Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Quid pro quo at work

More info from the Parnas documents.
New materials released by House Democrats appear to show Ukraine’s top prosecutor offering an associate of President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, damaging information related to former vice president Joe Biden if the Trump administration recalled the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.

[...]

The cache of materials released by House investigators late Tuesday exposed a number of previously unknown details about efforts by Giuliani and his associates to obtain material in Ukraine that would undermine Trump’s Democratic opponents.

[...]

Among the revelations in the documents released Tuesday: a message from Giuliani to Parnas saying he had involved a person he called “no 1” — possibly Trump himself — in an effort to lift a U.S. visa ban on a former Ukrainian prosecutor who was planning to come to the United States to make claims about Biden.

[...]

The materials show that Parnas, a Russian-speaker who helped coordinate Giuliani’s outreach to Ukrainian sources, was directly communicating with an array of top Ukrainian officials. Among them was Yuri Lutsenko, at the time Ukraine’s top prosecutor and a close political ally of then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who was running for reelection.

Lutsenko wanted to get rid of Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador, in part because she had been critical of his office and supported a quasi-independent anti-corruption bureau he despised.

The messages, written in Russian, show Lutsenko urging Parnas to force out Yovanovitch in exchange for cooperation regarding Biden. At one point, Lutsenko suggests he won’t make any helpful public statements unless “madam” is removed.

“It’s just that if you don’t make a decision about Madam — you are calling into question all my declarations. Including about B,” Lutsenko wrote to Parnas in a March 22 message on WhatsApp.

It’s unclear if ‘B’ is a reference to Biden or Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company on whose board Hunter Biden served from 2014 to 2019.

Four days later, Lutsenko told Parnas that work on the case against the owner of the gas company is proceeding successfully and evidence of the money transfers of “B” had been obtained.

“And here you can’t even remove one fool :(” Lutsenko laments, again appearing to push for Yovanovitch’s ouster.

“She’s not a simple fool[,] trust me,” Parnas responded. “But she’s not getting away.”

[...]

The following month, Yovanovitch was removed from her post at Giuliani’s urging. Lutsenko later said publicly that he found no evidence of wrongdoing under Ukrainian law by Hunter or Joe Biden.

  WaPo
Ooooh. Burned 'em. I guess we found the fools.*

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:


Didn't want to rile His Nibs?



* Contradictory?



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