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| Nunes Is An American Hero |
One part of one Devin Nunes letter says more truth than in all of the Mueller report and in all of the radical Leftist crazies media coverage on SpyGate over the past years combined.
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| BHO SPYGATE: BIGGEST SCANDAL IN U.S. HISTORY |
If Mifsud has extensive, suspicious contacts among Russian officials as portrayed in the Special Counsel's report, then an incredibly wide range of Western institutions and individuals may have been compromised by him, including our own State Department. Indeed both the United States and many of our allies would be obligated to run damage assessment to determine what sensitive information Mifsud may have spread. In fact, this could entail a major scandal for the United States and allied governments.
Alternatively, if Mifsud is not in fact a counterintelligence threat, then that would cast doubt on the Special Counsel's fundamental depiction of him and his activities, and raise questions about the veracity of the Special Counsel's statements and affirmations.
It should be noted that the Special Counsel declined to charge Mifsud with any crime even though to justify seeking a prison sentence for Papadopoulos, the Special Counsel claimed Papadopoulos' untruthful testimony "undermined investigators" ability to challenge Professor Mifsud or potentially detain or arrest him while he was still in the United States.
Furthermore, it's still a mystery how the FBI knew to ask Papadopoulos specifically about Hillary Clinton's emails, on multiple occasions throughout 2016-17, before having interviewed Mifsud, if the FBI hadn't already somehow received this information directly or indirectly from Mifsud himself.
In a letter* Nunes presented photographic evidence of Mifsud in close proximity to influential Western political and government officials.
"The Mueller Report 'cherry-picked' information to portray Mifsud as a Russian Agent, he was really a western agent," said Rep. Devin Nunes. "...so, if the FBI does in fact have transcripts of Papadopoulos talking to anyone, whether it's Mifsud or Downer or whoever, I think Congress and the American people have the right to know this, because, in fact, we paid for it."
I don't think the American people expect 20 DOJ lawyers and 40 FBI agents to write a 450-page report that's built off of news stories. ~Rep. Devin Nunes
Mueller's depiction of Joseph Mifsud still doesn't make any sense. If he had extensive "connections to Russia," as Mueller claims, how is it that Mifsud ended up speaking at a State Department conference at the Capitol in 2017? The letter noted *above from Rep. Nunes to FBI/CIA highlights this oddity. ~ Michael Tracey
Mifsud is a crucial figure in the report: Mueller’s report states that Mifsud was the one who told Papadopoulos in April 2016 that the Russians had “dirt” in the form of emails that could damage Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Robert Mueller refused to answer questions during his testimony Wednesday about why he never filed charges against Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud, a mysterious figure integral to the initiation of the Trump-Russia investigation in 2016.
Aussie diplomat Alexander Downer is alledged to have later learned about Hillary Dirt from Papadopoulos. Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, is alledged to have informed the U.S. government and prompted the original counterintelligence investigation into Trump's campaign in July 2016, code-named Crossfire Hurricane.
Former Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer funneled $25 million in funds from his government into The Clinton Foundation.
Since Barack Hussein Obama's FBI failed to tell Congress about Downer's connection to the Clinton Foundation, Americans are concerned that all of the early evidence from the Obama FBI, used to justify its election-year probe of Barack Hussein Obama's political rival, also came from Clinton forces just like the fraudulent Steele dossier that was bought and paid for by Hillary and the DNC.Downer, now Australia’s ambassador to London, provided the account of a conversation with Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos at a London bar in 2016 that became the official reason the FBI opened the Russia counterintelligence probe.
Plenty of ex-Bernie supporters are fuming about how Hillary rigged the DNC primary. Independents and Republicans also abhor Barack Hussein Obama's endless abuse of power and his hatred of our country, Constitution, borders and our military.
The Democrat Party has been taken over by those at war with the United States. There has been no apology for the Democrat Party running the KKK, so we're watching the criminal party ride off again scott free. Can we expect the many criminal Democrats and Leftist felony leaking media outlets to go to prison? It is the Driveby Enemy Media and Democrats who colluded and conspired with Brit foreigner, Christopher Steele, to tamper with the U.S. 2016 Elections.
"They will say and do anything to support their far-left candidate against me ... Nancy Pelosi, George Soros and their assembly of deep-pocketed, far-left insiders are willing to spend whatever they have in order to defeat me,” Mr. Nunes said.
Trump’s decision to release the Nunes Memo is a page right out of the tinpot dictator handbook. This is an open declaration of war on the FBI and the rule of law. Nunes and Trump are lashing out like guilty men who know investigators are inching closer and closer to exposing their crimes. Devin Nunes must be held to account for his dangerous smear campaign against the FBI. ~ Eric C. Bauman, California Democrat Chairman
Nunes Statement on Mueller Report
The Mueller report ignored a wide range of abuses committed during the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. And now, with the revelation that the Special Counsel was authorized at the outset to investigate Carter Page for allegedly colluding with Russians to hack the election, it’s clear that false allegations from the Steele dossier played a major role not only in the FISA warrant application on Page, but in the appointment of the Special Counsel as well.
It has long been suggested that Mifsud was connected to Russian intelligence. But Nunes ... questions that assumption, saying Mueller’s report “omits any mention of a wide range of contacts Mifsud had with Western political institutions and individuals.”
The biggest takeaway from the entire Russia hoax is that our nation’s counter-intelligence capabilities should never again be abused to target an administration’s political opponents. Those who colluded in this effort – the media, Fusion GPS, Democratic Party leaders in Congress, the Clinton campaign, and partisan intelligence leaders – should apologize to the innocent people they maligned and to the American people they deceived.
After observing the enemy media's massive hoax operations, it is known that they view themselves as the entitled government of the United States. They are psychopaths with no conscience. They feel entitled to use lies to smear anyone who gets in their way, including the Founders, the Constitution, the historical record, Christians, or Jews. They are Jew haters. They hate Americans.
In their brainwashed heads they view those who refuse to bow to Allah as damned souls with no right to life, liberty, or our vote, even if they must import a phony immigrant population to annul our representative government. They only admit they're communists, so it is vital that more of us understand that Islam is communism. Emails show that Ilhan's staff is boasting of being able to shut down stories in the Star Tribune.
"It is clear Bob Mueller didn't write the Mueller Report." ~Devin Nunes
"Mifsud’s the guy who starts it all, and when the FBI interviews him, he lies three times and yet you don’t charge him with a crime," Rep. Jim Jordan said, before listing off all the Trump associates Mueller's team did charge for false statements, including former campaign manager Paul Manafort, lawyer Michael Cohen, and ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn.
We continue to get new information every week, it seems, that sort of underscores the fact that the FBI hasn’t been square with us. ~Rep. Jim Jordan
Mifsud has denied that he told Papadopoulos the Russians had Clinton's emails, and his lawyer Stephan Roh claims his client has cooperated with Western intelligence, not Russian intelligence, aligning with the assertions by Republican Leader Rep. Devin Nunes.
"Mifsud appears in your report a dozen times or more ... he really is the epicenter, he’s at the origin of this, he’s the man who supposedly knows about Clinton’s emails. You've seen on the screen, that the Democrats in the committee have put up all the prosecutions that you made against Trump campaign officials and others. But I’m struggling to understand why you didn’t indict Joseph Mifsud, who seems to be in the middle of all of this." ~Rep. Devin Nunes
The pious horror of the Democrats about “foreign interference” in American elections is hard to take seriously, especially since most of them seek to turn foreigners — namely, illegal immigrants from Mexico — into tomorrow’s voters. A party that shrugs at open borders is in no position to lecture anyone on eroded sovereignty.
The subject of American sovereignty has always left Democrats cold, since many of them spent their youth openly rooting for America’s enemies. Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, cast his first presidential vote for Gus Hall, a plant for the Soviet Union in American politics.
Brennan these days is loudly seconding Bob Mueller’s astonishingly feeble claim that Russia’s interference in the 2016 election was nothing short of “devastating,” “sweeping,” and “systematic.” In fact, it was minor and ineffectual, as even the lefties at The Nation have concluded. The most glaring data point is how minimally Russian social-media activity pertained to the 2016 campaign.
Don’t buy the hype, writes The Nation’s Aaron Maté: “Far from being a sophisticated propaganda campaign, it was small, amateurish, and mostly unrelated to the 2016 election,” he writes. He notes that the only serious studies on the matter have found no confirmation for Mueller’s claim and the chattering class’s incessant echoing of it.
Writing in the New York Post last year, Betsy McCaughey cut through Mueller’s sanctimonious BS: "Russians added nothing more than a tiny whisper to the overall political clamor. These numbers disprove the myth that Russian interference won the election for Trump."
It’s telling that those who are so certain Russian social-media posts affected the 2016 election never cite the posts that they think actually helped achieve that end. The actual content of those posts might explain why. A former Cambridge Analytica employee explained their legal blueprint that boosted Trump's victory. They used legal techniques to target voters.
The IG Report by the Inspector General over the FBI finally became available. We will break it down. Corporate Media didn't acknowledge the truth found in this report. It is everything, it is major clarity on the witch hunt voo doo that dems have been conjuring in Washington D.C.
REPORT CARD ON THE 'MUELLER' INVESTIGATION
"F" Grade For No Indictments for Illegal Spying on a Political Rival & Court DeceitTo mislead the FISA court Barack Obama FBI officials tucked away inconvenient required disclosures in footnotes, hidden in plain sight. This was how Obama spied on Trump using the distant Carter Page association. In the four FISA Requests' footnotes Barack Obama obscured his reliance on opposition research financed by Hillary, the Steel Dossier!
"F" Grade on ScholarshipA close reading of the Mueller Report footnotes by Eric Felten raised more questions than they answered, especially regarding Mueller’s methods and purposes. The so-called 'Mueller Report' footnotes often show that Mueller relied on the flimsy say-so of media accounts, and blind acceptance of anti-Trump critics at face value! Mueller's footnotes were thousands of pieces of unsubstantiated gossip and speculation. Footnotes are intended to carry precise facts, sources and first-person eye-witness accounts!!
"F" Grade on ReliabilityThe gold standard to measure the significance of the Mueller report is who's information he trusted or did not trust. Long stretches of the special counsel’s report hang almost exclusively on Comey gossip, yes, the discredited, conflicted felony-leaker. Comey’s memos are cited some three dozen times in Volume II alone, a person Trump fired!!! Comey was never a disinterested observer at any point.
"F" Grade on Corrupt, Bias'd, Conflicted Mueller TaintComey in point of fact was attempting to build a conspiracy case against Trump, according to Paul Sperry in RealClearInvestigations, citing sources familiar with an internal DOJ review. And Comey memo's were written with a desire to influence public opinion! Footnote 544 in Volume II indicates Comey's political motive and that Comey broke the law. Comey arranged to have several memo's leaked to the New York Times to prompt the appointment of a special counsel!
That was a felony leak. Mueller proved untrustworthy to investigate his close friend, Comey. And the choice of Bob Mueller as the Special Counsel's Leadership says everything one needs to know about House Democrat Leaders and the Fake News who with them widely and loudly raved around in everyone's face their claim that Bob Mueller was an excellent choice for Special Counsel Leadership!
"F" Grade on Echo Chamber & High School MentalityMueller’s footnotes show a surprising reliance on media accounts as evidence of consequential claims. The Mueller Team also resorted to hearsay thrice removed to make claims when they had every investigative tool at their disposal. The Mueller Team's work was so shoddy that even the media accounts they cited undercut the speculation it meant to buttress.
For example, take Footnote No. 16 of the report’s 2nd Volume. The body text referenced read, “The press also reported that foreign policy adviser Carter Page had ties to a Russian state-run gas company.” The first footnote citation is to a Bloomberg article making that claim, but the Bloomberg article goes on to cite a Sept 2016 Politico article by Julia Ioffe who wrote that she discovered, "Page was not known by Russian experts, energy experts, or Russian energy experts." This footnote misspelled Ioffe’s name and referred to an article that established the exact opposite of the point it was being cited to validate.
Although Mueller refused to share details about the elusive Mifsud, Attorney General William Barr has asked U.S. Attorney John Durham, who hails from Connecticut, to review the origins of SpyGate. And Durham's investigators are seeking to set up an interview with Mifsud through his attorney Roh.
Durham's team at least wants to view a recorded deposition Mifsud gave in 2018 on his role in the Trump-Russia controversy. Roh said he would provide a least one page of the deposition to Durham's investigators.
It was Barack Hussein Obama treason that
triggered spying on his political rival.
"Democrats want to have Impeachment without saying the word." ~ Rep. Kevin McCarthy (CA)
The real collusion in the 2016 election was not between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. It was between the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration. The media–Democrat “collusion narrative,” which paints Donald Trump as cat’s paw of Russia, is a studiously crafted illusion.
Despite Clinton’s commanding lead in the polls, hyper-partisan intelligence officials decided they needed an “insurance policy” against a Trump presidency. Thus was born the collusion narrative, built on an anonymously sourced “dossier,” secretly underwritten by the Clinton campaign and compiled by a former British spy. Though acknowledged to be “salacious and unverified” at the FBI’s highest level, the dossier was used to build a counterintelligence investigation against Trump’s campaign.
Miraculously, Trump won anyway. But his political opponents refused to accept the voters’ decision. Their collusion narrative was now peddled relentlessly by political operatives, intelligence agents, Justice Department officials, and media ideologues―the vanguard of the “Trump Resistance.” Through secret surveillance, high-level intelligence leaking, and tireless news coverage, the public was led to believe that Trump conspired with Russia to steal the election.
Not one to sit passively through an onslaught, President Trump fought back in his tumultuous way. Matters came to a head when he fired his FBI director, who had given explosive House testimony suggesting the president was a criminal suspect, despite privately assuring Trump otherwise. The resulting firestorm of partisan protest cowed the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel, whose seemingly limitless investigation bedeviled the administration for two years.
Yet as months passed, concrete evidence of collusion failed to materialize. Was the collusion narrative an elaborate fraud? And if so, choreographed by whom? Against MSDNC caterwauling, a doughty group of lawmakers forced a shift in the spotlight from Trump to his investigators and accusers. This has exposed the depth of politicization within American law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. It is now clear that the institutions on which our nation depends for objective policing and clear-eyed analysis injected themselves scandalously into the divisive politics of the 2016 election.
They failed to forge a new Clinton administration. Will they succeed in bringing down President Trump?
Knowledge is power, and the hated Establishment is demanding that THEY control the DNI, our national intelligence. We can't use this fleecing, it is VERY expensive because America needs to own its own power. We hope the Supreme Court will halt the unConstitutional distortion of our Republic that is termed "The Establishment," that ever growing swamp that is the Washington D.C. area. It endlessly is increasing in size, numbers and power even though Americans judge the town "F" for colossal Flop.
There is no device permitting the Congress to delegate its power to increasing numbers of agencies, Congress has the duty of oversight, a 'permanent' agency class does NOT.
Judge Jeanine solves our befuddled compound questions within questions. Hat tip to a great Lady. Thank you, Judge!
Judge Jeanine solves our befuddled compound questions within questions. Hat tip to a great Lady. Thank you, Judge!
Exonerate? Where the hell is that from?
In America we do not prove innocence, we are innocent until proven guilty. Democrats show no ethics. Must see above video for excellent help to our comprehension.
Comey FBI’s Criminal Conduct in 2016 and 2017 FISA Warrants
Described in Horowitz’s Own Words
The significant failings are laid bare in a report made public Monday that showed the FBI withheld from the FISA court misgivings about its star informant Christopher Steele, as well as evidence of innocence against targets like former Trump campaign advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.
1. Omitted information the FBI had obtained from another U.S. government agency detailing its prior relationship with Page, including that Page had been approved as an “operational contact” for the other agency from 2008 to 2013, and that Page had provided information to the other agency concerning his prior contacts with certain Russian intelligence officers, one of which overlapped with facts asserted in the FISA application;
2. Included a source characterization statement asserting that Steele’s prior reporting had been “corroborated and used in criminal proceedings,” which overstated the significance of Steele’s past reporting and was not approved by Steele’s handling agent, as required by the Woods Procedures;
3. Omitted information relevant to the reliability of Person 1, a key Steele sub-source (who was attributed with providing the information in Report 95 and some of the information in Reports 80 and 102 relied upon in the application), namely that (a) Steele himself told members of the Crossfire Hurricane team that Person 1 was a “boaster” and an “egoist” and “may engage in some embellishment” and (b) INFORMATION REDACTED
4. Asserted that the FBI had assessed that Steele did not directly provide to the press information in the September 23 Yahoo News article based on the premise that Steele had told the FBI that he only shared his election-related research with the FBI and Fusion GPS, his client; this premise was incorrect and contradicted by documentation in the Woods File- Steele had told the FBI that he also gave his information to the State Department;
5. Omitted Papadopoulos’s consensually monitored statements to an FBI CHS in September 2016 denying that anyone associated with the Trump campaign was collaborating with Russia or with outside groups like Wikileaks in the release of emails;
6. Omitted Page’s consensually monitored statements to an FBI CHS in August 2016 that Page had “literally never met” or “said one word to” Paul Manafort and that Manafort had not responded to any of Page’s emails; if true, those statements were in tension with claims in Report 95 that Page was participating in a conspiracy with Russia by acting as an intermediary for Manafort on behalf of the Trump campaign; and
7. Included Page’s consensually monitored statements to an FBI CHS in October 2016 that the FBI believed supported its theory that Page was an agent of Russia but omitted other statements Page made that were inconsistent with its theory, including denying having met with Sechin and Divyekin, or even knowing who Divyekin was; if true, those statements contradicted the claims in Report 94 that Page had met secretly with Sechin and Divyekin about future cooperation with Russia and shared derogatory information about candidate Clinton.
8. Omitted the fact that Steele’s Primary Sub-source, who the FBI found credible, had made statements in January 2017 raising significant questions about the reliability of allegations included in the FISA applications, including, for example, that he/she had no discussion with Person 1 concerning WikiLeaks and there was “nothing bad” about the communications between the Kremlin and the Trump team, and that he/she did not report to Steele in July 2016 that Page had met with Sechin;
9. Omitted Page’s prior relationship with another U.S. government agency, despite being reminded by the other agency in June 2017, prior to the filing of the final renewal application, about Page’s past status with that other agency; instead of including this information in the final renewal application, the OGC Attorney altered an email from the other agency so that the email stated that Page was “not a source” for the other agency, which the FBI affiant relied upon in signing the final renewal application;
10. Omitted information from persons who previously had professional contacts with Steele or had direct knowledge of his work-related performance, including statements that Steele had no history of reporting in bad faith but “[d]emonstrates lack of self-awareness, poor judgment,” “pursued people with political risk but no intelligence value,” “didn’t always exercise great judgment,” and it was “not clear what he would have done to validate” his reporting;
11. Omitted information obtained from Ohr about Steele and his election reporting, including that (1) Steele’s reporting was going to Clinton’s presidential campaign and others, (2) Simpson was paying Steele to discuss his reporting with the media, and (3) Steele was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being the U.S. President”;
12. Failed to update the description of Steele after information became known to the Crossfire Hurricane team, from Ohr and others, that provided greater clarity on the political origins and connections of Steele’s reporting, including that Simpson was hired by someone associated with the Democratic Party and/or the DNC.
13. Failed to correct the assertion in the first FISA application that the FBI did not believe that Steele directly provided information to the reporter who wrote the September 23 Yahoo News article, even though there was no information in the Woods File to support this claim and even after certain Crossfire Hurricane officials learned in 2017, before the third renewal application, of an admission that Steele made in a court filing about his interactions with the news media in the late summer and early fall of 2016;
14. Omitted the finding from a FBI source validation report that Steele was suitable for continued operation but that his past contributions to the FBI’s criminal program had been ” minimally corroborated,” and instead continued to assert in the source characterization statement that Steele’s prior reporting had been “corroborated and used in criminal proceedings”;
15. Omitted Papadopoulos’s statements to an FBI CHS in late October 2016 denying that the Trump campaign was involved in the circumstances of the DNC email hack;
16. Omitted Joseph Mifsud’s denials to the FBI that he supplied Papadopoulos with the information Papadopoulos shared with the FFG (suggesting that the campaign received an offer or suggestion of assistance from Russia); and
17. Omitted information indicating that Page played no role in the Republican platform change on Russia’s annexation of Ukraine as alleged in the Report 95, which was inconsistent with a factual assertion relied upon to support probable cause in all four FISA applications.The partisan FBI was not 'scrupulously accurate,' they proved to have no scruples at all. "...the FBI did not have information corroborating the specific allegations against Carter Page in Steele’s reporting when it relied upon his reports in the first FISA application or subsequent renewal applications,” the IG report said. Clearly the FBI was partisan from their very first step.
The IG Report portrayed the Steele dossier as essentially intelligence garbage. Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent and 'palestinian' advocate hired by Hillary, was among the IG Report's biggest losers. Every Democrat Congressperson who continues to spew Hillary's impeachment babble is guilty of conspiracy and treason with her.
The report divulges that concerns about Steele’s reliability as an informant pre-dated the first FISA applications when a senior Justice official, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stuart Evans in the National Security Division, flagged Steele’s political bias and connections to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which paid for his dossier.
Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stuart Evans in the National Security Division, flagged Steele’s political bias and connections to Hillary’s campaign, which paid for his dossier. He warned, "...intelligence to be collected through the FISA order would probably not be worth the risk ... politically sensitive."
What quibblers call sensitive is really illegal spying and treason. Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe chose to proceed. Just giving these creepers 5-year prison sentences is an insult to the American people. These are high crimes. A high crime is a crime done by those in high office, due to the quatum-level deleterious effects arising from the fact that they affect millions of people. Stop using government to punish the peons, and place the punishment on the ones pulling the strings: Barack, HILLARY and Bill Clinton.
The IG Report quoted the FBI agent handling Steele as saying “... he would not have approved the representation” that Steele had been a reliable informant because most of his information had not been corroborated.
The FBI obtained exculpatory information from Carter Page and George Papadopolous, that raised questions about the validity of their investigation, for they did not disclose that exculpatory information to the FISA judges. That is treason against the United States, given that they kept spying on the President of the United States with this flimsy concoction. It is extremely dishonest if not complicit of Horowitz to ignore the partisan Donkey sitting in the middle of this global conspiracy.
As they say, you've got to live hardcore to be hard core. Hardcore. Hardcore. John Solomon lives hardcore.
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| John Solomon |
Biden's 2016 Election Interference
A growing number of myths and falsehoods are being spread by partisans.
John Solomon, former editorialist and executive at The Hill,
lands daggers into nine of the bigger fairy tales.
QUESTION: is Joe Biden above the law? Democrats refuse to investigate Hillary or Joe Biden, so claiming there is no evidence is vapid lying. When Dems refuse to investigate the evidence, and they donn't even set up a case, it is not 'proof' of anything. But there is the negative inference that Democrats believe Democrats are above the law.
Hillary Operatives in State, FBI, DOJ, and the media conjured a Trump-Russia-Collusion Conspiracy Theory, by using corrupt echo chamber tactics through late 2016 and early 2017 seeking to trigger a Special Counsel Investigation with counterterrorism spying rather than using evidence of a crime; this was not a legal application of Special Counsel statutes. Facts do matter. Here are the facts, complete with links to the original materials.
1) Myth: There is no evidence the Democratic National Committee sought Ukraine’s assistance during the 2016 election.
The Facts: The Ukrainian embassy in Washington confirmed to me this past April that a Democratic National Committee contractor named Alexandra Chalupa did, in fact, solicit dirt on Donald Trump and Paul Manafort during the spring of 2016 in hopes of spurring a pre-election congressional hearing into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. The embassy also stated Chalupa tried to get Ukraine’s president at the time, Petro Poroshenko, to do an interview on Manafort with an American investigative reporter working on the issue.
The embassy said it turned down both requests. You can read the Ukraine embassy’s statement here. The statement essentially confirmed a January 2017 investigative article in Politico that first raised concerns about Chalupa’s contacts with the embassy.
Chalupa’s activities involving Ukraine were further detailed in a May 2016 email published by WikiLeaks in which she reported to DNC officials on her efforts to dig up dirt on Manafort and Trump. You can read that email here.
2) Myth: There is no evidence that Ukrainian government officials tried to influence the American presidential election in 2016.
The Facts: There are two documented episodes involving Ukrainian government officials’ efforts to influence the 2016 American presidential election. The first occurred in Ukraine, where a court last December ruled that a Parliamentary member and a senior Ukrainian law enforcement official improperly tried to influence the U.S. election by releasing financial records in spring and summer 2016 from an investigation into Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s lobbying activities. The publicity from the release of the so-called Black Ledger documents forced Manafort to resign. You can read that ruling here. While that court ruling since has been set aside on a jurisdiction technicality, the facts of the released information are not in dispute.
The second episode occurred on U.S. soil back in August 2016 when Ukraine’s then-ambassador to Washington, Valeriy Chaly, took the extraordinary step of writing an OpEd in The Hill criticizing GOP nominee Donald Trump and his views on Russia just three months before Election Day. You can read that OpEd here.
Chaly later told me through his spokeswoman that he wasn’t writing the OpEd for political purposes but rather to address his country’s geopolitical interests. But his article, nonetheless, was viewed by many in career diplomatic circles as running contrary to the Geneva Convention’s rules barring diplomats from becoming embroiled in the host country’s political affairs. And it clearly adds to the public perception that Ukraine’s government at the time preferred Hillary Clinton over Trump in the 2016 election.
3) Myth: The allegation that Joe Biden tried to fire the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his son Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian gas firm employer has been debunked, and there is no evidence the ex-vice president did anything improper.
The Facts: Joe Biden is captured on videotape bragging about his effort to strong-arm Ukraine’s president into firing Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. Biden told a foreign policy group in early 2018 that he used the threat of withholding $1 billion in U.S. aid to Kiev to successfully force Shokin’s firing. You can watch Biden’s statement here.
It also is not in dispute that at the time he forced the firing, the vice president’s office knew Shokin was investigating Burisma Holdings, the company where Hunter Biden worked as a board member and consultant. Team Biden was alerted to the investigation in a December 2015 New York Times article. You can read that article here.
The unresolved question is what motivated Joe Biden to seek Shokin’s ouster. Biden says he took the action solely because the U.S. and Western allies believed Shokin was ineffective in fighting corruption. Shokin told me, ABC News and others that he was fired because Joe Biden was unhappy that the Burisma investigation was not shut down. He made similar statements in an affidavit prepared to be filed in an European court. You can read that affidavit here.
In the end, though, whether Joe Biden had good or bad intentions in getting Shokin fired is somewhat irrelevant to the question of the vice president’s ethical obligation.
U.S. ethics rules require all government officials to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest in taking official actions. Ethics experts I talked with say Biden should have recused himself from the Shokin matter once he learned about the Burisma investigation to avoid the appearance issue.
And a senior U.S. diplomat was quoted in testimony reported by The Washington Post earlier this month that he tried to raise warnings with Biden’s VP office in 2015 that Hunter Biden’s role at the Ukrainian firm raised the potential issue of conflicts of interest.
4) Myth: Ukraine’s investigation into Burisma Holdings was no longer active when Joe Biden forced Shokin’s firing in March 2016.
The Facts: This is one of the most egregiously false statements spread by the media. Ukraine’s official case file for Burisma Holdings, provided to me by prosecutors, shows there were two active investigations into the gas firm and its founder Mykola Zlochevsky in early 2016, one involving corruption allegations and the other involving unpaid taxes.
In fact, Shokin told me in an interview he was making plans to interview Burisma board members, including Hunter Biden, at the time he was fired. And it was publicly reported that in February 2016, a month before Shokin was fired, that Ukrainian prosecutors raided one of Zlochevsky’s homes and seized expensive items like a luxury car as part of the corruption probe. You can read a contemporaneous news report about the seizure here.
Burisma’s own legal activities also clearly show the investigations were active at the time Shokin was fired. Internal emails I obtained from the American legal team representing Burisma show that on March 29, 2016 – the very day Shokin was fired – Burisma lawyer John Buretta was seeking a meeting with Shokin’s temporary replacement in hopes of settling the open cases.
In May 2016 when new Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko was appointed, Buretta then sent a letter to the new prosecutor seeking to resolve the investigations of Burisma and Zlochevsky. You can read that letter here.
Buretta eventually gave a February 2017 interview to the Kiev Post in which he divulged that the corruption probe was resolved in fall 2016 and the tax case by early January 2017. You can read Buretta’s interview here.
In another words, the Burisma investigations were active at the time Vice President Biden forced Shokin’s firing, and any suggestion to the contrary is pure misinformation.
5) Myth: There is no evidence Vice President Joe Biden did anything to encourage Burisma’s hiring of his son Hunter.
The Facts: This is another area where the public facts cry out for more investigation and raise a question in some minds about another appearance of a conflict of interest.
Hunter Biden’s business partner, Devon Archer, was appointed to Burisma’s board in mid-April 2014 and the firm Rosemont Seneca Bohai — jointly owned by Hunter Biden and Devon Archer — received its first payments from the Ukrainian gas company on April 15, 2014, according to the company’s ledgers.
That very same day as the first Burisma payment, Devon Archer met with Joe Biden at the White House, according to White House visitor logs. It is not known what the two discussed.
A week later, Joe Biden traveled to Ukraine and met with then-Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. During that meeting, the American vice president urged Ukraine to ramp up energy production to free itself from its Russian natural gas dependence. Biden even boasted that “an American team is currently in the region working with Ukraine and its neighbors to increase Ukraine’s short-term energy supply.” Yatsenyuk welcomed the help from American “investors” in modernizing natural gas supply lines in Ukraine. You can read the Biden-Yatsenyuk transcript here.
Less than three weeks later, Burisma added Hunter Biden to its board to join Archer. To some, the sequence of events creates the appearance that Joe Biden’s pressure to increase Ukrainian gas supply and to urge Kiev to rely on Americans might have led Burisma to hire his son. More investigation needs to be done to determine exactly what happened. And until that occurs, the appearance issue will likely linger over this episode.
6) Myth: Hunter Biden’s firm only received $50,000 a month for his work as a board member and consultant for Burisma Holdings.
The Facts: This figure frequently cited by Biden defenders and the media significantly understates what Burisma was paying Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca Bohai firm for his and Devon Archer’s services. Bank records obtained by the FBI in an unrelated case show that between May 2014 and the end of 2015, Hunter Biden’s and Archer’s firm received monthly consulting payments totaling $166,666, or three times the amount cited by the media. In some months, there was even more money than that paid. You can review those bank records here.
The monthly payments figures are confirmed by the accounting ledger that Burisma turned over to Ukrainian prosecutors. That ledger, which you can read here, also shows that in spring and summer of 2014 Burisma paid more than $283,000 to the American law firm of Boies Schiller, where Hunter Biden also worked as an attorney.
7) Myth: President Trump was trying to force Ukraine to reopen a probe into Burisma Holdings and its founder Mykola Zlochevsky when he talked to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in July of this year.
The Facts: Trump could not have forced the Ukrainians into opening a new Burisma investigation in July because the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s office had already done so on March 28, 2019, or three months before the call.
The prosecutors filed this notice of suspicion in Ukraine announcing the re-opening of the investigation. The revival of the case was even widely reported in the Ukrainian press, something U.S. intelligence and diplomats who are now testifying to Congress behind closed doors should have known. Here’s an example of one such Ukrainian media report at the time.
8) Myth: Former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko retracted or recanted his claim that U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch in 2016 identified people and entities she did not want to see prosecuted in Ukraine.
The Facts: In a March interview with me at Hill.TV captured on videotape, Lutsenko stated that during his first meeting with Yovanovitch in summer 2016, the American diplomat rattled off a list of names of Ukrainian individuals and entities she did not want to see investigated or prosecuted. Lutsenko called it a “do not prosecute” list. You can watch that video here. The State Department disputed his characterization as a fabrication, which Hill.TV reported in its original report.
A few weeks later, a Ukrainian news outlet claimed it interviewed Lutsenko and he backed off his assertion about the list. Several American outlets have since picked up that same language.
There is just one problem. I re-interviewed Lutsenko after the Ukrainian report suggesting he recanted. He adamantly denied recanting, retracting or changing his story, and said the Ukrainian newspaper simply misunderstood that the list of names were conveyed orally during the meeting and not in writing, just like he said in the original Hill.TV interview.
Here is Lutsenko’s full explanation to me back last spring: “At no time since our interview have I ever retracted the statement I made about the U.S. ambassador providing me a list of names of people and organizations she did not want my office to prosecute. Shortly after my televised interview with your news organization I was asked by a Ukraine reporter if I had a copy of the letter that Ambassador Yovanovitch provided me with the names of those she did not want prosecuted. The reporter misunderstood how the names were transmitted to me. I explained to the reporter that the Ambassador did not hand me a written list but rather provided the list of names orally over the course of a meeting.” Lutsenko reaffirmed he stood by his statements again in September.
It is important to note Lutsenko’s story was also backed up by State Department officials and contemporaneous memos before his interview was ever aired. For instance, a senior U.S. official I interviewed for the Lutsenko story reviewed the list of names that Lutsenko recalled being on the so-called do-not-prosecute list.
That official stated during the interview: ““I can confirm to you that at least some of those names are names that U.S. embassy Kiev raised with the Prosecutor General’s office because we were concerned about retribution and unfair treatment of Ukrainians viewed as favorable to the United States.”
Separately, both U.S. and Ukrainian official confirmed to me a letter written by then-U.S. embassy official George Kent in April 2016 in which U.S. officials pointedly, and in writing, demanded that Ukrainian prosecutors stand down an investigation into several Ukrainian nonprofit groups suspected of misspending U.S. foreign aid. The letter even named one of the groups, the AntiCorruption Action Centre, a nonprofit funded jointly by the State Department and liberal megadonor George Soros.
“We are gravely concerned about this investigation, for which we see no basis,” Kent wrote the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office in April 2016. You can read the letter here.
So even without Lutsenko’s claim, there is substantial evidence that the U.S. embassy in Kiev applied pressure on Ukrainian prosecutors not to pursue certain investigations in 2016.
9) Myth: The narratives about Biden, the U.S. embassy and Ukrainian election interference are conspiracy theories invented by Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, to impact the 2020 election.
The Facts: Giuliani began investigating matters in Ukraine in late fall 2018 as a personal lawyer to the president. But months before his quest began, Ukrainian prosecutors believed they possessed evidence about Burisma, the Bidens and 2016 election interference that might interest the U.S. Justice Department. It is the same evidence that came to light this spring and summer and that is now a focus of the impeachment proceedings.
Originally, one of Ukraine’s senior prosecutors tried to secure a visa to come to the United States to deliver that evidence. But when the U.S. embassy in Kiev did not fulfill his travel request, the group of Ukrainian prosecutors used an intermediary to hire a former U.S. attorney in America to reach out to the U.S. attorney office in New York and try to arrange a transfer of the evidence. The Ukrainian prosecutors’ story about making the overture to the DOJ was independently verified by the American lawyer they hired.
So the activities and allegation now at the heart of impeachment actually pre-date Giuliani starting work on Ukraine. You can read the prosecutors’ account of their 2018 effort to get this information to Americans here.
