Free Republic

December 2015 was a pivotal month in many respects. During the first week of December 2015, Donald Trump began to establish a substantial lead over his Republican primary opponents. Vice President Joseph Biden traveled to Ukraine to announce, on December 7th, a $190 million program to “fight corruption in law enforcement and reform the justice sector,” but behind the scenes explicitly linked a $1 billion loan guarantee to the firing of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who had been investigating the energy company Burisma, which employed Biden’s son Hunter. On December 9, 2015, the reported whistleblower Eric Ciaramella held a meeting...

A Ukrainian court revealed Wednesday that two Ukrainian officials had violated the law by revealing information about illegal cash payments made to Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former presidential election campaign chair. The disclosure amounted to interference in a foreign election. A Kiev district court ruled Wednesday that Artem Sytnik, director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, and member of parliament Serhiy Leshchenko acted illegally when they disclosed Manafort's name from among the documents of ousted President Viktor Yanukovych's Party of Regions, the Kyiv Post reported. By doing so, they acted in favor of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election. In response to the ruling, Leshchenko wrote...

But Giuliani kept quoting this court decision, though it was never a rule of law. Once that decision was rendered, we appealed and in the summer of 2019, Sytnyk and I won the appeal and the decision was completely overturned. The appeal issued a new ruling, which states that all of Rosenblat’s claims are unfounded. Also, Rosenblat was ordered to pay me Hr 2,400 ($100 at the time) in court fees. But Giuliani has never apologized for spreading lies and even undermining my political career in Ukraine.

While special counsel Robert Mueller has concluded there was no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, some of the key people in creating the Russia-collusion narrative themselves have ties to a foreign nation. Both the Democratic National Committee as well as Fusion GPS—the company hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign to research the Trump campaign—were using Ukrainian sources in their efforts to discredit Trump. Serhiy Leshchenko, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, was a common thread involved in Democratic opposition research efforts into former Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort. Leshchenko, along with Artem Sytnyk, the...

Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko told Hill.TV’s John Solomon in an interview aired on Wednesday that he has opened a probe into alleged attempts by Ukrainians to interfere in the United States' 2016 presidential election. “Today we will launch a criminal investigation about this and we will give legal assessment of this information,” Lutsenko said last week. Lutsenko is probing a claim from a member of the Ukrainian parliament that the director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), Artem Sytnyk, attempted to the benefit of the 2016 U.S. presidential election on behalf of Hillary Clinton. A State Department...