Posted on 02/06/2020 3:46:55 PM PST by Hojczyk
Editors Note: Just The News officially launches later this month but we are offering you a sneak peek with this story of the sort of reporting we will be doing.
One of Robert Mueller’s pivotal trial witnesses told the special prosecutor’s team in spring 2018 that a key piece of Russia collusion evidence found in Ukraine known as the “black ledger” was fabricated, according to interviews and testimony.
The ledger document, which suddenly appeared in Kiev during the 2016 U.S. election, showed alleged cash payments from Russian-backed politicians in Ukraine to ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
“The ledger was completely made up,” cooperating witness and Manafort business partner Rick Gates told prosecutors and FBI agents, according to a written summary of an April 2018 special counsel’s interview.
In a brief interview with Just the News, Gates confirmed the information in the summary. “The black ledger was a fabrication,” Gates said. “It was never real, and this fact has since been proven true.”
Gates’ account is backed by several Ukrainian officials who stated in interviews dating to 2018 that the ledger was of suspicious origins and could not be corroborated.
If true, Gates’ account means the two key pieces of documentary evidence used by the media and FBI to drive the now-debunked Russia collusion narrative — the Steele dossier and the black ledger — were at best uncorroborated and at worst disinformation. His account also raises the possibility that someone fabricated the document in Ukraine in an effort to restart investigative efforts on Manafort’s consulting work or to meddle in the U.S. presidential election.
(Excerpt) Read more at justthenews.com ...
We need to support John Soloman, he is a rare creature.....an honest journalist.
Start by offering a pardon to Jim Comey - conditional on his turning rat on his pals
“The black ledger was widely reported to be fake in mid-2019, so this is not new info.”
I believe you’re missing the point. The significant fact is not that the report was “widely reported to be fake”. What’s momentous is that the Mueller team new this as early as the Spring of 2018.
yet this attempted coup continued right thru the mid-term elections, which undoubtedly suppressed some of the GOP votes.
It didn’t just suppress voters. It fueled executive branch “Resistance” and MAGA agenda obstruction from the GOP controlled Congress.
Will any heads roll? Or will the proverbial rug get a bit lumpier from more crap being swept under it?
I think it’ll be the latter.
Barr has yet to show himself up to the task of going after the swamp creatures.
Mueller knew it earlier than that, imo.
For example, Ukraine’s top anticorruption prosecutor, Nazar Kholodnytsky, told me he warned the U.S. State Department’s law enforcement liaison and multiple FBI agents in late summer 2016 that Ukrainian authorities who recovered the ledger believed it likely was a fraud.
“It was not to be considered a document of Manafort. It was not authenticated. And at that time it should not be used in any way to bring accusations against anybody,” Kholodnytsky said, recalling what he told FBI agents.
Likewise, Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Konstantin Kilimnik, a regular informer for the State Department, told the U.S. government almost immediately after The New York Times wrote about the ledger in August 2016 that the document probably was fake.
Manafort “could not have possibly taken large amounts of cash across three borders. It was always a different arrangement — payments were in wire transfers to his companies, which is not a violation,” Kilimnik wrote in an email to a senior U.S. official on Aug. 22, 2016.
He added: “I have some questions about this black cash stuff, because those published records do not make sense. The timeframe doesn’t match anything related to payments made to Manafort. … It does not match my records. All fees Manafort got were wires, not cash.”
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team and the FBI were given copies of Kilimnik’s warning, according to three sources familiar with the documents.
It would be great if this was true, but I would take anything Rick Gates says with more than a few grains of salt.
“Hope so too but Trump seems to be opposed to pardons”
He has already pardoned two people just off the top of my head. This is an election year and any pardon would be giving the democrats a campaign smear.
You are right. Professional hit job on the car for the laptop. Hope he had backed up his information on a different computer or a cloud site.
NO! Presidential pardons for guilty subordinates ARE high crimes and misdemeanors. (Yes, impeach Clinton and Obama and George H W Bush, and if need be, George W Bush) The President needs to establish in a court of law that he is innocent, and then that can be used to go after the criminals who put him away.
Re-establishing the rule of law is more important than one man (and Manafort’s not exactly an angel).
If you do not think Trump’s press conference today did not set the stage for this to happen you were not paying attention to the last parts of the speech.
I think he presaged something big and good during his “celebration talk” yesterday...pointed out the treason/sedition of Strzok and Paige, dirtiness of Comey and others and Mueller allowing 30K emails worth of evidence to be deleted - and that Mueller and company new by day 2 that he was innocent and the whole deal was a sham...and continued for a couple years anyway...destroying lifes and careers.
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