I'll point out here that Alexandra Chalupa consulted for the DNC at the time, and her sister Andrea is teamed with author and PhD in authoritarian regimes, Sarah Kendzior, in the Gaslit Nation podcast. Kendzior and Andrea Challupa have been calling out Manafort and Trump since the early days of Trump's campaign, and Kendzior has been a regular guest commentator on MSNBC's AM Joy with Joy Reid for a year or so.The effort by President Trump to pressure the government of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son had its origins in an earlier endeavor to obtain information that might provide a pretext and political cover for the president to pardon his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort [and undermine the Mueller investigation], according to previously undisclosed records.
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[A]ttorneys representing Trump and Manafort respectively had at least nine conversations relating to this effort, beginning in the early days of the Trump administration, and lasting until as recently as May of this year. [A]ttorneys representing Trump and Manafort respectively had at least nine conversations relating to this effort, beginning in the early days of the Trump administration, and lasting until as recently as May of this year. [...] Manafort exhorted the White House to press Ukrainian officials to investigate and discredit individuals, both in the US and in Ukraine, who he believed had published damning information about his political consulting work in the Ukraine.
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From 2004 to 2014, Manafort had advised [then-Ukrainian] President Viktor Yanukovych, who advocated that his country sever ties with the United States and other Western nations, and align itself more closely with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. After Yanukovych fled the country in disgrace in 2014, a ledger was recovered from the burned-out ruins of his Party of Regions. Its records showed that Yanukovych and his political allies had made some $12.7 million in secret cash payments to Manafort. The disclosure led directly to Manafort’s resignation in August 2016 as chairman of the Trump presidential campaign.
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[O]n at least three occasions, Rudy Giuliani was in communication with Manafort’s legal team to discuss how the White House was pushing a narrative that the Democratic National Committee, Democratic donors, and Ukrainian government officials had “colluded” to defeat Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid.
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Manafort’s camp provided Giuliani with information designed to smear two people: one was a Ukrainian journalist and political activist named Serhiy Leshchenko, whom Manafort believed, correctly, of helping to uncover Manafort’s secret payments from Yanukovych; another was Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American political consultant and US citizen, whom Manafort suspected, mistakenly in this case, was also behind the exposé.
Murray Waas @ New York Books
Recall that Trump fired ambassador Yovanovich (alternately spelled Jovanovich and Jovanovic).The records also show that Giuliani and attorneys for Manafort exchanged information about the then US ambassador to the Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who Giuliani believed had attempted to undercut his covert Ukrainian diplomacy and fact-finding.
That's a big "if".After his arrest in 2017, Manafort continued to encourage President Trump and his lawyers to engage in this effort when they joined Manafort in a joint legal defense agreement.
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According to the participant in the joint defense agreement discussions, Manafort was distressed at the uncertainty about whether President Trump would pardon him. There was no formal understanding that Trump would do so, because this would instantly have raised the specter of whether such a pardon might constitute an obstruction of justice.
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Trump is famously transactional, and Manafort feared that the president might be leading him on, according to the person who was party to the joint defense agreement communications. Giuliani’s constant touting of the Ukraine issue proved “reassuring” to Manafort, albeit to “a limited degree,” according to this person.
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If Giuliani’s own account can be believed, it was while he was looking into the purported Ukrainian collusion to defeat Trump that he stumbled upon Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine.
Rudy going crazy - in other words, being Rudy.Giuliani did not add that he was also pressing for Kiev to investigate Manafort’s enemies. [...] In recent months, both Trump and Giuliani have intensified those efforts, pressuring Ukraine to investigate not only Leshchenko and Chalupa, but also other Ukrainian government officials, activists, and journalists—and specifically to look into any part they may have had in publishing details of Manafort’s illicit political consulting work in the Ukraine.
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[In Trump's July 25 phone call to Ukrainian president Zelensky,] Trump expressed concern to Zelensky that he was “surrounding [him]self with some of the same people,” an apparent reference to Leshchenko. Trump went on to disparage the Mueller Report, saying, “a lot of it started with Ukraine,” a seeming allusion to Manafort’s problems. And he urged the Ukrainian president to take calls from both his personal lawyer and Attorney General William Barr. Giuliani has admitted to repeatedly pressing the Manafort matter with Ukrainian officials.
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After Giuliani had to cancel a trip to Kiev earlier this year to meet with Zelensky to press the president’s agenda of having Ukraine investigate Trump’s political adversaries, Giuliani blamed Leshchenko for generating the publicity about it. In 2016, Leshchenko had held a press conference in Kiev to publicize the “black ledger” that forced Manafort’s resignation from Trump’s campaign.
On May 10, Giuliani lashed out at Leshchenko, characterizing him as one of several people around Zelensky who were “enemies of the president” and “enemies of the United States.” Without offering any evidence to substantiate this disparagement, Giuliani now claimed that the ledgers had been doctored or forged. He even alleged that Hillary Clinton or the Democratic National Committee were involved in the effort to bring the ledger to light. On Fox News this past Sunday, Giuliani added to his conspiracy theory the claim that George Soros was somehow involved in “Ukrainian collusion.”
He needn't have bothered. From that July 25 phone call, it appears Zelensky has created his own.Leshchenko—who had for a time been a member of the Ukrainian parliament—wrote that Giuliani’s accusations had “had a devastating effect on my political career.” “Giuliani’s smear,” he said, “cost me a job in the new administration.” Leshchenko had been an adviser on Zelensky’s team, but facing this onslaught from Trump’s attorney and his media allies, he had felt forced to withdraw in order to avoid creating problems for the Ukrainian president.
Alexandra Chalupa has faced similar attacks. [...] Her consultancy for the DNC had involved outreach to Ukrainian-American voters, not opposition research; and she had conducted her research on Manafort entirely on her own account. Although Chalupa mentioned what she was doing to colleagues at the DNC, they took no interest in her efforts, and in July 2016 she quit working for the DNC to focus on human rights advocacy. Although she did independently report on Manafort’s work in Ukraine, she played no part in exposing the black ledger.
President Trump and his surrogates, however, had their own motives for attacking Chalupa. After the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian officials was revealed, they used Chalupa’s work to argue that Democrats had engaged in much the same conduct: Chalupa’s outreach to Ukrainian officials, they said, was no different.
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Acting in part on Manafort’s advice, on July 10, 2017, then White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders encouraged reporters to investigate how, she claimed, “the Democrat National Committee coordinated opposition research directly with the Ukrainian Embassy.” Two days later, Fox News’s Sean Hannity began efforts to repeatedly amplify the allegations evening after evening on his show. On July 24, Republicans on Capitol Hill, among them Senator Charles Grassley, of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said it would investigate whether Chalupa’s activity constituted a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (there would be no such finding).
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Manafort is currently serving a seven-and-a-half-year federal prison sentence of eight felony counts, including money-laundering, tax avoidance, and mortgage fraud. Following those convictions in August 2018, Manafort agreed to cooperate with the Mueller investigation.
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But Manafort’s cooperation was a ruse. Little more than three months later, in December, the special counsel stated in federal court that Manafort had broken his cooperation agreement by telling prosecutors and FBI agents “multiple discernible lies.” Even more unsettling were disclosures that an attorney for Manafort had been constantly briefing President Trump’s attorneys on what Manafort was being asked and what he was telling the special counsel.
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In the end, Mueller did not follow up. Nor have Democrats in the House, who had a similar legitimate right to independently investigate the matter. If they had, they would have discovered that as late as May of this year, Giuliani was in touch with Manafort’s attorneys to discuss how they could keep pushing the “Ukrainian collusion” narrative, as the records shown me demonstrate. In the absence of any branch of government holding them accountable, Trump and Giuliani faced no sanction for doing so. They had good reason, after all, to believe they were invincible.
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