Obama engaged Ukraine to give the Russian collusion narrative an early boost (and 2016 Hillary)

thehill.com ^ | 04/25/19 07 | JOHN SOLOMON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR

[Liz]

As Donald Trump began his meteoric rise to the presidency, the Obama White House summoned Ukrainian authorities to Washington to coordinate ongoing anti-corruption efforts inside Russia’s most critical neighbor.

The January 2016 gathering, confirmed by multiple participants and contemporaneous memos, brought some of Ukraine’s top corruption prosecutors and investigators face to face with members of former President Obama’s National Security Council (NSC), FBI, State Department and Department of Justice (DOJ).

The agenda suggested the purpose was training and coordination. But Ukrainian participants said it didn’t take long — during the meetings and afterward — to realize the Americans’ objectives included two politically hot investigations: one that touched Vice President Joe Biden’s family and one that involved a lobbying firm linked closely to then-candidate Trump. U.S. officials “kept talking about how important it was that all of our anti-corruption efforts be united,” said Andrii Telizhenko, then a political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington tasked with organizing the meeting.

Telizhenko, who no longer works for the Ukrainian Embassy, said U.S. officials volunteered during the meetings — one of which was held in the White House’s Old Executive Office Building — that they had an interest in reviving a closed investigation into payments to U.S. figures from Ukraine’s Russia-backed Party of Regions. That 2014 investigation was led by the FBI and focused heavily on GOP lobbyist Paul Manafort, whose firm long had been tied to Trump through his partner and Trump pal, Roger Stone.

Agents interviewed Manafort in 2014 about whether he received undeclared payments from the party of ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, an ally of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and whether he engaged in improper foreign lobbying.

The FBI shut down the case without charging Manafort. Telizhenko said he couldn’t remember whether Manafort was mentioned during the January 2016 meeting. But he and other attendees recalled DOJ officials asking investigators from Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) if they could help locate new evidence about the Party of Regions’ payments and its dealings with Americans.

“It was definitely the case that led to the charges against Manafort and the leak to U.S. media during the 2016 election,” he said.

That makes the January 2016 meeting one of the earliest documented efforts to build the now-debunked Trump-Russia collusion narrative and one of the first to involve the Obama administration’s intervention. Spokespeople for the NSC, DOJ and FBI declined to comment. A representative for former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice did not return emails seeking comment.

Nazar Kholodnytskyy, Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, told me he attended some but not all of the January 2016 Washington meetings and couldn’t remember the specific cases, if any, that were discussed. But he said he soon saw evidence in Ukraine of political meddling in the U.S. election. Kholodnytskyy said the key evidence against Manafort — a ledger showing payments from the Party of Regions — was known to Ukrainian authorities since 2014 but was suddenly released in May 2016 by the U.S.-friendly NABU, after Manafort was named Trump’s campaign chairman: “Somebody kept this black ledger secret for two years and then showed it to the public and the U.S. media. It was extremely suspicious.”

Kholodnytskyy said he explicitly instructed NABU investigators who were working with American authorities not to share the ledger with the media. “Look, Manafort’s case is one of the cases that hurt me a lot,” he said. “I ordered the detectives to give nothing to the mass media considering this case. Instead, they had broken my order and published themselves these one or two pages of this black ledger regarding Paul Manafort."

“For me it was the first call that something was going wrong and that there is some external influence in this case. And there is some other interests in this case not in the interest of the investigation and a fair trial,” he added.

Kostiantyn Kulyk, deputy head of the Ukraine prosecutor general’s international affairs office, said that, shortly after Ukrainian authorities returned from the Washington meeting, there was a clear message about helping the Americans with the Party of the Regions case. “Yes, there was a lot of talking about needing help and then the ledger just appeared in public,” he recalled. Kulyk said Ukrainian authorities had evidence that other Western figures, such as former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig, also received money from Yanukovych’s party. But the Americans weren’t interested: “They just discussed Manafort. This was all and only what they wanted. Nobody else.”

Manafort joined Trump’s campaign on March 29, 2016, and then was promoted to campaign chairman on May 19, 2016. NABU leaked the existence of the ledgers on May 29, 2016. Later that summer, it told U.S. media the ledgers showed payments to Manafort, a revelation that forced him to resign from the campaign in August 2016.

A Ukrainian court in December concluded NABU’s release of the ledger was an illegal attempt to influence the U.S. election. And a member of Ukraine’s parliament has released a recording of a NABU official saying the agency released the ledger to help Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The other case raised at the January 2016 meeting, Telizhenko said, involved Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company under investigation in Ukraine for improper foreign transfers of money. At the time, Burisma allegedly was paying then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter as both a board member and a consultant. More than $3 million flowed from Ukraine to an American firm tied to Hunter Biden in 2014-15, bank records show.

According to Telizhenko, U.S. officials told the Ukrainians they would prefer that Kiev drop the Burisma probe and allow the FBI to take it over. The Ukrainians did not agree. But then Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire Ukraine’s chief prosecutor in March 2016, as I previously reported. The Burisma case was transferred to NABU, then shut down. The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington on Thursday confirmed the Obama administration requested the meetings in January 2016, but embassy representatives attended only some of the sessions.

"Unfortunately, the Embassy of Ukraine in Washington, D.C., was not invited to join the DOJ and other law enforcement-sector meetings," it said. It said it had no record that the Party of Regions or Burisma cases came up in the meetings it did attend. Ukraine is riddled with corruption, Russian meddling and intense political conflicts, so one must carefully consider any Ukrainian accounts.

But Telizhenko’s claim that the DOJ reopened its Manafort probe as the 2016 election ramped up is supported by the DOJ’s own documents, including communications involving Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr, his wife, Nellie, and ex-British spy Christopher Steele.

Nellie Ohr and Steele worked in 2016 for the research firm, Fusion GPS, that was hired by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to find Russia dirt on Trump. Steele wrote the famous dossier for Fusion that the FBI used to gain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. Nellie Ohr admitted to Congress that she routed Russia dirt on Trump from Fusion to the DOJ through her husband during the election.

DOJ emails show Nellie Ohr on May 30, 2016, directly alerted her husband and two DOJ prosecutors specializing in international crimes to the discovery of the “black ledger” documents that led to Manafort’s prosecution. “Reported Trove of documents on Ukrainian Party of Regions’ Black Cashbox,” Nellie Ohr wrote to her husband and federal prosecutors Lisa Holtyn and Joseph Wheatley, attaching a news article on the announcement of NABU’s release of the documents.

Bruce Ohr and Steele worked on their own effort to get dirt on Manafort from a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, who had a soured business relationship with him. Deripaska was “almost ready to talk” to U.S. government officials regarding the money that “Manafort stole,” Bruce Ohr wrote in notes from his conversations with Steele.

The efforts eventually led to a September 2016 meeting in which the FBI asked Deripaska if he could help prove Manafort was helping Trump collude with Russia. Deripaska laughed off the notion as preposterous. Previously, Politico reported that the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington assisted Clinton’s campaign through a DNC contractor. The Ukrainian Embassy acknowledges it got requests for assistance from the DNC staffer to find dirt on Manafort but denies it provided any improper assistance.

Now we have more concrete evidence that the larger Ukrainian government also was being pressed by the Obama administration to help build the Russia collusion narrative. And that onion is only beginning to be peeled. But what is already confirmed by Ukrainians looks a lot more like assertive collusion with a foreign power than anything detailed in the Mueller report.

John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill.

[semimojo]

This was a ploy to divert attention from the dirty deals of Hillary's pals...........the infamous Podestas (who Manafort worked for in the Ukraine)...........

Not sure I see how having Ukraine re-open an investigation into Manafort diverts attention from his firm but there’s a lot here to not understand.

[Liz]

Newly Released Mueller Document Suggests Dem Power Broker Tony Podesta Misled Federal Investigators
Law and Crime ^ | 3:44 pm, September 15th, 2018 | Colin Kalmbacher / FR Posted by E. Pluribus Unum

The office of special counsel Robert Mueller just released a document which appears to show that longtime Democratic Party power broker Tony Podesta misled federal investigators when questioned about his obligations, and how he understood them, under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

The document is dated March 31, 2017 and was released late Saturday morning in line with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request initiated by the New York Times‘ Kenneth Vogel. Taking the form of a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) National Security Division and addressed to Podesta’s attorney Matthew T. Sanderson, the document reads, in relevant part:

In conclusion, we have determined that Podesta must register under FARA, because the firm’s activities on behalf of the [European Centre For a Modern Ukraine (ECFMU)] constitute “political activities” as defined under the Act and were conducted at the order, request, or under the direction or control of a foreign principal…in furtherance of, and for the purpose of influencing, U.S. government officials and sections of the public within the United States, with reference to the political or public interests, policies or relations of a foreign government or foreign political party.

The document continues, noting, “the principal beneficiary of the political activities conducted within the United States was the Ukrainian government and/or the [pro-Russian] Party of Regions.” (Excerpt) Read more at lawandcrime.com ...

=====================================

gatewaypundit.com
By Jim Hoft February 24, 2019

Paul Manafort Indicted and in Solitary Confinement While Hillary and Creepy Podesta Brothers Run Free –
Manafort Worked for Podestas!
Robert Mueller filed under seal, an 800-page redacted sentencing memo on Paul Manafort in the Washington D.C case ahead of the midnight deadline and was ordered to release it by corrupt Obama judge Amy Berman Jackson.Mueller said in the sentencing memo that Paul Manafort “repeatedly and brazenly” violated the law for over a decade. Mueller also accused Manafort in engaging in witness tampering while on bail, perjuring himself and making false statements. Last Friday, Robert Mueller issued a sentencing memo in the Virginia case recommending Paul Manafort, who will turn 70 in April, serve between 19.5 to 24.5 years in prison. In other words, Paul Manafort should die in prison for the crime of associating with Donald Trump — the crimes Manafort is being charged with were dug up by the criminal and corrupt Andrew Weissmann as revenge.

The Virginia sentencing memo also recommends Manafort pay a fine of up to $24 million, restitution of more than $24 million and forfeiture in the amount of more than $4 million, reported CBS. The corrupt and criminal Obama-appointed Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled last week that Paul Manafort intentionally lied to Mueller and the FBI and voided his plea deal. Paul Manafort faces an additional maximum of 10 years in prison in the D.C. case, however, Mueller did not offer a specific recommendation for how much time Manafort should serve in the memo released Saturday. Paul Manafort is scheduled to be sentenced March 8th in the Virginia case and March 13th in the Washington D.C. case.

The case in Washington D.C. involves Manafort’s illegal lobbying on behalf of Ukrainian interests — these are the same ‘crimes’ Tony Podesta committed (failing to file a FARA form) yet Tony Podesta was allowed to retroactively file a FARA form for his work in Ukraine then Mueller granted him immunity.

The Podesta’s are surprisingly not even mentioned in Mueller’s filing – Manafort worked with the Podesta brothers in the Ukraine. John Podesta was Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Manager. Manafort was President Trump’s Campaign Manager for a couple months. Manafort and the Podesta’s brought a number of individuals to the Ukraine in an effort to support their candidate. It’s unknown how much these visitors were paid by the Podesta’s and Manafort’s Ukrainian candidate or if they filed the correct forms with the US government for visiting there.

Hillary visited the Ukraine – as did Chelsea. Corrupt cop Mueller was a guest as well –

According to a new report by Bloomberg, New York prosecutors have put together a criminal case against Trump’s former campaign chair Paul Manafort that they could quickly file if Trump were to issue him a presidential pardon. Will they do the same for the Podesta brothers? We all know the answer to that. The US today is clearly a two-tiered system of justice. One set of laws for the Clintons, Obama and their corrupt accomplices and one for the rest of America.

[Boardwalk]

I have to say you are a freerepublic treasure! Keep up the fine work!

[Liz]

Let's play connect the dots....ready?

UKRAINIAN BILLIONAIRE VIKTOR PINCHUK DONATED $29 MILLION TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION-----
he's THAT altruistic (cackle).

September 2013 -- Clinton Foundation mega-donor, Viktor Pinchuk introes Hillary Clinton paid speech at one of his events
(cough) promoting Ukrainian membership of the European Union, the break with Russia, and regime change in Kiev and Moscow.

POINTS TO PONDER Was Viktor Pinchuk the Oligarch that the fired Ukrainian prosecutor was investigating?
WRT a $5 billion IMF theft, being investigated simultaneously with Hunter Bidens $3 million salary?

SALIENT POINT: The fired Ukrainian prosecutor was investigating the $5 billion IMF money theft;
he was fired when Joe Biden twisted his arm for investigating (cough) Hunter Biden's Burisma appointment.

HMMMMMMM....Could be Obama was peeved that Hunter only got $3 million of the missing IMF $5 billion?

Or was Hunter----with the expensive cocaine habit-----holding out?

Chelsea Clinton and Viktor Pinchuk who donated $29 million to Clinton Foundation in Kiev, Ukraine 8/21/16.

[relictele]

We also need decentralized government - not theoretically but practically.

The rest of the world telecommutes these days yet we have an entire huge metro area in DC where people crawl along in gridlock to go to offices every day.

Meetings, lunches, cocktails. It’s a company town in which the company is looking to screw its source of funding every day.

Congress and the Supreme Court have a laughably light schedule of sessions.

[Liz]

T/Y.

[exDemMom]

Congress and the Supreme Court have a laughably light schedule of sessions.

It’s clear they do not have enough to do to justify their 180k salaries. If they did, they would not have enough time to manufacture “evidence” of the President’s supposed misdeeds or make sweetheart deals with lobbyists, crony capitalists, and foreign governments that make them millionaires.

I totally agree with you. Congress should telework, and stay home where their constituents are. They make decisions that affect ordinary people’s lives; they should live among those people so that they can see the effects of those decisions and get feedback.

[Religion and Politics]

I will give Obama credit. If the implication here is to be believed he was smart enough to go after Manafort three months before he joined the Trump campaign.

They had this ready to go with media leaks, etc. That is just too coincidental to me. I remembered at the time wondering how Trump could have selected such a radioactive campaign manager. Manafort's half life was like 10 days.

[Spok]

It’s becoming more and more clear that the real animus against Trump isn’t rooted in his tweets or SCOTUS appointments but the exposure of the universal malignancy that infects nearly all politics. The depth and virulence of corruption is directly proportional to the amount of money that is up for grabs, which is in the billions. It’s revealing that the real rarity is the politician who does not imbibe. Like DJT.

[DouglasKC]

Well remember trump wasnt being quiet about Obama...especially hthe lack of a birth certificate.

[agatheringstorm]

The fact that the Obama administration was going after Manafort months before his appointment as Trump’s campaign manager indicates to me that the Intelligence Community was already surveilling Trump’s campaign teams phone calls in early 2016. Manafort would have been in contact with the team for months before his appointment. The Intelligence Community knew he was going to get appointed and had this black ledger waiting for him.

John Solomon, if you’re listening, look for an earlier FISA warrant, probably in the January/February 2016 timeframe.

[agatheringstorm]

How is story this not in the Free Republic breaking news?

[kvanbrunt2]

Absolutely —CIA and FBI in Nome Alaska, Homeland security in El Paso. Land mangement in North Dakota. Ag in Washington state, CMS in chicago. Treasury in Birmingham, AL. DOJ in Yuma, Arizona.. Just a start. Education in North or west Philly.

[semimojo]

Yeah, but anticipating Manafort of all people?

[BenLurkin]

Good catch. Good question.

[Ann Archy]

Om... Tad Devine is one of the ICKIEST people on earth!!

[Ann Archy]

Wasn’t HILLIARY s State department Also Missing 5 BILLION DOLLARS while she was the SECRETARY???

[NorseViking]

Why is he not in prison but Manafort is? There is a phone record of the former head of that Ukraine had for FBI bragging how he helped to hit Manafort to bring down Trump.
I like the part when he said that Trump would be better for America but Hillary is absolute best for ‘us’.

[Liz]

6 bill............

[Ann Archy]

Could she have given $6 BILLION from the State Dept to Ukraine?? And then the Ukranians "disappeared" $5 BILLION of it?? Paid thru many Countries to LAUNDER it to OUR CORRUPT POLITICIANS and FAMILIES???

I wonder if that could be the path that money took.