deripaska’s plane coincidence and the fact that the source for last months article claimed the polling data took place in the spring of 2016, which is very different from the August 2 date we now have. But there’s still been no retraction by the New York Times of that correction that Lyovochkin and Akhmetov, and not Deripaska, were the actual recipients of the polling data.
Another circumstantial factor pointing in the direction of Lovochkin being the recipient of the polling data is the fact that Manafort and Kilimnik had a long, close, and ongoing working relationship with Lovochkin at that point. Plus, as we learned from the earlier report, Lovochkin still owed Manafort millions of dollars for services he had been providing. And as we’re going to see, there was a New York Times report from August 1, 2016, that raised the question of whether or not Manafort was still a client of Lovochkin at that point even after becoming Trump’s campaign manager.
So Lovochkin owed Manafort money for past services and may have handed Lovochkin polling data. Might the purpose of handing off the polling data to Lovochkin have been for the purpose of having the Opposition Bloc Ukrainian political machinery under Lovochkin’s command assist the 2016 Trump campaign as a form of paying back Manafort? Who knows, but the reality is that Lovochkin and Akhmetov ran the political machine that Manafort helped rebuild following the 2014 Maidian protests and the collapse of the Party of Regions. Did that Opposition Bloc political machine include an online dirty tricks team that could have secretly been used by the Trump campaign? It’s a possibility worth keeping in mind.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that one day after this August 2 meeting between Manafort, Gates, and Kilimnik in Manhattan there was the August 3, 2016, Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Erik Prince, George Nader, and Joel Zamen in to secretly inform Trump that the crown princes of the UAE and Saudi Arabia (MBZ and MBS) wanted to help Trump beat Hillary using Zamen’s Psy-Group to run a digital dirty tricks campaign. So at almost the same time Manafort was handing polling data over to either Lovochkin or Deripaska, Trump Jr. was meeting about the UAE and Saudi secret psy op support. The Trump campaign clearly hit its foreign collusion stride in early August.
Another aspect of this August 2 meeting that prosecutors appear to have fixated on regarding the potential signs of Trump campaign collusion with the Russian government is the fact that Konstantin Kilimnik is involved and his history with the GRU. The fact that Kilimnik’s GRU ties appear to be largely limited to going to a Soviet language school with GRU ties doesn’t appear to be factored in. And the fact that Kilimnik went on to work for the International Republican Institute from 1994 — 2005 and then spent the subsequent years working with Paul Manafort as the two tried to move Ukraine and the Party of Regions into the West’s orbit (working closely with Lovochkin for much of this) also appears to be completely ignored. So a highly suspect interpretation of Konstantin Kilimnik appears to now be at the “heart” of the Mueller team’s investigation into Trump team Russian collusion
Finally, the Mueller teams reportedly views the fact that Manafort and Kilimnik and Gates reportedly discussed a Ukrainian peace plan at the August 2 meeting as highly suspicious, especially because the plan would have involved the lifting of sanctions on Russia. Which seems like a rather odd hangup since a peace plan would probably involve the lifting of Russian sanctions. For instance, there was the peace plan put forward by Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk in December 2016 that angered much of the Ukrainian establishment when called for painful compromises to find peace, including putting aside the issue of Crimea and Ukrainian membership in the EU and Nato. Recall how Pinchuk is a member of the Atlantic Council, a vocal advocate for a new Cold War with Russia, and one of the financiers the ‘Hapsburg Group’ initiative. Even Pinchuk would be seen as a Russian spy based on his peace plan by the standards of the Mueller team.
Ok, let’s start off with this Washington Post report from a few days ago describing how Mueller’s prosecutors now view that August 2 meeting and the potential hand-off of the polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik as being at the “heart” of their ongoing investigation into Russian collusion with the Trump campaign:
“It was at that meeting that prosecutors believe Manafort and Kilimnik may have exchanged key information relevant to Russia and Trump’s presidential bid. The encounter goes “very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating,” prosecutor Andrew Weissmann told a federal judge in a sealed hearing last week.”
It’s the “heart” of the investigation at this point. An August 2 meeting in Manhattan between Manafort, Gates, and Kilimnik, with the tantalizing possibility of a hand off of polling data:
Many have noted that Trump also made some comments regarding the situation in Ukraine around that time that are viewed as pro-Kremlin. Like his comments that he’s heard that many of the people of Crimea would prefer the country be part of Russia over Ukraine. And while it may have been highly politically incorrect for Trump to say that, it actually appears be true based on polling and shouldn’t really be a surprise given the demographics of Crimea and its history. That doesn’t excuse the annexation of Crimea from an international law perspective but it is a notable complication in any sort of peace plan when it comes to the fate of Crimea. And as we’ll see below, even viruently anti-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs like Viktor Pinchuk were pushing peace plans that didn’t involve the return of Crimea:
And note how Manafort’s decision to meeting with Kilimnik is viewed as highly suspect by prosecutors under the assumption that Kilimnik was a GRU spy, which seems to ignore the reality that Manafort were long-time partners and were reportedly in frequent contact throughout Manafort’s time working on the Trump campaign:
Also note how there’s no mention by prosecutors of Kilimnik’s decade of work at the DC-based International Republican Institute before teaming up with Manafort. And even the US Embassy in Kiev admitted that Kilimnik met with officials there frequently to discuss Ukrainian politics:
Regarding the suspicion about Deripaska, we do have to acknowledge the April 2016 email Manafort sent to Kilimnik asking of the “OVD operation” (Deripaska) had seen the positive press he was getting and asking “how do we use to get whole?”, which is presumably a reference to the ongoing dispute Deripaska had with Manafort and Kilimnik going back to their work for him in 2008–2010. Given that Lovochkin and Ahkmetov reportedly owned Manafort millions in 2016, you have to wonder if have those two pay off Deripaska directly (they pay back Manafort by paying Deripaska) was part of the plan to “get whole” :
And then there’s the July 29, 2016 email Kilimnik sent to Manafort that triggered the August 2 meeting. Critically, Kilimnik refers to the the man who had given Manafort “the biggest black caviar jar several years ago,” which would have been right in the middle of the ‘Hapsburg Group’ lobbying campaign Lovochkin, Pinchuk, and other pro-Western Ukrainian oligarchs were secretly financing. So Kilimnik apparently had a 5 hour meeting with Lovochkin and then contacted Manafort about the need to relay the messages:
The August 2 meeting happens, and it involves the discussion of a peace plan. A peace plan that seems likely to have been Lovochkin’s design given the circumstantial evidence. The plan involved the lifting of Russian sanctions, which is seen as highly suspect despite the fact that any peace plan would almost certainly involve the lifting of sanctions. It’s as if maintaining those sanctions at all costs is seen as a national security issue for the US which is somewhat bizarre:
Importantly, as we’re going to see below, the particular peace plan discussed by Kilimnik and Manafort does not appear to be the same peace plan being pushed by Felix Sater and Andrei Artemenko.
Then there’s the handoff of the polling data. One of the new details we’re learning is that the non-public polling data handed over was apparently much more detailed than previously acknowledged, making it the kind of data that could be potentially useful for use in manipulating the 2016 election:
Finally, the fact that Oleg Deripaska’s plane did in fact arrive at Newark Liberty International Airport shortly after midnight on August 3 for a few hours does remain a highly suspicious event:
This has led to the understandable speculation that Kilimnik returned to Moscow on that plane. And Deripaska’s complete denials don’t exactly ease those suspicions. Because as the following article notes, not only does Deripaska claim that Kilimnik was not on the plane back to Moscow, he claims that he’s never actually met Kilimnik. And that seems rather hard to believe given the fact that he was a client of Manafort of Kilimnik and Kilimnik was apparent Manafort’s contact for Deripaska.
Although as the following article also notes, Kilimnik’s emails do indicate that his outreach to Deripaska generally ran through a Deripaska aide named “Victor” – or, as Kilimnik referred to him occasionally, “V.” This is a reference to Victor Boyarkin. So it’s possible that the Manafort/Kilimnik past relationship with Deripaska was always done through Victor Boyarkin and Deripaska never met Kilimnik in person. But it’s a denial that’s beside the point when it comes to whether or not Deripaska was involved in that August 2 meeting given the old business relationship between Manafort, Kilimnik, and Deripaska. It’s one of the complications with this whole mess: all of the players lack credibility so their denials are largely meangingless. That doesn’t mean that we can conclude that Kilimnik was on that plane, but Deripaska’s over-the-top denial of ever meeting Kilimnik ever doesn’t lend credibility to his denial about the plane trip:
“Some media reports have suggested that Deripaska might have lent his personal jet to Kilimnik around the time of the Aug. 2 meeting in New York. Flight records show it landed in Newark shortly after midnight on Aug. 3 and took off a few hours later. Deripaska’s team has denied that part before.”
It’s undoubtedly a tempting area of speculation: why did Deripaska’s plane show up shortly after this meeting? Did Kilimnik fly back on that plane to Moscow? If so, that would have been an incredible risk to take from an operational security standpoint if Kilimnik really was in the middle of a Trump campaign-Kremlin collusion effort given all the various ways this trip could have been discovered. After all, there are flight records.
But what’s most remarkable is Deripaska’s denial that he’s ever spoken with Kilimnik. Although, as the article notes, Kilimnik’s emails have references to how his outreach to Deripaska went through a Deripaska aide, Victor Boyarkin:
So that over-the-top denial by Deripaska just adds to the mystery.
But, again, we can’t ignore the facts that when Kilimnik emailed Manafort on July 29 to set up that meeting, saying he had spent five hours speaking “with the guy who gave you your biggest black caviar jar several years ago” is almost certainly a reference to someone paying him in 2013 for his work on the Hapsburg Group lobbying effort that that strongly points towards Sergei Lovochkin and Rinat Akhmetov, as the New York Times reported last month. The Deripaska flight adds to the intrigue but it doesn’t negate all of those facts that Lovochkin and Ackhmetov appear to be the individuals who spoke with Kilminik and prompted that August 2 meeting.
Next, here’s a July 31, 2016, New York Times article (published August 1, 2016) about Manafort’s history of work in Ukraine. And as it notes at the end, the question of whether or not Manafort and Kilimnik were still working for Sergei Lovochkin at that point in time remained an open question:
“It is not clear that Mr. Manafort’s work in Ukraine ended with his work with Mr. Trump’s campaign. A communications aide for Mr. Lyovochkin, who financed Mr. Manafort’s work, declined to say whether he was still on retainer or how much he had been paid.”
Yep, as of August of 2016, it remained unclear if Manafort wasn’t still working for Sergei Lovochkin. So when Kilimnik tells Manafort on July 29 that he had a five hour meeting with the “black caviar” man, he may have been referring to someone Manafort and Kilimnik were still doing work for.
Ok, now regarding the fixation on the lifting of sanctions as part of a peace plan that investigators appear to view as highly suspicious, here’s an article from February of 2017, in the wake of the initial reports on the Sater/Artkemenko peace plan, that describe the various peace plans that had been talked about in recent months. One of those plans was Kilimnik’s plan, which appeared to focus on reincorporating the separatist regions into Ukraine by having the Opposition Bloc and other opposition parties lead a dialogue. It also mentioned the possibility of Viktor Yanukovych playing a role. And while such a move is widely viewed as suspect in the West, the fact that Yanukovych appeared to be intent on moving Ukraine into the West’s orbit (which is the Hapsburg Group lobbying effort was all about) can’t be ignored. If the EU had simply not made a horrible offer to Ukraine that largely involved mass austerity it would probably would already have Ukraine in the trade agreement right now. Plus, the separatist regions broke away after what they perceived to be a coup against a legitimately elected president. So the idea of bringing Yanukovych back to lead the peace talks actually makes a great deal of sense if voluntarily reincorpating the separatist regions really is the goal.
And then there’s Viktor Pinchuk’s plan from December of 2016. Pinchuk’s plan involved explicitly putting aside the question of the fate of Crimea and the incremental lifting of sanctions on Russia in order to achieve peace. And this was the plan from an Atlantic Council and one of Ukraine’s biggest voices for a New Cold war against Russia. So as investigators vixate on peace plans and talks of lifting sanctions as a sign of Kremlin collusion, keep in mind Pinchuk’s peace plan:
“Balazs Jarabik, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told RFE/RL that he thinks the main reason for the peace plans seems to be to weaken Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who remains in limbo between the increasingly disparaged Minsk agreements and “victory.””
That sentiment expressed by Balazs Jarabik, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, seems to capture the views of many in the West regarding any peace plan for Ukraine: that they are all designed to weaken Kiev and a capitulation to the Kremlin. It’s a sentiment that the Mueller investigators appear to share, which is a rather big complication for peace.
Kilimnik’s plan appears to focus on using the Opposition Bloc and other opposition parties to essentially lead a dialogue that can bring the separatist regions back into Ukraine peacefully. Viktor Yanukovych could even play a role according to Kilimnik’s plan:
And then there was Viktor Pinchuk’s plan, which left unresolved the status of Crimea and opened the possibility of the incredmental rollback of sanctions on Russia. This is coming from one of the most pro-Western oligarchs in Ukraine:
So that’s all part of the context of now notorious August 2, 2016, meeting in Manhattan. Increasingly, it looks like Sergei Lovochkin and Rinat Akhmetov were the intended recipients of the polling data, although we still don’t know what exactly Oleg Deripaska’s role was or if it was a coincidence that his plane just happened to be in the area at that time.
And regarding Deripaska, keep in mind the reports about how the FBI had been trying to flip Deripaska from 2014–2016 and that Christopher Steele and Bruce Ohr were the two people directly to flip him. So when we’re wondering what Deripaska’s plane was doing in the US at that point in 2016, the fact that the FBI was trying to flip him that year should be kept in mind.
Here’s a rather fascinating fun fact about Sam Patten, one of the more interesting figures who got caught up in the #TrumpRussia investigation over his work in Ukraine with Konstantin Kilimnik and money-laundering allegations revolving around foreign donations to President Trump’s inauguration: The various letters written in support of Patten during his sentencing are public. One of those letters is from Patten’s wife, Laura Patten. According to her letter, Laura worked as a CIA covert operations officer overseas and, later, as the Counterintelligence Division Director at the Department of Energy. And in her last government position she was a Senior Counterintelligence Officer at the FBI’s Criminal Investigation Division, Transnational Organized Crime (East) which covers Ukraine. So that’s, uh, interesting.
First, recall how Patten and Kilimnik set up a political consulting business with Kilimnik in 2015 in Ukraine. Patten met Kilimnik when they both worked at the International Republican Institute (IRI). Their consulting clients included the Opposition Bloc and Sergei Lovochkin was the person they answered to for this work. And it was work for Lovochkin that was what part of led to the charges of violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) when Patten apparently acted as a straw buyer for tickets to Trump’s inaugural ball on behalf of a Ukrainian. That Ukrainian turned out to be Sergei Lovochkin. Patten paid the Trump inauguration fund $50,000 for four tickets. Patten also plead guilty to lying to the Senate about his foreign lobbying work and then later destroying the evidence. Patten also worked for Cambridge Analytica in 2014 and Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL, in 2015. Patten apparently played a central role in SCL’s 2015 work in Nigeria that involved the use of a hacking team to obtain hacked documents on their client’s political opponent.
Also recall how Patten’s work in Ukraine in 2015 also included consulting for Vitalii Klitschko, one of the leaders of the Maidan protests.
So Patten is clearly a highly intriguing figure in this entire affair because he touches upon so many aspects of it but does so in a way that undermines the prevailing narrative. And now we’re learning that Patten’s wife was an FBI and CIA counterintelligence official who’s work covered Ukraine.
Ok, first, here’s an article about Patten receiving a rather light sentence of just three years of probation, 500 hours of community service, and a $5,000 fine. This sentence came down from U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, the same judge that sentenced Paul Manafort. Jackson accepted the prosecutors’ request for leniency while Patten’s defense team cited his substantial assistance in several ongoing, undisclosed investigations:
“He was sentenced to three years of probation, 500 hours of community service and fined $5,000.”
Three years of probation. That was what Patten got for a crime that could have been punishable for up to five years in prison. Prosecutors asked for leniency and the defense cited “the substantial assistance he provided in several ongoing, undisclosed investigations”:
So that’s pretty notable that there are several ongoing, undisclosed investigations and Patten has provided substantial assistance.
And keep in mind that Patten and Kilimnik met while they were both working at the International Republican Institute, a pro-democracy group affiliated with the U.S. Republican Party. It’s quite a resume item for Kilimnik, someone who is routinely referred to as a GRU agent these days:
Ok, now here’s an excerpt from the letter Patten’s wife, Laura Patten, wrote in support of Sam where she describes how she worked as a CIA covert operations officer overseas and, later, as the Counterintelligence Division Director at the Department of Energy. And in her last government position she was a Senior Counterintelligence Officer at the FBI’s Criminal Investigation Division, Transnational Organized Crime (East) which covers Ukraine:
“I have devoted the bulk of my adult life to promoting U.S. interests and protecting our nation from foreign adversaries, first as a Central Intelligence Agency covert operations officer overseas, and later as an overt Counterintelligence Division Director at the Department of Energy here in Washington. In my last government position, I served as a Senior Counterintelligence Officer detailed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Criminal Investigation Division, Transnational Organized Crime (East), which covers Ukraine and broad swaths of the former Soviet empire. In 2017, I joined a private firm where I still work. I hold a Master’s in International Affairs from Columbia University, and am pursuing a Ph.D.”
It’s quite a background for the wife of one of the figures who is allegedly at the heart of a Kremlin collusion scheme. And note the reference to Laura apparently speaking with the FBI in 2014 (the year of the Maidan protests and downfall of the Yanukovych government) about Sam’s ability and willingness to help them access and analyze for subjects of investigative value — including those that are pertinent to this case:
Also note Laura’s apparently befuddlement at the government’s charges that “Foreigner A” (Konstantin Kilimnik) was “in the throes of a Russian intelligence agency during the period in which he worked with Sam”. Highly understandable befuddlement given that Kilimnik was an IRI employee for ten year. But it must be especially befuddling given that Laura was an FBI and CIA counterintelligence officer whose work included Ukraine. One would think this assessment of Kilimnik as a GRU agent would have come up during the course of her work before now:
“As a counterintelligence officer, I was aware of, and engaged in, multiple efforts to warn American citizens when a specific foreign threat actor targeted him or her. Thus, I am left wondering what would have happened had our government warned us, per normal and customary national security protocols, about what it believes if Foreigner A’s affiliation with Russian intelligence?”
Why didn’t the US government warn Laura that her husband’s business partner is a GRU agent? It’s a pretty massive question that will presumably remain officially unaddressed. And that’s all part of what makes the remarkably lenient sentencing for Sam Patten so notable.
There was never really any question as to whether or not the testimony of Attorney General Bill Barr before the Senate Judiciary Committee would be a disaster. The question was what kind of disaster. And now we know what kind of disaster: a constitutional crisis disaster where Barr repeatedly argues that presidents can legally obstruct investigations into themselves that they view as unfair and they are being falsely accused:
““If the President is being falsely accused — and the evidence now suggests that the accusations against him were false — and he knew they were false, and he felt that this investigation was unfair, propelled by his political opponents, and was hampering his ability to govern, that is not a corrupt motive for replacing an independent counsel,” Barr testified.”
It’s not corrupt for a president to replace the independent counsel investigating them as long as the president knows the accusations are false. That’s seriously what the attorney general argue in front of Congress. Beyond that, Barr went on to argue that Trump wouldn’t just have the constitutional authority to replace an independent counsel. Trump could shut the entire thing down, as long as he feels he’s being falsely accused and the investigation is groundless:
So that’s obviously a huge disaster. Because now it’s no longer a question about whether or not the obstruction of justice allegations in the Mueller report (and the obstruction of justice Trump engaged in publicly) constitute impeachable offenses for Trump. Barr just made impeachment of himself a political issue. Arguably an urgent political issue. And that more or less guarantees that impeachment is going to be a central issue heading into 2020.
But as with so much of this #RussiaGate story, the open obstruction of justice on the part of the Trump team doesn’t negate the many problems with the underlying narrative we are told about what happened in 2016. And those underlying problems can, in turn, feed into the Trump team’s charges that they were completely set up and are totally innocent. So as the impeachment investigations grow in scope and seriousness, the possibility of a serious reexamination of the facts surrounding this case is going to grow as a result of the Trump team adopting a “Trump can legally obstruct as long as he was falsely accused” defense strategy.
And that’s all what makes the following story so potentially explosive: Remember those stories from mid-2014, shortly after the Maidan protests toppled the government in Ukraine, about how Ukraine has about a quarter of the natural gas reserves in Europe and a natural gas company with big stakes in Ukraine, Burisma, had hired Hunter Biden, who happens to be the son of then-vice president Joe Biden? Well, that story is now back in the news. For rather constitutionally ominous reasons: it turns out that Ukraine’s new government opened an investigation into Burisma in 2014. Flash forward to March of 2016 and Joe Biden showed up in Kiev and threatened to withhold $1 billion in loans for Ukraine if the government didn’t fire Shokin. Shokin was fired later that day and the probe into Burisma was subsequently dropped. This sequence of events is unsurprisingly now being spun by the Trump administration as a move by Joe to protect Hunter’s company.
But the Trump administration isn’t just speculating as to whether or not Biden may have pushed for the firing of Shokin to protest Burisma and Hunter. No, it turns out Trump has been sending Rudolph Giuliani to Ukraine to have him meet with officials there to talk about this case and encourage the Ukrainian government to reopen the case against Burisma. Recall how Giuliani’s firm has been by the Ukrainian government to do cybersecurity work and Giuliani appears to be close to Ukrainian oligarch Pavel Fuks (Fuchs).
The probe of Burisma was reopened in March of this year by the same prosecutor general who closed it in 2016, Yuriy Lutsenko. It was seen by many at the time as a move by the Poroshenko administration to get the support of the Trump administration in the midst of a tough reelection bid.
So, as we saw with Ukraine’s investigations into Paul Manafort, we have another Ukrainian investigation that could have a big impact on US politics. But in this instance we have the Trump administration openly pushing for Ukraine to reopen an investigation primarily to embarrass Joe Biden, a potential 2020 opponent. But it’s also being done in the middle of a Trump drive to absolve himself of obstruction of justice charges by somehow proving that investigation against him was illegitimate and that makes anything that raises questions about the Obama administration’s interactions with the Ukrainian government potentially useful for Trump’s defense.
In addition, Giuliani is openly admitting that he got involved with this because he’s seeking to counter the Mueller investigation with evidence that Democrats conspired with sympathetic Ukrainians to trigger the initial investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016. Giuliani explains that his interest in the Burisma investigation was an outgrowth of that. So this push by the Trump administration to reexamine what role Ukraine played in the 2016 fiasco is likely to only deepen as this because a fundamental part of Trump’s defense against obstruction of justice.
Now, as we’re going to see, when you look at the broader context of the firing of Viktor Shokin, it’s pretty clear that Biden was simply delivering a message that not just the US government but EU governments had been pushing for for many months before the firing. There were even pushes within the Obama administration for its own investigations into Burisma and Biden reportedly didn’t get involved in that. And those calls from Western governments for Shokin’s firing was part of a much larger demand by Ukraine’s western backers for a larger government overhaul after Ukraine failed to implement an ambitious reform and anti-corruption agenda (in part because that agenda involved mass privatizations and austerity). But that broader context is largely left out of the public understanding of the Burisma investigation and the role Biden played in the firing of Shokin at this point, making this a politically potent story for now. So it’s going to be interesting to see if the Trump administration’s attempts to whip of a new Ukrainian investigation into Burisma leads to more focus on the actual history of Ukraine during the post-Maidan period. Because if there’s one central area where the entire #RussiaGate story falls apart it’s the parts of the story involving Ukraine, especially Paul Manafort’s role in Ukraine but not limited to that. It’s also going to be interesting to say what kind of pay back the Trump adminstration gives to Ukraine in exchange for reopening this investigation. More missiles?
“But new details about Hunter Biden’s involvement, and a decision this year by the current Ukrainian prosecutor general to reverse himself and reopen an investigation into Burisma, have pushed the issue back into the spotlight just as the senior Mr. Biden is beginning his 2020 presidential campaign.”
Not surprisingly, the investigation of Burisma has suddenly become quite topical following the decision by Joe Biden to jump into the 2020 race. Part of this is driven by new details on that investigation. But complicating the Trump administration’s narrative is that the Obama administration appears to have been pushing for investigations into Burisma:
But despite that, President Trump has made Rudolph Giuliani his point man on pushing this story. But it’s just one aspect of a larger Trump administration strategy of promoting the idea that the Democrats colluded with Ukraine in 2016. Trump is even asking Bill Barr to look into the materials gathered by Ukrainian investigators. And, again, this is all happening in the context of Trump and Barr pushing a defense against obstruction of justice charges that argue that it’s not obstruction if it was obstructing a case based on a false accusation. So if this Burisma case ends up getting spun as an example of the Obama administration colluding with the Ukrainian government in 2016 it could could end up becoming a big part of the Trump administration’s obstruction of justice defense:
It’s also worth noting how the decision by Ukraine’s prosecutor general to reopen the case in March has been widely seen as an attempt by the Poroshenko government to curry favor with the Trump administration:
Also note how the new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, hasn’t indicated whether he’s going to keep the case open, so it’s presumably going to remain a means for Ukraine to please Trump:
Adding to the intrigue of whether or not the Trump team ends up turning this case into a political football is the fact that Biden does have facts on his side to defend himself. Facts like the Obama administration showing an interesting in its own investigation into Burisma:
There also appears to have been a real debate in Ukraine as to whether or not the investigation into Burisma was part of a shakedown scheme by Shokin to get a bribe. But despite that debate, the Obama administration was apparently fully supportive of the Ukrainian government’s investigation:
So just went you look at the available details surrounding the Burisma case, it’s not like this is a black and white story. It’s murky.
What’s unambiguously clear is that the push for the firing of Viktor Shokin wasn’t some pet project of Joe Biden in 2016. It was just one part of a much larger push for an overhaul in Ukraine’s by Ukraine’s Western backers that had been going on for months. For example, here’s an article from February of 2016, a month before Shokin’s firing, when the Deputy General Prosecutor Vitaliy Kasko resigned, declaring the prosecutor general’s office a “hotbed of corruption”. Kasko’s resignation followed the resignation of Economy Minister Aivaras Abromavicius, who declared that the Poroshenko government was interfering with his reforms. Recall how Abromavicius was one of the officials imported from a different country (Lithuania) under the theory that Ukraine’s corruption could be addressed with foreign leadership. So when Abromavicius and Kasko were resigning in protest, it was part of a Western-backed protest of Ukraine’s lack of anti-corruption reform (and also a lack of harmful austerity and privatization reforms that the West demanded). And that’s the critical context of the firing of the Viktor Shokin the following month:
“Failure to tackle endemic corruption has derailed a $40 billion aid program that keeps the war-torn country afloat. If Yatseniuk falls, it would further delay negotiations with the International Monetary Fund for the next tranche of money, $1.7 billion, which has been on hold since October.”
Threats of derailing Ukraine’s $40 billion IMF loan package if Ukraine didn’t tackle its corruption. That’s the critical context in Shokin’s firing. A context that included the resignations of two key Western-backed Ukrainian officials: Deputy General Prosecutor Vitaliy Kasko and Economy Minister Aivaras Abromavicius:
Adding to that context is the fact that Kasko’s resignation happened one day before a no-confidence vote in the parliament that could have toppled Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk and lead to a snap election. That’s how much turmoil there was in Ukraine’s government at that point:
Now, it turns out Yatseniuk narrowly survived that no-confidence vote, but as the following article notes, it was none other than Petro Poroshenko who was also calling for the firing of Viktor Shokin at that time. There was even some confusion at that point as to whether or not Shokin had already resigned (he hadn’t). So, basically, Poroshenko, who was under massive pressure from the West for the lack of anti-corruption reforms, was redirecting some of that blame to Shokin. Beyond that, Poroshenko was calling for a “full cabinet reload” in response to pressure which is also part of the context of the fire of Shokin. As Poroshenko declared following the no-confidence vote: “The moment for a partial reshuffle of the cabinet of ministers has been lost...The discussion about it has been so long that the issue itself got lost in it. The demand for a full cabinet reload is obvious now.”:
“The moment for a partial reshuffle of the cabinet of ministers has been lost...The discussion about it has been so long that the issue itself got lost in it. The demand for a full cabinet reload is obvious now.”
A full cabinet reload in the wake of a near collapse of the government. This was was Petro Poroshenko was calling for in the weeks before Biden’s trip to Kiev where he made the demand that Shokin be fired. Shokin’s departure was so expected that there was confusion as to whether or not he had already resigned at that point:
And as the following article notes, when Shokin was eventually fired the following month, the European Union officially welcomed the decision. That’s how widespread the push was for his removal. As the following article also notes, one of the last acts of Shokin before his firing was the sacking o his deputy, Davit Sakvarelidze. Sakvarelidze was another one of the non-Ukrainians imported into the country (he’s from Georgia) under the theory that Ukraine needed foreigners to clean up its government. It highlights how the firing of Shokin appeared to be part of a broader fight between the Ukrainian establishment and its Western backers. That’s the agenda Joe Biden was pushing when he called for Shokin’s firing:
““This decision creates an opportunity to make a fresh start in the prosecutor general’s office. I hope that the new prosecutor general will ensure that [his] office . . . becomes independent from political influence and pressure and enjoys public trust,” said Jan Tombinski, the EU’s envoy to Ukraine.”
So the EU had an official stance on Ukraine’s firing of is prosecutor general. An official stance of approval, which makes sense given the extensive Western-backed demands to fire Shokin that had been going on for months as part of a broader push to overhaul the Ukrainian government. Western demands that included the implicit threat of cutting off Ukraine from international financial support:
And that whole chapter of Ukraine’s recent history is all central to the story of Joe Biden’s trip to Kiev that got Shokin fired. It’s obvious that the Trump administration isn’t going to be interested in having that broader context understood by the American public as Giuliani’s attempts to pump the Burisma investigation plays out.
So, to summarize, the Trump administration appears to be corruptly pushing for Ukraine to reopen an investigation that could embarrass Joe Biden in order to build up the false narrative that Biden was corrupting trying to close that investigation. And this antidote to all of this is a thorough reexamination of the actual recent history of Ukraine. A recent history that has largely been corrupted by spin on all sides for years.
At the same time, it’s not like there isn’t going to be plenty of content for the Trump team to work with when searching for evidence of Ukraine working to hurt Trump in 2016. For instance, there’s the story of Andrea Chalupa getting information about Paul Manafort. And there’s also all of the questions about the veracity of the “black ledger” scandal that implicated Manafort and whether or not the release of those documents in 2016 were an attempt by elements of the Ukrainian government to harm the Trump campaign. So if the Trump team is going to be focusing on alleged collusion between Ukraine and the US government in 2016 as part of his defense against obstruction of justice it’s not like there isn’t going to be content for them to work with when they build that narrative. This story of Joe Biden, Burisma, and the firing of Viktor Shokin, however, doesn’t appear to play into that narrative very well and risks backfiring given that Giuliani appears to be soliciting that investigation by Ukraine which presents obvious massive conflicts of interest.
It was always clear that the 2020 race would include a debate over whether or not the Trump had colluded with a foreign government to get dirt on his political opponents. It’s just a little surprising that Rudy Giuliani openly soliciting this information from the Ukrainian government is part of that foreign collusion story.
Well that was fast: After the the impeachment of President Trump is back on the table, with the impeachment investigation officially begun in the House. And there’s no shortage of historic irony that it could be Trump’s sleazy dealings with the government of Ukraine, not Russia, that could lead to his impeachment.
Specifically, it appears that Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine in order to pressure the newly elected president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the whipped up allegations against Joe Biden. These are the allegations from the Republicans that Biden threatened to without US aid for Ukraine in 2016 unless the government fired the prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, in order to protect his son Hunter from an investigation into the natural gas company Burisma. Now, as we’ve seen, the timeline and details for that allegation doesn’t add up. The investigation into Burisma was already shut down by the time Biden made that threat and there were calls for the firing of Shokin by Petro Poroshenko himself and Shokin was widely seen in the West as an obstacle to anti-corruption efforts and when he was eventually fired this was hailed by the EU. In other words, the threat to withhold the US aid by Biden unless Shokin was fired wasn’t some stunt Biden was doing on his own. This was US government policy and part of a broader US-EU pressure campaign on Ukraine. But that’s the narrative that the Republicans and right-wing media are aggressively running with.
Of course, given the profound role Ukrainian figures have played in the story of the 2016 Campaign it’s not really all that ironic that this is what has started an impeachment investigation. There was the Ukrainian ‘peace plan’ scheme pushed by Felix Sater and Andrei Artemenko, the Ukrainian politician routinely described as ‘pro-Kremlin’ despite helping to found the virulently anti-Russian Right Sector party. There were Michael Cohen’s numerous close family ties to Ukrainian figures like Alex Oronov and Fima Shusterman. And then the up-is-down reality of Paul Manafort’s work in Ukraine as a pro-West change-agent who was acting as Viktor Yanukovych’s government for the purpose of pulling Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and into Europe’s orbit with an EU Trade Association agreement. That’s what the ‘Hapsburg Group’ scheme was all about.
And when Yanukovych decided in November of 2013 to take Putin’s offer of ‘Eurasian union’ instead of the EU’s trade association agreement — in large part because the EU’s terms were incredibly stingy and pro-austerity — there is evidence pointing in the direction of Manafort and Yanukovych’s vice president Sergei Lyovochkin being behind at least some of the violence that took place during the initial November 2013 protests against the decision to pull out of the EU trade association talks that sparked the Maidan movement and the sniper attacks that defined the February 2014 Maidan protests and led to Yanukovych’s downfall. And that just a sampling of the numerous Ukrainian connections to the Trump team alone. Given all that, our response to this recent turn of events with Ukraine playing a center role in a new Trump scandal should probably be, “well, it’s about time.”
The actual irony of this is that it’s so simple. Trump was trying to use US foreign policy as a cudgel to get a foreign government go after his opponent, a move that makes him a massive blackmail target by Ukraine’s government and anyone else who learns about this move. That alone is arguably worthwhile of impeachment. There are far worse things Trump has done and many presidents do, but this is the kind of presidential crime that’s relatively easy for the public to understand.
That said, we shouldn’t assume the relative simplicity of the crime means the backstory behind the crime will be simple too. After all, the Trump team is clearly trying to force an examination of the relationship between the Democratic Party and the Ukrainian government in 2016. For example, as we saw before, when Rudy Giuliani was found to looking into allegations related to Ukraine back in May, he openly admitted he was trying to dig up evidence that Democrats conspired with sympathetic Ukrainians to trigger the initial investigation of the Trump campaign in the first place in 2016. And there’s a lot under that rock for the Trump team to work with. But it’s not the kind of clean narrative they desire. As the following TPM piece from June of this year describes, Giuliani met with a Ukrainian political consultant earlier this year to solicit information regarding the Democrats’ coordination with Ukrainians in 2016. That consultant, Andrii Telizhenko, was a former Ukrainian diplomat who worked at the Ukrainian Embassy in DC in 2016. Telizhenko was reportedly quite eager to provide Giuliani with the kind of counter-narratives. Telizhenko described himself as someone who met Biden when he was in Kyiv and who negotiated with Biden’s tem. As Telizhenko puts it, “So I know the political side of that story and what was going on...The business stuff — I heard things, but I was not deeply related.”
Telizhenko first came up in the US media in January of 2017, when he showed up in a Politico article describing his experiences working in the Ukrainian Embassy in DC and meeting with Alexandra Chalupa, the Ukrainian-American Democratic National Committee consultant who openly bragged in the article about the role she played in convincing the Democratic Party that Paul Manafort was a Kremlin operative and that Russia was behind the hacking of the Democrats. So Telizhenko sounds like exactly the kind of person Giuliani was looking to find.
But there are some other aspects of his background that might complicate the narratives Giuliani is trying to build. For starts, it turns out Telizhenko spent the first six months of 2017 working with Andrii Artemenko. Yep, Giuliani’s source for what the Democrats were doing with Ukrainians in 2016 happened to spend the first part of 2017 working with the same far right Ukrainian figure who was working with Felix Sater, Michael Cohen, and Michael Flynn on the ‘peace plan’. And keep in mind that Artemenko’s work on that ‘peace plan’ scheme was indeed taking place in early 2017, so we have every reason to suspect Telizhenko was involved in working on that plan too. That’s got to be rather awkard for the Trump team.
But there’s more. It also turns out that Ukrainian oligarch Pavel Fuks (Fuchs) hired Telizhenko as a consultant in 2018. Recall how Fuks was a one-time potential partner with Trump in a ‘Trump Tower Moscow’ gambit. That’s somewhat awkward for Giuliani and the Trump team. But far more awkward is the fact that, as we’ve seen before, Fuks also hired Giuliani to be a consultant in 2017. Specifically, Giuliani’s girm Giuliani Security and Safety LLC, was contracted with the city of Kharkiv in May of 2017 to provide cybersecurity services. The mayor of Kharkiv, Gennady Kernes, is reportedly quite close to Fuks. Based on photographs we know that Giuliani met with Fuks during his 2017 trip to Ukraine.
So both Telizhenko and Giuliani’s cybersecurity business appears to have benefitted from some sort of association with Fuks. And Telizhenko worked for Andrii Artemenko in the first half of 2017, a period of time when the Ukrainian ‘peace plan’ scheme was getting hammered out. It’s has to be rather awkward for the Trump team given the importance of Telizhenko’s testimony in crafting these counter-narratives:
“Conservatives have sought to deflect from Trump ties to Russia and the sketchy foreign lobbying of imprisoned Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort with tales of corrupt involvement by Democrats in the former Soviet Union. The main narrative involves the former Vice President’s son, Hunter Biden, taking a position on the board of a Ukrainian gas company while Biden was still in office. Republicans have argued that this was some sort of quid-pro-quo involving Biden, and suggested that Biden used his influence to protect his son from Ukrainian criminal investigations into the gas firm.”
So Telizhenko appears to be someone Giuliani had determined could be useful in pushing the narrative about Biden and the Burisma investigation. And it’s not surprising Telizhenko was someone the Republicans seeking this kind of information would go to: He was telling reporters back in January of 2017 that Ukrainian officials were working with Democratic National Committee staff in 2016 to provide information on Trump/Manafort/Russia ties. In addition, it sounds like Telizhenko was already well known to US politicians. He even attended John McCain’s funeral:
But then there’s the fact that Pavel Fuks hired Telizhenko as a consultant last year, which is rather awkward given that Fuks also appears to have helped Giuliani’s cybersecurity company secure a Ukrainian consulting contract in 2017:
But by far the most explosive revelation about Telizhenko is that he was working with Andrii Artemenko for the first half of 2017, which would have overlapped with much of the time Artemenko was working on that Ukrainian ‘peace plan’ scheme with figures like Felix Sater, Michael Cohen, and Michael Flynn:
Now here’s an article that gives a little more information the claims Telizhenko was making about the DNC’s work with the Ukrainian government in 2016 to dig up dirt on Paul Manafort. As the article describes, all of Telizhenko’s claims are denied by both embassy officials and the DNC:
“Telizhenko, 28, is a political consultant educated in the United States and Canada who has previously worked in the Ukrainian government and prosecutor general’s office. One of his clients was Andrii Artemenko, the man behind the so-called “Ukrainian peace deal,” a proposal for a negotiated end to hostilities on terms favorable to Russia that Artemenko backchanneled to Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, shortly before Trump was inaugurated in 2017.”
So it sounds like Telizhenko’s work for Andrii Artemenko was in the role of a political consultant. Which is the kind of vague service that could mean a lot of different activities, including the politics surrounding the ‘peace plan’ scheme. Also note that it appears that Telizhenko was working in the Ukrainian DC embassy from December 2015 to June 2016, which is an important timeframe because the DNC hack didn’t actually go public until mid-June of 2016. But Paul Manafort was hired by Trump to be his campaign manager in March of 2016. So Telizhenko would have been in the Ukrainian embassy for at least several months of Manafort’s time as campaign manager but he wouldn’t have witnessed much after the hacks went public.
And note how one of Telizhenko’s claims that the Trump administration will be quite interested in is his claim that the “black ledgers” purporting to lay out the Yanukovych government’s political kickback operation was a forgery:
Recall that, while some of the entries in the “black ledgers” related specifically to Paul Manafort’s firm do appear to have been confirmed as real. But the larger question of whether or not the rest of the ledger is real remains unknown, in part because the investigation into the ledger ground to a halt, presumably over fears that it would implicate large number of people across Ukraine’s political spectrum. So when Telizhenko asserts that the ledgers were forgeries, that might be true but the information in those ledgers related to Manafort also appear to be real. So if the rest of the information in those ledgers really were forgeries but the information about Manafort was true, that raises the question of whether or not they really were forgeries intended to implicate Manafort. In other words, we can’t rule out the possibility they could be fakes with real information about Manafort.
Also note how everyone Telizhenko is implicating in his claims are denying them:
Note that the “former DNC contractor” denying these claims was almost certainly Alexandra Chalupa. And that makes those problematic denials. Why? Because Chalupa was pretty open about her work with the Ukrainian government in that January 2017 Politico article that first brought Telizhenko’s name to light. It’s a big reason we’re probably going to see a lot more focus on what Alexandra Chalupa was doing in 2016. Because while Telizhenko appears to be a problematic witness for a lot of this stuff given his associations and the fact that he was working with a figure like Andrii Artemenko, there’s no denying some of his claims because Chalupa was already openly bragging about them:
“Manafort’s work for Yanukovych caught the attention of a veteran Democratic operative named Alexandra Chalupa, who had worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison during the Clinton administration. Chalupa went on to work as a staffer, then as a consultant, for Democratic National Committee. The DNC paid her $412,000 from 2004 to June 2016, according to Federal Election Commission records, though she also was paid by other clients during that time, including Democratic campaigns and the DNC’s arm for engaging expatriate Democrats around the world.”
As we can see, contrary to Alexandra Chalupa’s recent denials that she was coordinating with the Ukrainian government in researching Paul Manafort in 2016, back in January of 2017, Chalupa was quite candid about a lot of this:
And it was at this point, in January of 2017, that Andrii Telizhenko started talking to reporters about his experiences too during his time in the Ukrainian embassy. According to Telizhenko, he was instructed by Oksana Shulyar, one of the top aides of Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., Valeriy Chaly, to help Chalupa research these connections. And Telizhenko isn’t the only source for these claims. There are other “sources familiar with the effort” who recount this kind of close working relationship with Chalupa:
At the same time, note how the DNC is stressing that Chalpua was doing this work not as a DNC consultant but instead on her own. Keep in mind that Chalupa’s personal interest in matters involving Ukraine are strong enough that it’s conceivable she would do at least some of this work on her own:
And note how Andrii Artemenko also shows up in this article, mentioning how he personally met with the Trump team during the campaign despite the Ukrainian government’s quiet official policy of keep a distance from the Trump campaign. This was before Artemenko’s role in the ‘peace plan’ was publicly revealed:
So that’s all part of the can of worms that the Rudy Giuliani and Trump appear to be trying to reopen. It’s a fascinating move because, as we saw, it’s not like there isn’t anything to the accusation that a Democratic operative, Chalupa, was working with the Ukrainian government in 2016. But these accusation turn out to have remarkably close ties to the Trump team’s own extensive clandestine ties to Urkainians in 2016. Andrii Telizhenko, the Ukrainian diplomatic official who was apparently tasked with assisting Alexandra Chalupa in her research efforts against Manafort, also happened to work with Andrii Artemenko in the first half of 2017, which happens to overlap when Artemenko would have been secretly working with Trump’s team on the details of the ‘peace plan’ proposal. It’s kind of amazing.
Also recall how Artemenko wasn’t an insignificant pro-Kremlin back-bencher in Ukraine’s parliament. Artmenko was the deputy head of the European Integration Committee and responsible for diplomatic connections with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United States, Kuwait, Lithuania and Belarus. So Artemenko was exactly the kind of figure one might expect to be involved with some sort of diplomatic initiative on behalf of Ukraine. And that fun fact, combined with the Telizhenko’s past working relationship with both Artemenko and Chalupa, raise a rather fascinating question about the role Ukraine played in the 2016 election: was the Ukrainian government out to secretly work with both US campaigns? A more overt outreach effort with Hillary Clinton’s campaign run out of the embassy (seemingly designed to maximum anti-Russian sentiments in the US) coupled with a covert campaign by Artemenko to court the Trump team?
Also keep in mind that Artemenko apparently wanted to replace Petro Poroshenko as president of Ukraine. That was also part of the ‘peace plan’ scheme. The idea was to oust Poroshenko in a corruption scandal with ‘kompromat’ and have Artemenko replace him. So based on that detail of Artemenko’s scheme it would appear that Artemenko probably wasn’t working on behalf of the Poroshenko administration during his secret negotiations with the Trump team. But we still have no idea how much of what we’re told about the ‘peace plan’ was real and how much was disinformation thrown in to obscure the real nature of those talks. And given the nature of these talks (that included a proposal to lease Crimea to Russia) it would be the kind of operation that would need to be highly deniable if accidentally exposed, so it’s possible the talk of Artemenko planning on ousting Poroshenko was added as a means of ensuring there’s a fog of confusion around the story if it ever goes public.
At the same kind, Artemenko’s far right ties to a party like Right Sector and history with Yulia Tymoshenko’s party also raises the possibility that he was negotiating on behalf of faction involving the far right and/or Tymoshenko, in which case it wouldn’t be at all surprising if they wanted to see Poroshenko ousted.
But now that we know Telizhenko was working with both Alexandra Chalupa and Andrii Artemenko, the question of the nature of Artemenko’s relationship with the Poroshenko government during his secret 2016/2017 negotiations with the Trump team have suddenly become much more interesting. Especially now that the Republicans are clearly planning on making the claims made by Telizhenko a key political attack heading into 2020. And that’s all part of why this seemingly simple impeachable offense committed by Trump has such a complicated backstory.
It’s also probably all part of why the GOP and right-wing media appears to be focusing on largely just making stuff about Biden and the Ukrainian prosecutor. The actual story about the Democratics working with Ukraine in 2016 gets way too close to the story of Republicans working with Ukraine in 2016.
Here’s a set of new twists in the unfolding Trump/Biden/Burisma story that rapidly morphed into an impeachment inquiry: First starters, it turns out Viktor Shoken — the former Ukrainian chief prosecutor who was fired in 2016 following threats by Joe Biden that the US would withhold military aid to Ukraine unless Shokin was replaced — is trying to get his old job back. By suing for it. Shokin is arguing that he was improperly fired and his case is going to be before Ukraine’s supreme court in a few days.
This isn’t the first time Shokin filed an appeal of his firing. Ukraine’s courts reject an earlier appeal in 2017. But Shokin refiled an appeal on September 2 of this year, citing unspecified “new circumstances.” Keep in mind that Giuliani has already been working on digging up this Biden/Burisma story in Ukraine for months before that September 2 appeal so the “new circumstances” are presumably related to this whole Trump/Giuliani initiative to make Shokin’s firing central to this political campaign against Biden.
Now, that’s quite a notable development in this story in an of itself in terms of getting a sense of the goals of at least some of the players on the Ukrainian side of this story. Because if Shokin wants his old job back, he and his backers are going to have a big incentive to make his firing sound as improper as possible. Which means Shokin and his Ukrainian allies are going to have a a big new incentive to further the narrative being put forth by Rudy Giuliani and the Trump team that Shokin’s firing was largely an attempt to protect his son Hunter Biden from the Burisma investigation.
But that’s not the only court case Shokin is involved with at the moment involving the Biden/Burisma story. Shokin was also asked by Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash — who is currently in Austria fighting a US extradition request — to testify in Firtash’s defense. What did Firtash ask Shokin to testify about? Well, Shokin argued that he didn’t find an evidence that Firtash had committed any crimes in Ukraine and viewed the case against him as politically motivated. According to Austrian law, extradition isn’t allowed if the case is considered politically motivated.
But Shokin also went on provide a sworn testimony to the Austrian court that his own firing was related to the Biden/Burisma investigation. In Shokin’s affidavit, he bluntly states, “I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holding.” He also asserts that Biden had intervened in Decemmber of 2015, when Shokin was still in office, and prevented Dmitry Firtash from returning to Ukraine. That’s presumably the basis for why Biden’s actions in Ukraine were part of this extradition hearing. So Firtash’s extradition defense now hinges on the argument that Biden was engaged in primarily politically motivated interventions in Ukraine and the key supporting evidence of that argument is the assertion that the firing of Shokin was primarily due to pressure from Biden over the Burisma investigation.
Shokin’s sworn affidavit in Firtash’s case has already shown up a recent piece in The Hill by John Solomon. Keep in mind Solomon has a track record of coming up with real investigative lead while simultaneously being a ‘go-to’ guy for Republicans who want to inject disinformation into the media. So his pieces are almost always an interesting mix of truth and fiction. In this latest piece, Solomon sets out to butress the underlying claim that Shokin’s firing really was done primarily to protect Burisma. The thrust of the argument centers around documents showing Burisma’s lawyers moved to meet with Ukrainian officials immediately after Shokin’s firing. But the piece also includes the newly sworn affidavit from Shokin in the Austrian court case where Shokin asserts that then-President Poroshenko asked him to look into the Burisma investigation and consider the possibility winding it down but Shokin refused. Solomon’s piece quotes the following Shokin testimony:
So Viktor Shokin is out to prove he was fired over Burisma in Ukraine’s courts in both a case before the Ukrainian Supreme court but also in this Austrian court case to help Dmitry Firtash.
Note that Paul Manfort and Firtash have a business history with each other. They both explored a venture to redevelop the Drake Hotel in New York about a decade ago.
But there’s another more significant fun-fact related to Dmitry Firtash and Paul Manafort: Firtash is a long-time business partner with Sergei Lovochkin(Lyovochkin)! Recall how Lovochkin was not only the lead financier of Paul Manafort’s ‘Habsburg Group’ lobbying effort to pull Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and into an EU trade association, but circumstantial evidence points towards Lovochkin and Manafort playing some sort of role in orchestrating the violence that fueled the Maidan protests following Viktor Yanukovych’s pull out of the trade association negotiations.
Recall how GOP political consultant Sam Patten — who had previously worked for Cambridge Analytica and formed a consulting firm with Konstantin Kilimnik — ended up pleading guilty to acting as a straw-purchaser of Trump Inauguration tickets for $50,000 on behalf of Lovochkin.
Also recall how one of the goals of the scheme by Giuliani and Trump to push for a reexamination of Ukraine’s role in the 2016 election is to find evidence that Paul Manafort was falsely smeared in 2016 (with the release of the “black ledgers”) in a joint Ukraine/DNC operation run by Alexandra Chalupa. So we probably shouldnt’ be too surprised to learn that one of Lovochkin’s closest allies, Dmitry Firtash, was using his court extradition hear to promote Viktor Shokin’s narrative about his firing.
But there’s another big new twist related to this that relates to Shokin’s assistance of Firtash’s legal defense against extradition to the US: it turns out Rudy Giuliani hasn’t been the only ‘independent’ actor working for Trump on promoting the Biden/Burisma story. We’re now learning that the husband and wife team of Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing — frequent guests of Fox News — have been working with Giuliani on his Ukrainian adventures too. And both diGenova and Toensing have also recently sign up for Dmitry Firtash’s legal defense in his extradition case.
So Giuliani’s team working on digging up/creating dirt on Biden in Ukraine is literally part of Dmitry Firtash’s legal defense team in his extradition case. It was in that extradition case that Firtash had Shokin testify that, yes, he was fired over the Burisma case, an argument he’s making in his own legal case in front of the Ukrainian Supreme Court to get his job back. And the closest ally of Firtash just happens to be Sergei Lovochkin who also happened to one of Paul Manafort’s closest allies in Ukraine. Lots of twists.
Ok, first, here’s an article about Viktor Shokin suing to get his old job back by arguing that he was improperly fired over the Burisma investigation:
“He argues that then Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko and the country’s parliament acted incorrectly in firing him. A court rejected his first appeal in 2017, and the court documents say his latest appeal is a response to unspecified “new circumstances” that have come to light.”
Unspecified “new circumstances” have come to light. That was the basis for Shokin’s September 2 new legal appeal to get his old job back. It’s hard to imagine those “new circumstances” didn’t involve the Giuliani initiative.
But as the following piece by Josh Marshall points out, it’s not just a Giuliani initiative. Now we’re learning that tv celebrity right-wing hack lawyers Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing have also been working with Giuliani on this Ukrainian scheme...at the same time the two are were recently hired for Dmitry Firtash’s legal defense team in his extradition case. The same extradition case where Shokin recently testified that he felt his firing was due to pressure from Biden over the Burisma investigation. And Shokin’s sworn affidavit in Firtash’s Austrian case making these claims has already shown up in John Solomon’s reports in The Hill. It’s some remarkable coordination between the Trump team, Firtash, and Shokin:
“So to review, former Manafort business partner Firtash asks Shokin to swear out an affidavit in which he accuses Biden. The affidavit quickly gets into the hands of Giuliani and Solomon. And who just recently went to work for Firtash’s legal team? None other than diGenova and Toensing, as reported just this week by the Kyiv Post and other publications.”
Again, the coordination of all this is pretty remarkable.
Now, here’s the Kyiv Post article about Shokin testifying in Firtash’s defense. Shokin explicitly said in his affidavit, “I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings,” and claims that Biden also intervened to prevent Firtash’s return to Ukraine in December of 2015. The article also notes that Austrian law doesn’t allow extradition in cases that are considered politically biased. So establishing that Biden was engaged in politically motivated interventions in Ukraine are central to Firtash’s legal defense against extradition to the US. And as the article also reminds us, Firtash also happens to be be the business party of former vice president Sergei Lovochkin, a key figure in understanding the nature of Paul Manafort’s work in Ukraine
“In a sworn affidavit, Shokin comes forward with more allegations against former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden. He claims that Biden pressured the administration of former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko not only to fire him to protect Biden’s son, but also to illegally block the return of oligarch Firtash to Ukraine.”
As we can see, in addition to arguing that he didn’t think Firtash committed any crimes and the charges against him were politically motivated under pressure from Biden, Shokin’s own grievances against Biden are being used to argue that the case against Firtash was also politically motivated:
Keep in mind that when Shokin asserts that the blocking of Firtash’s return to Ukraine in December 2015 was done under pressure from Biden, that actually supports the argument that Biden was primarily acting on behalf of US policy during this period unless there’s some reason to assume Firtash’s case involves Burisma.
And as the article note, Firtash remains a business partner of former vice president Sergei Lovochkin, one of the central figures in Paul Manafort’s history in Ukraine:
Might Lovochkin, one of Manafort’s closest partners in Ukraine, also be working on this Trump/Giuliani/deGenova/Toensing/Firtash/Shokin operation to create and exploit a narrative around the Biden/Burisma case? Given his proximity to so many of these characters, at this point it would be surprising if he wasn’t involved.
There was a new piece in the Financial Times recently giving more details about the history of Burisma and the other Western figures added to Burisma’s board in recent years in addition to Hunter Biden. The article describes how Burisma was started in 2002 by Mykola Zlochevsky. Zlochevsky headed Ukraine’s Ministry of Environmental Protection during 2010–2012 under the Yanukovych government. Burisma won several of its gas production licenses during this period. When the Yanukovych government collapsed following the 2014 Maidan protests people started looking into Burisma and allegations of self-dealing by Zlochevsky. While he was working in the government, Zlochevsky claimed he had sold his energy assets. But Ukrainian journalists discovered he continued to control Burisma through Cyprus-based holding companies. The UK Serious Fraud Office soon opened an investigation, freezing $23 million in Zlochevsky’s assets. It was at this point point that Zlochevsky started putting Western figures on Burisma’s board, including Hunter Biden. It was basically Zlochevsky way of making nice with Ukraine’s new primary allies in West.
So Hunter Biden was pretty unambiguously given this cushy job as a basically a way to placate Western concerns over the company now that ‘anti-corruption’ was suddenly a high-profile issue in Ukraine. He was apparently brought on board with the hopes of improving Burisma’s “transparency, corporate governance and responsibility.”
But as the following article notes, Biden was just one of several Western figures added to Burisma’s board in recent years. And around the same time Biden was added, another interesting figure was added to the board: the former president of Poland Aleksander Kwasniewski. Yep, the same figure who played a role in the ‘Hapsburg Group’ lobbying effort secretly being run by Paul Manafort and Sergei Lovochkin (Lyovochkin) from 2012–2013 to convince European governments and the US that Ukraine should be allowed into a trade association with the European Union. Recall how Kwasniewski was not just secretly working on the Hapsburg Group effort. He was simultaneously acting as the leading figure in the EU’s monitoring mission for Ukraine. Overall, Kwasniewski appears to be working largely as a conduit between the forces in the Yanukovych government trying to move Ukraine into the EU’s orbit (led by Manafort and Lovochkin) and the forces in the EU trying to make this happen.
So the guy secretly working to make the EU-Ukraine trade ends up on Burisma’s board in 2014. Although note that the second article below points out that Burisma’s own website states that the company’s board engaged with both Hunter Biden and Kwasniewski in 2013 and in the third article below it states that documents show Kwasniewski becoming a board member on January 2, 2014. So the timing of these appointments of Westerners is ambiguous at this point but it sounds like Kwasniewski actually joined Burisma before the collapse of the Yanukovych government and Hunter Biden may have also started some sort of work with Burisma in 2013 too. That would put their initial interactions with Burisma in a somewhat different light and make it sounds more like something done in concert with the ‘Hapsburg Group’ initiative under the assumption that Ukraine was going to be joining the EU trade association agreement.
There’s another very interesting figure who joined Burisma’s board in 2017: Cofer Black. Recall how Black has a long-time CIA officer who went on to become the vice-chairman of Erik Prince’s Blackwater. Soright after Trump takes office, Burisma hires a Blackwater figure. Isn’t that interesting timing.
Oh, and it turns out the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine turned down Burisma’s application, claiming the company didn’t pass due diligence. But it also turns out Burisma formed a partnership with the Atlantic Council in 2017 and donated between $100,000 and $250,000 in 2018. Karina Zlochevska, Zlochevsky’s daughter, attended an Atlantic Council roundtable on promoting best business practices as recently as last week. Yep, the Atlantic Council apparently felt that the questions about Burisma’s corruption weren’t bad enough to turn down Burisma’s money. It’s less of a statement about Burisma and more a statement about the Atlanic Council.
That’s all part of the context of Burisma’s decision to hire Hunter Biden. It’s pretty clear it was an attempt to basically send signals to Western governments that Burisma was going to play ball with Ukraine’s new Western allies during a period when ‘anti-corruption’ was going to be a major part of the branding of the ‘new Ukraine’. With Kwasniewski, it appears this process started before the collapse of the Yanukovych government. And with Cofer Black’s addition in 2017, it’s pretty clear this exact same pattern continued during the Trump administration. In other words, while there are plenty of justifiable questions about the nature of Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma, those kinds of questions should really be applied to corporate boards across the world because this is how international business is done. The real scandal is how typical and non-scandalous this all is:
“Mr Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, Ukraine’s largest private gas company which acquired several of its extraction licences while he was in government, had lost a political patron when Mr Yanukovich was evicted from office. Weeks later the energy tycoon sought help elsewhere.”
Zlochevsky was basically buying political cover after Ukraine found itself reliant on the West. It’s not a big mystery. This is how this stuff is done and that’s why Hunter Biden was hired. But he wasn’t the only one. Former Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski also came on board around that time. And after Trump came into office, former Blackwater VP Cofer Black joined the board too:
Notably, while this reputational whitewashing was largely successful, the one area where it appeared to have failed is in placating the US government. Because when Joe Biden and then-US ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt were publicly calling for the firing of Viktor Shokin, the fact that Shokin was allegedly deliberately thwarting the UK’s investigation into Zlochevsky was part of their complaint:
But this reputational whitewashing was in the end so successful that Burisma is now a sponsor of the Atlantic Council, which fancies itself as being active in promoting anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine. The American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine still apparently had misgivings about Burisma, but not the Atlantic Council:
Ok, now here’s an article that points out that Burisma’s website states that Burisma’s board engaged Hunter Biden together with former Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski in 2013. Again, keep in mind that Kwasniewski was one of the European figures secretly enlisted in the ‘Hapsburg Group’ lobbying effort in 2012–2013. Also recall how the ‘Hapsburg Group’ effort has the appearance of being more a joint effort conducted by both the Yanukovych government and a faction in EU that was already on board with the idea of getting Ukraine into that trade association. A joint Ukraine-EU secret lobbying campaign targeting the skeptics in the EU and US governments. So if Biden and Kwasniewski were already interacting with Burisma in 2013, it doesn’t sound like bringing them on board in 2014 was simply a response to the collapse of the Yanukovych government:
“Burisma’s web site says the company’s board engaged Hunter Biden in 2013 together with former Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski.”
So both biden and Kwasniewski were apparently doing something with Burisma in 2013, which was the fateful year when the push to get Ukraine into the EU trade association agreement was hitting its peak and looked most likely to succeed.
Now here’s a BuzzFeed article from May of 2014 that covers Biden and Kwasniewski quietly joining Burisma’s board, and it notes that Cypriot records indicated Kwasniewski joined the board on Jan 2, 2014, almost two months before the collapse of the Yanukovych government:
“As well as the other directors listed on Burisma’s website, Cypriot records list a man named Aleksander Kwasniewski — the name of Poland’s president from 1995 to 2005 — as having become a director Jan 2. Kwasniewski was a key figure in the European Union’s attempts to draw Ukraine closer to Brussels during Yanukovych’s presidency: he and former European Parliament president Pat Cox visited Kiev 27 times in failed attempts to secure the release of Yanukovych’s rival, former prime minister and current presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko, from prison.”
So Kwasniewski was became a director on Jan 2, 2014, according to Cypriot records. This strongly suggests he was actively working with Burisma in 2013, which is consistent with the information in the second above article. And that, in turn, suggests Hunter Biden was also probably doing some sort of consulting with Burisma in 2013 too as the second above article suggests. Consulting that would presumably be about getting Burisma up to the anti-corruption standards that would pass muster with the US and EU in anticipation of Given all that, the sudden hiring of Hunter Biden actually seems less sleazy than the generally accepted timeline of Biden getting hired only after the Yanukovych government collapsed. If Biden was working with Burisma in 2013 in anticipation of the EU trade association deal, that would make him an obvious choice for the board of directors following the government collapse. It would still pretty sleazy overall, but less sleazy than the scenario where Biden’s contact with Burisma only suddenly starts after Ukraine’s government collapsed and more likely just the typical corporate sleaze where directors are hired based on who they are and who they know. It could almost be argued that Hunter Biden was working to advance US interests at the time since getting Ukrainian energy companies to be compliant with Western anti-corruption standards was probably seen as an important element of the push to move Ukraine into the West’s orbit. Plus, following the collapse of the Yanukovych government, there was a big push to reduce Ukraine’s and Europe’s dependence on Russian natural gas, making Burisma, the largest private natural gas company in Ukraine, the kind of company that Ukraine’s new Western allies were going to be interested in making fully operational as soon as possible. It would still be problematic if Hunter Biden was hired primarily because of who he was and who he knew, but it could be seen as the kind of corruption that advanced US foreign policy at that point in time (putting aside all of the problems with that foreign policy). In other words, it was bad, but could arguably be worse.
So let’s hope this focus on Hunter Biden and his questionable hiring at Burisma translates into a broader examination of the endemic practice of hiring of people or doing business with people primarily because of who they are and who they know. Drain the swamp.
With word that a second intelligence community figure is considered filing a whistleblower complaint regarding the unfolding Trump/Ukraine shakedown scandal surrounding the Biden/Burisma story, it seems increasingly likely that the Trump administration and GOP is going to frame this as some sort of Deep State takedown of the Trump administration. Which might be true to some extent. Whistleblowing about major scandals implicitly has the capacity to take down a government, as the impeachment inquiry makes clear. And many have observed that the initial whistleblower complaint looks so thorough and professional that it may have created by a committee suggesting the initial CIA whistleblower was acting on behalf of a larger group within the intelligence community. Which, again, might be true. But given the overt corruption involving almost everything Trump does, the real question in this case is whether or not it’s an appropriate and necessary take down of Trump team, even if the ‘Deep State’ really is behind it. That’s how corrupt Trump is...he makes the ‘Deep State’ corruption look tame in comparison.
The question of whether or not it’s appropriate and necessary for the CIA to take down Trump at this point obviously isn’t a trivial question given the long history of intelligence community meddling in politics. But there’s also no denying that this is an administration that appears to be hellbent on normalizing corruption. Endemic corruption is awful. Normalized endemic corruption is far worse. It’s one of the grand ironies that Trump is trying to frame his actions in Ukraine as part of an anti-corruption effort given how blatantly corrupt it is to selectively (and largely exclusively) champion an anti-corruption effort against one of his main political opponents. He’s managed to further corrupt Ukraine’s corrupt anti-corruption efforts and the US intelligence community — a frequent facilitator/beneficiary of corruption around the world — is blowing the whistle about it. It’s ironic but here we are.
Related to this question of whether or not there’s a coordinated intelligence community attempt to bring about the impeachment of Trump is one of the more fascinating aspects of this story: how this scandals has been quietly bubbling both within the Trump administration and out in the public for months before it suddenly exploded with the initial CIA whistleblower complaint. A LOT of people had to know the Trump team was using US aid to Ukraine as leverage to force the Ukrainian government into publicly smearing Joe Biden. It’s part of what makes it very conceivable that we’re seeing a coordinated intelligence community effort to blow the whistle on this. There’s been plenty of time for the many alarmed people who knew about this to coordinate.
For example, the following TPM piece lays out three distinct instances where the Trump administration was trying to work out a quid pro quo arrangement with the new Ukrainian government. The evidence for this was made available with the newly release text messages released by Trump-appointed special envoy to Ukraine, Kurt Volker. In terms of establishing whether or not the Trump administration was demanding the new Ukrainian government publicly open up investigations into Joe Biden and the questions around his son Hunter and Burisma, they’re pretty damning.
For starters, days before the now notorious July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Zelensky — where Trump rambles on about the Bidens and Crowdstrike and implies that these investigations will be required for the purchase of more Javelin missiles — there was an effort by Volker, Rudy Giuliani, and US ambasasador to the EU Gordan Sondland about the need for Zelensky to commit to these investigations before the phone call with Trump takes place. Volker has breakfast with Giuliani on July 19, and then texts Sondland about the upcoming phone call, saying “Most impt is for Zelensky to say that he will help investigation.” On July 22, Giuliani spoke to Zelensky aide Andriy Yermak and that evening Giuliani was pushing for Trump to have the call with Zelensky. On the day of the phone call, Volker tells Yermak that Zelensky must agree to proceed with the investigations against the Bidens if Trump will agree to a White House meeting with Zelensky. That seems like a pretty clear quid pro quo.
Following the July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelensky, the State Department began preparing for Zelensky’s White House visit. August 9th text messages show Giuliani, Volker, and Sondland were once again intervening to attempt to ensure there was going to be a public announcement by Zelensky about new investigations into the Bidens as part of the visit. They again got in contact with Yermak to attempt to get a draft statement of what Zelensky would say during his trip regarding the investigations. The next day, August 10th, Yermak replied that Zelensky is willing to make these public pronouncements of an investigation but wanted to get a date for the visit confirmed first. The CIA whistleblower complaint was filed in August 12th. On August 13th, Volkder and Sondland were again discussing the need to ensure Zelensky makes a statement involving an investigation into Burisma. On August 16th, Yermak provided a draft statement, which Giuliani apparently didn’t think went far enough. So that was another very clear quid pro quo that apparently involved quite a bit of haggling.
The third clear quid pro quo involved the Trump administration initially blocking $250 million in aid to Ukraine that had already been appropriated by Congress. On September 1st, text messages show Bill Taylor — a career diplomat and the acting U.S. chief of mission in Ukraine — asked Sondland, “are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?” Sondland replied, “call me.” On September 8th, Sondland messaged Volker and Taylor about the need to meet so he could update them on various conversations taking place between Trump and Zelensky. They discussed something involving an “interview” of Zelensky, although it’s unclear what exactly the interview would entail. The next day, Taylor tells Sondland that he thought it was “crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.” Sondland replies, “The President has been crystal clear no quid pro quo’s of any kind” before concluding “I suggest we stop the back and forth by text.” As we’re going to see in the second article below, this denial of any quid pro quo by Sondland has now been refuted by GOP Senator Ron Johnson who tells us that Sondland told him there was indeed a quid pro quo. Also on September 9th, the House announced its investigation into Giuliani’s attempts to pressure Ukraine and the inspector general informed the House Intelligence Committee that it had received the whistleblower complaint. The White House released the Ukrainian aid two days later.
Oh, and it turns out Ukraine just publicly announced yesterday that it would be reopening a number of past investigations, including investigations into Burisma. In other words, the Trump administration got its wish/quid/demand.
So as Volker’s text messages make abundantly clear, this Giuliani/Volker/Sondland team had been working for months to get hard assurances that Zelensky was going to publicly announce an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma as a condition for first talking with Trump on the phone, then arranging a White House visit, and later releasing the US aide to Ukraine. It’s not ambiguous. It’s right there in their own words:
“The exchanges showed that there were concrete “deliverables” — as a Trump donor-turned-ambassador called them — that Ukraine was being pushed to offer Trump, in exchange for phone calls and meetings with the President, as well as the release of military aid.”
Concrete “deliverables” in the form of new investigations into the Bidens and public announcements of these investigations, in exchange for a phone call with Trump, then a meeting, and later the Congressionally approved aid. It’s hard to see that as anything other than a shakedown. Hell, even Tucker Carlson is now acknowledging this looks bad. That’s how bad it looks. Even the morally blind can see it.
And as the following article describes, while those text exchanges are more than adequate in terms of establishing the nature of this quid pro quo shakedown, we got further confirmation from an unexpected source that Trump was withholding that aid to Ukraine until he got the desired investigations: Republican Senator Ron Johnson decided to tell the Wall Street Journal that he was told by EU ambassador Sondland on August 30th, that, yes, the Trump administration is requiring Ukraine to appoint a prosecutor general to “get to the bottom of what happened in 2016—if President Trump has that confidence, then he’ll release the military spending”:
“The senator recalled to the Journal that Sondland told him that a deal would require Ukraine to appoint a prosecutor general to “get to the bottom of what happened in 2016—if President Trump has that confidence, then he’ll release the military spending.””
Who knows why Johnson decided to acknowledge this damning anecdote about the situation, but he did it.
So we now have more than enough evidence to establish that, yes, the Trump administration was using its leverage over Ukraine — a country largely dependent on the US at this point — to extract a big political weapon against one of his key political opponents. And, true to form, Trump did it under the ‘anti-corruption’ banner. He’s like the King Midas of corruption. Even anti-corruption initiatives get corrupted. Because let’s not pretend that Burisma’s hiring of Hunter Biden wasn’t rather corrupt. It clearly was. It’s just quaint in comparison Trump’s faux-‘anti-corruption’ shakedown scheme, in part because at least Hunter Biden’s foolish decision to take that job has the look of trying to advance the West’s long-standing policy of moving Ukraine into Europe’s orbit. Playing nice with Burisma appears to be part of that US foreign policy. The hiring of people connected to the powerful is the kind of endemic corruption that the world tragically runs on, but with Trump’s scheme he’s literally trying to push the envelope of corruption by normalizing the use of US foreign policy to extort foreign governments into forced investigations into political opponents.
It’s also clear from this timeline that people inside the US government have known about this scheme for a while. The first CIA whistleblower complaint was filed on August 12th. But as the following article makes clear, this campaign to pressure Ukraine into making public insinuations about corruption by the Bidens has been out in the open since at least May of this year. And it came from an very unlikely source: Ihor Kolomoisky, the Ukrainian oligarch widely seen as the key backer of Zelensky.
Recall how Kolomoisky is not just one of Ukraine’s wealthiest individuals but also seen as one of its most corrupt. Also recall how Kolomoisky, who is Jewish, is ironically one of the key benefactors of Ukraine’s militias including the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. His support of these militias was seen as critical for Ukraine’s military efforts when the civil war broke out. So Kolomoisky is the kind of corrupt oligarch who nonetheless opposed Moscow which made him someone the West sort of had to tolerate following the outbreak of the civil war.
But there’s been no shortage of tensions between Kolomoisky and both Ukraine’s other oligarchs and the West. Kolomoisky’s conflicts with Petro Poroshenko resulted in him living in self-imposed exile in recent years. In addition, Kolomoisky’s bank, PrivatBank, is Ukraine’s largest bank, but it was nationalized (and bailed out) in 2016 as part of a Western-backed clean-up effort of Ukraine’s banking system and charges (almost surely true) that PrivatBank was involved with money-laundering. The move has resulted in ongoing lawsuits by Kolomoisky. Kolomoisky has now returned to Ukraine following Zelensky’s victory in April, with the hopes of having his dispute of the PrivatBank nationalization favorably resolved. Zelensky’s government has announced it’s going to try to find a “compromise” with Kolomoisky over the PrivatBank lawsuit that doesn’t anger Ukraine’s Western backers. So Kolomoisky has a touchy relationship with the West: he’s anti-Kremlin and a vital figure for Kiev in Ukraine’s conflict with Russia but he’s also not the West’s preferred oligarch.
That’s all part of what makes Kolomoisky’s claims regarding the Trump administration’s shakedown campaign against the Zelensky government so remarkable. According to an interview Kolomoisky gave to Ukrainian media in May, Kolomoisky was approached by Giuliani’s business associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, in Israel in April to “demand” he set up a meeting between Giuliani and Zelensky. He went on to assert that Parnas and Fruman told him Giuliani had worked out a deal with then-chief prosecutor Yuri Lutsenko to investigate the range of topics Trump mentioned in his July 25 phone call, saying, “They came here and told us that they would organize a meeting with Zelensky. They allegedly struck a deal with [Prosecutor-general Yuriy] Lutsenko about the fate of this criminal case – Burisma, [former vice president] Biden, meddling in the U.S. election and so on.” When Kolomoisky rejected these demands, Giuliani attacked him on twitter and called for an investigation into him. On May 18, Giuliani tweeted that Kolomoisky was under investigation by the FBI and had “threatened two American citizens,” an apparent reference to Parnas and Fruman. Giuliani went on to call Kolomoisky an enemy of Trump and suggested Zelensky should arrest him. It was after this that Kolomoisky gave his tv interview. As Kolomoisky put it during the interview, “A big scandal may break out, and not only in Ukraine, but in the United States. That is, it may turn out to be a clear conspiracy against Biden.” So the world was warned this scandal was coming since at least May, even if that warning was widely ignored:
” One Ukrainian oligarch in particular, a figure close to President Volodymyr Zelensky, claims to have first-hand knowledge of Giuliani’s activities because, he says, Giuliani’s business associates tried to rope him into the scheme. When this Ukrainian business tycoon, Ihor Kolomoisky, rejected Giuliani’s request for help, Giuliani attacked him on Twitter and called for him to be investigated. Kolomoisky then gave an on-the-record interview on Ukrainian television in which he predicted that Giuliani was soon going to be the center of a “big scandal” in the United States.”
So after he apparently rejected Giuliani’s demands and then Giuliani tweeted about how the FBI was investigating Kolomoisky, Kolomoisky gives his interview where he predicts a big scandal about a conspiracy against the Bidens. You can’t say he wasn’t prescient. Kolomoisky called it, back in May:
And while this interview on Ukrainian tv was largely ignored in DC, there’s no way it was entirely ignored. Someone had to have noticed this, including the assertions about Burisma and investigating 2016 meddling.
It’s also important to note that Kolomoisky might have a connection to Burisma. According to a piece in Naked Capitalism published back in 2014, evidence suggest Kolomoisky’s PrivatGroup might be a secret owner of a holding company that held the shared of Burisma. But that’s not been confirmed. So it’s possible the Burisma affair has a more direct connection to Kolomoisky which would make the West’s light treatment of the corruption allegations against Burisma even less surprising. Again, Kolomoisy was a vital supporter of the military units fighting for the new interim Kiev government following the collapse of the Yanukovcyh government. Yes, he was wildly corrupt, but so were the rest of the Western-backed oligarchs who were given the blessings of the West following the Maidan protests. And yes, the West’s foreign policy during this period was extremely perilous and cynical in how it propelled the most extreme far right factions of Ukrainian society into prominence. But within the context of carrying out the US’s foreign policy at the time, if Kolomoisky secretly owned Burisma that would make it even less surprising that Burisma was allowed to get a pro-West makeover with the hiring of figures like Hunter Biden or Aleksandr Kwasniewski.
It’s also the kind of context that makes it clear that Trump’s plan to absolve himself of alleged Russian collusion by pressuring the Ukrainian government to take responsibility itself for the 2016 election meddling was basically a plan to completely reexamine what actually happened in Ukraine during the 2013–2014 period, when Western intelligence would have been deeply involved in Urkaine. That’s part of what would make the apparently triggered by the intelligence community very unsurprising. There’s a lot under that rock (that Paul Manafort would probably prefer left under the rock). But Trump has somehow managed to infuse his attempts to force this reexamination of what happened in Ukraine with such overt corruption and abuse of power that all of the focus is now on his own corrupt actions. As the GOP likes to say when dismissing away concerns about his actions, it’s just Trump being Trump.
One of the more bewildering aspects of the Trump administration’s strategy for dealing with the revelations that the Trump administration was extorting the government of Ukraine into carrying out politically charged investigations into Joe Biden and his son Hunter has been the fact that the Trump White House’s key rhetorical defense has been to say, “look at the transcripts...they show no quid pro quo!” That would be the redacted transcripts of a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymry Zelensky that clearly showed a ‘quid pro quo’ arrangement Trump was trying to force Ukraine into accepting. Those words alone were damning evidence — putting aside the avalanche of evidence that has subsequently emerged — and yet the Republicans and the larger right-wing media complex have rallied around those damning words as evidence of Trump’s innocence. The GOP often relies on nonsense defenses focused on misdirection and obfuscation but this was a doozy even by the GOP’s standards. The damning evidence is literally what they used as the centerpiece for their misdirection and obfuscation. It just seemed like a panicked strategy that would have to shift at some point. The ‘no quid pro quo’ defense was just too stupidly untenable. Plus, by pushing that narrative, a huge chunk of the right-wing media echo chamber jumped on board with the narrative and declared, “if there was a quid pro quo, that would obviously be problematic, but there wasn’t so there’s no problem.”
And it looks like we’ve finally hit the point where the Trump White House is dropping the ‘no quid pro quo’ argument as the core of its defense and shifting to an assertion that quid pro quos of this nature are actually quite fine. But based on the timing of this new defense it doesn’t look the Trump White House actually wanted to adopt it: In a stunning admission, Trump’s acting Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, just came out and declared that, yeah, there was a quid pro quo. The Trump administration really was withholding military aid for Ukraine until the investigations into the Bidens was started and this is all fine and normal and no one should complain. And Mulvaney came out and said this at the same time Trump’s EU ambassador, Gordan Sondland, was testifying before Congress about how this was a clear quid pro quo.
So it appears the Trump White House has been forced into a “quid pro quo like this are fine and normal” defensive posture in response to its wall of lies collapsing in real time. We’ll see if the “yes, it was as quid pro quo and it was totally fine” defense works better than the “there was no quid pro quo, don’t believe your lying eyes” defense. Presumably Republican voters will be fine with whatever the Trump White House says, but with polls already showing a majority of Americans supporting impeachment even before today’s bombshell admission from Mulvaney, it’s hard to imagine shifting from “there was no quid pro quo” to “quid pro quos are totally fine” is going to make impeachment less popular. And that suggests the national debate over this impeachment inquiry is going to revolve around whether or not soliciting and extorting foreign countries into meddling in US elections is officially just fine or not:
“Sondland told congressional investigators he did not realize “until much later” that Giuliani was seeking a Ukrainian-led investigation into Biden and his son — even though Trump himself and Giuliani had been calling publicly for such probes for weeks. He said any effort to solicit foreign assistance in an American election — an allegation central to the House’s impeachment inquiry — “would be wrong,” adding that he was “disappointed by” the May 23 meeting with Trump because he believed a Trump-Zelensky meeting “should be scheduled promptly and without any pre-conditions.””
Sondland made clear: the military aid to Ukraine was indeed contingent on Ukraine engaging in the investigations Giuliani wanted to see happen. Investigations into the Bidens and Burisma but also the confused allegation that Ukraine has the hacked DNC server. Now, it was pretty clear this was the case based on the released transcripts of that July 25 phone call, but it’s pretty undeniable at this point. One of the key schemers, Sondland, is openly acknowledging the military aid was contingent on those investigations:
Yet there appears to be even more evidence Sondland has. Evidence that the White House is trying to block him from releasing:
But Sondland’s testimony wasn’t the most damning testimony taking place today. At the very same time Sondland was testifying before Congress, Mick Mulvaney comes out and basically declares, yeah, there was a quid pro quo and it’s fine:
Now let’s take a closer look at what Mulvaney said. Because he wasn’t simply admitting there was a quid pro quo. He told everyone: “I have news for everybody: Get over it. There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy. That is going to happen. Elections have consequences, and foreign policy is going to change from the Obama administration to the Trump administration.” So the Trump defense is now that politically charged quid pro quos that include things like demands for investigating political opponents are a normal part of foreign policy and something that happens all the time:
“Pressed on whether he was describing a quid pro quo with Ukraine, Mulvaney responded that “we do that all the time with foreign policy,” and cited the holding back of aid to Northern Triangle countries in an attempt to affect their immigration policies.”
“We do that all the time with foreign policy.” That’s part of Mulvaney’s new defense. It’s a rather amazing defense given that the question of impeachment is now a question over whether or not these kinds of secret quid pro quos should be a normal part of US foreign policy. The GOP’s line of defense at this point is, yes, this should be normal and acceptable.
But Mulvaney’s comments also raise the question of how many other quid pro quos are they doing right now? And not necessarily quid pro quos involving ginning up investigations into political opponents. Don’t forget that this is the president who declared the emoluments clause doesn’t apply to him. There’s plenty of quid pro quo potential there. And then there’s the whole Saudi/UAE/PsyGroup quid pro quo arrangement that the Trump campaign appeared to have accepted during the 2016 campaign. Were other foreign powers making similar offers to the Trump campaign?
It also raises the question of what other quid pro quos involving getting a foreign power to help attack domestic political rivals have past administrations engaged? Mulvaney appeared to be suggesting this has long been the norm. Hmm...there’s probably a lot under that rock.
There was a significant update to the testimony of Gordan Sondland, the US ambassador to the EU who is in the middle of the ongoing #UkraineGate investigation. It’s the kind of update that’s probably going to make Trump and the GOP even more inclined to do whatever it takes to beat the charges but Sondland’s update implicates a figure the GOP probably would prefer as untouched as possible: Vice President Mike Pence.
Recall how Sondland was dubbed one of the “three amigos”, along with former Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Kurt Volker, the US envoy to Ukraine. The Trump administration reportedly replaced its core Ukraine policy team with Sondland, Volker, and Perry in the spring of 2019 because the latter three were considered more reliable for carrying out this pressure/extortion scheme. Also recall how Sondland’s communications with the acting chief US diplomat for Ukraine, Bill Taylor, raised eyebrows when it was revealed that Taylor sent Sondland a text on September 1, asking, “are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?” Sondland replied, “call me.” The next day, Taylor messages Sondland saying he thought it was “crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.” Sondland replied, “The President has been crystal clear no quid pro quo’s of any kind” before concluding “I suggest we stop the back and forth by text.” It was a series of communications that contained both evidence of guilt and evidence of a cover up.
Later, Sondland testified before Congress that he opposed President Trump’s request that the administration’s Ukraine policy be run through Rudy Giuliani — who appears to be the ‘mastermind’ of this scheme — but Sondland followed those orders and met with Giuliani on May 23. It was during that meeting that Giuliani drew a direct link between scheduling a White House visit for Ukraine’s newly elected president and demands that Ukraine prioritize the investigation into the Bidens. Giuliani emphasized at that meeting that Trump wanted a public statement from President Zelensky about Ukraine’s commitment to look into the Burisma/Biden issue. And it was at that hearing that Sondland clarified that he previously claimed there was no quid pro quo only because Trump repeatedly assured him of this in a phone call.
So now, after multiple other witnesses have informed congress about the nature of this ‘quid pro quo’ extortion scheme, Sondland appears to have ‘refreshed his memory’ about events. And those new memories include memories of Mike Pence’s direct involvement in this scheme. Specifically, Sondland now suddenly remembers that he had discussed with Andriy Yermak, a top Zelensky adviser, the linkage between the release of the US military aid to Ukraine and the public announcement by Ukraine of these investigations. This conversation took place on the sidelines of a September 1 meeting between Vice President Mike Pence and Mr. Zelensky in Warsaw. Sondland added that Zelensky had discussed the suspension of aid with Mr. Pence. That sure sounds like Pence was directly involved with Zelensky in enforcing Trump’s ‘quid pro quo’ extortion demands, which makes both Trump and Pence potential impeachment targets.
Now, at this point there’s still now indication that Trump will be convicted by the Senate even if he’s impeached, so the fact that Mike Pence is implicated too doesn’t posed some immediate risk that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will become president as a result of a Trump/Pence double impeachment conviction. But let’s not forget that this scandal has been growing by the day. We don’t really know where this is going to lead and whether or not at least some Republican senators might end up voting to convict an impeachment. So while it’s still not likely that Trump will be removed from office of this, if this scandal does blow up to the point where he is removed from office it’s looking like Mike Pence could be removed too:
“In the addendum, Mr. Sondland said he had “refreshed my recollection” after reading the testimony given by Mr. Taylor and Timothy Morrison, the senior director for Europe and Russia at the National Security Council.”
There’s nothing that ‘refreshes’ one’s recollection quite like testimonies that contradict your previous lies. And this refreshed recollection now includes Sondland making it unambiguously clear to one of Zelensky’s top advisers that the military aid was contingent on Ukraine publicly declaring it was opening these investigations. And this unambiguous message to Ukraine was delivered by Sondland at the sidelines of a September 1 meeting between Mike Pence and Zelensky where Pence and Zelensky discussed the suspension of aid. That’s pretty clear: Pence was also part of this shakedown campaign:
Is this the point when Mike Pence gets fully swept up in this inquiry? Well, if not, maybe the testimony of Pence’s top national security aid, Jennifer Williams, will do the trick. Because Williams just agreed to comply with a request to testify before congress on Thursday and she sounds like someone who would know what Pence knew about this shakedown scheme. As the following article notes, Williams accompanied Pence to that September 1 meeting where Pence and Zelensky met to discuss Ukraine’s aid. In addition, while Pence himself wasn’t listening in to the now-notorious July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelensky, Williams was listening in and a transcript of the call was put into Pence’s daily briefing binder:
“Jennifer Williams would be the first person on Pence’s national security team to appear and has knowledge of how much the vice president knew about the efforts by President Donald Trump and those around him to push Ukraine to launch investigations into Joe Biden and his son, as well as 2016 election interference, according to a source familiar with her thinking.”
So Williams will be the first person to testify who is knowledgeable of what Pence knew and when he knew it. And it sure sounds like Pence knew all about it. Might we be looking at a ‘President Pelosi’ scenario at the end of this story? Again, it still seems extremely unlikely that enough Republican Senators would vote to convict an impeachment. But that likelihood is still highly dependent on public polls and even Fox News has a new poll showing 49 percent of respondents not only supporting the impeachment of Trump but also his removal for office. A Fox News poll shows that.
But keep in mind that with the Trump team so far sticking with a “there was no quid pro quo and if there was it was fine” defense, that means we haven’t reached the “throw each other under the bus” phase. So while the question of whether or not Pence is going be impeached and convicted is an increasingly tantalizing question, a more immediate question at this point is whether or not Pence can be thrown under the bus in the defense of Trump. Is there a way the Trump team can somehow arrange for Pence to take the fall instead of Trumps? Perhaps both Trump and Pence get impeached but only Pence is removed? As polls move increasingly in support of impeachment and removal, the GOP is going to be increasingly interested some sort of scenario that placates that sentiment without the full removal of Trump and blaming it all on Pence is an obvious option. It’s hard to imagine that Trump himself can avoid culpability at this point given everything we’ve learned but who knows how they might be able to shape the story if they decide to make Mike the fall guy.
Of course, it’s possible most Republicans in congress would prefer to dump Trump and keep Pence, which seems like a much more feasible outcome given the facts of the case. Pence was clearly involved, but Trump was clearly in charge. So while there’s probably some calculations about the viability of throwing Pence under the bus to protect Trump taking place in the White House right now, there’s probably also some calculations about the opposite scenario. And yet the facts of the case are increasingly damning for both Trump and Pence. They’re both deeply implicated in terms of the available facts of case. It’s part of what makes the unfolding drama so fascinating. They’re all highly incentivized to throw each other under the bus and yet they’re all attached at the hip with this shared crime. So it’s actually like conjoined twin crime bosses trying to toss each other under the bus. That’s a complicated toss.
The Washington Post had a piece yesterday that describes what appears to the be strategy the House Republicans are slowly arriving at for protecting President Trump from impeachment over the #UkraineGate extortion scandal. The plan seems to revolve around throwing someone under the bus and portraying the whole situation as something done independently from Trump, but they are sure who to throw at this point. There are three figures they’re looking at to take the fall: Rudy Giuliani, Gordon Sondland, and Mick Mulvaney. All three have made wildly incriminating statements that directly implicate Trump, so the plan is to sow doubts about whether or not they were actually carrying out Trump’s wishes vs pursuing their own independent agendas. It sounds like part of the reason the House GOP haven’t arrived at a specific fall guy yet is because it’s kind of absurd to portray any of these figures as operating independently of Trump based on everything we know at this point. So this is less of a developing GOP strategy, and more like a wish list:
“All three occupy a special place in the Ukraine narrative as the people in most direct contact with Trump. As Republicans argue that most of the testimony against Trump is based on faulty secondhand information, they are sowing doubts about whether Sondland, Giuliani and Mulvaney were actually representing the president or freelancing to pursue their own agendas. The GOP is effectively offering up the three to be fall guys.”
That’s right, the three people in the Ukraine narrative who had the most direct contact with Trump regarding Ukraine are the three fall guys the GOP is considering for making the case that they weren’t actually coordinating with Trump at all and were pursuing their own agenda. It’s an ambitious strategy.
Gordon Sondland has testified that his understanding that Trump was demanding investigations into the Bidens and Burisma came from his conversations with Giuliani and Sondland was only “assuming” Giuliani was speaking for Trump. But Sondland also told investigators that he was in touch with Trump far more than he was with Giuliani but testified that he never heard directly from Trump on these issues. So in that sense it won’t be hard for the GOP to portray Sondland as someone who might lie. His own contradictions make it clear he’s been lying at some point. But both Bill Taylor and Tim Morrison also testified that Sondland told them that Trump asked Sondland to use the prospect of a direct meeting between Trump and Ukrainian president Zelinksy and military aid as leverage for getting the desired investigations, so if Sondland has been lying the evidence points towards him lying about not talking directly to Trump:
At the same time, Morrison also testified that he wondered if Sondland might be ‘freelancing’ when Sondland told him about the ‘quid pro quo’ shakedown scheme. Might that be enough for the GOP to run with and concoct a whole narrative about a freelancing Sondland? Taking individual facts/statements and creating elaborate narratives around them is kind of a GOP/right-wing media specialty so maybe that will be enough for them to work with?
Still, the assertion that Sondland was ‘freelancing’ raises the obvious question of ‘why’? Sondland doesn’t have any obvious interests in Ukraine and didn’t appear to be personally benefiting from this whole scheme at all. Giuliani, on the other hand, does have his own personal interests in Ukraine, like the bizarre cybersecurity contract he got with the city of Kharkiv. But it’s even more absurd to assert that he was freelancing without Trump’s involvement. After all, why would all of these other figures like Sondland be interfacing with Giuliani if they weren’t told to do so? He Trump’s personal lawyer. And yet Rep. Mark Meadows, head of the far right House ‘freedom caucus’, has been making the case that Giuliani wasn’t actually coordinating any of this with Trump at all:
Note that Giuliani just tweeted the following admission out two days ago:
As many of pointed out, this was an exceptionally incriminating tweet because it undermines the argument that the ‘quid pro quo’ shakedown was done simply as a normal course of US government anti-corruption efforts. But that’s what Rudy tweeted.
And then there’s Mick Mulvaney, who created an uproar when he came out and flatly said there was a ‘quid pro quo’ and everyone should “get over it”. According to some House Republicans, maybe this entire fiasco was Mick Mulvaney simply trying to cut foreign aid as he is ideologically inclined to do? It’s the kind of narrative that would rely on ignoring almost everything else we’ve learned about this case. Yes, ignoring almost everything when convenient is a GOP specialty so we can’t rule this strategy out, but laying this all on Mulvaney seems like a stretch even for the GOP. There’s just too much else that would have to be ignored. Like Giuliani:
So given the absurdity if these narratives, it looks like the GOP has arrived as a strategy that’s less about defending Trump and more about highlighting all the contradicting statements made by the figures at the center of this scandal.
It also happens to be a strategy that portrays Trump as a kind of absent president who allows his minions to carry out US foreign policy for their own ends. In other words, the ‘Reagan defense’. Which, if you think about it, might be the only valid Trump defense at this point. Giuliani might also want to look into that defense.
Here’s a set of articles that highlight one of the more interesting aspects of the whole #UkraineGate fiasco: The Trump team wasn’t just trying to pressure the recently elected Zelensky government into investigating Burisma and Hunter and Joe Biden along with Ukrainian interference in the 2016 US election. They had previously been trying to get the Poroshenko government to announce their investigations into these matters too. The Poroshenko government was, of course, the very same government that would have been involved with any election meddling so the Trump team was trying to get the Poroshenko government to investigate itself. You have to wonder what those negotiations were like.
And given that the recent congressional testimony by a number of the figures involved with this, in particular EU ambassador Gordon Sondland, has been making it clear that the pressure campaign the Zelensky government was done at the behest of President Trump and involved a large number of officials working on this beyond the ‘shadow diplomacy’ unofficial team — Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas, and Igor Fruman — that raises the question of whether or not the pressure campaign against the Poroshenko government also involved officials like Sondland or if that was primarily done just by the ‘shadow’ team. At this point it’s unclear. But as we’re going to see in the third article below, it turns out Lev Parnas wasn’t just working with Trump and Giuliani. Back in the fall of 2018, Lev Parnas was helping Republican congressman Devin Nunes arrange trips and meetings to Europe as part of Nunes’s own investigation into the origins of the Mueller investigation.
Part of what makes this all quite interesting is that, based on what we’ve seen so far, it looks like Parnas and Giuliani were basically indulging in garbage conspiracy theories about these topics that weren’t really based in reality. There’s an abundance of legitimate areas of inquiry regarding possible actions by people in Ukraine regarding the 2016 election. For example, the Ukrainian oligarch Dmitro Firtash — who appears to be key figure financing the Giuliani/Parnas/Fruman team and who wanted to see — is probably the Ukrainian oligarch who would have had the greatest incentive to hack the Democrats, assist Trump, and make it look like a Russian operation. But Giuliani and Parnas were never pushing for investigations into legitimate questions. They were pressing for investigations into claims like Crowdstrike being owned by Ukrainians and possessing the hacked DNC server in Ukraine. So if that’s the kind of stuff Parnas was pushing with Giuliani, you have to wonder what Parnas was peddling to Nunes. Might one of the roles Parnas has been playing in all of this is to ensure the Republicans don’t go looking in the direction of Firtash?
Ok, first, here’s an article summarizing all the ways Gordan Sondland’s congressional testimony yesterday made it clear that when he was working on this scheme to force the Zelensky government to publicly open investigations into the Bidens Sondland was acting on President Trump’s direct orders. In other words, Trump definitely was NOT out of the loop when Sondland and the rest of the diplomatic staff were following Giuliani’s direction in shaking down the Zelensky government:
““We weren’t happy with the President’s directive to talk with Rudy. We did not want to involve Mr. Giuliani,” Sondland said. He added that Trump presented them with a choice: “abandon the efforts” to schedule Zelensky’s call and White House visit, or “do as President Trump had directed and ‘talk to Rudy.’””
Sondland clearly isn’t going to be the fall guy here. And as he made clear, the official US diplomatic team operating in Ukraine was basically ordered by Trump to following Rudy Giuliani’s lead on these matters. At least that’s the case regarding the shakedown of the Zelensky government. But we haven’t heard Sondland make any comments regarding the Poroshenko government, and as the following TPM article describes, the Giuliani/Parnas/Fruman crew appears to have been convinced they had a deal worked out with Poroshenko’s government to open up investigations into the Bidens in February of this year. The apparent deal was that Poroshenko would get a state visit to the US and in return he would announce the opening of an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma. That state visit never happened, but Ukraine’s then-prosecutor general Yuri Lutsenko was reportedly working directly with Giuliani earlier this year and put forward stories of abuse of power by Biden and collusion between the Ukrainian government and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Lutsenko sat down with right-wing journalist John Solomon for a series of interviews in March where Lutsenko announced he was opening the investigations into the Bidens and potential Ukrainian interference in the 2016 elections. Part of what makes that interesting is that the allged abuse of power of Biden that this whole story revolves around is the pressure Biden put on the Ukrainian government to fire of Viktor Shokin, who was Lutsenko’s predecessor. Keep in mind that Shokin announced in September that he is suing to get his old job back and has been publicly defending Dmitro Firtash. That’s the kind of context that raises the question of whether or not Lutsenko’s apparent eagerness to work with the Trump team to exonerate Shokin was driven, in part, by a desire to stay on the Trump administration’s good side over fears that a public exoneration of Shokin might lead to calls for Shokin’s return to the prosecutor general position. Either way, the question of what sort of ‘carrot/stick’ arrangement was worked out with Poroshenko’s government to convince it to investigate itself seems like a potentially significant question at this point, along with the question of whether or not that arrange with Poroshenko was working out exclusively by the ‘shadow’ team of Giuliani/Parnas/Fruman or if it involved the larger official diplomatic team as was the case later with the Zelensky government:
“The crucial piece in understanding the Ukraine scandal is that two months before Zelensky won power – in February 2019 – Trump thought that he had done a deal which would transform Ukraine into a domestic political bludgeon.”
They thought they had a deal all worked out. And then Poroshenko lost in a landslide. Amazingly, it sounds like the Giuliani/Parnas/Fruman team didn’t see this coming, which is absurd given how wildly unpopular Poroshenko was. It’s another example of this team appearing to be divorced from reality:
But note how this Poroshenko deal only appears to have involved Giulian, Parnas, and Fruman. There’s no mention of any official diplomats. That suggests this really was some sort of secret shadow diplomacy going on that the official diplomatic team may have known nothing about:
And note how Lutsenko appeared to be Poroshenko’s point man on these negotiations. On one hand, that makes sense since he would be the Ukrainian figure with the most power to announce new investigations. But it’s also kind of amazing that it included a request from an investigation into the firing of the guy that preceded Lutsenko. Those must have been some interesting negotiations. But some sort of deal was worked out because by March 20, Lutsenko was doing interviews with John Solomon and announcing these investigations:
Also note the interesting trip Parnas and Fruman took to Israel in April, after Zelensky’s win, to apparently shakedown Ihor Kolomoisky for money to get access to Trump administration officials. Keep in mind that there’s evidence pointing towards Kolomoisky being the secret owner of Burisma, so you have to wonder of the real nature of this shakedown and if Kolomoiksy’s relationship with Burisma is part of why the ‘negotiations’ with Zelensky look like extortion:
And based on this timeline, it sounds like figures like Sondland and Volker were only asked to get involved with this pressure campaign (that turned into an extortion campaign) after Zelensky took office. Before that, this was all shadow diplomacy by unofficial figures:
So that all makes it appear that the Giuliani/Parnas/Fruman team were working unofficially and secretly for Trump until Zelenksy won and the official diplomats were were asked to help with the effort. But now we’re learning that Parnas was apparently working with Republican congressmen Devin Nunes and late 2018 too. So Parnas’s ‘secret mission’ for Trump may not have been much of secret to the rest of the GOP since they were apparently relying on Parnas too:
“Lev Parnas, an indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani, helped arrange meetings and calls in Europe for Rep. Devin Nunes in 2018, Parnas’ lawyer Ed MacMahon told The Daily Beast.”
That sure is an interesting thing for Parnas’s lawyer to start talking about to the press. But that’s what his lawyer said. And it sounds like Parnas’s hurt feelings over Trump’s disavowals of knowing Parnas may have had something to do with this embarrassing disclosure:
And since Parnas was helping Nunes on Nunes’s invstigation of the origins of the Mueller investigation, you have to wonder if Parnas was also providing him various ‘leads’ on that effort too. Given the confused conspiracy theories that Giuliani was pursuing regarding Ukraine and the 2016 election, it would be interesting to know if Nunes was also being fed confused conspiracy theories about the origins of the Mueller investigation by Parnas. Because don’t forget, any investigation by the Republicans into the origins of the Mueller investigation would also include a look into the real culprits for the hacks of the Democrats. And of all the Ukrainian oligarchs who would have had an incentive to harm Hillary Clinton’s campaign and see Trump win without getting caught Dmytro Firtash is near the top of the list, as this whole fiasco has made clear. Given that Parnas is reportedly getting paid handsomely by Firtash, you have to wonder if one of his jobs was ensuring the Republicans’ investigations into Ukraine remain thoroughly confused and ungrounded and stay as far away from looking into Firtash as possible.
We’re learning more about Lev Parnas — one of the two Ukrainian-Americans working with Rudy Giuliani for Trump’s Ukrainian extortion schemes — and his work with Republican congressman Devin Nunes in the fall of 2018 on Nunes’s attempts to contact people in Europe for Nunes’s investigations. We were initially told those investigations centered on the origins of the Mueller probe. But based on the following interview with Parnas’s lawyer, it’s sounding more and more like Nunes was primarily focused on the exact same topics that Rudy Giuliani was pursuing regarding the Biden/Burisma story and the story of the Ukrainian government working to harm Trump in 2016 by working with then-DNC operative Alexandra Chalupa. In other words, the Trump team’s Burisma/Biden investigation scheme was actually a Trump/Congressional GOP scheme to force the Ukrainian government into publicly declaring investigations into the Bidens.
According to Parnas’s lawyer, Joseph A. Bondy, the help Parnas offered Nunes last fall included getting Nunes in touch with Viktor Shokin. Nunes was primarily interested in the exact same Biden/Burisma story Giuliani was pursuing. The timing of Nune’s trip to meet Shokin is also notable: it was after the 2018 elections, when the Republicans lost control of the House, but before the start of the new congressional session so Nunes was still the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
The timing apparently helped Nunes avoid having to disclose the trip to the Democrats. According to Bondy, “Mr. Parnas learned through Nunes’ investigator, Derek Harvey, that the Congressman had sequenced this trip to occur after the mid-term elections yet before Congress’ return to session, so that Nunes would not have to disclose the trip details to his Democrat colleagues in Congress.” So Nunes was very interested in keep this a secret, which makes sense since the ultimate goal was to get the Ukrainian government to public open investigations into the Bidens. Learning that the GOP basically forced the Ukrainian government into making those public investigations pretty much ruins their propaganda value.
Nunes’s investigator, Derek Harvey, also appears to the be key person in establishing that the Giuliani effort was basically merged with the Nunes effort. Because it sounds like after Nunes initially met with Parnas and spoke with him the phone a few times, Nunes instructed Parnas to work with Harvey on these Ukraine matters. But Harvey also met several times a week with a larger group of people working with Giuliani on these matters at the BLT restaurant at Trump’s International Hotel in DC. It was understood that Harvey was Nunes’s proxy at these meetings.
It also sounds like Parnas is seriously personally wounded by Trump’s disavowals of Parnas’s working on this scheme and he’s getting revenge by offering to tell all to congress. So while a picture is emerging of a joint Giuliani/Nunes (White House/GOP congress) effort on this story, it’s very possible Parnas has a lot more to add to that picture and sounds willing to do so:
“Bondy tweeted directly at Republican California Rep. Kevin McCarthy Thursday night after McCarthy accused Schiff of blocking important witnesses from testifying, saying “I don’t agree with your premise, but please, if you mean what you say, call my client, Lev Parnas. #LetLevSpeak.””
#LetLevSpeak. That’s quite a hashtag. What additional secrets might Lev Parnas have to share about his ‘secret mission’? We’ll find out. Maybe. But in the mean time his lawyer seems ready publicly dangle all sorts of tantalizing details. Details like Devin Nunes apparently doing his own investigation into the whole Biden/Burisma story and traveling to meet with the fired former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin as part of that effort. Parnas helped Nunes meet Shokin according to his lawyer:
So Parnas was apparently help both the Trump/Giuliani scheme to hype the Biden/Burisma story and the parallel Nunes scheme to do the same thing. But it doesn’t sound like those two separate teams looking into the Biden/Burisma story and the Ukrainian work with Alexandra Chalupa in 2016. Instead, we’re learning about Parnas’s lawyer that Nunes tasked one of his aides on the House Intelligence Committee, Derek Harvey, to participate in weekly meetings with the Giuliani team at the Trump International Hotel in DC. Harvey had previously worked on Trump’s National Security Council, so it sounds like Harvey may have been well positioned to coordinate the efforts between the Nunes team and the Giuliani team. Making it all one big team:
And note that it’s not just Parnas’s lawyer making these claims about these regular Trump Hotel meetings. Right-wing journalist John Solomon also confirmed the meetings to CNN:
It’s not just Parnas making these claims. If Solomon is confirming this, the BLT meetings really did happen.
It’s also worth noting that the general approach of the Democrats of asserting that the story of coordination between the Ukrainian government and then-DNC operative Alexandra Chalupa is just debunked Russian propaganda seems like a horrible mistake and missed opportunity. After all, there’s never actually been a debunking of that January 2017 Politico article where Chalupa herself appeared to be openly acknowleding this interfacing happened with Ukrainian embassy officials. There were some denials by Ukrainian officials and some quibbling by Chalupa about the article but not a real debunking. And nor is a debunking necessary because that ‘coordination’ with Chalupa was coordination to basically share publicly known information and suspicions that Manafort had ties to the Kremlin based on his work for Viktor Yanukovych. That’s it. The key takeaway from the story of Chalupa’s work withe the Ukrainian embassy is how utterly pointless it was. Chalupa gets alarmed by Paul Manafort’s ascension to the role Trump’s campaign manager and started following the standard narrative about Manafort working as a Kremlin operative. She contacts the Ukrainian embassy in DC and officials there apparently agree to share what they might know about Manafort, which is just the same stories about Manafort that were already widely reported in the news for years. It would have almost been odd if the Ukrainian government was enthusiastic to share these stories with Chalupa about Manafort given the Ukrainian government’s deep hostility towards anyone associated with the Yanukovych government. And that points to why it makes no sense at all to compare the information sharing of information on Manafort between the Ukrainian embassy personnel and Chalupa with the Trump/Giuliani extortion scheme: The Ukrainian government would have been enthusiastic to shared info of Manafort with Chalupa and apparently shared utterly useless publicly known information about Manafort the Chalupa could have found on the internet but they had to be extorted into opening these investigations in the Bidens. That’s not an apples and oranges comparison. It’s an apples and hand grenades comparison.
Now, it’s true that the publication of the “Black Ledger” in August of 2016 by Ukrainian parliamentarian Serhiy Leshchenko that led to the Manafort’s resignation from Trump’s campaign was certainly impactful in the 2016. But there’s no indication he did that in coordination with the Democrats and, again, there’s every indication Ukrainian politicians like Leshchenko would have been extremely enthusiastic to embarrass Manafort for their own reasons. They didn’t require secret Democratic extortion or shakedown efforts. And that’s why the Democrats shouldn’t be denying the undeniable about that information sharing between Chalupa and the Ukrainian embassy...it turned out to be such a useless act of coordination that the Ukrainians would have been enthusiastic to voluntarily engage in at the time that it actually underscores the awfulness the Trump/Giuliani extortion scheme. Or, rather, the Trump/Giuliani/Nunes extortion scheme.
The New York Times had a fascinating new update on Rudy Giuliani’s Ukrainian scheming. It’s looking like the story of the shakedown of Ukraine’s president Zelensky — no Javelin missiles until an investigation was announced against the Bidens/Burisma — was just an appetizer story about shakedowns: Based on the statements from Lev Parnas’s lawyer and interviews of two Ukrainian oligarchs at the heart of this story, Dmitry (Dmitro) Firtash and Ihor Kolomoisky, it appears that the Giuliani team actually identified both Firtash and Kolomoisky as vulnerable to manipulation due to their legal troubles in the US and the scheme was encourage them to work with Giuliani on digging up/creating dirt on the Bidens by dangling offers of legal assistance. Don’t forget that Giuliani claims to have been acting as Trump’s personal attorney during this whole thing so the president’s attorney was basically dangling legal help to these Ukrainian oligarchs facing legal trouble in the US. As we now know, Firtash took Giuliani’s offer and ended up hiring two Trump-connected laywers, Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova, to represent him in US courts. Lev Parnas, who made the offer to Firtash to hire these attorneys, ended up getting a hefty $200,000 finder’s fee as a result too.
As the following article notes, Toensing and Mr. diGenova had been working on Giuliani’s dirt digging operations for months, interviewing anyone they could find who had claims of dirt on the Bidens. Shortly after Firtash hired Toensing and diGenova, legal documents from his extradition case in Vienna — specifically, documents written by former Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin alleging that Joe Biden improperly forced him from office over the Burisma investigation — started appearing in the press via right-wing journalist John Solomon. Solomon has also retained Toensing and diGenova as his attorney. Firtash denies he ever authorized the release of those documents and claims he’s been wrangled into this domestic US political dispute without his permission.
When Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman approached Kolomoisky in late April with an offer of arranging a meeting between Giuliani and president Zelensky, Kolomoisky told them he couldn’t arrange such a meeting and asked them to leaving. As we’ll see in the second article excerpt below, Parnas and Fruman also told Kolomoisky they could arrange for Vice President Mike Pence to attend Zelensky’s inauguration...for $250,000. Kolomoisky refused all of these offers and soon after that refusal Giuliani was openly tweeting to president Zelensky about how Ukraine “must cleanse himself from hangers-on from his past and from criminal oligarchs — Ihor Kolomoisky and others.”
Keep in mind that the timeline here — approaching Kolomoisky in April and Firtash in June — puts all of this months into this initiative by Giuliani to dig up dirt on the Bidens that started some time in the fall of 2018. It might explain in part why Giuliani started resorted to seeking out and shaking down legally vulnerable oligarchs...they couldn’t find anything after months of searching around and therefore needed to apply pressure to have someone create the incriminating allegations they were seeking out.
So it really does look like Giuliani’s operation revolved around finding Ukrainian oligarchs that faced legal troubles in the US, dangling legal help to them in exchange for help in digging up dirt on the Bidens, and making a hefty profit while they’re at it. As former US attorney Chuck Rosenberg puts it: “And it is even worse if Mr. Giuliani, either directly or through emissaries acting on his behalf, intimated that pending criminal cases can be ‘fixed’ at the Justice Department. The president’s lawyer seems to be trading on the president’s supervisory authority over the Justice Department, and that is deeply disturbing.”:
“But interviews with the two Ukrainian oligarchs — Dmitry Firtash and Ihor Kolomoisky — as well as with several other people with knowledge of Mr. Giuliani’s dealings, point to a new dimension in his exertions on behalf of his client, Mr. Trump. Taken together, they depict a strategy clearly aimed at leveraging information from politically powerful but legally vulnerable foreign citizens.”
Leveraging information for legally vulnerable Ukrainian oligarchs. That appears to be the core of Giuliani’s scheme. But not initially. This came months into the operation to find dirt on the Bidens. And the scheme appeared to be coming to fruition, with the Poroshenko government agreeing to publicly open investigations into the Bidens. But then Poroshenko lost, hence the need to shakedown these legally vulnerable oligarchs, one of whom happens to be very close to the new president Zelensky:
And note how Lev Parnas is making it unambiguously clear that the the purpose of meeting with Firtash was to solicit dirt on Biden, but Giuliani is giving the ‘I didn’t do it, but if I did it would be ok’ denial, which is basically an admission at this point:
As Chuck Rosenberg describes it, it appears that Giuliani was offering to ‘fix’ cases for these oligarchs at the Justice Department. That was what was clearly being dangled in exchange for cooperation in digging up dirt on the Bidens. Plus money. Lots of money in the case of the services offered to Firtash, which cost $1.2 million to date, including a $200,000 finders fee for Parnas. So this wasn’t just a shakedown for incriminating information. It was also just a classic shakedown for money:
And hese lawyers really did deliver what they offered in the sense that they got an interview with Attorney General Bill Barr. While it doesn’t sound like they got Barr to ultimately intervene in Firtash’s case, the fact that they were able to even get a meeting with Barr raises the question of whether or not Giuliani, who is acting as Trump’s lawyer in all this, was using his connection to Trump to get that meeting. Also note how Firtash is continuing to retain Toensing and diGenova, which also raises the question of whether or not this case is being strung along in order to extract more incriminating information/allegations about the Bidens from Firtash. In other words, if they completely succeeded in getting Firtash’s case thrown out, they wouldn’t have leverage on Firtash anymore:
And then there’s the attempted shakedown of Kolomoisky following Zelensky’s win, where Parnas and Fruman traveled to Israel “under the made-up pretext of dealing liquefied natural gas,” according to Kolomoisky. But it soon became clear they were actually trying to arrange a meeting between Giuliani and Zelensky. After Kolomoisky refused his offer, Giuliani started tweeting about how Zelensky, “must cleanse himself from hangers-on from his past and from criminal oligarchs — Ihor Kolomoisky and others.” So given that the public fight between Giuliani and Kolomoisky was over an attempt to arrange a meeting between Giuliani and Zelensky, those tweets attacking Kolomoisky should really be seen as an indirect threat against Zelensky if he doesn’t eventually agree to go along with this scheme. That’s all part of the context leading up to the now notorious July 25th phone call between Trump and Zelensky:
So we have a successful shakedown of Firtash and an unsuccessful shakedown of Kolomoisky. And in both cases Giuliani, acting as the President’s attorney, appeared to be dangling legal assistance in the US justice system. Legal assistance that included successfully getting a meeting Attorney General Bill Barr for Firtash’s Trump-connected lawyers. But also cash, with $1.2 million paid by Firtash for these legal services, including a $200,000 finders for Lev Parnas.
And as the following article from last month mentions about the meeting with Kolomoisky, Parnas and Fruman actually tried to get paid by him too. They wanted $250,000 in exchange for Vice Prsident Mike Pence and Energy Secretary Rick Perry attending Zelenksy’s inauguration. So they weren’t just peddling legal ‘fixes’ in US cases at the Justice Department. They were also selling appearances by US officials:
Then, Marks said, they told Kolomoisky that they could arrange for top U.S. officials, including Pence and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, to attend Zelensky’s inauguration should he win the presidency. In exchange, Marks claims, Parnas and Fruman asked that Kolomoisky pay them $250,000. Marks’s allegations were first reported by CNN.
Parnas and Fruman were literally selling visits by Trump officials, while working on behalf of Trump’s personal attorney. $250,000 is apparently the going rate for the vice president and energy secretary. It raises the question of who exactly was going to ultimately get this $250,000. What was Giuliani’s cut? How about Trump’s cut? Was he in on this? Either way, it sounds like Trump may have been aware of Kolomoisky’s refusal to take that offer because Mike Pence was apparently instructed by Trump to stay away from the inauguration:
And given that it sounds like the Giuliani/Parnas/Fruman team was legitimately surprised that the Poroshenko government lost to Zelensky despite it being overwhelmingly obvious Poroshenko was likely to lose and prompting this sudden meeting with Kolomoisky in late April, it’s worth keeping in mind that most of the people in Trump’s orbit who would have had actual knowledge of the politics in Ukraine were probably unavailable for assistance at this point. The Paul Manafort was facing prison. Sam Patten was under scrutiny by the Mueller team and Rick Gates already flipped. Rudy Giuliani, who had business ties to Ukraine via is bizarre cybersecurity company, may have been the one guy left in the fall of 2018 who was close enough to Trump to be trusted with this kind of scheme and who had a passing familiarity with Ukraine, but only had a passing familiarity.
So, overall, it’s looking like offering to help Ukrainian oligarchs with their legal battles in the US is a major aspect of the Giuliani/Parnas/Fruman shakedown campaign. But don’t forget that we recently learned that congressman Devin Nunes was apparently part of this operation too, so you have to wonder if any congressional assistance was also being dangled. We haven’t heard anything yet suggesting that’s the case, but with the way this story is playing out we shouldn’t be surprised if we eventually learn about that happening too.
In related news, we’re now learning that when Giuliani, Parnas, and Fruman traveled to Madrid in August of this here to meeting with a top Zelensky aide, Andriy Yermak, they also made a separate meeting with a wealthy Venezuelan oligarch, Alejandro Betancourt López, who is facing a Justice Department investigation into alleged money laundering and bribery. A month later, Giuliani at a meeting at the Justice Department headquarters with the rest of of Betancourt López’s legal team to meet with the head of the criminal division. Because that’s how Rudy rolls:
“Giuliani’s representation of Betancourt — which has not been previously disclosed — is a striking example of how Trump’s lawyer has continued to offer his services to foreign clients with interests before the U.S. government while working on behalf of the president. And it shows how Giuliani — who says he was serving as Trump’s attorney pro bono — has used his work for paying clients to help underwrite his efforts to find political ammunition in Ukraine to benefit the president.”
Yes, it is quite striking how Trump’s personal attorney keeps finding these wealthy international clients facing legal challenges in the US. But that appears to be his business model. A business model that doesn’t include any compensation at all for his representation of Trump. Presumably all the additional business he gets by dangling the prospect of fixing oligarch legal problems at the Justice Department serves as adequate compensation
“Nobody is paying me for a single thing I’m doing for Donald J. Trump.” And that apparently includes Trump. All of this work Giuliani has been doing for Trump as his personal attorney has been entirely for free, including all of the work he’s done trying to dig up dirt on the Bidens. And all of the work he’s done for these other wealthy oligarch clients is entirely unrelated to his free work for Trump. It’s just a coincidence that the primary service Trump’s private attorney is offering these wealthy oligarch clients is legal help with the Justice Department. Because Rudy cares so deeply about corruption.
The events that led up to the firing of former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin are about to become even more important to US domestic politics now that the House Intelligence Committee has formally voted, along strictly partisan lines, to approve its #UkraineGate impeachment probe report and send it along to the House Judiciary Committee. The report prepared by the Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee more or less reiterates the already damning evidence against President Trump and Rudy Giuliani in their increasingly zany and corrupt ‘anti-corruption’ scheme to force the Ukrainian government into publicly announcing investigations into Joe Biden’s role in Shokin’s firing. The actions by Giuliani and Congressman Devin Nunes — who was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee when he started working on this scheme in the fall of 2018 shortly after the mid-term elections that resulted in the Republicans losing control of the House — are looking increasingly intertwined at the same time Giuliani’s and Dmitro (Dmitry) Firtash’s actions are looking increasing intertwined and a pattern of extortive influence peddling at Trump’s behest emerges. The more convoluted this scheme gets, the clearer it becomes that this group is guilty of a whole range of potentially impeachable offenses.
And that’s all why the story of what actually happened with Joe Biden and the firing of Viktor Shokin is bound to be an even more important question in the coming months. The GOP’s defense of Trump appears to revolve around the notion that Trump was primarily driven by an anti-corruption zeal. Interesting, when Trump tried to ‘pass the buck’ for this scheme by acting like Rudy Giuliani was acting on his own last week, Trump cited Giuliani’s alleged anti-corruption zeal as Giuliani’s motive, calling Giuliani a “warrior” against corruption. The whole scheme is about fighting corruption. Charges of Biden’s guilt is bound to be a core Trump defense making the story of what actually led to the firing of Viktor Shokin a lot more important as the impeachment process plays out.
So it’s worth noting one of the more interesting twists of that story that led up to Shokin’s firing: one of the top advocates of his firing inside Ukraine at the time, Deputy Prosecutor General Davit Sakvarelidze, happened to be one of the Georgians brought into Ukraine’s government under an anti-corruption program and the cases he worked on targeted corrupt prosecutors. Sakvarelidze is also an ally of Mikheil Saakashvili, himself appointed the governor of Odessa in 2015 under the banner of ‘anti-corruption’. As we’ve seen, Saakashvili has since been trying to brand himself as an anti-corruption crusader in his own quest to build a Ukrainian political movement. It rather perverse that figures associated with Saakashvili were framed as anti-corruption fighters but that’s what happened. In July of 2017, Saakashvili started the New Movement Forces party, which triggered the ire of Petro Poroshenko who stripped him of his citizenship and expelled him from the country. Saaskashvili made his return in May of this year following the victory of Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Zelenskiy reinstated Saakashvili’s Ukrainian citizenship. Saakashvili’s New Movement Forces party remains active in Ukrainian politics and fielded candidates for parliament this year, which included Sakvarelidze.
The following article described Sakvarelidze’s calls for Shokin’s firing is from March of 2016. It also describes 150 demonstrators who had been protesting for Shokin’s decision to fire the subordinates of Sakvarelidze who were working on corruption cases on prosecutors. Recall that by that point there are already been a number of calls for Shokin’s firing in protest of Shokin’s protection of the so called “diamond prosecutors”, Oleksandr Korniyets and Volodymyr Shapakin. The two had been arrested in 2015 for running a shakedown scheme (threatening to prosecutor businessmen unless they pay a fee), but Shokin blocked their prosecution. Vitaly Kasko, also a Deputy Prosecutor General, resigned in protest a month earlier, specifically over Shokin’s blocking of the prosecution of the “diamond prosecutors”. And according to Sakvarelidze, Shokin and his first deputy Yury Sevruk had been sabotaging efforts to prosecute Korniyets and Shapakin and more generally thwart efforts to purge the prosecutor’s office of corrupt and incompetent officials:
“The demonstrators called for re-instating Sakvarelidze’s prosecutors, firing Shokin and choosing a new prosecutor general in an open and transparent process. They also demanded preventing the appointment of old prosecutorial cadres and Shokin loyalists like his deputies Yury Sevruk and Yury Stolyarchuk, as well as proteges of President Petro Poroshenko.”
Were these 150 demonstrators calling for Shokin’s firing over the refusal to prosecute the “diamond prosecutors” part of a scheme arranged by Joe Biden to get Shokin fired to protect Hunter Biden’s position at Burisma? That’s half of what the whole Trump/Giuliani/Nunes fiasco was all about...proving that Shokin really was innocent of these charges and was unfairly driven from office because Joe Biden turned everyone against him. And under their version of events, Biden would have not only encourage Vitaly Kasko to resign in protest in February of 2016 but he also arranged for Sakvarelidze, a Georgian invited into the country under an anti-corruption program, to join in on a smear campaign against Shokin.
Now here’s a piece giving more information on the scandal that erupted around Shokin and his defense of the “diamond prosecutors” and how that eventually resulted in US calls for Shokin’s firing. It turns out one of the “diamond prosecutors”, Oleksandr Korniyets, had actually been Shokin’s personal driven before Shokin made him a prosecutor. Based on the testimony of George Kent, who was the deputy chief of the mission in Ukraine at the time, “Shokin went to war” against the inspector general unit that was leading the investigation. The “diamond prosecutors” case also happened to be the first investigation of a watchdog unit that had partnered with the US to reform the prosecutor’s office. So this case was a very big deal to the international community working in Ukraine at that time. According to Kent’s congressional testimony back in October, it was Geoffrey Pyatt, then-US ambassador to Ukraine, who asked Joe Biden to make the demand to Poroshenko that he fire Shokin:
“Kent’s testimony gives the context for Joe Biden’s demand that Ukrainian leaders fire Shokin following the “diamond prosecutor” scandal, as the case came to be known. The controversy put Shokin on the wrong side of the first investigation launched by the watchdog who had partnered with U.S. officials to reform the prosecutor’s office.”
The very first anti-corruption case by a watchdog partnered with the US. That’s what the “diamond prosecutors” cases represented. A “test case” that happened to involve a corrupt prosecutor who had previously been Shokin’s driver. And as the article notest, after Sakvarelidze made his calls for Shokin’s firing over the case, Shokin fired him too:
And Sakvarelidze was just one of Shokin’s targets in defending these “diamond prosecutors”. As Kent describes it, Shokin went to war against the entire inspector general unit that was leading the investigation into corrupt prosecutors. This resulted in then US ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt asking Biden to demand to Poroshenko that Shokin be fired:
But another part of what angered the US about Shokin’s actions was his refusal to investigate, Mykola Zlochevsky, the apparent owner of Burisma. As Kent recalled telling a Ukrainian official: “We spent months and hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to help your country get your stolen assets back, and somebody in your office took a bribe and shut a case, and we’re angry”:
So as we can see, the firing of Viktor Shokin was due to frustrations over his refusal to pursue corruption investigations, but those didn’t just include corruption investigations into figures like Mykola Zlochevsky at businesses like Burisma. It also involved the refusal to allow corruption investigations into corrupt prosecutors and a willingness to fire figures like Deputy Prosecutor General David Sakvarelidze when they protested. Now, it may be the case that importing figures associated with Saakashvili to fight Ukrainian corruption was a deeply cynical policy that never should have been considered, but that doesn’t change the underlying facts of this case. And the underlying facts do not appear to align at all with the narrative being crafted by the Giuliani/Trump/Nunes scheme. A narrative that’s now central to Trump’s impeachment defense.
It’s also worth noting that Saakashvili’s party, which Sakvarelidze is a member of, only got 0.46% of the vote in this year’s parliamentary elections and therefore won’t have any members in parliament. So it’s unclear how much of a future this group of Georgian Saakashvili allies has in Ukraine’s political scene. But in Sakvarelidze’s case, given the potential importance of his own testimony on these matters involving Trump’s impeachment, there’s at least one additional country where he can make an anti-corruption contribution. Third times a charm!
Now that the House Judiciary Committee has passed two articles of impeachment against Donald Trump over #UkraineGate and proceedings are soon going to be passed to the Senate, one of the interesting questions we’ll soon get an answer to is whether or not we’ll see the Republican controlled Senate call up all the various witnesses to testify before Congress that the Republicans in the House have been demanding but don’t have the power to call.
For weeks now, we’ve seen the House Republicans leading Trump’s defense asking their Republican colleagues in the Senate call various witnesses. Witnesses like Hunter Biden or Alexandra Chalupa. Trump himself has also endorsed the idea of a Senate trial that includes calling these witnesses. And last week it was looking like that was exactly what some Senate Republicans were planning, with Senators Ron Johnson, Chuck Grassley, and Linsday Graham requested records from Chalupa as well as a staff-level interview with her.
But now we’re hearing that the Senate Republicans are planning on calling no witnesses at all and immediately moving to hold a vote on the impeachment. This, despite Trump openly saying on Friday that he would prefer a drawn out Senate trial that involves calling lots of witnesses. So why the sudden change of plans after months of Republican clamoring about not being able to call witnesses? It’s understandable that they might be concerned that a protracted debate in the Senate with witnesses could unearth even more impeachable offenses, but that doesnn’t explain why the GOP is suddenly so keen on passing up the opportunity to subpoena figures like Chalupa that they’ve been clamoring to hear from as the process played out in the House.
Well, as the following Politico article describes, one reason the Senate Republicans might be be very interested in subpoenaing Chalupa is because they questioned her already. This was back in the fall of 2017, when the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee was in the middle of its own investigation of the whole #TrumpRussia and investigated the accusation that Kyiv was actively meddling in the 2016 election. Chalupa was apparently not a particularly interesting witness and the matter was dropped by the Senate Republicans:
“But an interview that fall with the Democratic consultant at the heart of the accusation that Kyiv meddled, Alexandra Chalupa, was fruitless, a committee source said, and Republicans didn’t follow up or request any more witnesses related to the issue.”
Wow, Alexandra Chalupa must have been a pretty unsatisfying witness. They asked her about that January 2017 Politico article and her answers left the Senate Republicans so uninterested that the didn’t follow up and or request any more witnesses on the issue of Kyiv’s interference in the 2016 campaign. The fact that they didn’t call other witnesses also hints at a lack of other possible witnesses. Chalupa is apparently the main witness to call on the topic of Ukrainian interference and the Republicans didn’t like what they heard the first time they called her:
And just a quick note, but it’s interesting that Chalupa has apparently never actually been to Ukraine herself:
Also recall how the one other key witness in this is Andrii Telizhenko, the former Ukrainian-American former Ukrainian DC embassy staffer who worked with Chalupa in 2016 in her investigations into Paul Manafort according to that 2017 Politico article. And as we’ve seen, Telizhenko appears to be a strongly pro-Trump individual who has been working closely with Rudy Giuliani on his Ukrainian escapades. But Telizhenko also spent the first half of 2017 working with Andrii Artemenko, the far right Ukrainian politician who was trying to craft the ‘Ukrainian peace plan’ with Felix Sater and Michael Cohen in late 2016-early 2017 along with a plan to refurbish Ukraine’s nuclear power plants (a plan that looks likely to be tied into to Michael Flynn’s parallel plan to sell build nuclear power plants across the Middle East). So it’s important to keep in mind that if the Senate Republicans decide to reinvestigate these matters and call witnesses, it’s very possible that bizarre association between Telizhenko and Artemenko will get more attention and prompt a reexamination of who these individuals are and what they were up to and might still be up to. Don’t forget that despite the widespread and ongoing mischaracterizations of Artemenko as ‘pro-Russian’, he appears to be politically aligned with Ukraine’s viruently anti-Russian far right parties. Does the GOP not want to draw attention back to Artemenko and remind the public of that whole aspect of the #TrumpRussia scandal that was largely ignored? What else might be under that rock?
But there’s another potential consequence of calling of Alexandra Chalupa as a witnesses that seems like the kind of thing the Republicans would be interested in seeing happen: Chalupa’s testimony would be a great way to reexamine what exactly Paul Manafort was up to during his years in Ukraine, specifically regarding the “Hapsburg Group” initiative. As we’ve seen, the Hapsburg group initiative was done for the purpose of pulling Ukraine closer to the West and the secret lobbying effort was conducted to overcome opposition in European capitals and the US over allowing Ukraine into a trade union with the EU. Paul Manafort was acting as a pro-West consultant, the exact opposite of how he’s been widely characterized. And yet the Republicans and right-wing media have completely ignored this. It seemed like a exactly the kind of propaganda slam dunk the right-wing media thrives on but the clear nature of Manafort’s Hapsburg group initiative has been almost entirely avoided by the right-wing media complex. It’s bizarre.
Now here’s where a Chalupa testimony might be able to act as a prompt for unraveling the whole Manafort/Hapsburg Group story: it turns out that January 2017 Politico article isn’t the only article that Chalupa has been interviewed in over the past few years. Back in October 2018, Chalupa was interviewed in the Kyiv Post, where she recounts her experiences investigating Manafort. According to the interview, Chalupa first came across Manafort in early 2014 after she organized a meeting with Barack Obama’s National Security Council and leaders of Ukrainian-American organizations to give the White House a briefing about the Maidan protests. This would have been just a couple of months after Viktor Yanukovych pulled out of the negotiations with the EU-trade association agreement in November of 2013. Recall how Yanukovych’s decision to pull out of the negotiations was reportedly due to the extreme austerity the EU was mandating as a condition for Ukraine joining the trade union and a refusal to give Ukraine a path to EU membership. So despite Manafort’s success in secretly lobbying to overcome US and EU opposition to Ukraine joining the EU trade association, the deal fell apart due to EU’s austerity fetish. And the way Chalupa describes that first meeting with Obama’s National Security Council, the people there seemed genuinely surprised that Yanukovych abandoned his pledge to sign the agreement. So according to Chalupa, the National Security Council was fully expecting Yanukovych to sign the trade association agreement and move Ukraine towards the West when the talks collapsed. That sure sounds like Manafort was viewed within the US government as a pro-West change agent up until the talks collapsed
“While Chalupa understands Mueller’s reasons for abandoning the second trial and applauds what his investigation has already delivered, she is disappointed there wasn’t a second trial “to highlight Manafort’s work in Ukraine, which would have been carefully scrutinized by the media and helped Americans better understand the significance.””
As we can see, even Chalupa herself would like to see a fuller exploration of Manafort’s activities in Ukraine carefully scrutinized by the media. And indeed that would be quite useful to finally see a reasonably accurate careful scrutiny of Manafort’s time in Ukraine. Chalupa herself could clearly use some additional lessons on these matters. And she admits in the interview that, until the Maidan protests broke out, she knew relatively little about Ukrainian politics (which would be consistent with her have never traveled to Ukraine). But if there was a fuller media exploration of Manafort’s time in Ukraine, it’s hard to see how that wouldn’t involve describing Manafort’s efforts to pull Ukraine closer to the West. Efforts that Obama’s National Security Council apparently fully expected to succeed until the talks collapsed in November of 2013:
Recall how this isn’t the first time we’ve heard about US government officials assuming that Manafort was working as a pro-West change agent. There was also Daniel Fried, a former assistant secretary of state who communicated with Manafort during Yanukovych’s reign in George W. Bush’s second term, who also expressed a sense that Manafort had seemingly betrayed the US when the talks collapsed. So we have multiple data points indicating that the US government fully expected Yanukovych to join the EU trade association and then when the talks collapsed they blamed it on Manafort. And part of blaming Manafort appears to be a bizarre mischaracterization of the entire Hapsburg Group initiative. For example, Chalupa describes in the interview how Manafort had seemed to mislead the Obama administration and many others in Washington through organizations like the European Center for a Modern Ukraine in Brussels. Recall how the European Center for a Modern Ukraine was one of the primary entities through with the Hapsburg Group lobbying effort was conducted. So the efforts to mislead the US government Chalupa was describing were the same efforts to lobby the US government to back Ukraine moving closer to the West:
So that’s all an example of the kind of stuff that could have been brought up by the Republicans if they decided to call Chalupa as a witness. But when it comes to a reexamination of Manafort’s time in Ukraine, it’s not like the GOP even needs to call Chalupa as a witness to bring this stuff up. It’s all been reported on extensively. Reported on and then systematically ignored by almost everyone including the Republicans. Why is that? You have to wonder what else is under that rock that the GOP doesn’t want uncovered. You also have to wonder what Paul Manafort thinks about the GOP’s refusal to discuss these topics while he’s sitting in prison. It seems like the kind of treatment from his ‘team’ that should make him extra chatty.
Now that President Trump has been formally impeached by the House of Representatives and the case (eventually, maybe) goes to the Senate for trial, one of the interesting questions is whether or not there’s going to be a meaningful Senate trial at all in the Republican-controlled Senate. But if there is a trial that actually involves calling witnesses, another question is to what extent that trial will simply be turned into an opportunity for Rudy Giuliani to elaborate on his various allegations that got this whole thing started. And that’s where the following TPM piece from last month comes in. The describes the role former US federal prosecutor Bud Cummins has played in Giuliani’s Ukrainian adventures and his attempts to get US prosecutors to investigate the various claims Giuliani is pushing. As the article reminds us, while much of the focus on this story has to do with allegations surrounding Burisma, Hunter Biden, and the role Joe Biden played in the firing of former Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, there’s a whole separate chapter to Giuliani’s ambitions that have to do with proving that the “Black Ledger” that implicated Paul Manafort in Viktor Yanukovych’s secret payment system.
On one level, the “Black Ledger” aspect of Giuliani’s scheme seems far less interesting or controversial than the allegations about Burisma and the Bidens because the latter center around allegations against one of Trump’s chief political opponents, Joe Biden. It’s a big part of the whole ‘abuse of power’ charge against Trump. He wasn’t just extorting the Ukrainian government into ginning up an investigation into a US citizen. He was extorting the Ukrainian government into ginning up an investigation into one of his key political opponents, something that makes this an exceptionally dangerous precedent to normalize in a democracy.
But the investigation into the “Black Ledger” and the assertions that it was all a forgery could end up being a very important element of this story in terms of understanding the motives of the various actors involved in this. Because as we’ve seen, the “Black Ledger” didn’t just implicate Paul Manafort or other figures associated with the Party of Regions. The ledger potentially implicated people across the Ukrainian political establishment. Recall how, in April of 2017, we learned that documents found in Manafort’s old office in Kiev appeared to verify the payments to him found in the Black Ledger. And then in June of 2017, we learn that the Black Ledger investigations had already come to a halt and potentially implicated politicians far beyond the Party of Regions. And in May of 2018, we learned the Ukrainian government had halted cooperation with the Mueller investigation reportedly over concerns of angering the Trump administration at the same time Ukraine was trying to get the US to sell the country Javelin missiles. So the Ukrainian government appears to have had multiple incentives to obstruct the investigations into Paul Manafort. Pleasing the Trump administration so the US will sell Ukraine Javelin missiles was one incentive, but avoiding a full investigation into the Black Ledger that could implicate the politicians in the government at the time is another plausible motive. Might that be part of motive for the Ukrainian government cooperating with Giuliani?
Keep in mind that we’ve now learned that this Trump/Giuliani scheme started months before Volodymyr Zelensky won the presidency. The Poroshenko government was apparently already on board with the scheme, partly in the hopes of getting some high profile public meetings with the Trump administration to bolster his reelection run. So when we’re asking who in the Ukrainian government might have had an incentive to discredit the Black Ledger, those are going to be very different questions when it comes to the Poroshenko government vs the Zelensky government. At a minimum, it seems unlikely Zelenksy himself could have been involved in a Yanukovych-era kickback scheme. Poroshenko, on the other hand, had a long history in Ukraine’s politics and it’s not at all hard to imagine he or people close to him could have been implicated by the ledger. And it’s not like the Ukrainian government itself could plausibly declare the ledger to be fake. The Ukrainian public wouldn’t believe it. But the Ukrainian public response would probably be very different if the US government declared it a forgery. So getting the Trump administration to declare the ledger a forgery really would be providing a huge assistance to many in Ukraine.
Also recall how the Trump/Giuliani scheme appeared to get more overtly extortive when it came to dealing with the Zelensky government compared to the earlier negotiations with the Poroshenko government. We haven’t heard yet about the withholding of military aid to the Poroshenko government in order to get the investigations Trump and Giuliani desired but that’s what they had to do to get Zelensky to play ball. Might a difference in the culpability of the Poroshenko vs Zelensky governments regarding the Black Ledger partly explain why greater pressure needed to be applied to the Zelensky government?Those kinds of questions are part of why the story of the role Bud Cummins played in trying to get federal prosecutors to meet with Ukrainians claiming to have evidence that the Black Ledger was a forgery could end up being critical in understanding why it was the Ukrainian government, at least the Poroshenko government, appeared to be so ready and willing to help Giuliani on this scheme.
Interestingly, it sounds like unnamed Ukrainians who approached Cummins in September of 2018 may have been the catalyst for this entire scheme. According to Cummins, two intermediaries of Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuri Lutsenko approached him that month with information about Hunter Biden and Manafort. He claims that they approached him with this information and created this backchannel to the US government instead of approaching the FBI directly because they believed, the “FBI in Ukraine had either wittingly or unwittingly become the pawns of the ambassador and secretary of state and vice president, and they cannot be trusted.” So that makes it sound like the Ukrainians themselves started this and had an interest in seeing the Black Ledger officially declared a forgery and they were dangling damaging information about Hunter Biden to get the Trump administration more interested. In that sense, part of the ‘quid pro quo’ nature of the arrangement Giuliani was offering the Ukrainians could have been along the lines of ‘if you help the Trump administration with ginned up criminal charges against Joe Biden, we’ll help Ukraine’s politicians dodge the criminal charges from the Black Ledger’:
“TPM has been investigating Cummins’ role in attempting to serve as an intermediary between certain Ukrainian interests and federal law enforcement. Cummins’ involvement has not been previously reported. However, Rudy Giuliani sent a letter on Saturday to Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R‑SC) claiming that a former U.S. attorney was ready to provide emails and memoranda about an attempt to get the FBI to investigate Biden and the list of Manafort bribes, called the Black Ledger.”
Yes, Giuliani told the Senate Judiciary Committee last month that he was ready to provide emails and memoranda about a plant to get the FBI to investigate Biden and the Black Ledger. So he apparently wants to publicly talk about what Cummins was up to during a Senate trial. And the way Cummins describes how the situation unfolded, it was intermediaries of Yuri Lutsenko who first approached him in September of 2018 with information about both Hunter Biden and the Black Ledger. While it’s hard to see why Ukrainians would care about Hunter Biden, it’s pretty obvious why they might want to see that Black Ledger officially discredited by the US government. If this really was the origins of this scheme it sure looks like it was Lutsenko’s office who initiated the ‘quid pro quo’ offer:
It’s also worth noting that, while Cummins expressed embarrassment over not understanding the motivations of the Ukrainians who approached him and claimed to not know a whole lot about Ukraine at the time. And yet we’re also learning that he was previously registered as a lobbyist for Yulia Tymoshenko. So he presumably wasn’t a complete novice on Ukrainian matters:
Also keep in mind that, while Tymoshenko herself was jailed by the Yanukovych government and so probably wasn’t getting too many kickbacks from Yanukovych, there’s no reason to assume other political figures associated with her weren’t getting secret payments. Might the Tymoshenko block be part of the Ukrainian establishment interested in seeing the Black Ledger officially discredited by the US government? It’s plausible.
Finally, note that Cummins has expressed a willingness to appear before the Senate if he’s subpoenaed:
So are we going to see Bud Cummins testify about how Yuri Lutsenko’s office approached him with the twin tantalizing tales about Hunter Biden and the Black Ledger? We’ll see, but that seems very up in the air since we don’t yet know if there’s going to be a trial in the Senate at all at this point. But if this story pans out, it would appear to absolving Ukraine’s corrupt politicians of the consequences of having their kickback system publicly revealed was part of the motive of this entire scheme. Because Rudy and Trump care so deeply about fighting corruption in Ukraine.
There were a pair of interesting revelations in a cache of documents obtained by the House Intelligence Committee from Lev Parnas and released late Tuesday night. The first revelation is mostly just a confirmation of what was already obvious: that Rudy Giuliani’s antics in Ukraine that are at the heart of the #UkraineGate impeachment proceedings were done at the behest of President Trump, contrary to Trump’s public denials. That’s made clear in a letter Parnas provided that Giuliani wrote to the then-newly-elected President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, back in May where Giuliani requests a personal meeting with Zelensky to discuss a topic during a trip to Ukraine Giuliani had planned. The topic he intended to discuss was clearly the Trump administration demands for opening investigations into the Bidens. But what makes this letter noteworthy in the context of the impeachment proceedings is that that it makes clear Giuliani is doing this in his capacity as Trump’s personal attorney and with Trump’s knowledge and consent. As the article notes, when Trump himself was asked by the New York Times about what Giuliani was going to be up to with that planned trip (the trip was canceled after the Times’s report on it), Trump played dumb and acted like it could have involved one of Giulani’s other clients.
The second revelation comes from the text messages on Lev Parnas’s phone and is much more in the ‘WTF’ category. It points towards a possible private surveillance operation run in Kiev against then-ambassador Marie Yovanovitch back in March of 2019. The figure who was behind this operation, Robert Hyde, is current a fringe Republican Party candidate for a US Senate seat in Connecticut. Hyde also happens to have been arrested at Trump’s Doral resort back in May of 2019 and involuntarily committed for psychological examination after he told police that “he was in fear for his life, was set up and that a hit man was out to get him. Mr. Hyde spoke about e‑mails he sent that may have placed his life in jeopardy. Mr. Hyde explained several times that he was paranoid that someone was out to get him.” He also appeared to believe his computer was being hacked by the Secret Service. So the guy who appeared to be running a surveillance operation of Yovanovitch in Kiev in March of 2019 ends up getting involuntarily committed in May of 2019 after he shows up at a Trump resort gripped with paranoia and fears that the Secret Service is monitoring him and a hit man was out to get him.
Ok, first, here’s an article about the letter Giuliani wrote requesting a private meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky where he is explicit that he is requesting this meeting in his capacity as Trump’s personal attorney:
“The material included the letter below, sent by Giuliani to Zelensky shortly before the Ukrainian president’s inauguration — and shortly before Giuliani’s planned trip to Ukraine. In the letter, Giuliani is explicit about the role he plays.”
As we can see, Giuliani is quite explicit in his letter to Zelensky: He wants to meet in his capacity as Trump’s private attorney with Trump’s knowledge and consent, something Trump denied when asked about it in November:
And then there was a note written on a Vienna Ritz-Carlton notepad (recall that Dmitry Firtash is currently living in Vienna, fighting his extradition to the US) that appears to be a note from Parnas saying, “Get Zalensky [sic] to Annouce [sic] that the Biden case will be Investigated”:
So those two pieces of evidence released by the House Intelligence Committee more or less confirm what we already could strong suspect based on the available evidence: that Trump was fully backing this scheme and that the primary motive of the scheme was to get a public announcement by the government of Ukraine of an investigation into the Bidens.
Now here’s a TPM piece on the other, far more bizarre, series of releases by the House Intelligence Committee that center around a series of text messages between Parnas and a Connecticut landscaping contractor, Robert F. Hyde, involving what appears to be a Kiev-based surveillance operation Hyde was doing of then-ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch in late March. As the article notes, Hyde seems to indicate that he has “a person on the inside,” and makes references to people who “are willing to help if we/you would like a price,” adding “Guess you can do anything in the Ukraine with money … what I was told.” Hyde now dismisses the texts as simply a joke he and a friend were playing on Parnas. But as the article also notes, Hyde was involuntarily committed in May after showing up at Trump’s Doral resort in a paranoid state and worried people were out to get him. So either Hyde was actually involved in this surveillance operation with Parnas or he’s really, really into elaborate jokes:
“Hyde provided Parnas with updates on Yovanovitch throughout the week that Solomon released a bevy of articles laying out unsubstantiated allegations against the ambassador and the Bidens.”
A week of text messages between Hyde and Parnas in late March of 2019 that happens to correspond to the same period right-wing ‘journalist’ John Solomon was publishing articles criticizing Yovanovitch in The Hill, along with interviews of former Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuri Lutsenko. So there’s an operation to publish articles condemning Yovanovitch and a parallel surveillance operation. And yet it remains a mystery what they would have been watching for as well as a mystery if Hyde was trying to offer surveillance services Parnas even asked for or if this was an independent attempt by Hyde to ingratiate himself to someone close to Trump. Either way, the fact that we have the low-level Republican grifter involved with this scheme raises the question of how many other low-level Republican grifters were involved:
Adding to the intrigue is this ominous reference by Hyde to Parnas that he has “a person on the inside” and that some unspecified “they” are “willing to help if we/you would like a price.” Who is “they”? We have no idea, but they are apparently willing to do anything for money:
Unsurprisingly, Hyde dismissed the texts as a joke, but there’s no way to dismiss the fact that he was involuntarily committed to a mental hospital for observation after he had a breakdown in May of 2019 at the Doral resort expressing a fear for his life:
Now here’s that Mother Jones piece on Hyde’s breakdown at the Doral resort. According to the police report, “he was in fear for his life, was set up and that a hit man was out to get him. Mr. Hyde spoke about e‑mails he sent that may have placed his life in jeopardy. Mr. Hyde explained several times that he was paranoid that someone was out to get him,” He also told police the Secret Service hacked his computer and watching him on the premises:
“According to an “incident/investigation” report filed by the Doral, Florida, police department, on May 16, 2019, an officer was dispatched to the Trump National Doral Miami to deal with a “male in distress fearing for his life.” That man was Hyde. The report noted that Hyde explained to the police officer that “he was in fear for his life, was set up and that a hit man was out to get him. Mr. Hyde spoke about e‑mails he sent that may have placed his life in jeopardy. Mr. Hyde explained several times that he was paranoid that someone was out to get him.””
He was set up and a hit man was out to get him and the secret service hacked his computer. So he went to one of Trump’s resorts?! That’s the kind of behavior that sure suggests the guy really was involved with something very shady. Shady enough to drive the guy mad with paranoia. Although who knows, maybe he really was getting gas-lighted by someone. Maybe it was a government agency but it wouldn’t have to be. As this whole #UkraineGate scandal makes clear, the Trump team is more than happy to use private actors to carry out its agenda, especially when that agenda is extremely shady. But at this point Hyde appears to be convinced he was “effed” with by someone:
And now, following the release of these texts, Hyde is declaring that he’s out to expose the actions of the “bad people” and he welcomes an investigation:
Who are the “bad people” Hyde has in mind at this point? Lev Parnas? The Secret Service? Intelligence agencies? Hyde appears to still be a Trump super-fan based on his twitter account. So it doesn’t sound like Trump is on his “bad people” list. But Hyde is vowing to expose whoever “they” are.
It’s all lesson to low-level GOP grifters that if they get themselves involved in some of the big boy scheming and things go awry, they just might end up fearing for their life. Or they might be mentally unstable which is why you’re a low-level GOP grifter in in the first place. Both are important lessons for low-level GOP grifters, but it remains unclear which lesson applies in this case. Maybe both.
With the Senate trial in the impeachment of Donald Trump now underway, one of the more interesting things to watch is what the Republican Party’s fundamental strategy will be regarding whether or not they should go for as fast a trial as possible with as few witnesses as possible or if they should go for an extended trial that includes attempts to call witnesses like Joe and Hunter Biden. So it’s worth noting who just started publicly whispering in President Trump’s ears specifically regarding the strategy he should take over the impeachment: Steve Bannon.
Bannon has a new podcast with regulars like for Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller and former Nigel Farage aide Raheem Kassam. It’s been running for over 100 days and includes guests like Rience Priebus and Rudy Giuliani. The idea is that the podcast will provide strategic advice to Trump and continue until the impeachment process is run to completion. It’s also being syndicated on Newsmax TV. So we’ll see if Trump ends up taking Bannon’s advice. That might not seem likely given that Bannon is just publicly broadcasting his recommended strategy. But given that Trump has spent years openly following the advice of Fox News, it seems like the model of just publicly talking to the President and hoping he’s listening is a viable model for Trump, at least if you’re someone like Steve Bannon. And it turns out Bannon is advocating for an extended Senate trial with a large number of witnesses that goes on for months or even into next year. The way Bannon is describing it, a short attenuated trial with few witnesses will just leave a cloud hanging over Trump, so instead he should call for an extended trial that includes calling witnesses like John Brennan and the anonymous whistleblower who got the #UkraineGate scandal started in the first place. So as the Senate trial gets underway with the expectation that Trump and the Senate GOP are going to try to finish the trial and get Trump acquitted as soon as possible, keep in mind that Trump’s ‘brain’ is telling him to drag this thing out for as long as possible:
“One of Bannon’s key arguments is the Republicans should be demanding and facilitating an extended Senate trial — in contrast to the strategy that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has announced of having a short trial without witnesses in service of a speedy acquittal. For Bannon, this is “the quick and dirty” option that will still leave a dark cloud of doubt looming over Trump and his presidency. In his view, a short trial just allows House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff to present curated anti-Trump talking points to a national audience without a chance for them to be fully rebutted. By contrast, Bannon thinks an extended trial with witnesses called by both sides — including former Trump national security adviser John Bolton and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney by Democrats, and former Obama CIA director John Brennan and the anonymous whistle-blower by Republicans — would “get to the heart of it.” This sort of long trial would force the “Washington apparatus” to defend itself in public, he says, and inevitably lead to “a real exoneration [for Trump] and then a vindication in November.””
Vindication via an extended Senate trial. That’s what Steve Bannon has been telling Trump to do. The way Bannon sees it, an extended trial in the Senate would end up putting the “Washington apparatus” on trial itself which would lead to “a real exoneration” of Trump.
Is there any indication that people in power are listening to Bannon’s advice? We’ll according to Republican congressman Matt Gaetz, who is seen as close to Trump, “A lot of people in the White House listen to it.” So, yes, it would appear that Bannon’s target audience is actually listening:
And Bannon isn’t just recommending that the Republicans call figures like John Brennan or the anonymous whistleblower to testify. He’s also calling for Trump to allow staffers like Mick Mulvaney or John Bolton to be allowed to testify in exchange for bringing Joe and Hunter Biden in to testify too:
“On Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon said Trump should allow his staffers to testify in exchange for having Joe and Hunter Biden, as well as others, such as the initial CIA whistleblower whose complaint is at the center of the impeachment inquiry, appear before senators in the trial.”
That’s the price of actually allowing witnesses that Bannon is advocating that Trump and the Republicans demand in exchange for allowing witnesses like John Bolton and Mick Mulvaney to testify: the relevant witnesses can only be called if the Republicans are allowed to turn it into a trial of Donald Trump into a trial of the Bidens too.
And yet, as of Sunday, Trump was tweeted out calls for dismissal of the impeachment without a trial:
Is Trump genuinely opposed to a trial with witnesses or is this just theatrics intended to generate rhetorical leverage in preparation for demanding witnesses like the Bidens in exchange for allowing figures like Bolton and Mulvaney to testify? Time will tell. But it’s worth noting that Republican Senator Ted Cruz was also arguing Sunday on Fox News that Republicans should be allowed to call figures like Hunter Biden to testify if figures like John Bolton are also allowed to testify. So it’s more than just Steve Bannon who is thinking along these lines at this point.
Should we expect the Hunter Biden, and maybe even Joe Biden, to get called to testify before the Senate? It wouldn’t be super surprising at this point. But at the same time, this seems like one of those ‘too clever by half’ moments for the Republicans. Because their primary defense of Trump at this point is that his demands for a Ukrainian investigation into the Bidens really was driven by a desire to address the allegations of rampant corruption by the Bidens in Ukraine. And yet those allegations of rampant corruption by the Bidens are at the heart of the case against Trump and Rudy Giuliani because it appears to be the case that the Trump team was knowingly initially dealing in ginned up charges against the Bidens offered by corrupt Ukrainian officials under the Poroshenko government as part of a ‘quid pro quo’ deal. So anything that weakens the corruption charges against the Bidens implicitly strengthens the argument that the Trump team was intentionally soliciting a foreign government to wage a staged investigation into a political opponent to impact the 2020 election. And then when the Poroshenko government lost its own reelection in 2019, Trump and Giuliani needed to work out a new deal with the the Zelensky government which is when the outright extortion took place. If they call Hunter and Joe in to testify and it ends up just being a circus of Republicans haranging them for the cameras, that could end up being a very powerful case against Trump. In other words, it’s not like calling the Bidens to testify is some sort of smear freebie for the GOP. There’s a real risk to their case. Granted, there’s virtually no risk that the Republican-controlled Senate will vote to convict Trump regardless of who testifies what. But there’s a real risk of this trial making the Republican defense of Trump look even more like a farce and hoax if they really do call the Bidens to testify and that testimony doesn’t have the corruption ‘fireworks’ the GOP has long been promising. The GOP doesn’t generally do well with reality checks.
That’s all part of what’s going to keep Steve Bannon’s podcast topical: the fascist who used to privately whisper in Trump’s ear is now publicly whispering in his ear and he’s giving advice that might be in the ‘be careful what you wish for’ category. Or maybe it’s sound advice. We don’t know and there’s only one way to really find out.
This should be darkly fascinating to watch play out: Formal investigations of Joe and Hunter Biden’s are now underway at the Department of Justice into the allegations of corruption in Ukraine made by Rudy Giuliani. That’s what we’ve learned from comments made by senator Lindsey Graham on Sunday and confirmation from DOJ today. Graham told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday morning that a channel had been established between Giuliani and Attorney General Bill Barr to review the information Giuliani collected about Biden. According to Graham, “He told me that they have created a process that Rudy could give information and they would see if it’s verified.” The DOJ confirmed this on Monday with a statement from Barr that “We had established an intake process in the field so that any information coming in from Ukraine could be carefully scrutinized by the department so that we could address its provenance...including info [from Giuliani].” So it sounds like this is really happening.
Part of what makes this so dark fascinating is that this review MUST arrive at the conclusion that there really was meaningful evidence of corruption by the Bidens. If the DOJ doesn’t arrive at that conclusion it’s potentially big problems for Trump politically because the entire #UkraineGate impeachment charge was based around the idea that there really was powerful evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens. If that powerful evidence doesn’t emerge, that implicitly confirms it really was just an attempt to created a staged show trial. A staged show trial against the Bidens that now includes a serious investigation by the DOJ. So the DOJ can’t realistically conclude there wasn’t powerful evidence of corruption by the Bidens without confirming so much of what Trump’s team was denying throughout the impeachment trial which means the DOJ is almost certainly going to conclude that there was reasonable suspicion of Giuliani’s allegations:
“The attorney general appeared to confirm that Giuliani has such a pipeline on Monday: “We had established an intake process in the field so that any information coming in from Ukraine could be carefully scrutinized by the department so that we could address its provenance...including info [from Giuliani],” Barr said. That explanation may work on some Republicans, who had called for investigations into the Bidens to go through proper channels and have expressed wariness about Giuliani, but will surely alarm critics, considering how Barr has previously used his office to protect Trump and threaten his rivals. Giuliani, who returned [to Fox News] this weekend to make his case against the Bidens, is just one of Trump’s allies now pushing for investigations in our current post-acquittal hellscape. Taking information from Giuliani, who is currently under criminal investigation, would mark a new low for a Justice Department that has already thrown itself at the president’s feet.”
It’s really happening. The fantasy political show trial Trump and Giuliani had spent over a year now trying to orchestrate is actually happening, and it’s not the government of Ukraine doing the investigation. It’s the US government. This is now a precedent in US politics.
And now that the DOJ is formally taking seriously Giuliani’s various claims about the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine, it raises the question: will there be witnesses called? In particular, will former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin be called to testify? After all, as the following article from back in December reminds us, it was Shokin’s failed attempt to get a US Visa to travel to the US to provide evidence of his charge that Joe Biden improperly got him fired to protect Hunter that Giuliani cited as the reason for his own moves to get former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch fired. Shokin isn’t just central to Giuliani’s charges, he’s also expressed a desire to come to the US and testify about it. So...is that trip to the US going to happen now for Shokin? And will there be other witnesses called to conduct this investigation? Given the Republicans’ blocking of all witnesses during the Senate impeachment trial it would be pretty ironic if the DOJ started call all sorts of witnesses in this investigation of Giuliani’s claims. And yet it’s hard to see how the DOJ could arrive at the conclusion that Giuliani’s claims had merit without talking to the same figures Giuliani talked to. Witnesses like Shokin. So it seems like witnesses are going to have to be called because, again, the DOJ MUST conclude that Giuliani’s allegations had merit and that’s going to require listening witnesses. Viktor Shokin in particular:
“Giuliani told The New Yorker in a November interview published Monday that he believed Yovanovitch was in the way of his attempts to pursue investigations Trump wanted.”
The allegations by Giuliani that the DOJ is now investigation required the firing of Yovanovitch. That’s what Giuliani was adamant about back in December. He personally got her fired because she was blocking the investigation of the Bidens and one of the way she was blocking that investigation was by blocking a visa for Shokin to travel to the US. According to the testimony of State Department official George Kent during the House impeachment investigation, Kent stated that the State Department blocked Shokin’s visa because he was seen as corrupt and was only planning on traveling to the US to spread rumors of corruption in the US embassy in Kiev. And Yovanovitch testified that Shokin lied on his visa application about merely wanting to travel to the US to visit children:
An out-of-control politically partisan embassy staff. That was part of what Giuliani has been alleging and it’s that embassy staff that blocked Shokin’s travel to the US. So the firing of Yovanovitch — a key event seen as a potential abuse of power that was being judged in the impeachment trial — was directly associated with whether or not Viktor Shokin would be allowed to travel to the US to make his allegations about the Bidens’ corruption and general corruption by the US embassy. Is a Shokin trip to the US, or at least an interview by the DOJ, something we should expect in this new DOJ probe? Who knows but it seems like the questioning of Shokin is something DOJ is going to have to do to really investigate Giuliani’s allegations. And since the DOJ absolutely MUST conclude that Giuliani’s allegations had merit, at least on the surface, it seems like a good chance that the DOJ is going to conclude that Shokin’s allegations about being improperly fired had merit too, or at least couldn’t be dismissed out of hand.
But Viktor Shokin is only one of the interesting witnesses who could be called in this DOJ investigation. For example, how about Lev Parnas? As the following article from back in November describes, Parnas was offering to testify before the House about all sorts of interesting aspects of this fiasco that should be relevant to the DOJ’s investigation. In particular, Parnas wanted to talk about how he was regularly meeting with Republican Congressman Devin Nunes and one of Nunes’s proxies, Derek Harvey, on their mission to dig up dirt on the Bidens. Nunes completely denied these reports and refused to answer questions about it. Parnas was also willing to testify that Nunes secretly met with Shokin in Vienna in 2018. That seems like a pretty big loose end in terms of establishing the veracity of Giuliani’s claims since Nunes seems intent on covering this up. But Parnas was never allowed to testify before congress during the impeachment hearings because his ankle-monitor broke the ‘no-electronic-devices’ rule for congressional testimonies. Isn’t this DOJ investigation a good excuse for Parnas to finally tell his story? Should’t the DOJ confirm if a top House Republican secretly in on this scheme all along?:
” “Mr. Parnas learned from former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Victor Shokin that Nunes had met with Shokin in Vienna last December,” said Bondy.”
Congressman Devin Nunes was deeply involved with the question to find dirt on the Bidens. That’s what Parnas was claiming back in November, to the complete denials by Nunes:
And yet Congressional travel records show that Nunes and three aides did indeed travel to Europe from November 30 to December 3, 2018, which is around the time Parnas claims Nunes met with Shokin in Vienna. Nunes clearly doesn’t want to reveal if this happened. That sure sounds like something the DOJ should investigate:
Then there’s Parnas’s claims that Nunes instructed Parnas to work with his aide Derek Harvey on these matters. Harvey was allegedly part of regular “BLT team” meetings. John Solomon has confirmed that the meetings took place. Will the DOJ be looking into whether or not Derek Harvey was attending these meetings on behalf of Congressman Nunes?
And then there’s Parnas’s claims that he had a private meeting with Trump where Trump tasked him with a “secret mission” to uncover dirt on the Democrats in Ukraine. Is that “secret mission” going to be investigated as part of this DOJ investigation?
These are all the kinds of questions the DOJ would be asking if it was seriously going to investigate Rudy Giuliani’s claims. After all, if there’s evidence that these claims were being cooked up by Republicans, including a member of congress Devin Nunes, that would be pretty crucial for an honest DOJ investigation.
Oh, and then there’s the fact the Lev Parnas now claims he doesn’t think Joe Biden did anything wrong and that Shokin really was a crooked attorney general:
“[I]t was never about corruption...It was never — it was strictly about Burisma, which included Hunter Biden and Joe Biden.”
It was never about corruption. That’s the assertion of one of the central characters in this entire affair. So will the DOJ be investigation Parnas’s claims about this entire thing never actually being about the corruption allegations? Will Lev Parnas be called as a witness in the DOJ’s investigation? We’ll see. But this is where we are: a likely corruption DOJ investigation into the absolutely corrupt private investigation into the president’s opponent run by the president’s private attorney. Let’s hope the investigators take very detailed notes. And keep them stored in a safe place. Because it seems like a good bet that there’s going to be the need for a future investigation into this latest investigation.
Did the US Department of Justice just send the signal that it’s going to be applying justice extra-lightly to Trump cronies? That appears to be the signal the DOJ just sent, intentionally or not, following the mass resignation of all four federal prosecutors working on the Roger Stone criminal case in protest to the the shock decision by senior Department of Justice officials yesterday to overrule their sentencing guidelines with much more lenient recommendations.
The fact that the DOJ intervened to give an extra-light sentence to Stone is, on its own, a pretty alarming move that could easily be interpreted as a signal to Republican operatives that they’ll get special treatment. But it’s the fact that this shock move came hours after President Trump tweeted out his displeasure of the sentencing recommendations for Stone — 7 to 9 years — that made the DOJ’s actions appear to be done at the behest of the president. So it wasn’t just a signal to Trump’s cronies that they can expect extra light legal treatment. It was also a sign that the independence of the Justice Department is overtly not going to be respected going forward. Attorney General Bill Barr will be doing what Trump tells him to do, even when it comes to the sentencing of Trump cronies. It’s one of those sad events that makes former-Attorney General Jeff Sessions seem relatively decent and honorable in retrospect.
And this all happened just a day after Bill Barr confirmed that the Justice Department had set up a channel for Rudy Giuliani to deliver his evidence of his Ukrainian corruption claims about Joe and Hunter Biden. And a day after Trump fired Lt. Col Alexander Vindman from the White House and recommended the military pursue charges against him. So the move to give Roger Stone a light sentence took place amidst a flurry of actions that all signal the Trump administration is going to be treating the Justice Department to pursue enemies, protect friends, and punish whistleblowers:
“Stone was convicted by a jury of lying to Congress and witness tampering. The Justice Department reversal that triggered the remarkable resignations of four top prosecutors in the case could fuel an impression that cronies of the President can commit crimes and get special treatment. It also poses the question of whether political appointees are undercutting the work of career prosecutors in a way that could prejudice the rule of law.”
Yes, the Justice Department’s decision to overrule its own team of prosecutors could indeed fuel an impression that cronies of the President can commit crimes and get special treatment. Since special treatment for Trump cronies is precisely what happened. And it happened only after Trump angrily tweeted about the news of the initial sentence:
And yet both the Trump White House and the Justice Department both gaslighted the public by denying that White House pressure played any role in this decision. It’s a reminder that trolling and gaslighting are going to be an increasingly important tools for the Trump administration as it continues its push to dismantle remaining governmental checks and balances:
And, of course, this is all happening at the same time we have the Justice Department opening up an investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden and the firing of whistleblower Lt. Col Alexander Vindman. It’s the kind of ominous timing that amplifies the signal being sent by this move. The signal that those loyal to Trump will be rewarded and those who defy him will be punished:
And that was all just yesterday’s news. Today, we’re learning that not only was Attorney General Bill Barr personally behind the move to reduce Stone’s sentencing recommendations, but that Trump is now accusing the four prosecutors who resigned of ‘cutting and running’ and being secret angry Democrat ‘rogue prosecutors’. Then he went on to suggest he might pardon Roger Stone entirely. And pardon Michael Flynn too:
“Trump also opened the door for potential pardons of Stone and Michael Flynn, writing “Prosecutorial Misconduct?” in response to a tweet suggesting such pardons on Tuesday night.”
A presidential tweet simply asking, “Prosecutorial Misconduct?” That was Trump’s response to a tweet calling for the pardon of both Stone and Flynn. So the day after the DOJ intervenes on Stone’s behalf, at the direction of Bill Barr, following a presidential twitter tirade, we have another presidential tweet calling for outright pardons. But at least a pardon is something Trump himself would do and wouldn’t involve the destruction of the Justice Department’s independence. It raises the possibility that the process of getting Roger Stone off the hook will first involve the Justice Department debasing itself in order to get a reduced sentence for Stone followed by a total pardon. A maximally corrupt miscarriage of justice that sends the signal that Republican cronies should feel free to engage in future dirty tricks campaigns and obstruct justice if they’re caught because they’ll all be protected in the end. And it was done for the benefit Roger Stone, one of the dirtiest dirty tricksters in US history. So of all the negative future repercussions we can expect from this overt politicization of the justice department, perhaps the one we should expect to see first is a lot more GOP dirty tricks. Soon. It’s an election year, after all. Especially more dirty tricks from Roger Stone if he does end up with that full pardon. Trump isn’t the only one who’s going to be ‘unleashed’ by the end of this.
One of the top rabbis in Ukraine, Rabbi Moshe Azman, made news last week after celebrating the January 6 Capitol insurrection in DC by posting on Facebook that “Maidan has begun in the USA.” It should come as no surprise that Azman has ties to the Trump White House and the figures at the center of the #Ukrainegate scandal, including being photographed smoking cigars with Rudy Giuliani in May of 2019, fueling speculation that the rabbi was being used to provide the Trump team cover for its secret Ukrainian lobbying efforts.
And, while the Azman’s comments were no doubt controversial, it’s hard to dispute the obvious parallels. At least the parallels to the real Maidan — which included a significant component of far right neo-Nazi militias — and not just the whitewashed version of Maidan as portrayed by the Western press. In both the Maidan and DC, we had far right militias effectively lay seige to a capitol and in both cases a significant chunk of the media was intent on representing those far right militias as righteous anti-corruption freedom fighters.
But there’s another rather interesting potential parallel between the two events that’s worth noting: the potential role Paul Manafort could have played in helping to foment these events.
Manafort’s possible role in the events that led up to Ukraine’s Maidan protests is now well established, even if major questions remain. And as we’ve seen, that role includes Manafort possibly orchestrating the brutal police crackdown on the initial November 2013 protests over the decision to pull Ukraine out of the EU trade association talks.
So we have to ask: given that Paul Manafort was allowed to leave jail and put under house arrest in May over coronavirus concerns and then he was pardoned by Trump a couple days before Christmas. Paul Manafort was a completely free man for at least a couple weeks leading up to the events of January 6. Did this individual have any role in planning the events of that day? He’s got crucial experience in these matters, and he was just pardoned by Trump. Was orchestrating an American Maidan part of the deal?
Who knows, but these are the kinds of questions we really should be asking about figures like Manafort and yet systematically don’t ask because of the systematic mischaracterizations of Manafort’s role in Ukraine. We can’t ask if Manafort played a role in the American attempted-Maidan if we refuse to acknowledge the pile of evidence pointing towards in role in the original Maidan coup. And that’s part of what makes the following Talking Points Memo piece from just before New Years so significant. The piece describes the role Manafort was playing in moving Ukraine into the orbit of the EU and asks the crucial question: did Paul Manafort, working with Sergei Lyovochkin, help to orchestrate the police brutality of November 2013 that helped kick off the Maidan protests?:
“What emerges is a picture of Manafort’s work on behalf of Ukraine’s former President, Viktor Yanukovych, that is more complicated than the one that’s taken hold in the U.S. — of Manafort as a soldier for a pro-Russian politician in the Wild West of the former Soviet Union. Rather, court documents and interviews I conducted in Kyiv years ago suggest that Manafort, an operator intimately acquainted with certain circles in the region, ran an ostensibly pro-Western lobbying campaign that took him very near the spark of violence that helped set off the country’s 2014 revolution.”
Yes, when we look at the actual history of Manafort’s work in Ukraine, a much more complicated picture emerges than the one that has taken hold in the US. A complicated picture that’s more or less the opposite of the dominant narrative. Manafort was trying to “launder Ukraine into Europe”, something the Western press more or less obscured for the past four years:
Then there’s the question of who actually called in the police to beat up the protestors on November 30, 2013, setting off the cascade of events and anger that culminated in the full blown Maidan protests. And all available evidence points in the direction of Lyovochkin’s office giving the orders:
So Manafort’s closest ally in Ukraine and the long-term partner in the project to launder Ukraine into Europe is the guy who had the power to actually call in the police. What role did Manafort play in this? We don’t know, but as with the rest of this story we have clues. Clues that point in the direction of an intentional attack devised by Manafort to build international sympathy for the protestors and destabilize the Ukrainian government:
Of course, we’ve seen all of this evidence before scattered across various reports. But rarely is it in a single piece like this and almost never do we see the question asked of whether or not Manafort could have played a role in the instigating the police crackdown on the Maidan protestors for the purpose of destabilizing Ukraine. So at least TPM is asking these questions. Let’s hope the rest of the media took notice.
Then, a week after this TPM report, America experiences its own near-Maidan event. A far right violent coup with the backing of powerful forces inside the government that almost worked. Congress was almost taken hostage. And Paul Manafort was pardoned two weeks before this happened.
So we have to ask, did Paul Manafort give any advice to the plotters of the American Maidan? Was that the price of his pardon? Evidence suggests he’s got the relevant experience. But the media can’t meaningfully ask what role Manafort could have played in the American near-Maidan if it doesn’t first ask what role Manafort played in Ukraine’s Maidan, so hopefully that acts as a meaningful incentive to ask the right questions sooner rather than later/never.
Is a new coup in Ukraine just around the corner? That’s precisely what Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has been publicly warning for the last week. On December 1st, Ukraine’s wealthiest man, Rinat Akhmetov, will execute the coup. A coup that will have in reality been executed by Moscow, with Akhmetov acting as Putin’s oligarch footsoldier. That’s that story.
And on the surface it’s not hard to see why President Zelenskiy has made Akhmetov the main villain in this plot. Akhmetov and Zelenskiy haven’t exactly gotten along, especially following the passage of an ‘anti-oligarch’ law that Akhmetov and many of the other oligarchs have openly criticized. Additionally, Akhmetov’s arch-rival oligarch, Ihor Kolomoisky, has been one of Zelenskiy’s primary backers. Recall how Kolomoisky has long been one of the financiers of the Azov Battalion.
Zelenskiy also claims to have audio intercepts of the plotters, “where representatives of Ukraine, so to speak, discuss with representatives of Russia Rinat Akhmetov’s participation in the coup in Ukraine.” No other oligarchs are fingered in the plot. It’s a very targeted accusation against just one oligarch. The audio intercepts have yet to be released.
So what does the US government say about these accusation? Here’s where it gets extra interesting: One person close to Zelenskiy told Politico that it was the US that had provided Ukraine with intelligence in recent weeks indicating there would be “an internal destabilization effort,” with the possibility that one or more Ukrainian oligarchs could be involved. So it would appear that these intercepts discussing Akhmetov’s role in the plot may have been US intercepts, although we don’t really know. President Biden gave the US’s official response to Zelenskiy’s claims on Friday when he told reports that he would “in all probability” be speaking to Zelenskiy and Putin about the coup allegations while voicing support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
So what are we looking at here? Is there a real coup attempt in the works? Some sort of false flag? If it’s a false flag event, is this going to be a US manufactured event? We’ll find out soon.
But when assessing the potential credibility of this plot, it’s important to recall just how often we’ve seen Akhmetov engaging in activities that point towards Akhmetov having a rather complicated relationship with the West and being far from the simplistic ‘pro-Russian’ oligarch he’s typically painted as.
For example, recall Akhmetov figures into the story of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates passing polling information Konstantin Kilimnik in the spring of 2016. At first, it was suspected that the ultimate recipient of that data was Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. But in the end, it turned out he passed the data along to Serhiy Lyovochkin and Rinat Akhmetov, underscoring Ahkmetov’s working relationship with Lyovochkin and the other Ukrainian oligarchs with a history of working with Paul Manafort. A history that, as we’ve seen in so many cases, is the history of the Ukrainian oligarchs widely assumed to be aligned with Russia quietly making overtures to the West, as exemplified by the “Hapsburg Group” lobbying efforts headed up by Manafort and Lyovochkin to get Ukraine permission to join an EU-Ukraine joint trade agreement.
But as we’ve seen, Rinat Akhmetov’s outreach to the West goes back to at least 2004, when it was Akhmetov who first reached out to Konstantin Kilimnik back in 2004 during the Orange Revolution in the hope of getting professional US political advice. It’s the kind of act that implicitly doubled as a Western outreach effort by this ‘pro-Russia’ oligarch. An effort that obviously led to something. That’s how Paul Manafort became the Party of Regions shadow figure in Ukraine.
Finally, recall the utterly bizarre and intriguing story involving Cambridge Analytica-offshoot AIQ and the work it was doing on behalf of Ukrainian oligarch Sergei Taruta. Taruta also happened to be behind a new Ukrainian political party, Osnova, in the fall of 2017. The party appeared to be designed to appeal to voters of the then-dissolved former Party of Regions. Akhmetov is strongly suspected of being the primary financial forced behind Osnova. And somehow, Sergei Taruta managed to get a fake congressional hearing in the US Capitol presenting a report created by Taruta criticizing Ukraine’s former central banker. Former CIA Director James Woolsey even made an appearance at the event. The whole thing was described as an “inter-oligarch dispute” and televised on Ukrainian television. So Sergei Taruta appeared to have a strangely powerful lobby in the US Congress willing to help him out with this inter-oligarch dispute, and Taruta just happened to be leading a new party backed by Akhmetov.
As we’ve seen, stories that end with major questions about who is working for whom and to what ends appears to be a Rinat Akhmetov specialty. The guy really is a man of mystery. So in the light of the fact that Rinat Akhmetov repeatedly shows up in these stories that appear to indicate a quiet working relationship with the US government, how are we to interpret Zelenskiy’s charges that are not just exclusively fingered at Akhmetov but were possibly delivered via US intelligence:
““It’s not only intelligence that we have, it’s also audio intercepts, where representatives of Ukraine, so to speak, discuss with representatives of Russia Rinat Akhmetov’s participation in the coup in Ukraine,” the president said.”
It’s not just intelligence. Audio intercepts exist. Intercepts discussing Akhmetov’s role in the plot. And no other oligarch’s name. It’s one of the more curious aspects of these claims, implying Akhmetov would attempt a one-man coup. And yet we are also told the US provided Ukraine with intelligence warning about exactly this kind of scenario:
And then there’s the context of claims: the recently signed anti-oligarch law that goes into effect next year:
It’s the kind of context that makes the general idea of an oligarch-backed coup more plausible. But, again, the claims are not that Akhmetov was leading a group of oligarchs. The accusations were against Akhmetov alone. So it’s worth noting that the anti-oligarch law was passed with the support of 279 lawmakers (out of 450), but 229 of those votes came from Zelenskiy’s Serveants of the People Party alone. So when we’re looking at opposition to this new anti-oligarch law, it appears to be opposed from a pretty broad cross-section of Ukraine’s political sphere:
“The bill was supported by 279 lawmakers. The votes mainly came from Zelensky’s 244-member Servant of the People party which provided 229 votes, three over the required minimum.”
The Ukrainian public maybe have generally supported this law — Zelenskiy’s victory was arguably based on his anti-oligarch platform — but with only 279 out of 450 lawmakers voting in support of the law, that’s still only aroudn 62% of the vote, suggesting a pretty substantial minority is opposed to this new law. A law that would potentially complicate life for far more than ins Rinat Akhmetov. A number of oligarchs, including Serhiy Lyovochkin, are expected to be directly impacted by this:
And that broader opposition to the anti-oligarch law is part of the reason we need to be seriously questioning any claims that Rinat Akhmetov is single-handedly planning a coup with Moscow. It doesn’t track for a number of reasons. And that’s assuming the underlying coup pot claim itself wasn’t a fabrication. A claim fabrication that may have originated from US intelligence. A lot of questions about this story. Making it just the latest Rinat Akhmetov story with major questions about who is working for whom and to what ends.
Here’s a pair of articles that ties together the story of Lithuania’s growing diplomatic dispute with China with the recent bizarre allegations by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy about a Kremlin-backed coup plot led by Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov.
First, here’s a Politico story from last week, right around the time Zelenskey’s claims of a coup-plot were dominating Ukraine’s news cycle. It’s about a new effort to pull Ukraine closer to the EU. Ukraine and two other Eastern European nations: Moldova and Georgia.
Keep in mind that the offer of Ukraine joining and EU trade association — but not full EU membership — was precisely the contentious issue that led up to the 2014 Maidan protests/coup. Paul Manafort’s entire “Hapsburg Group” saga was centered on getting around intra-EU opposition to the same plan. And when Viktor Yanukovych did ultimately walk away from the negotiations in 2013, it was at a point when he was being offered years a austerity. So less than a decade after all that unfolded, nearly tearing Ukraine apart, there’s a new push. But this time with Georgia and Moldova also part of the plan:
“The so-called “trio” — the three most EU-enthusiastic members of the bloc’s Eastern Partnership program for former Soviet republics — wants to convince the European Union to keep bringing them closer, while recognizing that they won’t be members of the club any time soon.”
An extremely enthusiastic trio of Eastern European nations seeking ‘friends with benefits’ status with the EU. They would like to be EU members. It’s the EU that isn’t entirely sure it wants them. But as the article notes, the idea of have a ‘ring of friends’ surrounding the EU was part of the vision Romano Prodi laid out back in 2002. So while everything may not be going according to the plans of this enthusiastic trio, having this trio spend years in the ‘friend’ box without ever gaining full EU membership does sound like it’s going according to the EU’s long-standing plans to set up a ‘ring of friends’:
And this brings us to the remarkable parallels between this latest ‘EU friends’ initiative and the EU-Ukraine trade association agreement that unraveled in 2013, precipitating the Maidan protest/coup months later. As we saw, the whole “Hapsburg Group” lobbying effort Paul Manafort was orchestrating with Ukrainian clients like Serhiy Lyovochkin was an effort to overcome resistance in the EU to allowing Ukraine into that trade association agreement. The exact same resistance this trio is still facing today. Don’t forget that when Viktor Yanykovych eventually relented on his years-long drive to get Ukraine closer into the EU’s orbit in late 2013, this was after being given an offer that was effective a guarantee of years of brutal austerity measures to meet EU standards. Will Ukraine get a more generous EU offer this time around? There’s no real indication of that:
And note who is the reported champion behind the formation of this “trio”: Lithuanian center-right MEP Andrius Kubilius, who seems to want to grant the trio some sort of de fact EU-almost-member status right away. Even Kubilius acknowledges the goal isn’t EU membership. But some sort of intermediate status that can keep these countries in the EU’s orbit:
Given how the whole scenario ended up playing out in Ukraine the last time when its pro-EU push was answered with a tepid pro-austerity offer, it’s going to be interesting to see how generous the EU ends up being with these three countries. Especially Ukraine.
Next, here’s an article related to Lithuania’s trade spat with China and how the country appears to be using the spat as a means of elevating its profile in the eyes of its EU and US allies. The story is from early November, about a delegation of seven EU parliamentarians who decided to visit Taiwan over Beijing’s opposition. Interestingly, all seven were also members of the European Parliament’s Special Committee on Foreign Interference, which focuses on issues like interference in elections, disinformation, cyberattacks and economic coercion.
Also of interest is the fact that two of these seven MEP were Lithuanian: Petras Auštrevicius and Andrius Kubilius. Now, as we saw, part of the motive for Lithuania’s sudden interest in championing Taiwan and picking an international fight with China is the hope of curry favor with DC and maintaining a US focus on containing Russia. Or at least that was one analyst’s take on the situation. So if that really is what’s playing out here, it’s notable that Kubilius, the center-right former Prime Minister of Lithuania and current MEP, appears to be a particularly important individual when it comes to EU’s role in the twin showdowns with Russia and China plays out. He’s been championing the idea of the “trio” to keep Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova in an EU orbit and he’s leading the way on Lithuania’s fight with China. That’s the kind of agenda that makes Kubilius someone worth keeping an eye on:
“The lawmakers headed for Taipei are all part of the European Parliament’s Special Committee on Foreign Interference, which deals with topics like interference in elections, disinformation, cyberattacks and economic coercion.”
As the story makes clear, when Lithuania picked its diplomatic fight with China, it had the implicit backing of the rest of the EU. That’s what this trip was about. A trip that had two Lithuanians in the seven member delegation, including Andrius Kubilius:
How will Lithuania’s long-standing fixation on the perceived existential threat from Russia and push to add to the EU’s ‘ring of friends’ complicate its new role as the West’s proxy pest in its showdown with China? Well that’s just it. The two roles are supposed to synergize with each other. At least that’s presumably what politicians like Andrius Kubilius are presumably hoping, which, again, is why he’s going to be someone to watch.