October 16, 2019
All of the media scrutiny has centered on President Trump’s July 25th phone call with President Zelensky of Ukraine. Missing from the mainstream media’s reporting are relevant precipitating facts, putting Trump’s request of the President of Ukraine into context.
Background
In February 2014, protesters toppled the Ukrainian government ousting President Yanukovych, setting the stage for Russia to invade Ukraine and annex Crimea. A month later, to help stabilize the country the Obama administration promised substantial monetary aid, and appointed Vice President Joe Biden to be the liaison between the U.S. and Ukraine. President Obama also urged Ukraine to establish a National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU).
In spite of having no expertise in natural gas, and not speaking the language, Joe Biden’s son Hunter, was made a board member of a Ukrainian natural gas company, Burisma Holdings, Inc in April 2014. During his 5 year tenure with Burisma, Hunter Biden was compensated millions.
Not long after Hunter Biden became a board member of Burisma, $1.8 billion in U.S. taxpayer backed loans were given to Ukraine by the IMF. Interestingly, the $1.8 billion was deposited into Privatbank, a bank owned by Ukrainian Oligarch, Ihor Kolomoyskyi. Coincidentally, Privatbank and Kolomoyskyi control Burisma. The $1.8 billion soon disappeared, and has never been accounted for.
Further, Kolomoyskyi had been denied access to the U.S because of his suspected ties to organized crime. In 2015, inexplicably Kolomoyskyi was granted a Visa to enter the U.S.
In 2015, while Hunter Biden was sitting on the Board of Burisma the Ukrainian Prosecutor General at the time, Viktor Shokin, began investigating Burisma, on allegations of money laundering and corruption. Joe Biden has admitted to threatening Ukrainian officials with withholding a billion dollar U.S. loan guarantee if they did not fire Shokin. Shokin was promptly fired. Many have countered that Shokin deserved to be fired because he was not aggressive enough in pursuing corruption. However, in a sworn statement in a separate court case Shokin stated that when he was fired there were no complaints about his performance, and that he believed he was forced out because of who he was investigating.
The narrative by the left, which is the basis for their impeachment inquiry, is that President Trump asked President Zelensky to do him a favor and get dirt on his political opponent in exchange for military aid. However, as indicated in the transcript of the call, Trump asked Zelensky to look into a singular issue in relation to former Vice President Joe Biden- the firing of the prosecutor who was investigating his son’s employer. This is in no way commensurate with asking a foreign nation to go on a fishing expedition to dig up dirt on his political opponent.
Moreover, the “favor” which Trump asked of Zelensky was to look into the origins of the Russia collusion narrative. There is evidence that an actual fishing expedition to dig up Russian dirt on Trump took place in Ukraine during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Ukrainian Collusion
It is a fact that Ukrainian efforts forced Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort to resign; and that Ukrainian government officials advanced the narrative that Trump’s campaign was conspiring with Russia to win the election. According to research by Politico Ukrainian officials not only preferred a Clinton presidency, some took active measures to sabotage Trump and prevent him from winning the 2016 presidential election.
Alexandria Chalupa
Starting in late 2015 a Democrat National Committee employee, Alexandria Chalupa, worked directly with Ukrainian officials to dig up dirt on candidate Trump to destroy his candidacy. Chalupa, a Ukrainian American had a network of sources within Ukraine to help with her research. Chalupa has acknowledged that she shared her findings with the DNC and Clinton’s campaign. Inexplicably, in January 2016, before any discussion about Russian collusion was on anyone’s radar, Chalupa told a senior DNC official that she believed, “there was a Russia connection” with Trump’s campaign.
A political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy, Andril Telizhenko, has admitted that the Ukrainian Ambassador, Oksana Shulyar instructed him to assist Chalupa’s efforts to research a Russia -Trump connection. Telizhenko told Politico, “They were coordinating an investigation with the Hillary team on Paul Manafort with Alexandra Chalupa”. He further stated that Shulyar did not want anyone to know about the coordination, but “the embassy worked very closely with Chalupa”.
Coordination Between the Obama White House, the FBI and Ukraine
In January 2016 President Obama summoned Ukraine’s top prosecutors and the members of the NABU to the White House. In attendance at some of these meetings were members of President Obama’s National Security Council, FBI, State Department, and Department of Justice.
The purported objective of the meetings was to discuss corruption in Ukraine. However the Ukrainian participants reported that during the meetings they were pressured to drop the investigation into the Bidens, and let the FBI take it over.
According to Telizhensko, who was in attendance, they were also urged to help the DOJ find new evidence regarding payments made to Americans by the Party of Regions. The Party of Regions is the political party in Ukraine of former Ukranian President Yanukovych who allegedly paid Manafort $12.5 million years prior.
Years earlier the FBI had looked into the payments made to Manfort by President Yanukovych and closed the investigation without any charges. The fact that the DOJ reopened the probe into Manafort during the 2016 election is highly suspicious. According to Telizhensko, “It was definitely the case that led to the charges against Manafort and the leak to U.S. media during the 2016 election.”
Rush Limbaugh recently made the discovery that Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, traveled to Ukraine during the 2016 presidential election under a fake passport to gather oppositional research on Trump. It is suspected that Brennan, who is a vociferous critic of President Trump, weaponized the power of his office to destroy Trump’s candidacy.
The Black ledger
In an interview with The Hill’s John Solomon, Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, Nazar Kholodnytskyy stated that a ledger indicating payments made to Paul Manafort by the Party of Regions was known by authorities since 2014. However, it was released for the first time by NABU in 2016, shortly after Manafort was named Trump’s campaign manager. Kholodnyskyy added that the timing of the release of the ledger was “extremely suspicious”.
A Ukrainian court convicted Artem Sytnyk- the Director of NABU, and Serhily Leshchenko – a member of Ukraine’s parliament, of publicly disclosing the ledger to harm Trump’s election chances. The ledger became central to the Russian collusion probe that dogged most of Trump’s presidency. In a statement the court described the actions of the two Ukrainian government officials as unlawful interference in the 2016 United States Presidential election. This case was overturned on a technicality, but is being retried.
Smoking gun evidence in the form of an audiotape was recently discovered. On the tape, in which Sytnyk was surreptitiously recorded, he stated that a Clinton presidency was better for Ukraine, and that he worked to help her campaign.
Nellie Ohr
Nellie Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS- the firm that compiled the Russian sourced debunked dossier, paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. She was hired by Fusion to find a connection between Russia and the Trump campaign. Ohr testified to Congress that she funneled her Clinton campaign oppositional research to the DOJ through her husband, Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr. She also admitted that some of the information she passed along came from a member of Ukraine’s parliament.
For more than three years the mainstream media and the left have accused President Trump of conspiring with Russia to steal the presidential election away from Hillary Clinton. The reality was it was Hillary Clinton’s campaign that conspired with Russians to get dirt on then candidate Trump. There is also ample evidence that the Obama administration, along with the DNC and Clinton’s campaign enlisted Ukrainian officials to harm their political opponent- Donald Trump. It’s beyond ironic that the Democrats’ “smoking gun” to impeach President Trump is his attempt to root out their own corruption.
