Speaking of Rudy and the hunt for dirt on Joe Biden

He's sure he'll get away with it.  They all are. And they could be right.

Rudy Giuliani continues to be the Scrappy Doo to Trump’s Scooby. In a recent interview, the former mayor of New York City and the president’s personal lawyer admitted that in order to dig up dirt on Democrats, he needed to get the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine removed.

[...]

So yeah, Giuliani just straight up admitted that he removed a career diplomat earlier this year so that she could stop interfering with his corrupt efforts to get possible info on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

“I believed that I needed Yovanovitch out of the way,” Giuliani told reporter Adam Entous, CNN reports. “She was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody.”

[...]

Until Giuliani’s admission it had been speculated by many witnesses, including Yovanovitch herself, that she was recalled and then removed from her position because she was aware that Giuliani’s interest in the Bidens wasn’t pure and as such she became a thorn in his side.

[...]

Because Giuliani is a messy bitch that lives for drama, he openly admitted to the New York Times on Monday, “I may or may not have passed along the general gossip that the embassy was considered to be a kind of out-of-control politically partisan embassy, but that was, like, general gossip, I didn’t report that as fact.”

  The Root

Rudolph W. Giuliani said on Monday that he provided President Trump with detailed information this year about how the United States ambassador to Ukraine was, in Mr. Giuliani’s view, impeding investigations that could benefit Mr. Trump, setting in motion the ambassador’s recall from her post.

  NYT

I hope Trump didn't want to claim he knew nothing about that.

The president in turn connected Mr. Giuliani with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who asked for more information, Mr. Giuliani said.

And I hope Pompeo didn't want to try to stay out of it.

The circumstances of Ms. Yovanovitch’s ouster after a smear campaign engineered in part by Mr. Giuliani were documented during testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, where she was a key witness in impeachment proceedings against Mr. Trump. Mr. Giuliani has made no secret of his role in flagging concerns about Ms. Yovanovitch to Mr. Trump.

But Mr. Giuliani’s account, in an interview with The New York Times on Monday evening, provided additional detail about the president’s knowledge of and involvement in one element of a pressure campaign against Ukraine.

[...]

In conversations in the first months of the year with the president, Mr. Giuliani, by his account, cast Ms. Yovanovitch as impeding not only investigations in Ukraine that could benefit Mr. Trump, but also Mr. Giuliani’s efforts to gather evidence to defend him — and target his rivals — in the United States.

“There’s a lot of reasons to move her,” Mr. Giuliani said, asserting that his briefings of Mr. Trump and Mr. Pompeo most likely played a role in their decision to recall Ms. Yovanovitch.

“I think my information did,” he said. “I don’t know. You’d have to ask them. But they relied on it.”

He added that he did not recommend that Mr. Trump or Mr. Pompeo recall Ms. Yovanovitch. “I just gave them the facts,” he said. “I mean, did I think she should be recalled? I thought she should have been fired.” He said, “If I was attorney general, I would have kicked her out. I mean — secretary of state.”

[...]

In the interview, he portrayed himself as personally involved in the effort to derail a career diplomat around the time he was considering business arrangements with some of the Ukrainians funneling information to him.

[...]

Testimony in the impeachment proceedings as well as other information have shown that Mr. Giuliani’s claims about Ms. Yovanovitch were either unsubstantiated or were taken out of context.

[...]

Mr. Giuliani told the president and Mr. Pompeo that Ms. Yovanovitch was blocking visas for Ukrainian prosecutors to come to the United States to present evidence to him — and also to federal authorities — that he claimed could be damaging to Mr. Biden and his son Hunter Biden, and to Ukrainians who distributed documents that led to the resignation of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.

[...]

“I think I had pointed out to the president a couple of times, I reported to the president, what I had learned about the visa denials,” Mr. Giuliani said, as well as the claims that she ordered one Ukrainian prosecutor to drop cases. “I may or may not have passed along the general gossip that the embassy was considered to be a kind of out-of-control politically partisan embassy, but that was, like, general gossip, I didn’t report that as fact.”

[...]

Mr. Giuliani told The Times that after he briefed Mr. Trump on the claims, the president said “either ‘discuss it with Mike’ or ‘turn it over to Mike.’” Mr. Giuliani said he could not recall “if he had me call him, or him call me — but he put us together so that Pompeo could evaluate it.”

EVERYbody was in the loop.

Rudy doesn't have the sense to keep quiet. On the other hand, they've gotten away with everything so far.

Mr. Giuliani said that Mr. Pompeo asked him whether he had anything in writing, so Mr. Giuliani sent a timeline listing events related to some of the claims about Ms. Yovanovitch, the Bidens’ work in Ukraine and other matters.

Mr. Pompeo subsequently requested more detailed information, Mr. Giuliani said, so he had someone hand deliver to Mr. Pompeo’s office an envelope containing a series of memos detailing claims made by a pair of Ukrainian prosecutors in interviews conducted by Mr. Giuliani and his associates in January.

[...]

“What I thought was, a really smart guy and he’s going to see what else is involved,” Mr. Giuliani said, referring to Mr. Pompeo. “And then he’ll be the one referring it to the F.B.I. And maybe they’ll take it from him and also it won’t look like I’m pushing the F.B.I. to do it.”

Jesus, Rudy. Would you like to confess to every crime you ever committed?

Mr. Trump has said that Mr. Giuliani will submit a report of his findings to Attorney General William P. Barr and Congress.

Mr. Giuliani has shared some information gathered on the trip with Mr. Trump — but “not too much” — the president told reporters on Monday. He added that Mr. Giuliani “knows what he is doing.”

We can tell.

Mr. Giuliani would not comment on any conversations with Mr. Trump about the report from his most recent trip. He said he has not spoken with Mr. Barr about it. He has spoken to “several” members of Congress about his findings, he said, but he would not identify them, explaining, “It’s all very confidential.”

Until you tell the world, Rudy.

Asked about his comments to The New Yorker by Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Monday night, Giuliani said "of course" he helped oust Yovanovitch, but contradicted his earlier remarks regarding why he desired her removal.

"I didn't need her out of the way," Giuliani told Ingraham. "I forced her out because she's corrupt. I came back with a document that will show, unequivocally, that she committed perjury when she said she turned down the visa for Mr. Shokin because of corruption."

[...]

Giuliani has promoted many claims about Yovanovitch, including that she "perjured" herself before impeachment investigators, bad-mouthed Trump and had a do-not-prosecute list of people Ukraine's top prosecutor could not go after.

[...]

Giuliani told NBC News in a text message Tuesday that he plans to provide the Justice Department with a report on his recent findings in Ukraine as Trump suggested his lawyer would, but said he "can't comment beyond what" Trump has said. On the timeline for such a submission, Giuliani said, "All in good time."

  NBC

Speaking to reporters at an event at the Oval Office, Trump defended Giuliani, calling him "a very great crime fighter" and "the best mayor in the history of the city of New York." Trump then suggested Giuliani "does this out of love."

  Washington Examiner

Love of attention.

The New Yorker published a lengthy article on a key Ukrainian cooperator with Rudy, Yuri Lutsenko.

Some excerpts:

[Yuri] Lutsenko, sometimes referred to simply as “the corrupt prosecutor general” of Ukraine, has been portrayed, hardly without reason, as an unscrupulous politician prone to telling lies to further his personal ambitions. As those closely following the news have learned, Lutsenko fed information to Giuliani, which Giuliani, Trump, and their allies spun to smear the reputations of the Bidens and of Yovanovitch, whom Trump fired in April.One of the House’s star witnesses told me, of Lutsenko, “I don’t think we’d be here if not for him.”

  New Yorker

Well, then, I owe Yuri some gratitude.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1991, Ukraine has been ranked as one of the most corrupt countries in Europe. The corruption has contributed to the country’s impoverishment and left its people beholden to external influence. In 2014, after the Euromaidan Revolution, officials in the Obama Administration saw an opportunity to reduce the influence of Vladimir Putin’s Russia by giving aid to Ukraine on the condition that certain reforms took place. Among those officials were Vice-President Biden, Yovanovitch and her predecessor as Ambassador, Geoffrey Pyatt, both veterans of Republican as well as Democratic Administrations, and Kent, who spent two years as the anti-corruption coördinator in the State Department’s European bureau.

[...]

Before becoming prosecutor general, [Lutsenko] was considered one of Ukraine’s most promising pro-Western politicians. In 2004, he helped lead the country’s first major post-Soviet protest movement, known as the Orange Revolution. In 2010, he was incarcerated for his political opposition to Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russia Ukrainian President, and his release became a cause célèbre for the European envoys who’d visited him in prison. As prosecutor general—the equivalent of the Attorney General in the United States—Lutsenko tried to assure his American counterparts that he, too, was committed to reform, but they soon came to see him as an enabler of the corrupt system that they were seeking to fix.

[...]

Lutsenko, who is fifty-five, left his job in August. He’d become a figure of some notoriety in Kyiv, and, in the fall, he relocated temporarily to London, enrolling in an English-language immersion program. I first met him at a hotel bar in Kensington in October. An entertaining raconteur with a deadpan sense of humor, he was determined to rehabilitate his image. As he alternated beverages—double Scotch, Coke, double Scotch, beer—he railed against his treatment by American diplomats, including Yovanovitch, who, he believed, had unjustly favored his rival, the head of a new anti-corruption bureau in Ukraine, and the cadre of young activists who scrutinized his every move.

[...]

As Kent said in a closed-door deposition on October 15th, “He was bitter and angry at the Embassy for our positions on anti-corruption. And so he was looking for revenge.”

[...]

During the past two years, Lutsenko, seeking to bolster his reputation and suspecting that Yovanovitch was attempting to undermine him, was eager to arrange high-profile meetings for himself in Washington, starting with Attorney General Jeff Sessions. When he heard rumors that Yovanovitch and other U.S. officials were blocking the meetings, he grew increasingly resentful.

[...]

In January, 2019, Giuliani spoke by phone with Viktor Shokin, the previous prosecutor general, about alleged misconduct by the Bidens, which set him on a new path of inquiry. That month, Lutsenko flew to New York, and, in the course of several days, spoke with Giuliani at his Park Avenue office. Parnas and his associate Igor Fruman were there, too. Lutsenko knew what would interest Giuliani, so he had brought along financial information purportedly drawn from bank records, which, he said, proved that Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company, had paid Hunter Biden and his business partner to “lobby” Joe Biden. [...] Giuliani seized on Lutsenko’s claims, offering to help him secure high-level meetings in Washington and encouraging him to pursue investigations beneficial to Trump.

[...]

Giuliani largely confirmed Lutsenko’s account of their relationship. He, too, saw Yovanovitch as an obstacle, hindering his attempt to dig up dirt against his client’s rival in advance of the 2020 election. “I believed that I needed Yovanovitch out of the way,” he said. “She was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody.” Giuliani compiled a dossier on the Bidens and Yovanovitch, which he sent to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and which was shared with the F.B.I. and with me.

[...]

After Giuliani failed to arrange a meeting with Attorney General William Barr, who had succeeded Sessions, and Lutsenko failed to publicly announce a Ukrainian investigation into the Bidens, Trump made his fateful July 25th call to the new Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, to request that he announce a probe into the Bidens and the 2016 election.

[...]

On October 3rd, Kurt Volker, Trump’s former special envoy to Ukraine, said in a closed-door deposition, “My opinion of Prosecutor General Lutsenko was that he was acting in a self-serving manner, frankly making things up, in order to appear important to the United States, because he wanted to save his job.” In a closed-door deposition on October 11th, Yovanovitch described Lutsenko as an “opportunist” who “will ally himself, sometimes simultaneously . . . with whatever political or economic forces he believes will suit his interests best at the time.” On the first day of public testimony, Kent accused Lutsenko of “peddling false information in order to exact revenge” against Yovanovitch and his domestic rivals. Lutsenko told me they were all liars.

[...]

In December, 2004, [Viktor] Yushchenko won the Presidency, and in February, 2005, he appointed Lutsenko his Interior Minister.

“He was hailed in the local papers as an honest cop,” John Boles, a former F.B.I. special agent who served at the time as the legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, told me of Lutsenko. “They made a big deal out of the fact that, when he visited the police academy, he was probably the first Minister of Interior who actually paid for his own lunch.” In those years, U.S. officials generally viewed Lutsenko favorably, and gave him meetings with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and, briefly, with Robert Mueller, the F.B.I. director at the time; a photo from the Mueller meeting was displayed outside his office.

Lutsenko set about launching investigations into [Viktor Yuschenko's rival, Viktor] Yanukovych’s allies.

I know. It's not easy to keep all the players straight.

One of his targets was Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, who had served as the head of the State Committee for Natural Resources [...] . Lutsenko suspected that Zlochevsky had abused the position, issuing illegal permits for companies to explore for mineral deposits. But the prosecutor general’s office, widely regarded as corrupt, didn’t pursue an investigation.

[...]

[O]n November 21st, [2013] Yanukovych balked at signing [an] E.U. agreement and announced instead a separate pact with Moscow. During the next few days, thousands of Ukrainians assembled on the Maidan. Lutsenko, who was injured in the protests by riot police, was one of the most energetic participants. “We treated him as an ally at that time,” Daria Kaleniuk, the executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, a nonprofit in Kyiv.

[...]

In February, 2014, after months of protests, Yanukovych and many of his allies in the government fled Ukraine for Russia. Before they left, they squirrelled away tens of billions of dollars in government funds in a network of private bank accounts around the world. The country was virtually bankrupt.

[...]

Ukraine’s problems grew in March, 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, and soon afterward a war broke out in the Donbass, in eastern Ukraine. Yet it was also a time of some optimism. In early spring, Petro Poroshenko, a financial backer of the Orange Revolution who had made a fortune in the chocolate industry, announced his candidacy for President, pledging “zero tolerance” for corruption. [...] Lutsenko enthusiastically backed him.

The Obama Administration saw a chance to help remake Ukraine’s government. In April, 2014, Vice-President Biden told a group of parliamentarians that the U.S. was ready to provide financial support to Ukraine, but, he added, “you have to fight the cancer of corruption that is endemic in your system right now.” [...] In May, Poroshenko won the election, and Biden attended his inauguration. “There was a sense of guarded optimism that Poroshenko had a real chance of making some progress,” one of Biden’s aides said.

[...]

Lutsenko had hoped to become the mayor of Kyiv, but, when Poroshenko backed another candidate, he ran for and won a seat in parliament, where, for a year and a half, he was the head of Poroshenko’s faction. Biden expected swift action on corruption, and a Poroshenko adviser told me that Poroshenko indicated that “he had everything under control.” But it was soon evident that, without a reliable majority in parliament, he was wary of offending his fellow-oligarchs in Ukraine, who, if challenged, were sure to make it difficult for him to win reëlection.

In April, 2014, Attorney General Eric Holder had announced the creation of “a dedicated Kleptocracy squad within the F.B.I.” and veteran agents were assigned to help Ukrainian investigators [recover the billions stolen from the country by Yanukovych and his allies].

[...]

A former U.S. law-enforcement official told me that, after an initial period of close coöperation, “the F.B.I. agents would call the prosecutors, and they wouldn’t answer their phones anymore.” The official went on, “The agents would show up and try to meet with them, and the door would be closed. One time, one of our agents caught one of them trying to run away when they were coming to see them.” U.S. and U.K. officials later came to believe that at least one prosecutor had taken a bribe. [...] In the years that followed, the alleged bribe was often cited by American officials in explaining why they felt they could not trust the prosecutor general’s office.

[...]

Lutsenko told me that, during this period, he supported Biden’s efforts, but Sergii Leshchenko, an investigative journalist who had joined Poroshenko’s bloc in parliament, said that Lutsenko had no “particular enthusiasm” for pushing through reforms.

[...]

Some American officials had reason to suspect that Poroshenko’s pro-reform stance was an example of pokazukha, a Ukrainian term that means “something that is just for show.” The Obama Administration’s doubts about Poroshenko deepened in 2015, when he chose an old-school prosecutor and friend, Viktor Shokin, to be the new prosecutor general.

[...]

When the internal-affairs unit launched a sting operation against a friend of Shokin’s, Shokin cracked down on Sakvarelidze’s team, prompting anti-corruption activists to protest. Geoffrey Pyatt, at that time the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, publicly sided with [David] Sakvarelidze [head of a new anti-corruption unit in the prosecutor general's office], delivering a blunt speech in Odessa in which he singled out for criticism the prosecutor general’s office. Later, U.S. officials learned that Shokin’s allies had tried to get Pyatt recalled, planting a fake news story claiming that Biden had agreed to his removal. The F.B.I. was fed up with Shokin, and decided to shift its support to NABU [National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine].

In December, 2015, Biden gave a speech to the Ukrainian parliament: “It’s not enough to set up a new anti-corruption bureau and establish a special prosecutor fighting corruption. The Office of the General Prosecutor desperately needs reform.” Biden threatened to block a billion dollars in I.M.F. loan guarantees to Ukraine unless Poroshenko fired Shokin. Poroshenko resisted, but, one of his former advisers told me, “there was no other option, and we were hitting deadlines. He had to dismiss Shokin because of the money.”

[...]

The relationship between Lutsenko and the anti-corruption activists began to sour. Lutsenko told me that the activists, who were treated by the international community as “heroes,” were turning the Americans against him and his colleagues. Daria Kaleniuk, of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, said, “What irritated Lutsenko was that the I.M.F., the E.U., and other foreign partners trusted our analysis and doubted the true intentions of parliament and the President.” Volodymyr Chemerys, a former Lutsenko ally, said that Lutsenko represented a familiar archetype: the child of late-Soviet Communist nomenklatura, devoid of ideological belief, who thinks of power as a natural birthright.

A perfect fit for Giuliani and Trump.

In April, 2016, [...] Lutsenko told me [...] Poroshenko asked him if he would be the new prosecutor general.

[...]

Lutsenko was not a lawyer, and American diplomats and law-enforcement officials had hoped that the job would go to a proven reformer. “The Americans preferred people from their list, and I was not on their list,” Lutsenko said.

[...]

Before Lutsenko’s appointment was approved, he met three times with George Kent, the U.S. Embassy’s deputy chief of mission. Kent reported back to his colleagues in Washington that he believed the U.S. government could work with Lutsenko.

[...]

The activists called for an overhaul, demanding that the prosecutor general’s office focus on prosecuting criminals and that it transfer its investigators, who were seen by the F.B.I. as “attack dogs,” to other Ukrainian law-enforcement bodies. [...] When Lutsenko resisted “cleaning house,” and failed to deliver on other changes favored by the Americans, the U.S. Embassy’s hopes for coöperation with the prosecutor general’s office began to fade.

[...]

At every level, American officials were frustrated by their Ukrainian counterparts’ refusal to investigate and prosecute corruption and self-dealing among government officials and the business class. In September, 2016, Biden’s team learned that Poroshenko planned to allow the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade to take over a state-owned Ukrainian pipeline company, Ukrtransgaz, a move that was seen by the Americans as “a highly corrupt act,” benefitting a Poroshenko ally.

[...]

In October, 2016, Lutsenko and Yovanovitch met at the prosecutor general’s office. According to Lutsenko and a former aide of his, Yovanovitch had recently learned that Lutsenko’s office was investigating Vitaliy Kasko, the young prosecutor who had worked with David Sakvarelidze in the internal-affairs unit under Shokin. She explained that she and other American officials believed that there were other people who should be a higher priority for investigation. If Lutsenko was committed to reforms, she said, he should look closely at whether some of his own prosecutors were part of the corruption problem. (Yovanovitch declined to talk to me for this story.)

Lutsenko resented feeling like he was being dictated to by the American Ambassador.

No doubt he's not the only person who feels that way.

Lutsenko gave Yovanovitch examples of prominent anti-corruption experts and activists whom he reserved the right to investigate—among them Sergii Leshchenko, the former investigative journalist who joined the Ukrainian parliament as a reformer. [...] When Yovanovitch became upset, Lutsenko took a piece of paper from his desk and wrote their names on it. He told Yovanovitch that this was her “do-not-prosecute list” and then, in a dramatic flourish, ripped it to pieces.

Aha! There's the "list" that the Republicans in the Intel Committee hearings tried to claim Marie Yovanovich gave to Lutsenko.

Lutsenko, seeking tangible results to prove his efficacy, seized on a long-standing tax-evasion case against Burisma. He impounded some of the company’s assets, and later, as part of a settlement, Burisma agreed to pay the state around seven million dollars.

I've held out on this story longer than the average American would, I think. And my eyes are crossing now, but the article goes on and on with more Ukrainians and more corruption stories. I'm skipping a lot, and this is a clue to why the House Dems had to narrow its articles of impeachment. The public can't juggle it all.

While U.S. authorities had pushed Ukrainian leaders to pursue the money-laundering case against Zlochevsky, Ukrainian law-enforcement officials became concerned, because Hunter Biden was on the Burisma board [in 2014], that any steps they took might displease powerful people in Kyiv and Washington, and they slowed down their efforts.

[...]

A former Poroshenko adviser told me that he and his colleagues found it “strange” that Hunter Biden had joined the board of Burisma, which had “a dubious reputation,” but that they hadn’t wanted to discuss it with Joe Biden. “They were uncomfortable penetrating the privacy of the family,” he said. Shymkiv told me that, in the spring of 2018, he began to suspect that Republicans would use Hunter’s membership on the board against Joe Biden if he entered the 2020 Presidential race. “I know how Ukrainian politicians would be tempted to get involved,” he said. “I told them, ‘Please, please, don’t. It’s going to be damaging. Republicans will play you against the Democrats. Don’t give them ammunition. We are a country that needs bipartisan support.’ ”

In January, 2019, Lev Parnas—who told me that he was “like Rudy’s assistant”—arranged a Skype call between Giuliani and Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor general whom Poroshenko had fired at the urging of Joe Biden, two years earlier, and who had since retired. During the call, Shokin made the unsubstantiated claim that Biden had him removed from the job because he had been investigating [...] Burisma. Ukrainian and American officials told me that the situation was quite the opposite, and that Shokin had in fact been fired for failing to investigate Burisma and other similar cases despite calls by Ambassador Pyatt and others for him to do so.

Giuliani invited Shokin to talk to him in New York, but consular officials who consulted with Ambassador Yovanovitch blocked his visa. Yovanovitch notified her superiors in Washington, including Kent, who concurred with the decision.

[...]

Giuliani, in an attempt to get the decision reversed, intervened with officials at the White House and at the State Department. He was not successful. Yovanovitch said in her October 11th deposition that Giuliani had accused her of preventing Shokin from coming to New York to provide him with information about “corruption at the Embassy.” Giuliani told me, “I was kind of pissed off at her at that point.”

Lutsenko told me that his main interest in talking to Giuliani was to seek his help in arranging a meeting with the next Attorney General. [...] In November, 2018, Trump fired Sessions, and Matthew Whitaker stepped in as the interim Attorney General. In December, Trump said he would nominate Barr to be Sessions’s replacement. Giuliani told me that he didn’t want to burden Whitaker with the Lutsenko matter. “So I figured we’ll wait, because I knew Barr would have the balls to deal with it,” Giuliani said.

Keep talking Rudy.

Lutsenko also said that he had not expected to discuss Yovanovitch with Giuliani, but several Ukrainian officials noted that he was obsessed with getting even with her. A Ukrainian official told me that, in one meeting, Lutsenko explicitly said that he wanted her to be removed. Lutsenko said he learned from Poroshenko that Yovanovitch had asked for him to be fired.

[...]

Lutsenko met with Giuliani in late January.

[...]

A summary of the meeting, which Lutsenko said was drafted by a Giuliani associate who was present, and which Lutsenko shared with me, suggests that Lutsenko, aware of Giuliani’s appetite for anything that might embarrass the Bidens, handed over an assortment of seemingly tantalizing but ultimately insubstantial data points, including what he claimed were Latvian bank records that purportedly showed Burisma payments to members of its international board. Lutsenko claimed that the records indicated that a company co-owned by Hunter and [his partner Devon] Archer had been paid nearly a million dollars “for lobbying” Joe Biden. Hunter and Archer told me that no such payment was made for lobbying Biden, and that they did not discuss their Burisma work with the Vice-President.

Lutsenko said he then suggested to Giuliani that, if the Americans launched an investigation into Hunter Biden’s ties to Burisma and into any conflicts of interest arising from his father’s role overseeing U.S. policy in Ukraine, the prosecutor general’s office would share relevant information.

[...]

Lutsenko, apparently eager to undermine his domestic rivals, told Giuliani that he had evidence that Artem Sytnyk was a Clinton supporter who was protected by Yovanovitch, and accused NABU of playing a role in the release of damaging information about [Paul] Manafort.

[...]

On the third day of their conversations, Lutsenko said, Giuliani promised to arrange for Lutsenko to have a meeting in Washington with Barr once he was confirmed by the Senate. Barr and Lutsenko could then set up a “joint investigation team” that would seek to recover the Ukrainian assets.

[...]

On the evening of February 12th, in Warsaw, Lutsenko met with Giuliani, Parnas, and Igor Fruman for drinks at a cigar bar. Giuliani asked whether Lutsenko was ready to meet with Barr, who would be sworn in as Attorney General two days later. When Lutsenko said that he was, Giuliani said that Lutsenko first needed to hire a lawyer who could arrange the meeting. “I had a conflict,” Giuliani told me. “I couldn’t do it.” Giuliani recommended a married couple, Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova, who often appear on Fox News.

And who also, at one point, were approached to represent Trump during the Mueller investigation, but were barred due to conflicts of interest.

Lutsenko declined to employ their services. Giuliani told me that he had decided not to reach out to Barr directly.

[...]

John Solomon, the columnist for The Hill, told me that he, too, had been reporting on the rift between the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine and the prosecutor general’s office. [...] Solomon called Giuliani, to see if he had any information to share. According to Solomon, Giuliani said, “I’m not ready and my client’s not ready to decide what to do with this information, and my first inclination is to give it to the U.S. government.” Solomon told me that he responded by saying, “Keep me in the loop.”

Lutsenko told me that he was waiting to hear about the meeting with Barr when he heard from Solomon. He gave him a long on-the-record, videotaped interview, in which he described having a “difficult personal relationship” with Yovanovitch. The first segment of Solomon’s video interview with Lutsenko was published on the Web site of The Hill on March 20th.

[...]

Giuliani said that he was asked to provide the State Department with some of the evidence he had collected from Lutsenko, Shokin, and others. The dossier was sent in a plain yellow envelope that was addressed, in calligraphic letters, to “Secretary Pompeo.” The return address was “THE WHITE HOUSE.” Solomon said he wasn’t involved in the creation of the dossier and does not know why the package contained a Post-it marked “Solomon Timelines.”

One section of the dossier, dated March 28, 2019, contained particularly outlandish claims. Kent, Yovanovitch, and other officials are accused of setting up NABU in order to protect the Bidens rather than to investigate corruption. (Neither Kent nor Yovanovitch was working in Ukraine when the law establishing nabu was passed.) Hunter Biden is alleged to have had breakfast on May 26, 2015, with Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken to discuss Burisma. (At the time, Hunter was at the hospital bedside of his brother, who died four days later.) The section also included a memo that claimed, falsely, that the financier George Soros, a perennial target of right-wing and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists, had “played a big role” in getting Yovanovitch nominated as Ambassador to Ukraine. “Until she is removed Soros has as much, or more, power over Yovanovitch as the President and Secretary of State,” the memo reads.

The dossier made its way from the office of the inspector general at the State Department to the F.B.I. in June. [...] An F.B.I. spokesperson, Brian Hale, declined to comment on what, if anything, the Bureau did with the information.

[...]

Lutsenko reached the conclusion that Giuliani either was not able to convince Barr to meet with him or was no longer trying. Lutsenko said he understood that Giuliani and his associates wanted him, as the prosecutor general, to “announce” investigations into the Bidens and into claims of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election. He told me that he suspected that an attention-grabbing announcement from Ukraine was more important to Giuliani than the proposed investigations themselves, which would drag on for years. But Lutsenko said that, under Ukrainian law, he didn’t have grounds to announce an investigation into the Bidens. “I was near the red line, but I didn’t cross it,” Lutsenko said. Giuliani told me, “I was wondering what kind of game he was playing. I felt like we were getting scammed.”

On April 21st, after Volodymyr Zelensky easily won the Presidency of Ukraine, Parnas asked Lutsenko whether he could arrange a meeting for Giuliani with the new President. Lutsenko said that he didn’t have a sufficiently close relationship with Zelensky to do that. Shortly afterward, Zelensky made clear that Lutsenko should step down.

[...]

On May 16th, [Lutsenko] told a reporter for Bloomberg News, “Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws—at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing. A company can pay however much it wants to its board.” Lutsenko told me that he chose to speak to Bloomberg “to declare my real position” and “to show I’m not Giuliani’s marionette.” Giuliani was furious. “It was going along fine,” he said, before Lutsenko seemed to let the Bidens off the hook. “It undermined everything.”

Giuliani reached out to Fruman and arranged a phone call with Lutsenko. It was the middle of the night in Kyiv when they spoke, Lutsenko told me. Giuliani recalled, “I got pretty angry at him on the phone.” He told me that he thought Lutsenko should have brought a case against former Vice-President Biden for bribery—an idea apparently based on Biden’s threat that he would withhold a billion dollars in I.M.F. loans unless Shokin was fired.

“I said, ‘Have you ever read your goddam bribery statute?’ ” Giuliani told me. “ ‘Let me read it to you.’ ” He went on, “ ‘This takes a mental midget to do one plus two equals crime. You don’t need to be a lawyer, Yuriy, you just need to be an honest man.’ ” According to Lutsenko, Giuliani kept on repeating “bribery, bribery,” in a loud and agitated voice. Lutsenko said that he told Giuliani that the bribery assertion didn’t make any sense to him. If Giuliani was correct, then anytime a state withholds something of value from another state to get something it wants, which happens all the time, it could be accused of bribery. According to Lutsenko, Giuliani responded by saying, “I’m a lawyer, you’re not.”

So Giuliani was pushing for that to be labeled bribery, but when the show was switched to Trump's foot, suddenly it's not.

On August 29th, when the new parliament was sworn in, Lutsenko submitted his resignation.

[...]

Lutsenko said that, when the White House released an official account of Trump’s call with Zelensky, on September 25th, he felt a measure of vindication. As he saw it, Trump had pressed Zelensky to announce investigations into the Bidens and into allegations of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election because Lutsenko hadn’t announced the probes himself.

And, Rudy...what's he up to after all this?

In a phone call with me on November 21st, Giuliani described some tips he was hearing from his sources in Ukraine, including allegations that a Ukrainian oligarch had made illegal campaign contributions to Hillary Clinton totalling forty million dollars, “that Biden helped to facilitate.” In addition, he said, “I was told Biden had participated in the hacking”—a reference to the penetration of Democratic National Committee computer servers in 2016, which U.S. intelligence agencies have attributed to Russia’s military intelligence agency, the G.R.U. The conspiracy theories were endless. “They may be true, they may be false,” Giuliani said of the rumors.

[...]

A few days later, One America News Network, a right-wing television outlet that Trump has promoted on Twitter, which reaches thirty-five million households, aired the first episode in an “exclusive multipart series” that, according to a trailer, “debunks the impeachment hoax and exposes Biden family corruption in Ukraine.” The series is hosted by Chanel Rion, the network’s White House and political correspondent and the author of several books of juvenile mystery fiction “for girls who want to Make America Great Again.”

Dear god.

On December 3rd, Giuliani tweeted that he was “working on an important project with @OANN.” That day, “at a safe house on the outskirts of Budapest,” Rion interviewed Giuliani, who plays the role of a guide in the series, alongside Lutsenko.

[...]

In the interview, Lutsenko holds up his office’s 2017 letter requesting U.S. assistance in recovering the billions of dollars that he said were held by Franklin Templeton—a claim rejected by the F.B.I. in the course of several years as unsubstantiated. As Lutsenko speaks in broken English about the letter and about Yovanovitch’s testimony, Giuliani jots down notes, as if he were collecting a witness’s statement for a report he was preparing. The letter is evidence, Lutsenko says, that Yovanovitch lied under oath when she said that Lutsenko had not told her why he wanted the meetings with Barr. “This is this document, with signature, with stamps, with everything,” he says. After the interview, Rion shot a short segment, on a snowy, tree-lined road: “It all made sense, says Lutsenko, when he realized that Adam Schiff was an investor in Franklin Templeton himself.” (A Schiff aide told me, in an e-mail, “As disclosed in his annual, publicly available financial disclosures, Rep. Schiff owns shares in some Franklin Templeton mutual funds, and has since 2009.”)

On December 12th, Trump promoted Lutsenko’s latest claims that Yovanovitch lied under oath, retweeting to his 67.5 million followers a link to Lutsenko’s interview with Rion. The day after Lutsenko’s interview, I asked him why he had renewed his partnership with Giuliani, whose competence he had previously questioned. “I have no other way to protect my reputation,” he responded. “Why not?”

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

UPDATE:

Ooopsie

A message from Sergii Leshchenko.

Every time U.S. President Donald Trump’s sympathizers bring up my name, “Leshchenko,” at the U.S. House impeachment hearings, I can imagine the effort it takes. The name has a Ukrainian sound in the middle that for a lack of an English equivalent is transliterated as this complicated combination, “shch.” Not an easy one to say.

So to spare American politicians the trouble of having to deal with the “shch” sound, I want to clarify my actions and respond to the accusations made during the hearing by Congressmen Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), and Steven Castor, Republican counsel for the House Oversight Committee.

  Kyiv Post

I see it's not just the president of Ukraine who's a comedian.

Republican politicians bring up my name in the context of two false narratives. Both narratives aim to feed the conspiracy theory that lies at the basis of Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, which in its turn started the impeachment inquiry.

The first narrative is that I was allegedly a source of information for Fusion GPS, a company that had been preparing a dossier on Trump and his possible connections in Russia. This was claimed by Nellie Ohr in her statement to the U.S. Congress last year.

In their statements, congressmen Jordan, Nunes and counsel Castor assume and sometimes even falsely claim that I was working for the Democrats and “digging” up dirt on Trump and his staff. To stop this flow of lies, I tweeted back at congressmen Jordan, Nunes and counsel Castor.

[...]

As a member of the Ukrainian parliament, which I had been until August, I have held thousands of meetings over the past five years. But I have never met these people. Perhaps they met me and introduced themselves using different names, but I definitely wasn’t talking to them as their source in the way Jordan, Nunes and Castor were trying to show.

I also do not rule out that when Ohr mentioned me as a source of information, she was referring to my public statements or press appearances. I don’t understand what she meant, and I can’t even ask her, because I don’t have her contacts.

The second narrative is that I allegedly tried to undermine Trump’s candidacy in 2016 by targeting his then-campaign manager Paul Manafort. I allegedly did so by publishing the papers known in Ukraine as the “black ledger” of the Party of Regions, the party of former President Viktor Yanukovych, ousted by the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2014. Representatives of the Republican Party say that since the documents mentioned payments to Manafort during his work for Yanukovych, it must mean I did it to hurt Trump’s campaign. Yet these statements don’t pass even the most basic fact-checking.

[...]

I published the first portion of the “black ledger” on May 31, 2016. I published 22 pages from the secret manuscript of the Party of Regions, which was sent anonymously to my official email address at the parliament’s domain. The document listed under-the-table cash payments to Ukrainian politicians, lawmakers, judges and members of the Central Election Commission. However, Manafort was not mentioned there. His name was not in the 22 pages I obtained.

[...]

I now know it was an excerpt from more than 800 pages that the black ledger contained. Believe me, had Manafort’s name been in the pages I obtained, I would have published it, because I think Manafort helped establish one of the most outrageously corrupt regimes in the world, headed by Yanukovych.

I would correct that to "two of the most outrageously corrupt regimes in the world," since he was Trump's first campaign manager, and helped him get elected even after he was dismissed for his corrupt acts in Ukraine.

I learned that Manafort was featured in the full version of the black ledger only on Aug. 14, 2016 when the New York Times reported it. The day before, I was contacted by a Times’ journalist and asked if I knew anything about Manafort in Yanukovych’s records. I said I didn’t, and it was true. If I had that information, I would have been the first to publish it.

[...]

According to [a report by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, Manafort] received cash payments of more than $12.7 million.

[...]

Thus, the conspiracy theory of congressmen Jordan, Nunes and counsel Castor is falling apart, as I was not the original source of information about Manafort’s shady payments in Ukraine. I wouldn’t mind being the first one to publish the information about Manafort, but I simply didn’t have it. I found out about it the same way that everyone else did — from a New York Times article.

[...]

I can add that I have been openly critical of Manafort since the time he worked as a political mentor to Yanukovych. And, of course, the fact of Manafort’s involvement in Trump’s presidential campaign, along with the change of the Republican Party’s attitudes toward Ukraine on the eve of the American elections in 2016, could not but cause a critical reaction from Ukrainians.

Many Ukrainian politicians and journalists have spoken out against Trump on social media. However, such criticism has always been made openly and published on personal accounts. It is a manifestation of freedom of speech, a key value of a democratic society — and one that America has been promoting for centuries.

And such criticism has nothing to do with the whole set of measures taken by Russia to undermine American democracy in 2016, which were established by the U.S. investigation. Now it appears that Russia, using some U.S. politicians as well as its agents of influence in Ukraine, is trying to shift the responsibility for interfering in the 2016 elections to my country.

Russia, which has been waging war against Ukraine for five years, is the main beneficiary of this conspiracy theory. This conspiracy undermines U.S. bipartisan support for Ukraine and undermines the foundations of American democracy.

Therefore, I call on U.S. politicians to operate exclusively with facts and reliable quotes to establish truth in the events of 2016.

Prepare to be disappointed again, Mr. Leshchenko.

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

A back story in the Rudy-Ukraine-Trump scandal: Serhiy Leshchenko

In 2014, Ukraine’s wildly corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovych, fled to Russia after mass protests on the Maidan, Kiev’s central square. During what Ukrainians call the Revolution of Dignity, police snipers killed dozens of demonstrators. In the revolution’s aftermath, a number of young idealists decided to plunge into politics, hoping to reform their troubled country from the inside. One of them was Serhiy Leshchenko, at the time perhaps the country’s most famous investigative journalist.

[...]

This year, after Volodymyr Zelensky won the presidential election, Leshchenko advised him during the transition.

Then Rudy Giuliani began attacking Leshchenko as a conspirator against America.

In 2016, Leshchenko had helped expose the “black ledger,” an accounting book of hundreds of pages found in Yanukovych’s former party headquarters. Among its many entries, it showed $12.7 million in secret payments to Paul Manafort. At the time, Manafort was running Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, but before that, he was one of Yanukovych’s most important advisers.

  NYT

As a side note: It was when Paul Manafort signed on to the Trump campaign that Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa (a Ukrainian-American) knew for a fact that the fix was in, and were inspired to start their podcast Gaslit Nation.

One of the reasons Manafort is in federal prison is that he failed to disclose or pay taxes on millions of dollars from Ukraine. But if you believe Giuliani, the black ledger was part of a plot to damage Trump.

Who in god's name believes Rudy Giuliani?

Giuliani described the ledger as a “falsely created book” and Leshchenko as part of a group of “enemies of the president, in some cases enemies of the United States.” Last month, in an epic, ranting interview on CNN, he accused Ukraine’s leading anti-corruption organization, the Anti-Corruption Action Center, or AntAC, of developing “all of the dirty information that ended up being a false document that was created in order to incriminate Manafort.”

In Giuliani’s fevered alternative reality, Ukraine’s most stalwart foes of corruption are actually corruption’s embodiment. Deeply compromised figures with vendettas against the activists — particularly the ex-prosecutors Viktor Shokin and Yuriy Lutsenko — are transformed into heroes.

Typical GOP playbook since Karl Rove, at least. Turn things on their head. Accuse your opponent of doing what you're doing.

Trump withdrew the American ambassador to the country, Marie Yovanovitch, whom reformers saw as their champion. He withheld military aid that Ukraine desperately needed, while asking Zelensky to do him a “favor” and investigate deranged fictions about Ukrainian interference in American elections, as well as Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

Given how much Ukraine depends on American support, Giuliani’s smears made it politically impossible for Leshchenko, who left Parliament in August, to continue advising Zelensky.

[...]

“I could imagine that maybe some Ukrainian prosecutors will create a fake case against me, or some criminals will attack me, or I could be attacked by trolls on social media,” Leshchenko told me when I met him in a Kiev cafe. “But I never imagined before that my real problems will appear because of the statement of the personal attorney of the American president.”

[...]

Pro-Western reformers, the Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko told me, had seen the United States as a “a perfect democracy functioning very well,” with an admirable system of checks and balances. “And now this image is crumbling and that’s very dangerous.”

The world is still learning who Donald Trump is?

If America can be said to have a foreign policy at this debased stage of the Trump administration, it mostly consists of sucking up to strongmen while betraying everyone who ever believed in America’s putative ideals.

[...]

The Ukrainians I spoke to aren’t naïve; they understand that America, like any other country, generally acts from self-interest rather than high principle. But there was a time when America at least viewed the projection of democratic values as being in its self-interest. That gave liberals in countries like Ukraine leverage against recalcitrant officials.

[...]

The U.S. also provided a degree of protection to local activists and journalists. When Lutsenko was prosecutor general in Ukraine — a position roughly equivalent to our attorney general — he would, said Ustinova, harass anti-corruption campaigners with spurious criminal investigations. “The U.S. ambassador and the E.U. ambassador were going out publicly saying you cannot do this,” [Oleksandra Ustinova, a former board member of AntAC who was elected to Parliament this year] said. Now that’s all changed. As The New York Times reported, after Trump recalled the U.S. ambassador, Lutsenko gloated to the head of AntAC that he had “eliminated your roof,” using Russian mafia slang for guardian.

[...]

A few hours after I met Leshchenko, news broke that two Ukrainian-born clients of Giuliani, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, had been arrested.

[...]

According to an indictment, the two “sought to advance their personal financial interests and the political interests of at least one Ukrainian government official with whom they were working.”

[...]

As soon as news of the indictment broke, I messaged Leshchenko, who guessed that the unnamed Ukrainian official was Lutsenko. It was a natural assumption; it had already been reported that Parnas and Fruman connected Giuliani with Lutsenko, who had been feeding Trump’s lawyer conspiracy theories about the journalist, the former American ambassador and Joe Biden.

Sure enough, on Saturday NBC News reported that Lutsenko was the official in the indictment.

[...]

Thanks to Giuliani’s escapades, the domestic grudges of a crooked Ukrainian prosecutor have blossomed into a scandal that’s likely to lead to the impeachment of an American president. Federal prosecutors are now investigating whether Giuliani himself broke the law.

[...]

Lutsenko has since left Ukraine for London, and Ukrainian authorities have opened a criminal case against him for allegedly abusing his authority in an unrelated matter. In a recent interview, he told reporters for The Times that in speaking to Giuliani, he sought to tell Trump’s lawyer what he wanted to hear. “I understood very well what would interest them,” Lutsenko said, adding, “I have 23 years in politics.”

[...]

He should be seen as wholly discredited, but in our polarized, frenzied media environment, lies never really go away. Trump’s defenders will continue to take Lutsenko’s stories at face value. Worse, long after America has forgotten them, these slanders, which Trump and Giuliani magnified to gargantuan scale, will linger in Ukraine.

[...]

Ukrainians are no strangers to post-truth politics. The first time I ever heard the term “fake news” was in 2015, when I learned about the Ukrainian fact-checking organization StopFake. It was created by a group of journalists to push back against the torrents of Russian disinformation sowing chaos in the country’s politics.

Oh, that can't be. Trump, as he's told us numerous times, "invented" the term fake news.

Throughout our history, America has committed many sins against democracy around the world, but we used to be on the right side in Ukraine. Not anymore. As one former U.S. diplomat said to me recently, “The beacon has gone out.” We’re with the oligarchs now.

UPDATE:



It's just amazing that Giuliani is going around as if he holds a government position.  At Trump's bidding, and leaving Trump free to disavow anything Rudy does.

Trump-Manafort-Giuliani-Ukraine

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.

[...]

[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.

[...]

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.

[...]

[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.

[...]

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

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 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.

Recall that Trump fired ambassador Yovanovich (alternately spelled Jovanovich and Jovanovic).

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.

[...]

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.

[...]

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.

[...]

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.

That's a big "if".

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.

[...]

[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.

[...]

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.”

Rudy going crazy - in other words, being Rudy.

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.

He needn't have bothered. From that July 25 phone call, it appears Zelensky has created his own.

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.

[...]

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).

[...]

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.

[...]

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.

[...]

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.

Available April 7, 2020

Ouch - insult to injury: The Ukrainians pile on

When Ukrainians voted to elect comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy as their next president in the spring of 2019, the fledgling administration was eager to coordinate a phone call with Kyiv’s most important benefactor -- the United States, according to an adviser to Zelenskiy.

But after weeks of discussions with American officials, Ukrainian officials came to recognize a precondition to any executive correspondence, the adviser said.

"It was clear that [President Donald] Trump will only have communications if they will discuss the Biden case," said Serhiy Leshchenko, an anti-corruption advocate and former member of Ukraine's Parliament, who now acts as an adviser to Zelenskiy. "This issue was raised many times. I know that Ukrainian officials understood."

[...]

During a bilateral meeting with Trump on Wednesday in New York, Zelenskiy reaffirmed that he has no interest in getting Ukraine involved in U.S. politics and denied that Trump had pressed him to investigate Biden.

"I'm sorry, but I don't want to be involved in ... elections of USA," Zelenskiy said. "No, you heard that we had, I think, a good phone call. It was normal, we spoke about many things, and you read it that nobody pushed it, nobody pushed me."

  ABC

That's very important to say, because he was elected to counter government corruption.

But in Ukraine, according to Leschenko, the prospective investigation was part of an effort by a Ukrainian official to curry favor with the Americans.

Not to mention the bit about Zelensky making a point to tell Trump he'd stayed at a Trump Hotel when he was in New York.

In early 2019, [Yuri] Lutsenko’s position as prosecutor general was under threat after Zelenskiy -- who was then heavily ahead in the polls -- promised to remove him if elected president. Leshchenko and the other official said Lutsenko had then sought out Giuliani in a desperate bid to try to enlist the Trump administration in the hope it would somehow protect him.

[...]

Leshchenko and another former senior Ukrainian law enforcement official said they believe that Lutsenko invented the [Biden] investigations that Giuliani pushed as part of an effort to keep his job.

[...]

Leshchenko and other Ukrainian officials said that as far as they were aware no investigation was ever opened into Biden. They said that if the Trump administration suspected that Biden and his son had broken the law, then U.S. authorities should submit a formal request that Ukraine investigate through the usual channels.

"If there will be a request from the American side, we’ll look at it," Anton Gerashchenko, who was appointed Ukraine’s deputy interior minister on Wednesday, told ABC News. He said that as far as he was aware no formal request had ever been made.

Leshchenko himself was attacked by Lutsenko and Giuliani, who alleged he had played a role in the origins of the Russia investigation into Trump that Giuliani has claimed were sown in Ukraine by Democrats and their allies there.

In 2016, Leshchenko helped publish parts of a secret accounts books detailing alleged illegal payments made by the party of Ukraine’s former President Viktor Yanukovych. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort’s name was included next to payments in the accounts, The New York Times reported, after which he stepped down as campaign manager.

Talk about your tangled webs.

[W]hile Lutsenko was still prosecutor general, a court in Kyiv in December convicted Leshchenko of illegally harming the interests of Ukraine. Leshchenko appealed that judgment, however, and in May a court in Kyiv cleared him of any wrongdoing and ordered he be paid compensation, he said.

The saga with Giuliani, Leshchenko said, had placed Ukraine in a very difficult position. The the key thing now was for Zelenskiy’s administration to remain neutral and not appear to take sides either with the Democrats or Republicans, he said.

"The best way for Ukraine is to be neutral," he said. "Ukraine has done nothing wrong."

I don't know. Zelensky looks a bit worried.

Ukraine is "ready" to help Trump win in 2020

Ukraine is ready to investigate the connections Joe Biden’s son Hunter had with the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings, according to Anton Geraschenko, a senior adviser to the country’s interior minister who would oversee such an inquiry.

  The Daily Beast

I don't think this contradicts what Ukraine's president has indicated.

Geraschenko told The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview that “as soon as there is an official request" Ukraine will look into the case, but “currently there is no open investigation.”

But there is this...

“Clearly,” said Geraschenko, “Trump is now looking for kompromat to discredit his opponent Biden, to take revenge for his friend Paul Manafort, who is serving seven years in prison.”

[...]

His remarks last week came amid widespread speculation that U.S. President Donald Trump had made vital U.S. military aid for Ukraine contingent on such an inquiry, but had tried to do so informally through unofficial representatives, including his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and Giuliani’s adviser on Ukraine, Sam Kislin.

[...]

Geraschenko reconfirmed his statements in a phone call on Friday.

[...]

According to the official readout on Ukraine's presidency website [of Trump's July 25 phone call to Zelensky], "Donald Trump is convinced that the new Ukrainian government will be able to quickly improve image of Ukraine, complete investigation of corruption cases, which inhibited the interaction between Ukraine and the USA."

[...]

Ex-MP Serhiy Leshchenko, the Ukrainian pro-Western politician and corruption fighter, has been in the epicenter of the scandal since Giuliani mentioned his name as one of “the enemies of Donald Trump and the USA.” The Trump attorney continued to criticize Ukraine’s leadership by saying that Ukraine’s president “is surrounded by people who are the enemies of the president [Trump] and people who are clearly corrupt.”

[...]

As a result of Giuliani’s statements, Leshchenko has lost a promising role on Zelensky’s team. “Both the United States and Ukraine are throwing Biden’s case at each other like a hot potato, pushing each other to begin investigating Biden,” Leshchenko told The Daily Beast on Tuesday. “I totally understand, and I don’t want to be in the way, since Zelensky clearly does not want to quarrel with Trump. The United States is our main strategic partner and I value that.”

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Toward the end of August, the White House reportedly was considering whether to block $250 million of funds to support Ukraine’s military in its war against Russian-backed separatists. On Sept. 12, however, that funding was released, and even increased.

So, the guy who says he makes the best deals in the world lost that one. Smart move on Zelensky's part: Sure, we'll investigate your opponent, but it'll raise the stakes considerably.

Ukraine elected Zelensky and his supporters in parliament by a landslide earlier this year, largely in response to the alleged corruption of his predecessor and amid hopes the former comedian-turned-politician could end the war with separatists that has killed more than 13,000 people.

To bring an end to the carnage, Zelensky needs strong international support. He hopes to strike a peace deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin with backing from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron at a so-called Normandy Four meeting later this month.

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He demands, as did his predecessor, that Russia return the annexed Crimean peninsula to Ukraine, a non-starter for Putin.

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“For now, we would like America to support us more, and not only with money but also with the newest weapons in our war against the aggressor, the Russian Federation,” Geraschenko, the adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, told The Daily Beast. “We want a status as NATO’s special partner, allowing us to buy any weapons in the U.S., including the newest anti-aircraft rockets to defend our country in case Russia decides to attack from the air; our technology is more than 40 years old.”

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Zelensky’s team is struggling to overcome war, poverty, and corruption. Clearly, the idea of helping politicians of foreign states win elections is not a part of his public agenda.

Explaining why his knees were shaking.

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