Biden-Ukraine Senate report - Part 2

A pro-Russian political party in Ukraine sought to partner with one of the most important witnesses in a Republican-led probe of the Biden family.

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The offer of cooperation came in the fall of 2019 from a political party in Ukraine that is co-chaired by Viktor Medvedchuk, a friend and trusted ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Medvedchuk’s party made the offer to Andrii Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat and political operative, who has been a key witness in the year-long U.S. Senate investigation into the Ukraine connections of the Biden family. The party’s operatives, Telizhenko tells TIME, “offered me to help them with the Republicans much more closely, to be a back channel to Moscow.”

The offer, which Telizhenko says he turned down, marked the start of a complex influence campaign on the part of Putin’s allies in Kyiv, an effort that went further than has previously been reported. For over a year, agents and allies of the Kremlin in Ukraine have tried to feed information to President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and his Republican allies on Capitol Hill. The information passed through a variety of channels, including an indicted gas tycoon with deep ties to the Kremlin, and a Ukrainian lawmaker trained in a Russian spy academy.

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Medvedchuk and the political party of which he is co-chairman, Opposition Platform – For Life, also attempted to air their unsubstantiated claims of corruption against Biden in the Ukrainian parliament. They failed to get enough votes to open a parliamentary inquiry in Kyiv. Instead these claims about Biden found a far more prominent platform in the U.S. Senate.

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In the fall of 2019, when Telizhenko received the offer of help from the pro-Russian political party in Ukraine, he had already been working with Giuliani for several months on an effort to dig up political dirt on the Biden family.

Telizhenko got in touch with Giuliani that spring with help from another U.S. lawyer aligned with President Trump, Victoria Toensing, a Republican stalwart and Fox News pundit [who, along with her husband Joe DiGenova, is the attorney for Dmitry Firtash, accused Russian mobster and Putin ally].

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Over the past year, Telizhenko has repeatedly aired his claims about corruption in the Biden family while appearing on Giuliani’s YouTube channel and podcast. The claims are drawn from Telizhenko’s past work as a diplomat in the Ukrainian embassy in Washington, his employment with a DC lobbying firm and his stint in the office of the prosecutor general of Ukraine. While serving in these positions, Telizhenko claims to have witnessed signs of corruption and conflicts of interests involving the Biden family and other Obama Administration officials.

With help from Giuliani, these claims also found their way to the U.S. Senate, where Johnson and his staff have had repeated contacts with Telizhenko for over a year.

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Russian allies in Ukraine made repeated efforts to lend credibility to these claims of corruption against Biden. Some of these efforts involved Medvedchuk, a personal friend of the Russian President. Putin is the godfather to Medvedchuk’s teenage daughter, and their relationship serves as a primary channel of Russia influence in Ukraine.

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Medvedchuk’s political party approached Telizhenko, who was then working both with Giuliani and Senator Johnson in their efforts to investigate the Biden family. “They tried to go through me to get to Donald Trump or his team,” says Telizhenko. He turned down the offer to work with Medvedchuk, he says, because it would “toxify” his work with Giuliani. “I don’t do the Russians,” Telizhenko added.

  Time

Want to buy a bridge?

“I never discussed this idea with Putin or other senior Russian officials, because I see it as an internal matter for Ukraine,” Medvedchuk wrote. He also denied any attempt to set up a “back channel” to Moscow for President Trump’s associates. “The situation with corruption in the United States of America never interested me. That is an internal matter of the USA.”

How about THIS bridge?

Johnson defends his repeated contacts with Telizhenko. At the start of this year, the Senator prepared a subpoena for Telizhenko to testify before his committee. The Ukrainian even rented an apartment near Washington as he prepared to deliver that testimony and meet with Johnson’s staff. In March, however, the FBI reportedly warned lawmakers in a briefing that Telizhenko could be a “conduit for Russian disinformation about the Bidens,” according to the New York Times. Johnson then shelved his plans to have Telizhenko testify.

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The report released Wednesday details repeated contacts between Telizhenko and the Obama administration National Security Council. The claims of Russian attempts to influence his work, says the Senator, are all part of a Democratic effort to tarnish his reputation. “Because I am investigating corruption in the Obama administration, and they are afraid of what the results of that investigation is, so what they are doing is they are targeting me, trying to destroy me, so that any results of my investigation will be marginalized,” he told a Wisconsin broadcaster last month.

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