The basics: This Summer, a still-unidentified whistleblower came forward and alleged, among other things, that Donald Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others were involved in a scheme to get the Ukrainian government to dig dirt on Trump's political opponents, particularly potential 2020 Democratic candidate Joe Biden (a crime), and that Trump had withheld an aid package congress had designated for the Ukraine in order to pressure the new Ukrainian government of Volodymyr Zelensky into trying to find something--anything--to use against Biden.
The details:
This is the whisteblower's complaint, the basis for the story (it's in pdf format):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pqFxJABWA5oogCwf21SFZHcPuYFgiZrN/view?fbclid=IwAR15J7Yc17ZEY86Q7u5LEhIkZtmjiS3R1F1vkIIYzNTdSl5tCKFfvopYqmA
These are the White House notes on the 25 July phone conversation between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky (not a verbatim transcript):
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/25/politics/donald-trump-ukraine-transcript-call/index.html
To try to counter the story, the White House crafted a series of talking-points, most of them either false or so grossly misleading as to be false. They established the roadmap for Republicans' defense of Trump and were intended for Trump's allies in congress but they were accidentally mailed to Democrats, and were taken public. Screenshots:
https://twitter.com/MEPFuller/status/1176885414508081152
Here's a pretty good--though now somewhat incomplete--timeline of these events. It's a good primer for someone coming into the story who doesn't know much about it:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/09/ukraine-timeline-shows-trump-lying.html
Trump's defenders have made it a point to stress the secondhand nature of the information in the whistleblower complaint but everything the whistleblower claimed that is checkable via the public record has turned out to be true.
One of the whisteblower's allegations was that White House officials immediately realized Trump's phone conversation with Zelensky was completely inappropriate, removed it from the usual computer system in which such records are kept and squirreled it away in a much more secure system maintained by the National Security Council that is supposed to be reserved for highly classified material. The whistleblower also said Trump had done that with records of other exchanges with world leaders--strictly limiting access to records that, while posing no national security issue, were politically damaging. On 27 Sept., a report in the New York Times, using current and former Trump officials as sources, confirmed the Zelensky transcript and others had been treated in this manner:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/us/politics/nsc-ukraine-call.html
Paul Seamus Ryan from Common Cause, a fellow who specializes in election law, explains the law on the Ukraine matter:
"During the July phone call, Trump reportedly urged Zelensky 'about eight times' to work with Rudy Giuliani to probe Giuliani’s own assertions that Joe Biden had acted improperly as vice president to curb an investigation of a gas company for which Hunter Biden was a director. Trump’s request to Zelensky is reportedly part of a U.S. intelligence community whistle-blower complaint, tied to allegations that Trump may have delayed a military aid package as leverage on Ukraine’s president.
"Federal law prohibits a foreign national from directly or indirectly making a 'contribution or donation of money or other thing of value' in connection with a U.S. election, and prohibits a person from soliciting, accepting or receiving such a contribution or donation from a foreign national. Federal law defines 'contribution' to include 'any gift … of money or anything of value made by any person for the purpose of influencing any election for Federal office.' And the FEC by regulation defines 'solicit' to mean 'to ask, request, or recommend, explicitly or implicitly, that another person make a contribution, donation, transfer of funds, or otherwise provide anything of value.'
"And that’s all the law requires. Whether or not Ukraine came through, whether or not the communications involved a quid pro quo, the solicitation of a thing of value from the Ukraine President in connection with a U.S. election could be a federal crime."
https://www.justsecurity.org/66277/the-quid-is-a-crime-no-need-to-prove-pro-quo-in-ukrainegate/
The Ukrainians have a hostile Russia that only recently invaded the Crimea and are entirely dependent upon the U.S. and it's allies for its defense. During the course of this, Trump initially withheld a large aid package congress had appropriated to the Ukraine.
Why?
The whistleblower suggests this was to help pressure the Ukrainians into digging political dirt for Trump. The whistleblower also noted that the order to hold up the funds came from Trump himself and that the relevant White House officials had no idea why he did it:
"Neither OMB [Office of Management and Budget] nor the NSC [National Security Council] staff knew why this instruction had been issued. During interagency meetings on 23 July and 26 July, OMB officials against stated explicitly that the instruction to suspend this assistance had come directly from the President, but they were still unaware of a policy rationale."
This dovetails with a Washingotn Post report from 23 Sept.:
"Officials at the Office of Management and Budget relayed Trump’s order to the State Department and the Pentagon during an interagency meeting in mid-July, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. They explained that the president had 'concerns' and wanted to analyze whether the money needed to be spent.
"Administration officials were instructed to tell lawmakers that the delays were part of an 'interagency process' but to give them no additional information--a pattern that continued for nearly two months, until the White House released the funds on the night of Sept. 11."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-ordered-hold-on-military-aid-days-before-calling-ukrainian-president-officials-say/2019/09/23/df93a6ca-de38-11e9-8dc8-498eabc129a0_story.html
Trump has offered two different explanations as to why he withheld the funds from the Ukraine. As usual, both were false.
Trump insisted the Ukraine wasn't doing enough about corruption. This is flatly contradicted by Trump's own Department of Defense, which keeps track of Defense-related corruption--a subset of overall corruption but the one tied to military aid--as a matter of law. In May, it reported that the Ukraine had "taken substantial actions to make defense institutional reforms for the purposes of decreasing corruption, increasing accountability, and sustaining improvements of combat capability enabled by US assistance." This is the information Trump had before him when he suspended the aid.
https://www.businessinsider.com/pentagon-letter-on-ukraine-trump-corruption-allegations-2019-9
More recently, Trump insisted he'd withheld the funds because Europe wasn't helping Ukraine, leaving the U.S. unfairly shouldering the burden. On 25 Sept., Trump told the press:
“I want to see other countries helping Ukraine also, not just us. As usual the United States helps and nobody else is there.”
This had been his story on 24 Sept. as well:
"I’d withhold again, and I’ll continue to withhold until such time as Europe and other nations contribute to Ukraine. Because they’re not doing it; it’s the United States. ... Why is it only the United States putting up the money?"
And once again, Trump's tale is entirely false. The Associated Press fielded this one.
"European Union institutions have provided far more development assistance than the U.S.--$425 million in 2016-2017 compared with $204 million from Washington. EU members, Japan and Canada also contribute significantly.
"Since 2014, the EU and European financial institutions have mobilized more than $16 billion to help Ukraine’s economy, counter corruption, build institutions and strengthen its sovereignty against further incursions by Russia after its annexation of Crimea.
"The U.S. is a heavy source of military assistance. The aid package held back by Trump, and recently released, amounted to nearly $400 million in such aid. But NATO also contributes a variety of military-assistance programs and trust funds for Ukraine. In most such cases, the programs are modest and NATO countries other than the U.S. take the lead..."
https://www.apnews.com/900e0e01fccb4db1a70629498e1ed674
When Trump, in his after-the-fact rationales for holding up the aid, talks about "corruption," he's really only talking about the failure of the Ukrainians to dig his political dirt.
Before releasing the notes of the reconstructed phone conversation with Zelensky, he said some things about the call that made this clear. On 22 Sept., as recounted by NBC:
"'The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, with largely corruption, all of the corruption taking place and largely the fact that we don't want our people like Vice President Biden and his son creating the corruption already in the Ukraine, and Ukraine has got a lot of problems,' he added."
While one could make a case for the call, once the transcript was released, being characterized as "largely congratulatory"--because it is congratulatory at times--the claim that it was "largely" about "corruption" is entirely false. Corruption, in fact, wasn't mentioned at all (and since this story broke, the Ukrainians have asserted they'd never been made aware of any Trump concerns with how they were tackling corruption), but Trump did spend a lot of time on the different elements of that political dirt he wanted dug (I'll be getting to those elements soon).
On 23 Sept.--still prior to the release of the transcript--Trump returned to the subject. NBC again:
"'We want to make sure that country is honest. It's very important to talk about corruption. If you don't talk about corruption, why would you give money to a country that you think is corrupt?' Trump told reporters Monday morning in New York, when asked what he had spoken about with Ukraine's new president in a July phone call.
"'It’s very important that, on occasion, you speak to somebody about corruption,' he said, moments after telling journalists: 'Let me just tell you--let me just tell you. What Biden did was wrong.'..."
This--basically a confession of the quid pro quo included in the whistleblower complaint--apparently panicked the White House lawyers, who must have intervened behind the scenes because later in the day, Trump reversed himself:
"'I put no pressure on them whatsoever. I could have. I think it would probably, possibly have been ok if I did. But I didn't. I didn't put any pressure on them whatsoever,' Trump said.
"'I did not make a statement that you have to do this or I'm not going to give you aid. I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't do that,' he also said. 'With that being said, what I want is--I want, you know, we're giving a lot of money away to Ukraine and other places. You want to see a country that's going to be not corrupt.'..."
Trump talk of "corruption" in the Ukraine, he means digging his political dirt; "corruption" as a characterization for this is nothing more than dishonest spin to try to make what he did sound harmless or even noble.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/giuliani-says-he-can-t-be-100-percent-sure-trump-n1057561
So what was Trump, while, on his own initiative, holding up crucial aid, trying to get the Ukrainian government to do?
Here, we enter the fever-swamp.
The first part: In his call, Trump told Zelensky:
"I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you're surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it's very important that you do it if that's possible."
CrowdStrike was a forensic data firm hired by the DNC to investigate the hack of Democratic emails during the 2016 campaign. As Fortune notes, Trump's comments refers to a long-running crackpot conspiracy pushed by the alt-right and pro-Russian forces in the Ukraine, "that CrowdStrike was wrong about Russia hacking the DNC--and, moreover, that CrowdStrike intentionally blamed Russia for political reasons."
Fortune also dismantles this:
"CrowdStrike's findings have, of course, been repeatedly affirmed by the intelligence community, the Justice Department, members of Congress, and the office of Robert Mueller. Last year the government indicted a dozen Russian intelligence officers for their role in the hacking plot.
"The conspiracy theorists object. They say that the FBI should not trust CrowdStrike. (CrowdStrike provided the bureau with digital images of the DNC's hacked systems, as is common in this line of work.) They say CrowdStrike's findings are suspect because the company has ties to Google, whose former chairman and CEO, Eric Schmidt, supported the election of Hillary Clinton. (CrowdStrike is backed a private equity firm, CapitalG, owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet.) They say CrowdStrike is owned by a Ukrainian billionaire. (A cofounder of the Calif.-based company was born in Moscow and moved to America as a teenager.) And they say CrowdStrike is under the influence of Viktor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch. (Pinchuk funds a think tank, the Atlantic Council, where the aforementioned CrowdStrike cofounder is a senior fellow.)
"These straw-grasping claims and distortions of fact are fuel for the fire of disinformation. Further, the notion that there is some missing 'server,' and that the server might exist somewhere--like in Ukraine--has no basis in reality."
https://fortune.com/2019/09/28/crowdstrike-conspiracy-theories-trump-ukraine/
Before proceeding to the matter of Hunter Biden, it's probably prudent to deal with some of the political background of all of this in the Ukraine. In 2014, the Ukraine experienced a revolution. While Ukrainians favored closer integration with the European Union, then-president Viktor Yanukovych was pro-Russian. His efforts to force this point led to widespread protests. His increasingly dictatorial efforts to destroy those protests eventually escalated to the point that he was overthrown. He packed up and fled to Russia, where he continues to live in exile. In the Ukraine, he was tried in absentia for treason, convicted and sentenced to prison.
Upon Yanukovych's overthrow, Russia invaded, occupied and annexed the Crimea. Then, pro-Russian separatists in the Dombass region, backed by the Russians, took up arms against the Ukrainian government--a conflict which continues to this day. Luhansk and Donetsk have declared their independence from the Ukraine.
Like other former Soviet republics, the Ukraine has had a serious problem with corruption and gangsterism. Sitting atop its economy is a relative handful of oligarchs, who have made their fortunes via, in part, this corruption. They control the media and a massive chunk of the Ukraine's GDP; they're largely pro-Russian and have no interest at all in reforming away the corruption that has proven to be their bread-and-butter.
Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's current president, had basically no political experience when he entered the presidential race. He was the star of a popular tv comedy, "Servant of the People," about an ordinary guy who became president of the Ukraine. He named his party after it--the Servant of the People Party. He was elected in April. During his campaign, he supported the agenda of Ukraine's anti-corruption activists. Ukraine's most prominent anti-corruption org is AntAC, the Anti-Corruption Action Centre, which shows up at several points in this story.
Mykola Zlochevsky is a businessman who was, for a time, the Ukraine's Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources. After that, he served on the National Security and Defense Council. Zlochevsky was the founder of Burisma Holdings, a natural gas company central to this part of the story. He awarded contracts to his own company to the point that he held the most such contracts in the Ukraine. When, in 2014, Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown, Zlochevsky was out as well.
That's when Britain’s Serious Fraud Office, which had been investigating Zlochevsky, seized London accounts linked to the Ukranian containing $23 million, which the British said was laundered money. Around this time, Burisma hired Hunter Biden's law firm for an obscene amount of money, probably in the hope that having the American Vice President's son on the payroll would provide some sort of international clout. The British request for assistance from the Ukraine in pursuing the money-laundering case led to the opening of several cases against Zlochevsky in that country, which he fled in late 2014.
While investigations of Zlochevsky and Burisma opened on several fronts, Hunter Biden doesn't appear to have ever been under investigation in the Ukraine for anything.
The Ukraine's Prosecutor General when the British made their move was Vitaly Yarema. He assigned the Zlochevsky matter to his deputy, Viktor Shokin, who becomes another important player in this story. In 2015, Shokin became Prosecutor General.
In December 2015, then-Vice President Joe Biden traveled to the Ukraine and threatened to withhold millions in loan guarantees if Shokin wasn't replaced. A few months later, Shokin was gone.
The conspiracy peddled by Trump and his deranged mouthpiece Rudy Giuliani--the one Trump wanted current Ukrainian president Zelensky to investigate--is that Biden, in Giuliani's words, "bribed the president of the Ukraine in order to fire a prosecutor [Shokin] who was investigating his son."
This isn't just false, it's a direct inversion of reality. Shokin never investigated Hunter Biden. He wasn't investigating Burisma, and hadn't been for over a year before he was fired. And he was fired because he wasn't pursuing corruption cases at all.
I'll break that down next.
A little background: Viktor Shokin has become a key source for Trump, Giuliani and their apologists, and for the American "journalists" who spun his firing into a scandal in the first place (more on that later). Shokin was a corrupt shitbag. His advancement to the office of Prosecutor General was controversial, as he was the fellow who blocked prosecution of those who had shot down Ukrainain protesters during the 2014 revolution. Instead of pursuing anti-corruption cases, he was using his office against those fighting corruption. The Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC) was very critical of Shokin; in response, he raided their offices on trumped-up charges.
Two of Shokin's prosecutors, Oleksandr Korniyets and Volodymyr Shapakin, were arrested on suspicion of bribery. Euromaidan Press:
"Over $500,000, unregistered firearms, and other valuables were found during searches of their premises, as well as 65 diamonds (see photos below by Ukraine’s SBU). This was the beginning of the case of the 'diamond prosecutors'... It turned out that the diamonds were the tip of the iceberg. A month and a half after the arrest of Korniyets and Shapakin, cocaine was found in their apartments. 15 February 2016, Korniyets was accused in demanding monthly payments (up to UAH 80,000 monthly) from the Nikolsan waste utilization company, after which the company was extorted altogether. Later, Kasko informed that the costs of the London tuition of Korniyets’ daughter Anastasiia ($200,000) were paid for by an offshore company whose director was involved in a major corruption scandal of the 'Boiko derricks.'"
David Sakvarelidze had been brought into government to reform the prosecutor's office. Shokin was having none of that. But his opposition kicked into overdrive once his "diamond prosecutors" were arrested. This, he just wasn't going to allow:
"From the first day after the arrest of the 'diamond prosecutors,' the highest representatives of [Shokin's office] obstructed the work of David Sakvarelidze and the group of investigators and prosecutors in this case. Pressure, intimidation, and discrediting in the media was the beginning. The Prosecutor General dismissed the Korniyets and Shapakin from their posts only on 16 July; shortly after, they were freed on bail.
"On 24 March 2016, Davit Sakvarelidze together with the group of prosecutors and investigators involved in the case told about about the connections between Prosecutor General Shokin and the 'diamond prosecutors' and the ways in which Shokin tries to slow down and paralyze the progress of the investigation. Shokin responded by firing the investigators of this resonant case from the Prosecutor’s office under the pretense of structural changes. Five days later, on 29 March 2016, Viktor Shokin fired Sakvarelidze one hour before he was dismissed by the Parliament following months of presidential stalling and public outrage..."
http://euromaidanpress.com/2016/05/14/how-ukraines-old-guard-killed-the-prosecution-reform/
UPDATE (30 Sept., 2019) - The Obama administration's response to such things was delivered by Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine, in remarks to the Odessa Financial Forum on 24 Sept., 2015:
"...there is one glaring problem that threatens all of the good work that regional leaders here in Odesa, in Kharkiv, in Lviv, and elsewhere are doing to improve the business climate and build a new model of government that serves the people.
"That problem threatens everything that the Rada, the Cabinet, the National Reform Council, and others are doing to push political and economic reforms forward and make life better for Ukrainians, and it flies in the face of what the Revolution of Dignity is trying to achieve.
"That obstacle is the failure of the institution of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine to successfully fight internal corruption. Rather than supporting Ukraine’s reforms and working to root out corruption, corrupt actors within the Prosecutor General’s office are making things worse by openly and aggressively undermining reform.
"In defiance of Ukraine’s leaders, these bad actors regularly hinder efforts to investigate and prosecute corrupt officials within the prosecutor general’s office. They intimidate and obstruct the efforts of those working honestly on reform initiatives within that same office."
Pyatt praised David Sakvarelidze and Vitaliy Kasko, the fellows tasked with reforming this system, and whose efforts were opposed by Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin:
"The United States stands behind those who challenge these bad actors.
"We applaud the work of the newly-established Inspector General’s office in the PGO led by David Sakvarelidze and Vitaliy Kasko. Their investigations into corruption within the PGO, have delivered important arrests and have sent the signal that those who abuse their official positions as prosecutors will be investigated and prosecuted.
"I encourage all of you to speak up in support of these brave investigators and prosecutors. Give them the resources and support to successfully prosecute these and future cases."
https://m.facebook.com/usdos.ukraine/posts/10153248488506936
UPDATE (30 Sept., 2019) - In February 2016, Vitaliy Kasko, one of the fellows praised by Ambassador Pyatt, resigned his Deputy Prosecutor post in disgust at the corruption and, in his words, "lawlessness" he faced there.
"'The last straw was another redistribution of responsibilities in the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine. The Prosecutor General, Viktor Shokin, has taken away all the functions and tools to investigate and control proceedings in cases initiated by our team, including the cases of so-called diamond prosecutors. However, the reasons why it is no longer possible and meaningful to work at the General Prosecutor’s Office are much deeper. I have set them out in my resignation letter,' Kasko added.
"The Deputy Prosecutor General of Ukraine read his resignation letter out loud in which he noted that the leadership of the Prosecutor General’s Office has turned it into a body where corruption and 'group solidarity' reign and any attempts to change the state of affairs inside the Office are met with punishment.
"'Arbitrariness and lawlessness work here but not the law and legislation'... Kasko noted that the Prosecutor General’s Office has turned into a tool of political intimidation and income. 'The possibilities to help and create a real Prosecutor General’s Office after the European model in Ukraine have been exhausted by the current leadership of the Prosecutor General’s Office. That is why I see no reason to stay with the Office,' his letter reads.
http://uawire.org/news/kasko-had-resigned-from-his-post-as-the-deputy-prosecutor-general-of-ukraine
UPDATE (30 Sept., 2019) - Mykola Zlochevsky was, as noted earlier, the owner of Burisma Holdings. In 2015, the British had to release the millions in suspected laundered money they'd seized from Zlochevsky because of Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin's complete refusal to pursue the investigation. If the Obama administration had been looking to protect Hunter Biden (who was never under investigation for anything but who worked for Burisma), they would have been ecstatic about this inaction. The administration's reaction, however, was quite different. In that same speech, Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt specifically condemned Shokin's inaction:
"We have learned that there have been times that the PGO not only did not support investigations into corruption, but rather undermined prosecutors working on legitimate corruption cases.
"For example, in the case of former Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky, the U.K. authorities had seized 23 million dollars in illicit assets that belonged to the Ukrainian people. Officials at the PGO’s office were asked by the U.K to send documents supporting the seizure.
"Instead they sent letters to Zlochevsky’s attorneys attesting that there was no case against him. As a result the money was freed by the U.K. court and shortly thereafter the money was moved to Cyprus.
"The misconduct by the PGO officials who wrote those letters should be investigated, and those responsible for subverting the case by authorizing those letters should--at a minimum--be summarily terminated."
Shokin has claimed he was "forced out" of the Prosecutor General position "because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors." This has been picked up and parroted by Trump, his deranged mouthpiece Rudy Giuliani and nut-right media figures.
The truth: Shokin was fired for exactly the sort of shenanigans I've been describing--for NOT investigating corruption cases like that of Burisma Holdings, for instead using his office to target reformers. The implication that Biden was acting on his own initiative in getting Shokin fired is central to the Trump-and-co. narrative. In reality, everyone wanted Shokin gone, and that became official U.S. policy; Biden was just the one assigned to pull the trigger:
"The Obama administration, American allies, the International Monetary Fund and Ukrainian anti-corruption activists, among others, had all made clear that they were displeased with the performance of Viktor Shokin, who became prosecutor general in 2015.
"Shokin was widely faulted for declining to bring prosecutions of elites' corruption, and he was even accused of hindering corruption investigations. His deputy, Vitaliy Kasko, resigned in February 2016, alleging that Shokin's office was itself corrupt."
"The International Monetary Fund warned Ukraine in February 2016 that it risked losing financial support if it did not clean up its act. The Financial Times explained in its article on the warning that then-President Petro Poroshenko was facing pressure to replace Shokin, whom the newspaper described as a 'long-time loyalist' of the president; the article continued, 'Mr. Shokin has been criticized for failing to bring to justice any of the snipers who killed dozens of protesters in central Kiev in the final days of the revolution, and for dragging his feet over investigating senior officials and businesspeople.'
"In a September 2015 speech, the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, used blunt language in criticizing Shokin, blasting 'corrupt actors within the Prosecutor General's Office' who were 'making things worse by openly and aggressively undermining reform.' Then, during a visit to Ukraine, Biden, who had long handled Ukraine issues for the Obama administration, applied public and private pressure on the government..."
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/23/politics/fact-check-trump-ukraine-hunter-biden-joe-biden/index.html
UPDATE (30 Sept., 2019) - Shokin's last act as Prosecutor General, carried out on the same day the Ukrainian parliament voted to remove him from office, had been to fire David Sakvarelidze, his anti-corruption deputy who had repeatedly called for Shokin to be fired. That's the corrupt, spiteful little worm that is Viktor Shokin.
Shokin's removal was widely praised. For example:
"The European Union has welcomed the dismissal of Ukraine’s scandal-ridden prosecutor general and called for a crackdown on corruption, even as the country’s political crisis deepened over efforts to form a new ruling coalition and appoint a new prime minister.
"Ukraine’s parliament voted overwhelmingly to fire Viktor Shokin, ridding the beleaguered prosecutor’s office of a figure who is accused of blocking major cases against allies and influential figures and stymying moves to root out graft."
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/eu-hails-sacking-of-ukraine-s-prosecutor-viktor-shokin-1.2591190
UPDATE (30 Sept., 2019) - Some very important facts: Shokin never investigated Hunter Biden, whose presence on Burisma's board was merely decorative, and wasn't investigating Burisma Holdings either. At the time of his firing, that "investigation" was long dead.
"...at the time Biden made his ultimatum, the probe into the company--Burisma Holdings, owned by Mykola Zlochevsky--had been long dormant, according to the former official, Vitaliy Kasko.
"'There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against Zlochevsky,' Kasko said in an interview last week. 'It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015.'
"Kasko’s assessment adds a wrinkle to one of the first political intrigues of the 2020 election season. It undercuts the idea that Biden, now a top Democratic presidential candidate, was seeking to sideline a prosecutor who was actively threatening a company tied to his son. Instead, it appears more consistent with Biden’s previous statements that he was pressing for the removal of a prosecutor who was failing to tackle rampant corruption: According to public reports and internal documents from the Ukrainian prosecutor's office, U.S. officials had expressed concern for more than a year about Ukrainian prosecutors’ failure to assist an international investigation of Zlochevsky.
...
"The U.S. plan to push for Shokin’s dismissal didn’t initially come from Biden, but rather filtered up from officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation. Embassy personnel had called for U.S. loan guarantees to Ukraine to be tied to broader anti-corruption efforts, including Shokin’s dismissal, this person said.
"Biden’s threat to withhold $1 billion if Ukraine didn’t crack down on corruption reportedly came in March. That same month, hundreds of Ukrainians demonstrated outside President Petro Poroshenko’s office demanding Shokin’s resignation, and he was dismissed.
"Shokin has denied any accusations of wrongdoing and declined to provide immediate comment for this article. In an interview with the Ukrainian website Strana.ua published on May 6, Shokin said he believes he was fired because of his Burisma investigation, which he said had been active at the time."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-07/timeline-in-ukraine-probe-casts-doubt-on-giuliani-s-biden-claim
UPDATE (30 Sept., 2019) - Shokin's replacement, Yuri Lutsenko, was appointed in May 2016. He, himself, had a history of corruption and had, in fact, served four years in prison for official misconduct from his days working in the Ministry of Interior. Initially, he took the promising step of dismissing Shokin's trumped up charges against the founder of the Anti-Corruption Action Centre, saying they "simply dishonor the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine."
But soon, it was business as usual again: the Prosecutor General making war on the anti-corruption forces:
https://www.newsweek.com/poroshenko-targeting-ukraines-anti-corruption-campaigners-773212
UPDATE (30 Sept., 2019) - In 2018, the Ukranian National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) bugged the office of Nazar Kholodnytskyi, the head of the Specialized Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO). Kholodnytskyi had been blocking NABU's cases and it soon became apparent why: on the wiretaps, Kholodnytskyi was, among other things, tipping off subjects of corruption investigations, informing them of raids in advance, advising them to offer false evidence, ordering his subordinates to distort evidence, and so on. NABU--no surprise--called for Kholodnytskyi's dismissal.
https://map.antac.org.ua/news/bugging-in-aquarium-5-conversations-at-kholodnytskyis-office-as-recorded-by-nabu-detectives/
In March 2018, the Prosecutor General's office prepared a notice of suspicion on Kholodnytsky for these activities. But only Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko could sign it, and he wasn't doing it.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/ukraine-s-anticorruption-fight-hits-a-brick-wall-and-the-wall-has-a-name/
In July 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, under Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, called for Kholodnytskyi to resign:
https://twitter.com/usembassykyiv/status/1022452943340167169
UPDATE (30 Sept., 2019) - In March 2019, there had still be no real action on Kholodnytskyi, who continued in his position, and Ambassador Yovanovitch called for his firing.
"The U.S. urged Ukraine to dismiss its anti-corruption prosecutor and revive efforts to tackle graft, signaling displeasure at the government’s current course from its biggest international backer.
"The U.S. embassy in Kiev, the capital, said late Tuesday that Nazar Kholodnytskyi should be fired, legislation should be passed to replace the recent removal of punishments for illegal enrichment and 31 judges whose reputations are in question should be blocked from joining the Supreme Court.
"'To ensure the integrity of anti-corruption institutions, the Special Anti-corruption Prosecutor must be replaced,' U.S. ambassador Marie Yovanovitch said in a statement. 'Those responsible for corruption should be investigated, prosecuted, and if guilty, go to jail. And in order for that to happen, all of the elements of the anti-corruption architecture must be in place and must be working effectively.'"
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-06/u-s-calls-on-ukraine-to-dismiss-its-anti-graft-prosecutor
UPDATE (30 Sept., 2019) - Over time, Ambassador Yovanovitch had become very critical of Prosecutor General Lutsenko's poor record in handling corruption. After she called for Kholodnytskyi to be fired, Kholodnytskyi called this an unacceptable foreign interference in Ukrainian affairs. Prosecutor General Lutsenko took it much further, coming forward with a remarkable claim:
"An extraordinary row has broken out between Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko and the U.S. embassy in Ukraine, with Lutsenko claiming the embassy gave him a list of people not to prosecute, and the embassy accusing Lutsenko of making the whole story up.
"Lutsenko made the claim during an interview with the Washington D.C. newspaper The Hill published on March 20.
"'Unfortunately, at my first meeting with U.S. ambassador (Marie Yovanovitch), she gave me a list of people whom we should not prosecute,' Lutsenko said. He said he had found this unacceptable.
"But according to The Hill, the State Department called Lutsenko’s claim that he had been given such a list 'an outright fabrication.'
"Lutsenko said that he assumed that the Prosecutor General’s Office hasn’t received promised aid from the United States because of his rejection of the list."
This story was picked up by Trumpanzee hack "journalist" John Solomon, a villain in this matter. Solomon published this tale in the Hill.
"The Hill published a letter provided by Lutsenko to demonstrate that the U.S. embassy interferes in the work of his office.
"In the letter, sent to the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine in April 2016, the embassy expressed concerns about the prosecution of prominent activist Vitaliy Shabunin’s Anti-Corruption Action Center for alleged misappropriation of funds that the organization received as grant support from the U.S. embassy. The embassy said they have are satisfied with how the aid was spent and were concerned that the case could be an attempt to put pressure on anti-corruption activists."
But Lutsenko hadn't thought out the details of his bullwinder very carefully:
"Lutsenko told the Hill the letter was connected to his refusal to accept Yovanovitch’s alleged 'list of untouchables.' However, when the letter was sent in April 2016, Lutsenko wasn’t yet prosecutor general, having been appointed a month later. Yovanovitch arrived in Ukraine even later that year."
In fact, Yovanovitch didn't become the ambassador until 18 Aug., 2016--four months after the letter. As noted earlier in this thread, Lutsenko, himself, shortly after assuming office, dismissed Viktor Shokin's trumped up charges against the Anti-Corruption Action Centre, saying they "simply dishonor the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine."
https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/lutsenko-claims-us-ambassador-gave-him-untouchables-list-us-embassy-denies-it.html
UPDATE (30 Sept., 2019) - The Trump State Department described Lutsenko's allegations against Yovanovitch as a "complete fabrication"--a position it maintains to this day--but despite this and the obviously false allegation, Trump had Yovanovitch recalled and fired:
https://www.rferl.org/a/u-s-ambassador-to-ukraine-openly-criticized-by-top-ukrainian-prosecutor-departing-early/29924924.html
UPDATE (30 Sept., 2019) - The reason I'm going through all of these characters and events in so much detail is because all of these corrupt, lying slugs I've been describing, the prosecutors charged with battling corruption who, instead, battle anti-corruption forces, the grifters on the take, the charlatans who peddle false stories are the very sources that right-wing media then Trump and Giuliani have used to cook up their Ukrainian conspiracy theories.
In the notes on Trump's conversation with Zelensky, Trump trashes Ambassador Yovanovitch:
"We are ready to open a new page on cooperation in relations between the United States and Ukraine. For that purpose, I just recalled our ambassador from United States and [s]he will be replaced by a very competent and very experienced ambassador who will work hard on making sure that our two nations are getting closer... The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that."
Trump is apparently referring to the corrupt Viktor Shokin when he says, "I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that's really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved."
Then later:
"I heard the prosecutor was treated very badly and he was a very fair prosecutor..."
UPDATE (30 Sept., 2019) - At the same time Lutsenko was making his false allegations regarding the ambassador, he also alleged that he'd been investigating how the "black ledger," detailing Ukrainian officials' payments to then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, was leaked to the press, suggesting this had been done in order to help Hillary Clinton's presidential bid. He also suggested Joe Biden's intervention to have Shokin removed was to quash a criminal investigation of his Biden's son.
Back in the Spring, right-wing shitbag hack "journalist" John Solomon assembled this entire macabre menagerie into a series of articles repeating and expanding their claims. Shokin, Lutsenko, Kholodnytskyi, who also joined in the party, suggesting, among other things, that the "black ledger" documenting illicit payments to Paul Manafort was fake--Solomon uncritically parroted all of them, becoming, in effect, an extension of their corruption. Robert Mackey covered this in the Intercept:
https://theintercept.com/2019/09/22/reporters-stop-helping-donald-trump-spread-lies-joe-biden-ukraine/
UPDATE (30 Sept., 2019) - These became Giuliani's "sources" as well; he met with all of them, some of them several times, and, like Solomon, uncritically repeated their allegations, which were also coming out of Trump's mouth. Under the guise of opposing "corruption," they've been acting as corruption's mouthpiece:
https://www.thehour.com/news/article/Giuliani-engaged-parade-of-Ukrainian-prosecutors-14471702.php
UPDATE (30 Sept., 2019) - Lutsenko had some sort of epiphany and withdrew his false claims about Ambasssador Yovanovitch providing him with a do-not-prosecute list shortly after making them. This was before Trump recalled Yovanovitch but Trump fired her anyway and months later, was still trashing her in his call with Zelensky:
https://www.unian.info/politics/10520715-ukraine-prosecutor-general-lutsenko-admits-u-s-ambassador-didn-t-give-him-a-do-not-prosecute-list.html
UPDATE (30 Sept., 2019) - By mid-May, Lutsenko had also walked back his claims about the Bidens.
"Ukraine’s prosecutor general said in an interview that he had no evidence of wrongdoing by U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden or his son, despite a swirl of allegations by President Donald Trump’s lawyer... '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] said if there is a tax problem, it’s not in Ukraine."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-16/ukraine-prosecutor-says-no-evidence-of-wrongdoing-by-bidens
UPDATE (30 Sept., 2019) - Trump and co. have continued repeating Lutsenko's earlier false claims. John Solomon's garbage Spring articles parroting them are still on the Hill's website without correction or any acknowledgement of this. Foreign Policy ran a very good article on this journalistic scandal:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/26/how-a-dc-news-site-amplified-dubious-ukraine-claims/
UPDATE (1 Oct., 2019) - "As Joe Biden prepared to launch his 2020 presidential bid last April, members of President Donald Trump’s inner circle began publicly pushing unsubstantiated allegations about the former vice president and Ukraine.
"The president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and Brad Parscale, his 2020 campaign manager, both blasted out links to articles on Twitter within days of each other in early April that painted Biden and his son Hunter as unethical, based on unproven charges stemming from Hunter Biden's work in Ukraine.
"Those first mentions, distributed to their combined millions of social media followers, coincided with a spring effort by the president’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to find damaging information on Biden and preceded, by a matter of days, Trump’s first phone call on April 21 with then Ukrainian President-Elect Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
"Four days later, Biden announced his run for office.
"The trickle of tweets soon became a steady stream. Over the next four months, Giuliani, Trump Jr., and other top surrogates lobbed accusations at both Bidens at least a dozen times.
"By late July, when Trump placed a second call to the Ukrainian leader explicitly asking him to investigate the unfounded claims, the president’s campaign and official super PAC — as well as the Republican National Committee and its chairwoman — had all amplified messages with unverified information about the Bidens and the Eastern European country... The president has argued his conversations with Zelenskiy were intended to eliminate corruption, but a review of Trump’s top surrogates shows a much more targeted approach when it comes to spreading harmful stories that could ultimately hurt his political opponent heading into 2020."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/trump-allies-pushed-biden-ukraine-allegations-key-moments-campaign-timeline-n1060106
UPDATE (1 Oct., 2019) - "President Trump was repeatedly warned by his own staff that the Ukraine conspiracy theory that he and his lawyer were pursuing was “completely debunked” long before the president pressed Ukraine this summer to investigate his Democratic rivals, a former top adviser said on Sunday.
"Thomas P. Bossert, who served as Mr. Trump’s first homeland security adviser, said he told the president there was no basis to the theory that Ukraine, not Russia, intervened in the 2016 election and did so on behalf of the Democrats. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Bossert said he was 'deeply disturbed' that Mr. Trump nonetheless tried to get Ukraine’s president to produce damaging information about Democrats.
"Mr. Bossert’s comments, on the ABC program 'This Week' and in a subsequent telephone interview, underscored the danger to the president as the House moves ahead with an inquiry into whether he abused his power for political gain. Other former aides to Mr. Trump said on Sunday that he refused to accept reassurances about Ukraine no matter how many times it was explained to him, instead subscribing to an unsubstantiated narrative that has now brought him to the brink of impeachment.
...
"'It is completely debunked,' Mr. Bossert said of the Ukraine theory on ABC. Speaking with George Stephanopoulos, Mr. Bossert blamed Mr. Giuliani for filling the president’s head with misinformation. 'I am deeply frustrated with what he and the legal team is doing and repeating that debunked theory to the president. It sticks in his mind when he hears it over and over again, and for clarity here, George, let me just again repeat that it has no validity.'
"He added that pressing Ukraine’s president was disturbing, but noted that it remained unproven whether Mr. Trump’s decision to withhold aid to Ukraine was tied to the demand for investigations into former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other Democrats.
"'It is a bad day and a bad week for this president and for this country if he is asking for political dirt on an opponent,' Mr. Bossert said. 'But it looks to me like the other matter that’s far from proven is whether he was doing anything to abuse his power and withhold aid in order to solicit such a thing.' On Twitter on later on Sunday, he added that he did 'not see evidence of an impeachable offense.'
...
"The first time Mr. Bossert and other aides refuted the server theory came before the inauguration when intelligence agency directors briefed him on Russia’s election interference operation. Mr. Trump may not have absorbed it because he was thrown off guard when told about a Democratic-financed dossier that included unproven allegations about his ties to Russia.
"Shortly before Valentine’s Day in 2017, Mr. Bossert brought in Mike Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, to brief Mr. Trump not only on the summary about the conclusion that it was Russia, but with the technical mechanics that led to the conclusion. At that point, Trump appeared to register that it was Russia. But periodically after that, he would say at rallies that he wondered about the server. Mr. Bossert would not re-educate him each time.
"Another former senior official said it was a constant struggle to convince Mr. Trump that Russia, not Ukraine, had interfered in the election. The president would accept it after speaking with his more grounded aides, this official said, but then revert to believing it was a plot by Democrats or Ukrainians or others after speaking with associates outside the administration like Mr. Giuliani."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/29/us/politics/tom-bossert-trump-ukraine.html
UPDATE (1 Oct., 2019) - Republican legislators who, this weekend, appeared in the press to defend Trump have proven themselves unfamiliar with even the most basic facts regarding the inquiry.
On Sunday, "Gym" Jordan, the top Republican on the House Oversight and Reform committee, appeared was interviewed for Jake Tapper on CNN and didn't know there was no active Ukrainian investigation of Hunter Biden's employer when the Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin was fired after Joe Biden's intervention. He also didn't know that the whistleblower's sources were people with firsthand knowledge and insisted it could just be a case of a guy told a guy told a guy. Then, he asserted that one had to have firsthand knowledge to be a whistleblower, which is also false. Corrected on that point, he retreated and said that "you don't [have to have firsthand knowledge] now because they changed the form. You used to." Which was also false.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/29/politics/jim-jordan-ukraine-fact-check-jake-tapper-cnntv/index.html
UPDATE (1 Oct., 2019) - Then House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy appeared on 60 MINUTES. When Scott Pelley asked him about Trump requesting "a favor" from Zelensky in the midst of a discussion of the Ukraine's need for military hardware, McCarthy blanked and accused Pelley of adding a word to the exchange (probably "though," which is damning).
In an MSNBC op-ed, Steve Benen suggests--probably correctly--that this is the pernicious influence of far-right media:
"Too often, GOP officials rely exclusively on conservative media, which filters out accurate information Republicans really ought to know. Then, when the cocoon is punctured, and folks like McCarthy are exposed to details the rest of us already know, they’re incredulous."
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trying-defend-trump-gop-leader-caught-guard-reality
UPDATE (1 Oct., 2019) - Why was Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine, recalled earlier this year? She was a longtime diplomat with plenty of experience. Her criticism of then-Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko had prompted Lutsenko to publicly claim she hindered his work and even provided him, at one point, with a "do not prosecute" list. As already covered, his story was obviously nonsense--at the time he claims this happened, he wasn't the Prosecutor General and Yovanovitch wasn't the ambassador until months later--and Lutsenko retraced his allegations shortly after making them. Still, Trump recalled Yovanovitch.
This left the U.S. without an ambassador to the Ukraine. Former ambassador William Taylor Jr. stepped in a month after Yovanovitch's recall and now runs the embassy as the chargé d'affaires, but Trump hasn't replaced Yovanovitch. Trump's demented mouthpiece Rudy Giluliani ( #BigHeroGhouliani ) immediately jumped into the vacuum this created, and this, put together with some news reports, make for some pretty dark inferences:
"...it was only because elements of the Ukrainian government wanted her to ease up on pressing for investigations into corruption--and expected her to do so because they perceived Trump would care less about the issue--that they began a campaign against her, said the current and former officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. That campaign gained steam with the arrival on the scene of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
"At first, the officials said, [Sec. of State Mike] Pompeo resisted the demands for her recall and argued she should complete her tour in Kyiv. Pompeo 'was opposed to her early removal,' one of the current officials said. However, when it became clear that opposition to her was not receding, Pompeo arranged for 'a soft landing' for her in Washington, according to the official.
...
"The former and current officials said she was likely dismayed by the attention on her, which included a letter from Rep. Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican who lost his bid for reelection in November, to Pompeo seeking her dismissal because he had 'notice of concrete evidence' that she had 'spoken privately and repeatedly about her disdain for the current Administration.'
"A former official said he knew of no such evidence and said it would have been unlikely for the diplomat to disparage any administration. Sessions did not respond to questions about the letter forwarded to him through a spokeswoman.
"Sessions was among GOP politicians and a Trump-affiliated political action committee who received campaign donations in 2018 from Soviet-born business partners, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. The Texas congressman received $5,400 of the nearly $500,000 given by the men, and met with one of them. They have been working with Giuliani on his investigation of the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, who served on the board of an energy company in Ukraine.
"Ukrainian media have reported that the business partners arranged a January meeting in New York between Giuliani and Ukraine’s former prosecutor general, Yuri Lutsenko.
"Over the next several months, a series of articles appeared criticizing the ambassador. Donald Trump Jr. referred to her and other ambassadors as 'jokers' on Twitter and tweeted a link to one piece critical of her. Lutsenko then gave an interview alleging that Yovanovitch, who had been critical of the prosecutor in the past, had given him a 'do not prosecute' list of people who should not be pursued, according to the whistleblower complaint. He publicly retracted that claim on April 17.
"But the ambassador would be out of her position by the end of the next month."
https://www.denverpost.com/2019/09/27/us-ambassador-yovanovitch-ukraine-whistleblower-complaint/
UPDATE (2 Oct., 2019) - It hasn't gotten much attention but right-wing South Florida "businessmen" Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman may be very important pieces of this puzzle. The two do business in the Ukraine. Rudi Giuliani has described them as his clients. Early this year, they were the men who began setting up #BigHeroGhouliani with the various corrupt Ukrainians who form the basis of Giulaini's--and Trump's--insane claims regarding the Ukraine. They are big contributors to Republican candidates and orgs, which they've provided with hundreds of millions of dollars. Some bullet-points:
--In 2018, Parnas and Furman poinied up a wad of cash to then-Texas cognressman Pete Sessions. Back in July, long before the impeachment saga, Buzzfeed reported that, in May, 2018, "the pair had met with one of the most powerful Texas House members at the time on Capitol Hill, Republican Pete Sessions, and ripped into Yovanovitch. Parnas said he told Sessions that she was disloyal to Trump and had been 'bad-mouthing our president about getting impeached.'
"On the same date that Parnas posted a Facebook photo of the meeting, Sessions fired off a letter to Pompeo, saying he should consider firing her. 'I have received notice from close companions that Ambassador Yovanovitch has spoken privately and repeatedly about her disdain for the current administration,' he wrote."
--In January, Parnas and Furman--who, again, Giuliani has described as his clients--arranged for Giuliani to meet with, among others, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko.
--In April, Lutsenko publicly accused Amabassador Yovanovitch, who had been very critical of Lutsenko's lax prosecution of corrution, of interfering in his work and of providing him with a "do not prosecute" list of figures the Obama administration didn't want him to touch.
--Lutsenko retracted this ludicrous claim shortly after that but in May, Yovanovitch was recalled by the Trump administration. She's the one Trump can be seen badmouthing in the notes on his conversation with Ukrainian President Zelensky.
This left the U.S. without an ambassador in the Ukraine and Trump has left the job unfilled, which created a vacuum, leaving the Ukrainians without a clear channel to understand what the administration wanted of them. Rudy Giuliani jumped into that vacuum. It's speculation, obviously, but that sequence of events can't help but make one wonder if this was done on purpose.
Then, there's the nature of Parnas and Furman: they're criminals. Involved in every kind of con imaginable. The Miami Herald reports on a movie deal wherein they screwed investors out of over half a million dollars. And:
"Parnas has been sued over everything from a small-claims debt owed to a furniture maker in Delray Beach to unpaid legal bills to a $100,000 loan issued to a natural gas firm he runs with Fruman. The plaintiff in the latter case also alleged that Parnas and Fruman “boasted” about their close relationships with major figures in the GOP.
"In 2014, Parnas and his wife were evicted from a $15,000-per-month, six-bedroom house in Boca Raton, court records show. Separately, his business, Fraud Guarantee, was ordered to pay more than $26,000 to its landlord. His career as a securities broker saw him work for three brokerages that were expelled from the industry by regulators. In Florida, he has dabbled in everything from stocks to real estate to consumer electronics to hyperbaric chambers--machines for treating decompression sickness, a hazard of scuba diving--corporate records show.
"Parnas says he’s done nothing wrong in business or politics and the information he’s gathered from Ukraine is of vital national importance... At the same time he and Fruman have faced lawsuits over unpaid debts, the two men and their natural gas company, Global Energy Producers, have donated more than $400,000 to Republican candidates and committees supporting them in federal elections.
Fruman runs an import/export business and a boutique hotel in Odessa, Ukraine, according to a profile by Buzzfeed. He also invested in a milk-canning plant in Ukraine that went bankrupt after going nearly $25 million in debt... The two South Florida residents--Parnas lives in Boca Raton, Fruman owns property in Sunny Isles Beach--have had discussions both with officials in Ukraine and the United States, raising questions about whether they should register as foreign agents. Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer and adviser, has described the two men as legal clients and been photographed with them in the company of the president. Such efforts to retrieve dirt from Ukraine have been blessed by President Trump, Giuliani says, and coordinated with the State Department."
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article235626327.html
UPDATE (2 Oct., 2019) - Back in July, Buzzfeed reported, among other things, that Parnas and Fruman had "waged a remarkable back-channel campaign to discredit the president’s rivals and undermine the special counsel’s inquiry into Russian meddling in US elections." This took place in both the Ukraine and the U.S., where, "staying at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC," they were "meeting with key members of Congress as they joined in a successful push that led to the removal of the ambassador to Ukraine after she angered their allies in Kiev."
And:
"Their work proved influential. Prosecutors in Kiev announced in March that they would investigate the officials accused of trying to steer the election in Clinton’s favor — a month after meeting with Parnas, Fruman, and Giuliani--and Trump applauded the plan in an interview with Fox News, calling the allegations 'big' and 'incredible.' The next month, Attorney General William Barr announced he had appointed a federal prosecutor to lead a probe into the origins of the Mueller investigation."
It has never been clear in the reporting when and how these two grifters hooked up with Rudy Giuliani but in an interview, Parnas claimed Ukrainian officials had been contacting him because "they knew I was friends with the mayor," suggesting, if true, that the association with #BigHeroGhouliani extended at least as far back as some time in 2018. In "late 2018," the two organized a Skype call between disgraced former Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin and Giuliani, who has falsely claimed he was carrying out an investigation of Burismal Holdings, Hunter Biden's employer, when Joe Biden intervened to have him fired.
In a prescient passage, Kenneth McCallion, "a former federal prosecutor who once represented Ukraine’s former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko" told Buzzfeed 'Trump has either authorized Giuliani to engage in private diplomacy and deal-making or, even worse, remains silent while Giuliani and his dodgy band of soldiers of fortune engage in activities that severely undermine US credibility and are contrary to fundamental US interests."
The two launched an energy company in the Ukraine and "In one transaction in 2018, more than $1 million was wired to a bank account belonging to Parnas from the client trust account of a Florida lawyer specializing in real estate and foreign investments. Parnas and Fruman then redirected $325,000 to a Trump-supporting super PAC — without declaring the original source of the funds, records and interviews show.
"The money is now the target of a complaint before the Federal Election Commission (FEC) by a nonprofit watchdog group."
Buzzfeed notes that "The first public glimpse of Parnas and Fruman’s work emerged in May of this year, when Giuliani told the New York Times that Parnas had helped arrange a trip for him to Ukraine, where he hoped to meet with the newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, about matters that could help Trump. Critics said that amounted to evidence of foreign meddling in US elections, and Giuliani quickly announced that the meeting was off."
And:
"They had shared a breakfast last year [in May 2018] with Donald Trump Jr. and Tommy Hicks Jr., who is currently cochair of the Republican National Committee, at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills as they collectively poured $576,500 into GOP campaigns--and dined with the president himself in Washington."
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mikesallah/rudy-giuliani-ukraine-trump-parnas-fruman
UPDATE (2 Oct., 2019) - The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) worked with Buzzzfeed on that reporting. It details:
"Parnas and Fruman’s work with Giuliani has largely centered on efforts to connect the president’s personal attorney with current and former senior Ukrainian prosecutors believed to hold information harmful to Trump’s rivals.
"In late 2018, Parnas and Fruman organized a Skype call between Giuliani and Viktor Shokin, who served as Ukraine’s prosecutor general until he was dismissed by parliament in 2016 amid allegations he was blocking anti-corruption efforts.
"Parnas and Giuliani visited the French Senate building, where Giuliani attended a meeting that included Nazar Kholodnitsky, the head of Ukraine’s Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, according to social media posts and interviews. (Kholodnitsky has faced calls to step down after wiretaps in his office last year allegedly caught him interfering in corruption cases.)
"By the new year, Parnas said, he and Fruman had also connected Giuliani with Shokin’s replacement as top prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko. The Ukrainian official and Giuliani met in New York in January and again in Warsaw the following month... Shortly after their February meeting in Poland, both Lutsenko and Giuliani began airing a series of allegations in the U.S. media.
"In March and April, the online publication The Hill published a series of opinion pieces largely based on an interview with Lutsenko. The articles relayed the allegations about the Bidens, and went further.
"Lutsenko also claimed that officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv had worked with Ukrainian law enforcement to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election by coordinating the disclosure of the so-called 'black ledger,' a document that appeared to detail millions of dollars in secret payments from Ukraine’s former ruling party to Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign manager. Some of those payments were later verified to be real.
"The revelation of the black ledger in 2016 contributed to Manafort’s resignation from the Trump campaign, and helped lead to his prosecution and conviction by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Since then, prominent Trump supporters have used allegations that the ledger’s disclosure was motivated by anti-Trump bias to cast doubt on the origins of Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
"Lutsenko also told The Hill that Yovanovitch, who was still the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, had handed him a 'do not prosecute' list at their first meeting. The Hill characterized the claim as evidence that Yovanovitch was favoring Democrats in the middle of a presidential election because the purported list contained the names of supposed Democrat allies in Ukraine’s parliament and civil society groups."
The Trump State Department called that allegation of a "do not prosecute" list "an outright fabrication." The dates cited by Lutsenko proved it wasn't true--what he was describing happened before he had been Prosecutor General and months before Yovanovitch had been appointed ambassador--and Lutsenko retracted the claim shortly after making it.
"Still, the allegations caught like wildfire in U.S. conservative media, and were amplified by Giuliani in a series of interviews with cable news and newspapers.
"Trump called claims that Ukrainian officials had helped Clinton’s candidacy 'big' and 'incredible' in an April interview with Fox News, and said that he would leave it to Attorney General William Barr to decide whether to look into them. Barr announced a probe into the origins of the Mueller investigation--in which Manafort’s Ukrainian work became a focus--the following month."
OCCRP also go into the shady history of Parnas and Fruman--their long history of unpaid debts, fraud, lawsuits and rulings against them. It goes into details about Fruman's links to orgnaized crime in the Ukraine and Parnas/Fruman's extensive donations to Republican candidates and causes in 2018--hundreds of thousands of dollars from guys who are chronically sued for failing to pay massive debts. Where, OCCRP asks, is that money coming from?
"Amid their donation spree, Parnas and Fruman took part in an impressive series of meetings with senior Republicans.
"On or about May 1, 2018, while staying at the Trump International Hotel in the U.S. capital, both men had dinner with the president in a meeting documented by Parnas in a now-deleted Facebook post.
"Later that month, the two men had a 'power breakfast' in Beverly Hills with Donald Trump Jr. and Tommy Hicks Jr., who has since become co-chair of the Republican National Committee, according to a now-deleted Facebook post by Parnas. At the time, Hicks was head of America First Action, which had received the men’s $325,000 donation in the same month.
"Parnas also had meetings in May on Capitol Hill with several Republican congressmen.
"Among them was Sessions, the Texas Republican, according to a now-deleted May 9 Facebook post by Parnas. In a meeting also attended by Fruman, the two men urged the dismissal of the United States’ ambassador in Kyiv, Marie Yovanovitch.
"On the same day that Parnas posted pictures of the meeting, Sessions wrote a private letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calling for Yovanovitch’s dismissal.
"Parnas said he and Fruman told Sessions that Yovanovitch was disloyal to the president and questioned whether she should serve. 'She was bad-mouthing our president about getting impeached,' said Parnas."
https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/meet-the-florida-duo-helping-giuliani-dig-dirt-for-trump-in-ukraine
UPDATE (2 Oct., 2019) - The impeachment inquiry has raised congressional investigation of Trump to a new level and it remains to be seen whether the administration is going to comply with its legal obligations. Back in the Spring, when all of this was percolating, Trump declared total resistance to congressional oversight authority, and he has spent most of this year quietly precipitating a constitutional crisis over this, refusing to send documents, administration figures under subpoena refusing to testify on his orders, etc. I recently assembled a long Twitter thread about this. With an impeachment inquiry now underway, continuing this policy now constitutes grounds for an article of impeachment. It will be interesting to see this unfold. The relevant portion of the Twitter thread:
https://twitter.com/jriddlecult/status/1176840489699614720
UPDATE (2 Oct., 2019) - The White House tried to bury the whisteblower complaint. The whistleblower initially took his concerns to CIA General Counsel Courtney Elwood. Elwood perhaps unwisely took it to the White House. This apparently spooked the whistleblower, who, at that point, made his formal complaint with the intelligence community Inspector General Michael Atkinson. Atkinson looked into it and found it both credible and meeting the "urgent concern" requirement that triggers transmittal of the complaint to congress. He submitted his report to acting DNI Joseph Maguire on 26 Aug. Maguire was supposed to review the complaint then pass it on to the House and Senate Intelligence committees. Instead, he took the complaint, which identifies Attorney General William Barr as having engaged in possible misconduct, to the Department of Justice--run by William Barr. Unsurprisingly, the Justice Department concluded the complaint didn't have to be turned over to congress. Stunningly, Justice also argued that the dirt Trump was trying to get the Ukrainians to dig wasn't a thing of value! This would have probably been the end of the line, except Atkinson notified the intelligence committees of the existence of the complaint on 9 Sept. Had he not done so, it's likely the White House would have buried the whole matter and the public would have never known the complaint existed.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/justice-department-white-house-whistleblower-complaint-cia
UPDATE (2 Oct., 2019) - "On Monday, President Donald Trump tweeted a conspiracy theory suggesting the rules for whistleblowing had recently changed in order to accommodate the recent whistleblower complaint against him; specifically, so that someone with secondhand knowledge could now submit these complaints... Monday's tweet was at least Trump's second reference to the theory, which apparently was initially propagated by the right-wing website The Federalist on September 27.
"The article claims that 'between May 2018 and August 2019, the intelligence community secretly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings.'"
Unsurprisingly, "This is false. The Federalist reading of the form is inaccurate and although the submission form that whistleblowers from the intelligence community fill out was revised in August 2019, the revision did not change the rules on who can submit a whistleblower complaint... In a statement issued late Monday afternoon, the inspector general of the intelligence community (ICIG) said that the form submitted by the whistleblower on August 12, 2019, was the same one the ICIG has had in place since May 24, 2018. The statement reiterated the fact that having firsthand knowledge of the event has never been required in order to submit a whistleblower complaint. 'Although the form requests information about whether the Complainant possesses first-hand knowledge about the matter about which he or she is lodging the complaint, there is no such requirement set forth in the statute.'
"'In fact," the ICIG's statement continues, "by law the Complainant...need not possess first-hand information in order to file a complaint or information with respect to an urgent concern. The ICIG cannot add conditions to the filing of an urgent concern that do not exist in law.'"
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/30/politics/donald-trump-inspector-general-whistleblower-complaint-conspiracy-fact-check/index.html
UPDATE (3 Oct., 2019) - Rudy Giuliani's involvement with Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, corrupt Florida "businessmen" and big Republican donors, is fairly central to the present impeachment inquiry. Giuliani describes them as his clients but how and when did he become involved with them? What is known is that Parnas and Fruman, who operate in the Ukraine, were the first to put Giuliani in touch with the corrupt former Ukrainian officials who formed the basis of his insane Ukrainian conspiracies regarding Hunter Biden and all the rest.
On 30 Sept., CNN reported that
"Giuliani's role in Ukraine can be traced back to November 2018, when he was contacted by someone he describes as a 'well-known investigator' who connected him with a Ukrainian-American businessman in Florida named Lev Parnas.
"Through Parnas, who did not respond to CNN's request for comment, Giuliani began speaking with multiple Ukrainian nationals about information about two subjects of interest to his client, President Trump.
"The first regarded what Giuliani has described as collusion between Democrats and Ukraine during the 2016 election. The second is the claim that Vice President Biden had pressured Ukraine to halt an investigation connected to his own son...."
Back in July, long before the current impeachment inquiry, Buzzfeed reported that Parnas and Fruman carried out a smear campaign against Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine and an outspoken critic of Ukrainian government corruption and the failure of the then-current regime to investigate it. They knew Yuriy Lutskenko, then Ukraine's Prosecutor General, and, in fact, had hooked up Lutsenko with Giuliani in January. After multiple Parnas/Fruman-arranged meetings with Giuliani, Lutsenko publicly claimed the ambassador had given him a "do nor prosecute" list of Ukrainians considered allies of the Obama administration. Lutsenko recanted that false accusation within days but Yovanovitch was recalled anyway, not only removing an outspoken Lutsenko critic but leaving the Ukraine without a clear line to the U.S., just when the new Zelensky government was coming into office. #BigHeroGhouliani then jumped in to fill that vaccum, and that sequence of events and associations is suspicious as hell.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/29/politics/giuliani-journey-trump-impeachment-ukraine-phone-call/index.html
UPDATE (4 Oct., 2019) - Just when it seemed as if the sources #BigHeroGhouliani was using to peddle his conspiracies re:the Ukraine--various corrupt former officials, criminials, con-men--couldn't get any worse, well...
"In his quest to rewrite the history of the 2016 election, President Trump’s personal attorney has turned to an unusual source of information: Trump’s imprisoned former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
"Rudolph W. Giuliani in recent months has consulted several times with Manafort through the federal prisoner’s lawyer in pursuit of information about a disputed ledger that would bolster his theory that the real story of 2016 is not Russian interference to elect Trump, but Ukrainian efforts to support Hillary Clinton... Giuliani joined Trump’s legal team in April 2018 to help defend the president against special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe, and the former mayor said he launched his own investigation into Ukraine late last year, which led him to consult with Manafort... Giuliani said his consultation with Manafort centered on trying to ascertain the veracity of a secret black ledger obtained by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, which the New York Times revealed in an August 2016 story. The Times said the ledger recorded $12.7 million in cash payments from Yanukovych’s political party to Manafort. The revelation led Manafort to resign from the campaign. Giuliani’s narrative recasts Ukrainian accusations in 2016 against Manafort and efforts by Democratic operatives to gather research on Manafort after he took a leading role in Trump’s campaign as a conspiracy involving both Ukrainian and American officials to swing the election for Clinton... Giuliani said he needed to consult with Manafort through the latter’s lawyer this spring to ask whether a black ledger ever existed.
"'I said, "Was there really a black book? If there wasn’t, I really need to know. Please tell him I’ve got to know,"' Giuliani recalled asking Manafort’s lawyer. 'He came back and said there wasn’t a black book.'"
Well, that settles THAT, doesn't it?
"After a jury convicted Manafort of eight felonies, the former Trump campaign chairman pleaded guilty in Washington to avoid a second trial. As part of his plea, Manafort acknowledged that he made more than $60 million in Ukraine, laundering more than $30 million of it through foreign companies and bank accounts to hide it from the IRS and cheating the government out of $15 million in taxes. He also agreed that he had lobbied in the United States on behalf of Ukrainian officials without registering and that he conspired to tamper with witnesses in his case."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/giuliani-consulted-on-ukraine-with-imprisoned-paul-manafort-via-a-lawyer/2019/10/02/7a6dc542-e486-11e9-b7da-053c79b03db8_story.html
UPDATE (4 Oct., 2019) - The key element of the Trump / #BigHeroGhouliani conspracy re:the Bidens was that Biden intervened to have the then-Urkanian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin fired for investigating the company which employed Hunter Biden. In reality, Shokin had refused to conduct any such investigation and everyone from the European allies to the IMF to the Ukraine's anti-corruption activists wanted Shokin gone for his own corruption and his refusal to prosecute same. CNN has just put some meat on the bones of something else I've pointed out: Republicans also supported Shokin's ouster, including some of those now pretending as if the Biden/Ukraine conspiracy has any substance.
"A newly unearthed letter from 2016 shows that Republican senators pushed for reforms to Ukraine's prosecutor general's office and judiciary, echoing calls then-Vice President Joe Biden made at the time.
"CNN's KFile found a February 2016 bipartisan letter signed by several Republican senators that urged then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to 'press ahead with urgent reforms to the Prosecutor General's office and judiciary.'
"The letter shows that addressing corruption in Ukraine's Prosecutor General's office had bipartisan support in the US and further undercuts a baseless attack made by President Donald Trump and his allies that Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire then Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin to stop investigations into a Ukrainian natural gas company that his son, Hunter Biden, sat on the board of. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Joe or Hunter Biden... The 2016 letter, sent by members of the Senate Ukraine Caucus, was signed by Republican Sens. Rob Portman, Mark Kirk and Ron Johnson, as well as Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin, Jeanne Shaheen, Chris Murphy, Sherrod Brown, and Richard Blumenthal and focused on longstanding issues of corruption in Ukraine and urged reforms of the government.
"'Succeeding in these reforms will show Russian President Vladimir Putin that an independent, transparent and democratic Ukraine can and will succeed,' the letter reads. 'It also offers a stark alternative to the authoritarianism and oligarchic cronyism prevalent in Russia. As such, we respectfully ask that you address the serious concerns raised by Minister Abromavi?ius. We similarly urge you to press ahead with urgent reforms to the Prosecutor General's Office and judiciary. The unanimous adoption by the Cabinet of Ministers of the Basic Principles and Action Plan is a good step.'
"Kirk is no longer in Congress. But Johnson signed onto a letter with Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley last week to Attorney General Bill Barr asking him to investigate, in part, allegations surrounding Biden and Ukraine. Johnson's office did not respond to a request for comment. Portman's office did not comment.
"Ukraine's legislature voted to fire Shokin in March 2016, a month after the letter was sent.
"The letter was posted on the website of Republican Sen. Rob Portman, who in a tweet the same day expressed US support for anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine."
And that ain't all of it:
"A CNN KFile review of hearings in the House and Senate at the time also found bi-partisan concern for corruption in Ukraine from Republican members of Congress and praise for Biden's efforts from former members of George W. Bush's administration and an Obama administration official who is now a nominee for an ambassadorship in the Trump administration."
It goes through a pair of hearings in whic this sentiment was expressed. In one in July 2016, after Shokin was fired, Alina Romanowski, then a State Department official and now Trump's nominee to be the ambassador to Kuwait, praised Shokin's firing.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/03/politics/gop-senators-echoed-biden-on-ukraine-reforms-kfile/index.html
UPDATE (4 Oct., 2019) - The former U.S. special envoy for Ukraine told House investigators on Thursday that he warned President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, that Giuliani was receiving untrustworthy information from Ukrainian political figures about former vice president Joe Biden and his son, according to two people familiar with his testimony.
Kurt Volker, the unpaid U.S. special envoy to the Ukraine, helped arrange a meeting, in Madrid, between Rudy Giuliani and a representative of the Zelensky government. Today, he testified for hours to a closed-door congressional hearing. The Washington Post reports that Volker "tried to caution Guiliani that his sources, including Ukraine’s former top prosecutor, were unreliable and that he should be careful about putting faith in the prosecutor’s theories, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door meeting..."
Trump withheld a significant military aid package congress had appropriated to the Ukraine. The whistleblower suggests thiw was to try to pressure the Ukrainian government into digging his political dirt. As covered elsewhere in this thread, Trump officials reportedly had no idea why Trump was suspending the aid. Volker said he didn't know either.
"Volker said Thursday that he was never given an explanation about the aid suspension, which analysts called striking."
"Volker acknowledged, these people said, that the Trump administration had extended an invitation to Zelensky shortly after his election in the spring and that it was later withdrawn. Volker told House investigators that Trump’s delay in meeting Zelensky and the decision to halt military aid deeply concerned Ukrainian officials, who view Washington as a critical ally against Russia, the people familiar with his testimony said... Volker, [Democrats present at the hearing] said, made clear that the Ukrainians were confused and upset by the administration’s decisions to delay the diplomatic visit and stall military aid--and that they did not know how to handle the situation."
Some people seemed to get what was going on:
"In advance of his appearance Thursday, Volker had turned over a number of documents to congressional staffers including chains of text messages with Giuliani and other State Department officials, said people familiar with the documents. On Thursday, Fox News and ABC News each obtained text messages appearing to show a top U.S. diplomat to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, expressing concern that the Trump administration was trying to carry out a quid pro quo. 'I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,' read the message. It’s unclear when the exchange took place.
"The group text included Volker and the U.S. ambassador to the E.U. Gordon Sondland, who denied that a quid pro quo was in the works, according to Fox News and ABC News."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/this-is-when-the-inquiry-gets-real-former-us-special-envoy-to-ukraine-testifies-in-impeachment-probe-today/2019/10/03/51365c1b-5a01-4e44-872a-299b67949a5e_story.html
UPDATE (5 Oct., 2019) - When Kurt Volker, the unpaid U.S. envoy to the Ukraine, testified in a closed-session congressional hearing yesterday, he brought with him text exchanges which, among other things, detail the heat Trump was putting on the Ukraine to dig his political dirt. Trump, in fact, was conditioning a Washington meeting with Ukrainian President Zelensky on Z's opening an investigation. In a text with Andrey Yermak, a key adviser to Z, on the moring of 25 July--the same day Trump would call Z--Volker wrote:
"Heard from the White House--assuming President Z convinces trump he will investigate/'get to the bottom of what happened' in 2016, we will nail down date for visit to Washington."
After Trump's call, Volker and Yermak continued texting about Zelensky making a public statement on the subject before meeting Trump. In another text exchange with Volker, Yermak wrote that "Once we have a date [for the Zelensky visit to D.C.], will call for a press briefing, announcing upcoming visit and outlining vision for the US-UKRAINE relationship, including among other things Burisma and election meddling in investigations."
The Ukrainians were agreeing to hold up their end of the quid pro quo.
"A source familiar with the matter tells CNN that the Ukrainian government wrote the initial draft of a statement for public release, committing to pursue investigations of corruption."
The problem? The draft was a general statement about Zelensky being committed to cleaning up corruption, whereas Trump and Giuliani specifically wanted mention of Burisma Holdings (Hunter Biden's employer) and the 2016 election.
CNN:
"The statement was shared with Volker and Gordon Sondland, the U.S. Ambassador to the EU, who then shared it with Giuliani, according to the source. Giuliani told Volker that it did not go far enough and suggested inserting references to pursuing probes of Burisma and the 2016 election, although it did not mention the Bidens. Burisma is the Ukrainian company that hired Hunter Biden to be on its board.
"Volker and Sondland then exchanged text messages about the draft, which Volker said he would share with an adviser to Zelensky. The Ukrainians told Volker they were not comfortable with the suggested statement, and the matter was ultimately dropped while a meeting between Zelensky and Trump continued to be pursued, the source said.
"The source explained the context of the statement about the investigation after the discussion was included in the text messages provided to Congress ahead of Volker's testimony."
Giuliani denied having ever even seen a draft of this statement.
As noted in a post yesterday, what Trump was doing wasn't lost on at least some of his people:
"Volker testified to the House committees Thursday that he had urged the Ukrainians not to interfere in US politics, and that the Ukrainians were concerned about the meeting being put on hold, according to two sources familiar with the testimony.
"In August, it was publicly revealed that the Trump administration was holding up foreign aid to Ukraine, although the whistleblower complaint had not yet been made public.
"Behind the scenes, concerns were being raised by a senior US diplomat in Ukraine, Bill Taylor, that the aid had been held up.
"'Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?' Taylor texted Sondland on September 1.
"'Call me,' Sondland responded. The context of Taylor's text message is not clear from the messages released by the committee.
"A week later, Taylor was even more concerned, texting Sondland: 'As I said on the phone, I think it's crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.'
"Sondland responded, 'Bill, I believe you are incorrect about President Trump's intentions. The President has been crystal clear no quid pro quo's of any kind. The President is trying to evaluate whether Ukraine is truly going to adopt the transparency and reforms that President Zelensky promised during his campaign.'
"Sondland then suggested that if Taylor had additional concerns, he should reach out to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's assistant."
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/03/politics/us-envoys-trump-ukraine-investigate/index.html
UPDATE (5 Oct., 2019) - "On Aug. 13--coincidentally the day after the whistleblower complaint was filed--[Kurt] Volker sent [U.S. Ambassador to the EU Gordon] Sondland what appears to be draft language to include in the statement.
"'Special attention should be paid to the problem of interference in the political processes of the United States especially with the alleged involvement of some Ukrainian politicians,' the text read--an additional reference to the release of information implicating then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort in illegal payments in August 2016.
"'I want to declare that this is unacceptable,' Volker wrote, presumably speaking as though he’s Zelensky. 'We intend to initiate and complete a transparent and unbiased investigation of all available facts and episodes, including those involving Burisma and the 2016 U.S. elections, which in turn will prevent the recurrence of this problem in the future.'
"'Perfect,' Sondland replied.
"Four days later, Sondland asked whether they still want Burisma and the 2016 elements in the statement.
"'That’s the clear message so far,' Volker replied."
Later:
"Early the next morning [9 Sept.], Taylor again raised his concerns with Sondland.
"'The message to the Ukrainians (and Russians) we send with the decision on security assistance is key,' he said. 'With the hold [on the assistance], we have already shaken their faith in us. Thus my nightmare scenario.'
[Volker had outlined his "nightmare scenario" the day before: “The nightmare is they give the interview and don’t get the security assistance. The Russians love it. (And I quit.)”]
"Sondland replied, saying that he “believe[s] we have identified the best pathway forward.”
"'As I said on the phone,' Taylor replied, apparently referring to the failed three-way call on Sept. 8, 'I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.'"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/04/three-deeply-problematic-aspects-newly-released-text-messages-centered-ukraine-scandal/
UPDATE (5 Oct., 2019) - The strategy undertaken by Trump and his supporters is Triple D--deny, distract, deflect. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that the whistleblower had contacted a staffer for the House Intelligence committee before making his formal complaint to the IC Inspector General. The staffer advised the whistleblower to get a laywer and take the matter to the relevant Inspector General, which was done. The Times noted that the staffer "followed procedure" here. But Trump then told a press conference:
"“I think that it’s a scandal that he [Intel committee chairman Adam Schiff] knew before. I’d go a step further--I think he probably helped write it [the whistleblower complaint]."
And thus was born the latest Triple D conspiracy, which has been all over right-wing media, the notion that Schiff was behind the whistleblower complaint all along and probably even wrote it!
This is completely made-up--it doesn't even pretend to be based on any reporting--but Media Matters compiled a depressingly extensive list of rightist commentators who have very aggressively repeated and amplified variants on it.
Meanwhile, in the real world...
"According to Susan Hennessey, Lawfare executive editor and Brookings Institution senior fellow, 'This is literally how the process is supposed to work. Everyone did what they were supposed to do.' NBC News correspondent Ken Dilanian wrote that right-wing media’s spin is 'deeply misleading,' explaining, 'Intel officers complain to the oversight committee two or three times a month. The staff tells them what this person was told: Get a lawyer, file a formal complaint with the inspector general.' And Olivia Gazis, CBS News’ intelligence and national security reporter, tweeted that spokespeople for both Sens. Richard Burr (R-NC) and Mark Warner (D-VA) told her 'that it would be ***standard practice*** for intel committee to tell a potential whistleblower to hire counsel and file a complaint with an agency IG or the [intelligence community] IG.' Gazis emphasized that this assertion is bipartisan, writing, 'Both parties say this.'"
https://www.mediamatters.org/trump-impeachment-inquiry/right-wing-media-falsely-accuse-rep-adam-schiff-colluding-whistleblower
UPDATE (5 Oct., 2019) - Why was Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine, recalled back in May? It may very well be a central question in the impeachment inquiry. Here are some things we know:
1) Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman are con-men with a long history of dirty dealings. They're also massive donors to Republican candidates and causes. In 2018, they set up shop in Trump's D.C. hotel and started a campaign to, in part, smear Yovanovitch, who had been critical of the then-current Ukrainian regime's failure to pursue public corruption cases.
2) Among those they met was Texas Republican Rep. Pete Sessions. The same day they met him, Sessions fired off a letter to Sec. of State Mike Pompeo that claimed sources had told him Yovanovitch had been bad-mouthing Trump. Parnas/Fruman then gifted Sessions' reelection campaign with a bundle of money (Sessions went on to lose though).
3) Since at least November, Parnas/Fruman have been working with Rudy Giuliani, who has described them as his clients. Parnas has described Giuliani as a friend. It was Parnas/Fruman who first began, in December, putting #BigHeroGhouliani in touch with the corrupt Ukrainian officials, criminals, etc. that formed the basis of Giuliani's subsequent conspiracy claims.
4) One of those crooked officals was then-Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko. Parnas/Fruman hooked up Giuliani and Lutsenko in January, and the men met two more times in the coming days.
5) In March 2019, there had still be no action taken against Nazar Kholodnytskyi, an anti-corruption official who, early in 2018, was caught on wiretaps telling criminal suspects how to mislead investigators, to fake evidence, tipping them off to upcoming searches, etc. This had led to a major scandal and in July, the ambassador called for Kholodnytski to resign. In March 2019, there had still be no real action on the matter. Over a year after the wiretaps, Kholodnytski was still sitting in that job, and Ambassador Yovanovitch demanded he be fired.
6) In April, Lutsenko, who, again, had been conferring with Giuliani and Parnas/Fruman, suddenly claimed, in public, that Yovanovitch was interfering with his office and that upon their first meeting, Yovanovitch gave him a "do not prosecute" list of people in the Ukraine viewed as Obama allies. The Trump State Deparment immediately called this a "complete fabrication," and, in fact, the dates offered by Lutsenko proved his story was false. Lutsenko himself apparently realized he had placed himself in an untenable position--within days, he had confessed no such thing had ever happened.
7) But in May, Yovanovitch was recalled anyway. This created a vaccuum--the newly-elected government in Ukraine was now left without a clear line of communication to the administration. Giuliani jumped in to fill that void with demands about the Ukrainians digging Trump's political dirt and though it's speculation, it looks an awful lot like the firing was engineered to do just that.
Now, a new piece of the puzzle. Steve Linick, the State Department's Inspector General, just briefed congressional aides on a mysterious "packet of documents containing misinformation about the former ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch," which was "sent to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo earlier this year from an unknown source. Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, was also a target of debunked conspiracy theories laid out in the documents, lawmakers and aides said."
Sec. of State Mike Pompeo apparently discussed/distributed the documents--to whom, it isn't known--but he turned over the packet to the State IG on 3 May. Yovanovitch was recalled on 20 May. Politico:
"The origin of the documents is unclear, but one lawmaker who attended the briefing, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), said the stack included folders from a Trump-owned hotel. Raskin described the materials as 'amateurish'... 'The existence of this packet and its curious history raises profoundly troubling questions. Why was Secretary of State Pompeo in possession of this packet of disinformation? Why did he distribute and circulate it? To whom else did he distribute and circulate it?' Raskin told reporters.
"A Democratic source familiar with the briefing said the White House sent documents to Pompeo that 'contained notes from interviews that took place at Rudy Giuliani’s NYC office with various Ukrainians about debunked conspiracies related to Ukraine.'"
Things that make you say "Hmmm..."
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/02/state-department-inspector-general-ex-ukraine-ambassador-022482
UPDATE (6 Oct., 2019) - NBC News has acquired that mysterious packet described above, revealed more of what was in it in more detail and traced its apparent origin.
It came, unsurprisingly, from Rudy Giuliani. #BigHeroGhouliani claims he personally gave it to Sec. of State Mike Pompeo on 28 March, 2019. Richard Visekm, the State Department's acting legal adviser, only gave it to Steve Linick, State's Inspector General, on 3 May, 2019. It's unknown how far and wide it spread in the interim.
"The packet is largely the work of Giuliani, which he used to bolster unproven allegations that Biden pressured Ukraine in order to protect his son, Hunter Biden, who has been involved with a business interest there, and that the Obama administration was using Ukraine to help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 election... The documents appeared in Trump Hotel folders and included 'interview' notes Giuliani and his team conducted with Viktor Shokin, the former General Prosecutor of Ukraine who was pushed out at the urging of Biden because he didn’t prosecute corruption.
"Also included are notes of an in-person interview with Yuriy Lutsenko, the recently fired prosecutor general of Ukraine with whom Giuliani was corresponding. The five pages of interview notes paint the picture of the narrative that Giuliani has been pushing involving the Bidens.
"And they include timelines attempting to make connections between Biden’s conversations with Ukrainian officials and his son Hunter’s work with Burisma as well as a glimpse of an intricate media strategy to spread the story including segments being placed on Fox News."
On the matter of the ambassador:
"The documents also show that Giuliani, through conservative writer John Solomon’s columns in The Hill, attempted to tie former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch to the liberal donor George Soros as part of a massive conspiracy to take down Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 election.
"On March 20th Solomon published his interview with Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko alleging Yovanovitch gave him a 'do not prosecute list,' back in 2016.
"Just four days later Donald Trump Jr. called for Yovanovitch’s removal in a tweet linking to a Daily Wire article peddling the same narrative."
Confronted with these charges, which Lutsenko himself admitted were fabrications only days later, State Department officials correctly identified this as a disinformation campaign; Giuliani's packet contained communications between the various diplomats discussing the matter, probably to suggest they were all involved in some big motive-free cover-up. George Kent, then chargé d’affaires for the U.S. mission to Ukraine, noted that the names on the alleged list were misspelled. Yovanovitch had been very critical of Lutsenko for lax prosecution of corruption cases; Kent suggested Lutsenko's false narrative "appears to be Lutsenko’s effort to inoculate himself by claiming the U.S. told him not to prosecute.
"'Complete poppycock,” Kent wrote."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-impeachment-inquiry/giuliani-says-state-dept-vowed-investigate-after-he-gave-ukraine-n1061931
UPDATE (6 Oct., 2019) - "The CIA’s top lawyer sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department based on the now-famous whistleblower’s complaint about President Donald Trump’s conduct toward Ukraine. And no, that lawyer isn’t some deep-state conspiracist out to thwart the president: She’s a Trump appointee.
"According to NBC News on Friday, CIA general counsel Courtney Simmons Elwood and another top official called the Justice Department on August 14 to make a criminal referral--weeks before the whistleblower complaint had become public.
"'On that call, Elwood and John Eisenberg, the top legal adviser to the White House National Security Council, told the top Justice Department national security lawyer, John Demers, that the allegations merited examination by the DOJ, officials said,' NBC News reports.
"The DOJ, however, reportedly didn’t consider that to be an official referral because it came in a call, not in writing... As such, the DOJ didn’t look any further into the allegations that Elwood was so concerned about.
"In other words, they dropped it.
"The Justice Department would eventually look into the allegations made in the whistleblower complaint a bit later after receiving a different criminal referral, this one from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (and apparently in writing, luckily)."
***
"Now here’s the kicker: The CIA’s criminal referral wasn’t about campaign finance law, according to NBC News.
"This means DOJ essentially ignored the CIA criminal referral — which apparently included concerns that other laws besides campaign finance law may have been broken — all because it was made over the phone."
https://www.vox.com/world/2019/10/4/20899398/trump-ukraine-cia-doj-whistleblower
UPDATE (6 Oct., 2019) - "Mark Zaid, the attorney representing the whistleblower who sounded the alarm on President Donald Trump's dealings with Ukraine and triggered an impeachment inquiry, tells ABC News that he is now representing a second whistleblower who has spoken with the inspector general.
"Zaid tells ABC News' Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos that the second person--also described as an intelligence official--has first-hand knowledge of some of the allegations outlined in the original complaint and has been interviewed by the head of the intelligence community's internal watchdog office, Michael Atkinson.
***
"The New York Times on Friday cited anonymous sources in reporting that a second intelligence official was weighing whether to file his own former complaint and testify to Congress. Zaid says he does not know if the second whistleblower he represents is the person identified in the Times report.
"According to the first whistleblower, more than a half a dozen U.S. officials have information relevant to the investigation--suggesting the probe could widen even further."
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/2nd-whistleblower-forward-speaking-ig-attorney/story?id=66092396&fbclid=IwAR0rrfpZ_giBDCVuBG4rsB0FJjpPvzQ7UHs_4TzA5Fg4zcu1mQBOSUdMcAI
UPDATE (6 Oct., 2019) - Here's the cache of text messages Kurt Volker, special envoy to the Ukraine, gave congress prior to his testimony (in pdf format):
https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/_cache/files/a/4/a4a91fab-99cd-4eb9-9c6c-ec1c586494b9/621801458E982E9903839ABC7404A917.chairmen-letter-on-state-departmnent-texts-10-03-19.pdf
UPDATE (6 Oct., 2019) - Something that is going to seriously complicate any effort to defend himself in the face of his own criminal activities is his complete lack of loyalty. Because of the far-right press apparatus in the U.S. (and the gerrymandering of congressional districts that gives Repubicans disproportionate power but makes them vulnerable to primary challenges), Republicans are afraid of standing against him too vigorously. When it comes to loyalty though, Trump demands it of everyone but extends i tto no one. He doesn't respect it or reciprocate it, and if he thinks it's necessary to save himself, he'll burn down his entire house and everyone who would have been his friend. This has been his consistent pattern. We're getting more of it in this impeachment inquiry business:
"President Donald Trump told House Republicans Friday that he was urged by Energy Secretary Rick Perry to make the midsummer phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that is now at the center of House Democrats' impeachment inquiry, two sources familiar with the matter told NBC News.
"Trump suggested it was a call he didn't even want to make, the sources said... Department of Energy Press Secretary Shaylyn Hynes told NBC News late Saturday that 'Secretary Perry absolutely supported and encouraged the President to speak to the new President of Ukraine to discuss matters related to their energy security and economic development.'
"'He continues to believe that there is significant need for improved regional energy security--which additional options for natural gas supply will provide--and this is exactly why he is heading to Lithuania tonight to meet with nearly two dozen European energy leaders (including Ukraine) on these issues.'
"Perry is reportedly set to resign from his position as energy secretary in November..."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-impeachment-inquiry/trump-blames-energy-secretary-rick-perry-ukraine-call-center-impeachment-n1062931
UPDATE (6 Oct., 2019) - The Associated Press has just offered a remarkable piece of investigative journalism that opens up some all new fronts in this scandal; a group of shady Republican "businessmen" connected to Trump and Giuliani who were trying to replace the management of Naftogaz, the Ukraine's state gas company. "Their plan was to then steer lucrative contracts to companies controlled by Trump allies, according to two people with knowledge of their plans."
At the center of this is our old buddies Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, the con-artists, "businessmen" and massive donors to Republican candidates and causes. Here, Parnas and Fruman teamed up with Harry Sargeant III:
"Sargeant, his wife and corporate entities tied to the family have donated at least $1.2 million to Republican campaigns and PACs over the last 20 years, including $100,000 in June to the Trump Victory Fund, according to federal and state campaign finance records. He has also served as finance chair of the Florida state GOP, and gave nearly $14,000 to Giuliani’s failed 2008 presidential campaign."
The story:
"In early March, Fruman, Parnas and Sargeant were touting a plan to replace Naftogaz CEO Andriy Kobolyev with another senior executive at the company, Andrew Favorov, according to two individuals who spoke to the AP as well as a memorandum about the meeting that was later submitted to the U.S. Embassy in Kiev... The three approached Favorov with the idea while the Ukrainian executive was attending an energy industry conference in Texas. Parnas and Fruman told him they had flown in from Florida on a private jet to recruit him to be their partner in a new venture to export up to 100 tanker shipments a year of U.S. liquefied gas into Ukraine, where Naftogaz is the largest distributor, according to two people briefed on the details.
"Sargeant told Favorov that he regularly meets with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and that the gas-sales plan had the president’s full support, according to the two people who said Favorov recounted the discussion to them.
"These conversations were recounted to AP by Dale W. Perry, an American who is a former business partner of Favorov. He told AP in an interview that Favorov described the meeting to him soon after it happened and that Favorov perceived it to be a shakedown. Perry, who is no relation to the energy secretary, is the managing partner of Energy Resources of Ukraine, which currently has business agreements to import natural gas and electricity to Ukraine.
"A second person who spoke on condition of anonymity also confirmed to the AP that Favorov had recounted details of the Houston meeting to him."
Now here's a bombshell; Parnas knew a couple of months ahead of time that Trump was going to get rid of Marie Yovanovitch, then the U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine:
"According to Dale Perry and the other person, Favorov said Parnas told him Trump planned to remove U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and replace her with someone more open to aiding their business interests."
Dale Perry said he was so concerned about these schemes that he reported it to the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv. On 12 April, he also wrote a detailed memo about what Favorov had said and shared it with a State Dept. official. He also gave it to the AP.
On 24 March, Giuliani and Parnas "gathered at the Trump International Hotel in Washington with Healy E. Baumgardner, a former Trump campaign adviser who once served as deputy communications director for Giuliani’s presidential campaign and as a communications official during the George W. Bush administration." Parnas is now the CEO of 45 Energy Group, a Houston-based energy company that describes itself as a "government relations, public affairs and business development practice group." Giuliani claims that at this meeting, "the deals that were discussed involved Uzbekistan, not Ukraine." But "during this meeting, Parnas again repeated that Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv, would soon be replaced, according to a person with direct knowledge of the gathering. She was removed two months later." Giuliani confessed to having played a role in the removal of the ambassador but ain't talkin' about the rest of this.
"As part of their impeachment inquiry, House Democrats have subpoenaed Giuliani for documents and communications related to dozens of people, including Favorov, Parnas, Fruman and Baumgardner’s 45 Energy Group.
"Baumgardner issued a written statement, saying: 'While I won’t comment on business discussions, I will say this: this political assault on private business by the Democrats in Congress is complete harassment and an invasion of privacy that should scare the hell out of every American business owner.'"
Uh huh. Sargeant is presently hiding under his desk. Trump Energy Secretary Rick Perry soon got into this. Parnas and Fruman have their own story:
"John Dowd, a former Trump attorney who now represents Parnas and Fruman, said it was actually the Naftogaz executives who approached his clients about making a deal. He says they then met with Rick Perry to get the Energy Department on board.
"'The people from the company solicited my clients because Igor is in the gas business, and they asked them, and they flew to Washington and they solicited,' Dowd said. 'They sat down and talked about it. And then it was presented to Secretary Perry to see if they could get it together.
"'It wasn’t a shakedown; it was an attempt to do legitimate business that didn’t work out.'"
In May, Perry traveled to the Ukraine to attend the inauguration of the new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
"In a private meeting with Zelenskiy, Perry pressed the Ukrainian president to fire members of the Naftogaz advisory board. Attendees left the meeting with the impression that Perry wanted to replace the American representative, Amos Hochstein, a former diplomat and energy representative who served in the Obama administration, with someone “reputable in Republican circles,” according to someone who was in the room.
"A second meeting during the trip, at a Kyiv hotel, included Ukrainian officials and energy sector people. There, Perry made clear that the Trump administration wanted to see the entire Naftogaz supervisory board replaced, according to a person who attended both meetings. Perry again referenced the list of advisers that he had given Zelenskiy, and it was widely interpreted that he wanted Michael Bleyzer, a Ukrainian-American businessman from Texas, to join the newly formed board, the person said. Also on the list was Robert Bensh, another Texan who frequently works in Ukraine, the Energy Department confirmed... The Naftogaz supervisory board is supposed to be selected by the Ukrainian president’s Cabinet in consultation with international institutions, including the International Monetary Fund, the United States and the European Union. It must be approved by the Ukrainian Cabinet. Ukrainian officials perceived Perry’s push to swap out the board as circumventing that established process, according to the person in the room."
It gets better! When he was governor of Texas, Perry had appointed Bleyzer to "a two-year term on a state technologies fund board in 2009. The following year, records show Bleyzer donated $20,000 to Perry’s reelection campaign."
Yowza!
Perry is, of course, offering a different narrative. Hynes denied Perry had advocated for the business interests of any one individual or company. She says it was the Ukrainian government that had asked for U.S. recommendations "to advise the country on energy matters, and Perry provided those recommendations. She confirmed Bleyzer was on the list."
https://apnews.com/d7440cffba4940f5b85cd3dfa3500fb2
All of those men are connected to Trump. They knew things Trump was going to do well in advance. Is Trump's foreknowledge of what the AP describes about their grifting in the Ukraine why Trump thought he could throw Rick Perry under the bus?
UPDATE (7 Oct., 2019) - Trump defenders have endlessly circulated video of a Joe Biden apearance at the Council on Foreign Relations in which Biden talks about being sent, during his Vice Presidency, to get the corrupt Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin replaced. A version getting wide circulation was put up by Youtuber "dagalagas," who posted the clip under the headline "Joe Biden Brags about getting Ukrainian Prosecutor Fired." The video starts with a text narration:
"In 2006 Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, in his investigation of corruption involving Burisma Holdings, a natural gas company, identified Hunter Biden as the recipient of over $3,000,000 from the company. Not wanting this corruption exposed, Joe Biden swung into action, using U.S. loan guarantees as hostage while demanding Shokin be fired. Amazingly, Joe Biden now brags about his actions in this matter."
Readers of this thread will immediately recognize the extraordinary falsehoods on falsehoods packed into this. At the time he was fired, Shokin hadn't been investigating Burisma for the better part of 2 years, and had never investigated Hunter Biden for anything. He wasn't investigating corruption cases at all, and, in fact, was working to monkeywrench those who were trying to do so. He was, himself, appallingly corrupt. That's why Obama sent Biden to intervene and have Shokin replaced. Biden hadn't "swung into action"; in his CFR appearance, which is available in its entirety on Youtube, Biden pointed out he was just the guy who got the assignment. He also makes it clear why it was done--because of the corruption.
The full video is linked below. The relevant portion starts at the 51:49 minute mark:
"I am desperately concerned about the backsliding on the part of Kyiv in terms of of corruption.... I'll give you one concrete example: I, I, I--not I, I was just happened to be, that was the assignment I got. I got all of the good ones, and so I got Ukraine."
And then he proceeds to tell that story. "Dagalagas" simply edited out all of that material and added his own entirely false narrative as preface.
(A C-Span user, "Jonathan Moseley, posted one version under the wishful headline "Joe Biden Confesses to Bribery" but "Moseley" leaves in that excised stuff.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0_AqpdwqK4
UPDATE (7 Oct., 2019) - Displaying his usual contempt for the public and chronic inability to tell the truth, Trump, on 27 Sept., Donald Trump turned that same false narrative into a campaign ad:
"Joe Biden promised Ukraine $1 billion is they fired the prosecutor investigating his son's company."
There follows a very brief clip of Biden from that appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations, telling how he withheld loan guarantees to get the Prosecutor Genral replaced.
"But when president Trump asked Ukraine to investigate corruption, the Democrats want to impeach him, and their media lapdogs fall in line. They lost the election. Now, they want to steal this one. Don't let them."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbixdV2F6Ts&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR2lg2uzDVe3QfdnF4K9sMaAuMSDA4yPRSCuQmYihBibYHm_zhFEZYDxFFU
UPDATE (8 Oct., 2019) - "The Trump administration has blocked Gordon Sondland, President Trump's ambassador to the European Union, from testifying before Congress on Tuesday.
"Sondland has been a key figure in the widening Ukraine scandal involving the president, members of his Cabinet and high-ranking diplomats.
"Early this morning, the U.S. Department of State directed Ambassador Gordon Sondland not to appear today for his scheduled transcribed interview before the U.S. House of Representatives Joint Committee," the law firm representing Sondland said in a statement. 'Ambassador Sondland had previously agreed to appear voluntarily today, without the need for a subpoena, in order to answer the Committee's questions on an expedited basis. As the sitting U.S. Ambassador to the EU and employee of the State Department, Ambassador Sondland is required to follow the Department's direction.'
"The statement described Sondland as 'profoundly disappointed' and noted that he traveled from Brussels to Washington for the testimony and to prepare.
"'Ambassador Sondland believes strongly that he acted at all times in the best interests of the United States, and he stands ready to answer the Committee's questions fully and truthfully,' the statement notes. 'Ambassador Sondland hopes that the issues raised by the State Department that preclude his testimony will be resolved promptly. He stands ready to testify on short notice, whenever he is permitted to appear.'"
https://www.npr.org/2019/10/08/768200323/trump-administration-blocks-ambassadors-testimony-a-key-witness-in-ukraine-scand
UPDATE (8 Oct., 2019) - Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Rob Portman (R-OH) have both refuted Trump's claims about disgraced former Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. Trump insisted Shokin was a good and fair prosecutor who was fired for investigating Burisma Holdings, the company at which Hunter Biden worked. In reality, Shokin was corrupt; he was not only refusing to pursue corruption cases, he was actively blocking anyone who did. Even when two of his chief prosecutors were found to be on the take, Shokin intervened to prevent their facing the music. By the time he was fired, the Obama administration, our European allies, the IMF, Ukraine's anti-corruption activists--basically everyone--had wanted him gone for some time. Back in 2016, a bipartisan group of lawmakers wrote a letter calling for reform of the Prosecutor General's office; both Johnson and Portman were among those who created and signed it. In recent days, both have refuted Trump's claims with regard to Shokin.
But, of course...
"It’s worth noting that neither senator has said they believe Trump’s desire to have Kyiv probe a 2020 rival is impeachable conduct, so the president isn’t in any more danger of leaving the White House early. Johnson, particularly, has become one of the president’s staunchest defenders in recent days, signing a September 2019 letter asking Attorney General Bill Barr to look into possible Biden-Ukraine corruption and pushing debunked conspiracy theories about the FBI on television this weekend.
"But what’s more clear than ever is that the impeachment crisis, of Trump’s own making, was based on a conspiracy theory he had no business believing in."
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/7/20903398/trump-biden-ukraine-portman-johnson-impeachment
UPDATE (8 Oct., 2019) - The near-complete breakdown of American government as a consequence of the Trump "administration" continues:
"Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani's contempt for the House's ongoing impeachment inquiry has spread to his circle of associates. Two of Giuliani's colleagues who helped him pursue his Ukrainian conspiracy theories, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, officially stated Monday that they would not comply with a Monday deadline for them to turn over their documents to House investigators, nor will they appear at depositions scheduled for Thursday and Friday. In a letter sent to House investigators--and written in Comic Sans font--former Trump attorney John Dowd, who now represents Parnas and Fruman, said his clients could not provide the necessary documents in such a limited amount of time, calling the House request 'overly broad and unduly burdensome.' 'The subject matter of your requests is well beyond your scope of inquiry,' Dowd wrote, adding that he's reached the 'inescapable conclusion that the Democratic Committee members’ intent is to harass, intimidate and embarrass my clients.'"
Congress would normally call upon the Justice Department to deal with this sort of behavior but with Trump, the head of the Justice Department is implicated in this Ukraine business, and Justice isn't going to do a damn thing. Parnas and Fruman--and there will be many others--are doing this because they think they can get away with doing it.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/10/giuliani-ukraine-parnas-fruman-impeachment-house-subpoena
UPDATE (8 Oct., 2019) - Earlier this year, Trump announced a policy of total resistence to all congressional oversight efforts, and, controlling the Justice Department that would have to enforce the oversight efforts, has mostly gotten away with it. He's just announced he's going to extend that total resistance policy to the imepachment inquiry. This, alone, is grounds for impeachment:
"The White House told House Democrats it will not comply with demands for documents and testimony in Democrats' impeachment inquiry, setting up a legal showdown between the two branches of government.
"'You have designed and implemented your inquiry in a manner that violates fundamental fairness and constitutionally mandated due process,' White House counsel Pat Cipollone wrote in an eight-page letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the chairmen of the committees leading the inquiry.
"Cipollone argued the investigation is 'invalid' because there has not been a formal vote to open an impeachment inquiry. He said the inquiry clearly seeks 'to influence the election of 2020' and has 'no legitimate basis.' The letter also condemned Congressman Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a frequent target of the president."
https://www.cbsnews.com/live-news/trump-impeachment-inquiry-latest-dem-steps-to-protect-whistleblower-live-updates-2019-10-08/
UPDATE (9, Oct., 2019) - "South Florida energy and asphalt tycoon Harry Sargeant III is pushing back on news reports that he worked this year with two Soviet-born businessmen--who are now embroiled in an ongoing impeachment investigation--to overhaul the leadership of a massive Ukrainian state gas company and steer contracts to President Donald Trump’s allies.
"Sargeant, in a statement released Monday, disputed an Associated Press report that he schemed to create a pipeline of contracts from Ukraine’s Naftogaz, the state-owned oil and gas company, alongside two South Florida businessmen who have helped Trump’s personal attorney dig for dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden in Ukraine.
"Sargeant, a major Florida GOP donor, did meet with the two entrepreneurs and a Naftogaz executive in Houston last March at an energy industry convention, his attorney said. But he said Sargeant never discussed 'any role or participation in any Ukraine venture, nor any specifics regarding the potential business ventures of the other dinner participants.'"
Lots of lawyerly wording:
"'The [AP] news stories unfairly and inaccurately portray Mr. Sargeant as having involvement in Ukraine business affairs,' Sargeant’s attorney, Chris Kise, said in a statement. 'Mr. Sargeant conducts no business of any kind in the Ukraine and has not visited Ukraine, even as a tourist, in well over a decade. Attending a single, informal dinner in Houston does not place Mr. Sargeant at the center of any Naftogaz or Ukrainian business plan.'"
Suspicious yet? You will be! Kise went on to attack the AP's source in a way intentionally designed to mislead:
"[Chris] Kise, Sargeant’s attorney, confirmed that a conversation took place in March at CERAWeek, an industry gathering he described as 'one of the largest energy industry trade events in the world.' But he said that while Sargeant’s attendance was requested for 'an informal dinner' with Favorov, Fruman and Parnas, there was no discussion of any Ukraine ventures.
"'At the dinner, Mr. Sargeant simply provided broad industry guidance and his expert view on the challenges presented by operating in foreign markets,' Kise said. 'Notably absent from this dinner was the media’s alleged "source," Dale Perry.'
"Kise... suggested that Dale Perry made up the account to create 'stories to discredit his competitors and advance his own interests in the Ukraine.' And John Dowd, an attorney for Fruman and Parnas, told the Associated Press that it was Naftogaz that reached out to his clients in search of a deal that ultimately fell through.
"Dale Perry, though, didn’t say he attended the meeting in Houston. And in an email, he told the Miami Herald that, in fact, he welcomes competition in Ukraine because a lack of competition has actually hurt business due to Ukraine’s procurement rules.
"'We are actively trying to convince competitors to enter the gas market in Ukraine,' he wrote."
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article235881037.html
UPDATE (9 Oct., 2019) - "President Donald Trump directed Secretary of Energy Rick Perry and two top State Department officials to deal with his private attorney Rudy Giuliani when the Ukrainian President sought to meet Trump, in a clear circumvention of official channels, according to two sources familiar with the conversation.
"Trump believed Ukraine was still rampantly corrupt and said that if President Volodymyr Zelensky wanted to meet with him, Giuliani would have to be convinced first, one source said.
"'If they can satisfy Rudy, they can satisfy the President,' a person familiar with the meeting said.
"Trump's push to have Giuliani as gatekeeper is more direct than what was previously disclosed by one of the meeting's participants in his statement to the House last week. It also further demonstrates how significant Giuliani was in brokering access to the President regarding Ukraine policy and in passing messages to other administration officials... A key accusation in the whistleblower's complaint that has prompted the impeachment probe into the President's dealings with Ukraine is that Giuliani, a private citizen, had been presenting to Ukraine a US policy different than that from US diplomats."
"It became clear to the Trump administration officials, the sources said, that they would have to deal with Giuliani.
"Volker hinted last week in speaking to the House how central Giuliani was in the President's foreign policy approach to Ukraine.
"'The President was very skeptical,' Volker said to the House committees, describing what had happened when he, Sondland and Perry spoke to Trump. 'In the course of that conversation, he referenced conversations with Mayor Giuliani.'
"'He was clearly receiving other information from other sources, including Mayor Giuliani, that was more negative, causing him to retain this negative view' of a corrupt Ukraine, Volker added.
"The US officials then set out to correct the information feed coming into the President while realizing they would need to work with--and around--Giuliani, according to the sources."
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/08/politics/trump-perry-giuliani-state-department/index.html
UPDATE (9 Oct., 2019) - Trump his his sycophants have promoted the notion that there is a constitutional requirement for a formal vote to begin an impeachment inquiry, and that, consequently, the current impeachment inquiry is illegitimate. This is the basis for Trump's letter yesterday refusing to cooperate witn the inquiry.
The claim that there is some constitutional requirement for such a vote is flatly false. The constitution covers impeachment in four different places:
"The House of Representatives... shall have the sole Power of Impeachment."
--Article I, Section 2, Clause 5
"The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two-thirds of the Members present.
"Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States; but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law."
--Article I, Section 3, Clauses 6 and 7
"[The President] ... shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment."
--Article II, Section 2
And...
"The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."
--Article II, Section 4
While Trump's sycophants have insisted that impeachments of presidents are different than impeachments of other officials, please note that the constitution makes no such distinction.
At the same time, there is no requirement in the House rules for the sort of formal vote on which Trump is insisting. The notion that there is any requirement for a vote is false. Nor is this the precedent; such votes are virtually never taken in impeachment cases.
Narrowing the focus to just presidents, there was no such vote in the impeachment of Andrew Johnson but there were formal votes in both the Nixon and Clinton cases. The resolutions in both gave the minority party subpoena power, as a courtesy and a nod to bipartisanship, and Republicans have raised a big stink about the lack of this in the current inquiry; they don't like having to live by their own rules:
"...the House rules have changed since the last impeachment of a president more than two decades ago. In this Congress, the House majority already has unilateral subpoena power, a rule change that was made when Republicans last controlled the House, so Democrats don't need to pass any resolution to grant those powers."
The majority party can grant the minority subpoena power but it IS a courtesy, not something the minority is in any position to demand, particularly given the fact that the Repubs are the ones who changed the rules to eliminate this. The lack of it certainly doesn't allow the executive to refuse to cooperate with this constitutional function.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/08/politics/nancy-pelosi-letter-impeachment/index.html
UPDATE (9 Oct., 2019) - "For Lev Parnas, the Ukrainian American businessman who joined Rudy Giuliani in a back-channel campaign to unearth damaging information about Joe Biden, the money kept flowing.
"There was a $1,410 charge to a Palm Beach limousine service and nearly $20,000 in expenses at Trump hotels in Washington, DC, and New York. There were bills running to hundreds of dollars at exclusive restaurants such as Novikov in London and BLT Prime in Washington. During one of his many trips to the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, there was a $657 charge at Tootsie, the popular strip club in the heart of the city.
"At the same time that he was facing court judgments for hundreds of thousands in personal debts, the 47-year-old political operative was traveling like a freewheeling CEO as he met with Ukrainian prosecutors and other officials.
"BuzzFeed News obtained unprecedented access to scores of bank records from private business accounts controlled by Parnas and his partner, Igor Fruman, as they carried out a campaign now at the center of the first presidential impeachment inquiry in a generation."
Trump hooked up with Parnas and Fruman at least as far back as November 2018; there were the people who started putting Giuliani in touch with the corrupt former officials that Giuliani used to concoct his various conspiracies.
"While the partners continued to set up meetings for Guiliani in the ensuing months, Parnas was being chased by creditors in the United States in a series of civil cases that would begin to expose the secret political maneuvering.
"One lawsuit accused Parnas and Fruman of boasting about their connections to Giuliani and other Republicans in order to snare a $100,000 loan that was not repaid for months. In a second case, the lawyer for a family trust sought records about Parnas after Giuliani told the New York Times that Parnas had helped set up meetings for the former New York mayor.
"Parnas has incurred at least nine court judgments in the past 15 years--including two court orders to remove him from homes where he failed to pay the rent. And despite his lavish spending and newfound prominence in Washington, he continued to lag behind on financial obligations as recently as this year, the banking records show. In January, one of his business accounts dipped more than $8,000 into overdraft and stayed that way for several months."
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mikesallah/ukraine-spending-trump-parnas-fruman
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| Lev Parnas with Donald Trump at the White House |
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| Donald Trump with Igor Fruman at the White House |
UPDATE (9 Oct., 2019) - Trump's insistence that the House must take a formal vote on an impeachment inquiry before such an inquiry officially exists is without basis in either the constitution or the House rules. The House Judiciary committee is seeking acccess to the unredacted Mueller report and its underlying grand jury evidence as part of that inquiry and to prevent this, Trump has sent Justice Department attorneys into court to argue that without a formal vote, there is no inquiry. There is no basis for these claims, and the judge seemed to be astonished by them--as if she couldn't believe her ears.
"Republicans argue that impeachment is not underway until a formal House vote. Democrats say no such vote is necessary, a view [Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl] Howell appeared to share.
"After Elizabeth Shapiro, an attorney in the DOJ's civil division, made this argument in court, the judge called the Department of Justice's position 'extreme.'
"[Douglas] Letter [representing the House Judiciary committee] said the Constitution affords the House complete deference on how to conduct an impeachment investigation.
"'We are in an impeachment inquiry, an impeachment investigation, a formal impeachment investigation, because the House says it is,' Letter said.
"Shapiro then argued that 'some degree of formality' should be required to pierce grand jury secrecy. When asked by Howell where that line should be drawn, the DOJ attorney said, 'I'm not advocating any specific line.'
"'That's so not helpful,' Howell said.
"The discussion also turned back the clock to 1974, when Judge John Sirica, who presided over multiple Watergate cases, granted Congress access to grand jury materials as part of the House's impeachment inquiry of President Richard Nixon.
"Howell asked the Department of Justice if they disagreed with that ruling. Shapiro said that the department's position has evolved since the 1970s.
"'The answer would be that if that same case came today, a different result would be obtained,' Shapiro said. That briefly left Judge Howell in silence.
"'Wow, OK,' Howell said. 'As I said, the department is taking extraordinary positions in this case.'"
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-impeachment-inquiry/justice-department-asks-judge-block-house-obtaining-mueller-grand-jury-n1063856
UPDATE (10 Oct., 2019) - In what will probably be the news story of the day, our old pals Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman--the big Republican donors/con-artists whose work with Rudy Giuliani throughout this Ukraine fiasco have formed the basis of that fiasco--have just been arrested for campaign finance violations. The two established what appears to be merely a shell-company--officially, an energy company but one that had no business activity--in order to donate huge amounts of money to Republicans, something they somehow manage to do despite not paying their own bills and facing court judgments for hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid debt. In one case, they gave $325,000 to Trump's super PAC America First Action.
"The charges against the men include conspiracy and making false statements to the Federal Election Commission. Two other men were also charged in the campaign-fundraising scheme, the indictment says.
"John Dowd, who headed Mr. Trump’s legal team until spring 2018 and is a lawyer for the two men, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
"The Campaign Legal Center, a transparency advocacy group, filed a complaint with the FEC in July 2018 calling on the commission to investigate whether Messrs. Parnas and Fruman had violated campaign-finance laws by using an LLC to disguise the source of their donations.
"Messrs. Parnas and Fruman had dinner with the president in early May 2018, according to since-deleted Facebook posts captured in a report published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. They also met with the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr. , later that month at a fundraising breakfast in Beverly Hills, Calif., along with Tommy Hicks Jr. , a close friend of the younger Mr. Trump who at the time was heading America First Action. Mr. Parnas posted a photo of their breakfast four days after his LLC donated to the super PAC."
Since at least November 2018, Parnas and Fruman have been working with Giuliani. They were the ones who hooked up #BigHeroGhouliani with the various con-men and corrupt former officials who formed the basis of Giuliani's--and Trump's--insane conspiracy claims regarding the Ukraine. Hunter and Joe Biden, the Manafort thing, the smearing and ultimate removal from the Ukraine of Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch--all of it goes right into the White House through these guys.
"Mr. Parnas in July accompanied Mr. Giuliani to a breakfast meeting with Kurt Volker, then the U.S. special representative for Ukraine negotiations. 'We had a long conversation about Ukraine,' Mr. Volker wrote in his testimony to House committees last week. During that breakfast, Mr. Giuliani mentioned the investigations he was pursuing into Mr. Biden and 2016 election interference."
Parnas and Fruman were supposed to be deposed later this week in the impeachment inquiry but...
"Mr. Dowd wrote a letter to the House Intelligence Committee last week advising them that he was representing Messrs. Parnas and Fruman and noting that the two men had assisted Mr. Giuliani 'in connection with his representation of President Trump.' He said some of the documents sought by House Democrats last month were protected by attorney-client privilege and that a privilege review of those documents 'cannot reasonably be conducted by Oct. 7,' the deadline lawmakers had set.
"He also criticized the document requests as 'overly broad and unduly burdensome.'"
Parnas, Fruman and their "businesses" have "contributed just over $500,000 total in the past three years, according to FEC records. Other recipients of their donations include Florida Sen. Rick Scott, the National Republican Congressional Committee and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the records show.
"Mr. Parnas made his first donation, of about $100,000, on Oct. 24, 2016, to the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, the records show. Mr. Fruman made his first federal political contribution in February 2018, giving $5,400, then the legal maximum, to Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/two-foreign-born-men-who-helped-giuliani-on-ukraine-arrested-on-campaign-finance-charges-11570714188?fbclid=IwAR1EQSq1rjMn2x2Wt5152mC8Q9uK5-AzkDuHCFPBn4uESqNVn88Tzz1eixY
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| Mike Pence, Igor Fruman, Lev Parnas, Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani |
UPDATE (10 Oct., 2019) - "Two foreign-born businessmen with ties to President Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani were arrested on campaign finance charges at an airport with one-way tickets out of the country, federal prosecutors said Thursday.
"The two men, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were arrested at Washington's Dulles International Airport on Wednesday night 'as they as they were about to board an international flight,' Geoffrey Berman, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a press conference Thursday.
"The Wall Street Journal reported that Parnas and Fruman had lunch with Giuliani at the Trump International Hotel hours before they attempted to leave the country, citing a person who saw the three together at the Washington hotel."
If there were planning to leave, it seems impossible to believe they wouldn't tell Giuliani. The big question is, did Giuliani tell them to run?
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/10/foreign-born-trump-donors-tied-to-rudy-giulianis-ukraine-efforts-arrested.html
UPDATE (10 Oct., 2019) - Trump and his son repeatedly met with Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, just arrested for campaign finance violations. Rudy Giuliani, Trump's lawyer, has been working with them for nearly a year--perhaps even longer. Their claims are the basis for Trump's insane conspiracism re:the Ukraine. They helped Giuliani engineer Trump's firing of the U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine. They've given Trump and the Republicans hundreds of thousands of dollars. But when it comes to saving himself, the word "loyalty" simply isn't in Trump's vocabulary:
"President Donald Trump denied knowing two Ukrainian-born business partners indicted Thursday in connection with alleged schemes to funnel foreign money to U.S. political campaigns, dismissing a photograph that showed him with one of the men at the White House.
"'I don’t know those gentlemen,' Trump told reporters on the South Lawn on his way to a campaign rally in Minneapolis... 'Now it's possible I have a picture with them because I have a picture with everybody,' Trump said. 'Somebody said there may be a picture or something at a fundraiser, or somewhere, but I have pictures with everybody.
"'I don't know them,' Trump continued. 'I don't know about them, I don't know what they do...Maybe they were clients of Rudy. You'd have to ask Rudy. I just don't know.'"
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/10/10/donald-trump-denies-knowing-giuliani-associates-lev-parnas-igor-fruman/3858385002/
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| Lev Parnas Tweet, raving about meeting Trump in the White House |
UPDATE (10 Oct., 2019) - "CBS News has learned the full contents of what appears to be a memo written by the whistleblower one day after President Trump spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July.
"The memo, dated July 26, is based on a conversation the whistleblower had with an unnamed White House official who listened to the call.
"According to a source familiar with the matter, the memo was among the factors that led the intelligence community inspector general to determine the whistleblower's formal August 12 complaint was credible.
"The president's call with Zelensky was held on the morning of July 25. The whistleblower wrote the memo the next day after speaking with the official in the afternoon... and summarized their conversation.
"According to the memo, the White House official described the contents of the call as 'crazy,' 'frightening' and 'completely lacking in substance related to national security.'
"The whistleblower said the official was 'visibly shaken by what had transpired and seemed keen to inform a trusted colleague within the U.S. national security apparatus about the call.'"
The text of the memo:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-whistleblower-complaint-read-full-text-whistleblower-memo-trump-ukraine-call-described-cbs-news-exclusive/
UPDATE (11 Oct., 2019) - Trump and his sycophants continue to harp on the secondhand nature of the initial whistleblower's complaint but everything that has entered the public record since it did has confirmed what the whistleblower said; he hasn't gotten a single major detail wrong yet.
Today brings another example of this. The whistleblower described a scene akin to chaos in the White House following Trump's call to Zelensky, with everyone shocked or chagrined by what Trump had done and scrambling to figure out what to do. Well...
"At least four national security officials were so alarmed by the Trump administration’s attempts to pressure Ukraine for political purposes that they raised concerns with a White House lawyer both before and immediately after President Trump’s July 25 call with that country’s president, according to U.S. officials and other people familiar with the matter.
"The nature and timing of the previously undisclosed discussions with National Security Council legal adviser John Eisenberg indicate that officials were delivering warnings through official White House channels earlier than previously understood--including before the call that precipitated a whistleblower complaint and the impeachment inquiry of the president."
White House officials were in an uproar over Trump's efforts to get Zelensky to come up with something that would be politically damaging to Joe Biden.
"Those concerns soared in the call’s aftermath, officials said. Within minutes, senior officials including national security adviser John Bolton were being pinged by subordinates about problems with what the president had said to his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky. Bolton and others scrambled to obtain a rough transcript that was already being 'locked down' on a highly classified computer network.
"'When people were listening to this in real time, there were significant concerns about what was going on--alarm bells were kind of ringing,' said one person familiar with the sequence of events inside the White House, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. 'People were trying to figure out what to do, how to get a grasp on the situation'... [N]ew details about the sequence inside the White House suggest that concerns about the call and events leading up to it were profound even among Trump’s top advisers, including Bolton and then-acting deputy national security adviser Charles Kupperman."
Within hours of the call, the notes on it had been moved from its usual deposity--a widely-shared computer system--to one normally reserved for highly classified intelligence operations.
"[O]ne official who had listened on the call went 'immediately' to Eisenberg. By the end of the next day, at least two others who had either heard the call or seen the rough transcript had also done so, said a person familiar with the matter."
The Post story describes Trump under Giuliani's influence as increasingly wallowing in baseless and bizarre conspiracies, to the increasing dismay of those around him.
Before joining the administration, Gordon Sondland, Trump's ambassador to the EU, had run a hotel company; he got his ambassadorship by donating $1 million to Trump's inauguration. At one point, after Trump had recalled the ambassador to the Ukraine, Sondland "asserted that he had ben put in charge of public relations with Kiev by the president." He set out to "clarify" this during a July meeting with Bolton, Kurt Volker (the special envoy to the Ukraine) and a pair of Zelensky advisers.
"Amid a broader discussion in which White House officials were encouraging Ukraine to continue its work to eliminate corruption in the country’s energy sector, Sondland blurted out that there were also 'investigations that were dropped that need to be started up again,' according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter.
"Senior officials understood Sondland’s statement to be a reference to Burisma and Biden. 'Bolton went ballistic' after the meeting, the official said. In the ensuing days, senior NSC officials including Bolton and Kupperman huddled over their concerns about Ukraine."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/at-least-four-national-security-officials-raised-alarms-about-ukraine-policy-before-and-after-trump-call-with-ukrainian-president/2019/10/10/ffe0c88a-eb6d-11e9-9c6d-436a0df4f31d_story.html
UPDATE (11 Oct., 2019) - Yahoo News reports the Pentagon was frantic through the Summer over Trump's decision to withhold aid to Ukraine.
"...several congressional aides--all of whom would speak only on the condition of anonymity--provided Yahoo News with details of how, over the summer, officials in the Office of Management and Budget repeatedly stonewalled both Congress and Pentagon officials who wanted to know why funds allocated to Ukraine had not been disbursed.
"The State Department was making similar efforts--and encountering similar frustration, suggesting that career diplomats and senior military officers were being challenged by administration officials whose main objection was apparently to satisfy Trump politically.
Congress wasn't yet aware of Trump's efforts to engineer Ukrainian investigations of his political rivals but "congressional committees were already investigating why the Office of Management and Budget had placed holds on the Ukraine aid package.
"By mid-July, the Pentagon started 'pushing back quietly,' according to one of the two congressional aides who spoke to Yahoo News for this story, only to have OMB start asking questions of its own, such as, 'How is this money going to be used?'"
But in reality, this was already mapped out. Back in May, John Rood, an undersecretary of defense for policy, had sent congress a letter outlining it in detail "but OMB seemed unsatisfied. Officials from the budget office were “almost fishing for reasons” to keep the money from making its way to Kiev, according to the congressional aides familiar with the matter."
The Pentagon was on board with the aid.
"In mid-July, the Pentagon and other concerned parties began a series of interagency meetings about how to free up the money for security assistance to Ukraine. Everyone who attended the meetings was, according to congressional staffers, 'united in wanting to provide the Ukrainians this funding.'
"The Pentagon went so far as to conduct its own legal analysis of the holds, determining that they were illegal. A government official confirmed that such an analysis took place. So did several Capitol Hill staffers. They all described the conclusion of that analysis in similar terms... At that point, the budget office revealed that the holds were authorized at the direction of the president, which, in effect, made them legal."
A senior White House official disputed this version of events, arguing that Trump was a critic of foreign aid and merely wanted to make sure it was "not going to be wasted."
That official's version of events "is somewhat contradicted by a Wall Street Journal report that disclosed how political appointees at the OMB were the ones who prevented the military aid package from reaching Ukraine.
"According to congressional aides, Defense Secretary Mark Esper 'kept on pushing the issue' with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton, who would soon be forced out of his position. The Pentagon began to worry that if the money were not disbursed by the end of the fiscal year, the appropriation would expire. That would leave Ukraine weakened in the face of a determined, bellicose foe.
"Confusion spread across Capitol Hill--and beyond. One staffer to a Democratic congressman described how, in late August, the member of Congress she worked for was approached by defense contractors to send a letter to the Trump administration urging a release of the aid money. The congressman was made aware that the hold was being directed by the president.
"Another staffer says that when his colleagues visited the U.S. Embassy in Kiev in mid-August, they heard similar complaints. Those complaints were conveyed to the Pentagon, which made its own position clear.
"'We don’t support this,' defense officials told the Washington-based staffer."
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/10/11/pentagon-officials-deemed-withholding-of-aid-to-ukraine-was-illegal/23834273/
UPDATE (11 Oct., 2019) - Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman dined with Rudy Giuliani just before they tried to leave the U.S., which led me to speculate whether Giuliani had told them to run. When they were arrested, they were at the airport preparing to use a pair of one-way tickets to Vienna.
Elaina Plott, writing in the Atlantic, just made that story even more interesting:
"Last night, when Rudy Giuliani told me he couldn’t get together for an interview, his reason made sense: As with many nights of late, he was due to appear on Hannity. When I suggested this evening instead, his response was a bit more curious. We would have to aim for lunch, Giuliani told me, because he was planning to fly to Vienna, Austria, at night. He didn’t offer any details beyond that.
"Giuliani called me at 6:22 p.m. last night—around the same time that two of his associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were arrested at Dulles Airport while waiting to board an international flight with one-way tickets. As The Wall Street Journal reported this afternoon, the two men were bound for Vienna... But Giuliani, when confirming today that Parnas and Fruman were heading to Vienna on matters 'related to their business,' told the Journal that he himself only had plans to meet with them when they returned to Washington. By this logic, Giuliani was also planning to fly to Vienna within roughly 24 hours of his business associates, but do no business with them while all three were there."
After the arrest of Parnas and Fruman, Plott tried to contact Giuliani repeatedly.
"Why were Parnas and Fruman bound for Vienna? Why was Giuliani--if what he told me was true--planning to be in the same city a day later?
"Giuliani finally sent me a text message at 4:18 p.m. ET: 'I can’t comment on it at this time.'"
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/10/rudy-giuliani-vienna/599833/
UPDATE (11 Oct., 2019) - "The former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine was removed from her post after insisting that Rudy Giuliani’s requests to Ukrainian officials for investigations be relayed through official channels, according to a former diplomat who has spoken with her.
"The ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, is scheduled to testify before congressional lawmakers on Friday as part of the House impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. Democrats say they expect her to appear despite the White House’s position that no administration officials cooperate with the probe.
"Yovanovitch was recalled from Kyiv in May as Giuliani--who is Trump’s personal attorney and has no official role in the U.S. government--pushed Ukrainian officials to investigate baseless corruption allegations against the Bidens.
Neither Giuliani nor Trump have publicly said what they found objectionable about Yanokovitch, "but a former diplomat, recalling a recent conversation with Yovanovitch, said she was removed after insisting that a request for Ukrainian officials to join in an investigation be relayed according to long-established protocol.
"The former diplomat said Yovanovitch refused to do 'all this offline, personal, informal stuff' and made clear that the U.S. government had formal ways to request foreign governments’ help with investigations... The State Department traditionally relies on mutual legal assistance treaties, under which U.S. and foreign officials agree to exchange evidence and information in criminal investigations."
And...
"Former colleagues of Yovanovitch said Trump allies’ characterizations of her as politically motivated are off-base.
"She is 'a top-notch diplomat, careful, meticulous, whip smart,' and unlikely to have badmouthed Trump, either to Ukrainian officials or her colleagues, said John Herbst, a predecessor as ambassador in Ukraine who worked alongside Yovanovitch there in the early 2000s.
"Yovanovitch has always known that the role of diplomat 'wasn’t about her' but about 'serving American national interests and supporting the people around her,' said Nancy McEldowney, a former U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria who now directs a Foreign Service program at Georgetown."
https://apnews.com/01c10d68553b4d3c8a26525630c80be3
UPDATE (11 Oct., 2019) - The indictment of Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman:
http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2019/images/10/10/u.s..v..lev.parnas.et.al.indictment.pdf
UPDATE (11 Oct., 2019) - "Marie L. Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told House impeachment investigators Friday that she was abruptly forced out of her role in May at the direction of President Donald Trump.
"Defying State Department orders to ignore the House's demand for her testimony, Yovanovitch said Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan told her that there was 'a concerted campaign' against her--one based on 'unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives.' Yovanovitch attended her deposition in defiance of the State Department’s orders.
"'He also said that I had done nothing wrong and that this was not like other situations where he had recalled ambassadors for cause,' Yovanovitch said of her conversation with Sullivan, according to the opening statement she prepared for her closed-door tesitmony, obtained by POLITICO... Yovanovitch's statement represented a top-to-bottom rebuke of the president, his associates, and his foreign policy--a rare takedown from a career diplomat who has sought to avoid the spotlight ever since her ouster. Yovanovitch expressed her 'deep disappointment and dismay' at efforts to undermine trust in American institutions, and warned that 'this nation’s most loyal and talented public servants' are running for the exits. She also said other countries would likely exploit the same dynamic that led to her ouster to undermine U.S. foreign policy."
Yovanovitch had voluntarily agreed to testify but when the State Department and the White House ordered her not to attend the hearing, the committees issued a subpoena and she again agreed to testify.
"According to her statement, Yovanovitch was told 'abruptly' in late April to return to Washington 'on the next plane.' Her removal came amid a campaign by Trump supporters to accuse her of disloyalty, a charge she said was 'fictitious.' Trump himself attacked Yovanovitch during a phone call with Ukraine's newly elected president Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25... Yovanovitch said she had 'minimal contacts' with [Rudy] Giuliani, adding: 'I do not know Mr. Giuliani’s motives for attacking me.' She speculated that Giuliani’s associates 'believed that their personal financial ambitions were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine.'
"She also said U.S. interests are 'harmed' when 'private interests circumvent professional diplomats for their own gain, not the public good.' It appeared to be a reference to Giuliani’s efforts to leverage government officials to dig up dirt on Biden.
"'The harm will come when bad actors in countries beyond Ukraine see how easy it is to use fiction and innuendo to manipulate our system,' she said. 'In such circumstances, the only interests that will be served are those of our strategic adversaries, like Russia, that spread chaos and attack the institutions and norms that the U.S. helped create and which we have benefited from for the last 75 years.'"
UPDATE (11 Oct., 2019) - The text of Marie Yovanovitch's opening statement (pdf file):
https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/1888-yovanovitch-opening-statement/48cf6b834149b4867fb5/optimized/full.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1TZ611csLD-GZNQi89fArZd6VW_h_0stbRDqwkuu6aBWnDl_N0GvUYt8Q#page=1
UPDATE (11 Oct., 2019) - Rudy Giuliani is Trump's newest Mickey Cohen. Their formal "attorney/client" relationship has always mostly seemed just an excuse to complicate efforts to learn what has passed between them as they've been involved in legally questionable behavior. After Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman were arrested on campaign finance violations yesterday, Trump essentially threw them under the bus, writing off his significant association with them as if they were some nobodies he didn't know. Some remarks he made today suggest he may be thinking of doing the same with Giuliani:
"5:15 p.m.: Trump, when asked if Giuliani is still his attorney, says, ‘I don’t know’
"Trump told reporters Friday that he didn’t know whether Giuliani was still his personal attorney, adding that the two hadn’t spoken since Thursday.
"'Well, I don’t know,' Trump said, responding to a question about the lawyer as he prepared to leave the White House for a rally in Louisiana. 'I haven’t spoken to Rudy. I spoke to him yesterday briefly. He’s a very good attorney, and he has been my attorney.'
"Trump then added, 'Yeah, sure,' before moving on to another question.
"In a text message to The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey shortly after the president’s comments, Giuliani confirmed that he’s still representing Trump.
"'Yes,' Giuliani wrote. 'I am still his attorney.'"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-impeachment-inquiry-live-updates/2019/10/11/457440b0-eb9c-11e9-9c6d-436a0df4f31d_story.html
UPDATE (12 Oct., 2019) - "In television interviews, hallways and events back home, Republican lawmakers who hold President Trump's fate in their hands are struggling to give a 'yes' or 'no' answer to one question: Is it wrong for a U.S. president to ask a foreign leader to investigate a political rival?
"President Trump's request in a July 25 phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden--and subsequent comments to reporters that China should also investigate the Bidens--have left Republicans on Capitol Hill without a coherent or unified response regarding a president who still enjoys strong approval ratings among self-identified Republicans.... [N]o small number of GOP senators have seemed unable to answer whether asking a foreign leader for help in defeating an opponent is even unethical."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gop-senators-stumble-when-asked-if-its-wrong-for-president-to-ask-countries-to-probe-rivals/
UPDATE (13 Oct., 2019) - Gordon Sondland, the U.S. Ambassador to the EU, is a Trump loyalist who bought his ambassadorship via a $1 million donation to Trump's inauguration fund. In text messages given to congress by Kurt Volker, former special envoy to the Ukraine, the diplomats are straightforwardly speaking of Trump's quid pro quo as what it was and Sondland jumps in to contradict this assessment.
If some sources are correct, Sondland's denial "was actually relayed to him by Trump himself, according to The Washington Post.
"A source cited by the Post said Sondland plans to tell lawmakers that he can’t vouch for whether or not the president was honest when he said there was no quid pro quo in his urging the Ukrainian president to investigate former vice president Joe Biden. 'It’s only true that the president said it, not that it was the truth,' the source was quoted as saying of Sondland’s testimony... Sondland had contacted Trump before responding, and Trump told him he 'didn’t want a quid pro quo.' That call is said to have last less than five minutes."
Trump's defenders have consistently pointed to Sondland's part of the exchange as exculpatory of Trump; it now appears as if it instead came from Trump himself.
"Sondland is also expected to say during his testimony on Thursday that he spent months prior to the September text exchange working at Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani’s direction to get Ukrainian authorities to announce publicly that they would be investigating corruption at the Ukrainian gas company linked to Biden's son.
"In exchange for that announcement—described as the 'deliverable' in the text messages—Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would finally get the White House meeting he'd been seeking, according to the Post.
"'It was a quid pro quo, but not a corrupt one,' the person familiar with Sondland’s testimony told the Post."
https://www.thedailybeast.com/gordon-sondland-key-ukraine-witness-to-testify-his-quid-pro-quo-denial-came-from-trump-personally-wapo
UPDATE (13 Oct., 2019) - A not-insignificant part of the Ukraine story is that not even the officials who would ordinarily be centrally involved with a decision like the aid suspension were involved in Trump's suspension and had no idea why it was done; the decision had come from Trump himself and had no apparent policy rationale (beyond, it turned out, trying to pressure the Ukraine to manufacture dirt on Trump's political rivals). NBC is reporting that this lack of knowledge extended to Gordon Sondland:
"U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland will testify to Congress next week that he did not know why United States military assistance to Ukraine was held up nor who ordered it, according to a person with knowledge of Sondland’s testimony before the House next week.
"Sondland will say that he 'relied on the president’s assurances in good faith and passed these along' when he texted Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor that there was no quid pro quo with Ukraine, the person said. President Donald Trump has urged Ukraine to investigate the son of political rival Joe Biden... [T]he source says Sondland had no independent knowledge about whether or not there really was a quid pro quo and why that military aid, approved by Congress, was being withheld by the administration."
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ambassador-e-u-testify-he-doesn-t-know-why-ukraine-n1065476
UPDATE (13 Oct., 2019) - Follow this: In 2015, a dozen shell-companies in Cyprus were identified by Ukrainian investigators as holding $1.5 billion in funds the previous pro-Russian regime of Viktor Yanukovich stole from the Ukraine. Those assets were frozen for years. Ukrainian investigators traced the assets and managed to get them returned to the Ukrainian treasury in March 2017.
Ukrainian "businessman" Pavel Fuchs purchased Quickpace, one of those companies, with an eye toward engineering the unfreezing of their funds--$160 million. Fuchs was--surprise, surprise--an associate of both Trump and Rudy Giuliani. He was, in fact, involved with the talks to construct a Trump-branded tower in Moscow and has recently described Giuliani as "the lobbyist for Kharkiv and Ukraine" and, as al Jazeera reports, "paid Guiliani for what he said was a lobbying contract to improve the city's business reputation.
"Giuliani has repeatedly denied working as a foreign lobbyist, something he is not registered to do."
Fuchs spent $200,000 to get a pair of tickets to Trump's inauguration but decided he'd gotten bad seats. He's currently suing the businessman who facilitated the purchase. U.S. officials revoked Fuchs' visa in 2017--he was banned from entered the U.S. for five years.
It now turns out Semyon Kislin, another Trump/Giuliani associate, was involved in what appears to be an essentially identical scheme. Kislin, an Ukrainian born American, is a longtime friend of Rudy Giuliani and donated to his political campaigns in the '90s. He purchased Opalcore Limited in November 2016, a company that held $20 million in the frozen assets, and set to work trying to unfreeze them.
"Kislin denies collaborating with Fuchs but in each case the plan to release the funds is similar.
"First they purchased Cypriot shell companies that according to Ukrainian authorities held Yanukovich's stolen assets. Then they would appeal to regain the funds, claiming that Ukrainian prosecutors had not followed the correct legal process when they seized the funds.
"Finally, they hoped the asset seizure would be declared illegal and reversed, meaning they would have a court order allowing them to withdraw tens of millions of dollars."
Astonishingly, claimed to al Jazeera that he didn't know, when he bought Opalcore, that its funds were frozen!
The frozen funds were returned to the Ukraine in March 2017; in January 2018, "Kislin's lawyers wrote to Yovanovitch, the US ambassador, court documents show.
"The letter, obtained by the Centre for Investigative Journalism, portrayed Kislin's company Trans Commodities NY (TCNY) as a victim of an 'improper scheme' by Ukrainian officials. His advocates requested 'assistance' in recovering the funds for the company arguing that the transfer of the bond proceeds was unlawful."
Yovanovitch apparently took no effort to aid Kislin; four months later, Trump removed her from her post.
Yovanovitch, it seemed, stood in the way of a lot of schemes by Trump/Giuliani associates.
UPDATE (14 Oct., 2019) - Trump has been rewriting elements of his Ukraine scandal, freely inventing parts of it and reordering events to his liking. "He has said at least 18 times over the last 15 days that the whistleblower who lodged a highly accurate complaint about his phone call with Ukraine's President had been highly inaccurate." While Trump has repeatedly slammed House Intelligence committee chairman Adam Schiff for offering a rendition of Trump's call with Zelensky that included words Trump didn't say--comments that were clearly not meant to be some verbatim recitation of the White House notes--Trump has invented comments by Nancy Pelosi in which she is said to be angry because the transcript didn't back the whistelblower's account. The transcript did, of course, back that account and Trump's Pelosi comments are pulled from one of his orifices.
Trump's minions manufactured a smear campaign against the U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine and Trump fired her, apparently to get her out of the way of his and his henchmens' schemes. On Fox News on Saturday, Trump said Zelensky "had some things that were not flattering to say about her [Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch]. And that came out of the--out of the blue." This, too, is false. Trump was the one who brought up--and slammed--Yovanovitch in that conversation. Zelensky went along with this--what else could he do?--but he made very clear the source of his own skepticism: "It was great that you were the first one who told me that she was a bad ambassador..."
In Louisiana on Friday, Trump told his awful followers that Schiff went before congress and made up a false version of the Zelensky call because he didn't think Trump would release the transcript. Trump then portrayed himself as outfoxing Schiff. He told the same tale to the Values Voters Summit on Saturday: "By the way, he only did it because he never thought that I was going to release the transcript. I gave the transcript of the call, but he did it and then I released the transcript. They never thought in a million years, even in terms of violation with another country--but we got the approval, so he's very embarrassed. He made a conversation that didn't exist... He never thought in a million years that I was going to release the real conversation." The reality: Schiff made his comments the day after Trump released the notes on the call.
These and more details:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/14/politics/fact-check-trump-ukraine-pelosi-schiff-yovanovitch/index.html
UPDATE (15 Oct., 2019) - Fiona Hill, who had been Trump's top aide for Russian and Eurasian affairs, has testified to the impeachment inquiry. She spent 10 hours talking to three different committees. This was in closed session, so we don't know most of what she said but the New York Times has reported that Hill testified that John Bolton, Trump's then-National Security Adviser, reacted angrily to the Trump/Giuliani effort to pressure the Ukraine into fabricating an investigation of the Bidens--something that was already reported by the Washington Post. Bolton called Giuliani a "hand grenade who's going to blow everybody up."
"'I am not part of whatever drug deal Rudy and Mulvaney are cooking up,' Bolton told Hill to tell White House lawyers, according to the testimony reported by the Times. That is a reference to Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff."
https://thehill.com/policy/international/europe/465790-bolton-told-ex-trump-aide-to-call-white-house-lawyers-about
UPDATE (15 Oct., 2019) - "Rudy Giuliani said Tuesday that he won't comply with a congressional subpoena for documents and communications related to House Democrats' impeachment inquiry.
"Giuiliani, who is President Trump's personal attorney, told ABC News that he will 'see what happens' if Democrats enforce the subpoena. The deadline for complying is Tuesday.
"Giuliani had hired former Watergate prosecutor Jon Sale to assist him in responding to the subpoena. Sale told The Hill on Tuesday that he sent a letter to Congress that same day about the subpoena. His work for Giuliani is completed, Sale said, and he is no longer representing him as a result."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/giuliani-says-he-wont-comply-with-subpoenas-from-democrats/ar-AAIPbOj
UPDATE (15 Oct., 2019) - Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman--the last two of whom are presently in prison awaiting trial on a massive campaign fraud scheme--were essentialy running Trump's shadow foreign policy. Parnas and Fruman are "business" partners and close friends with #BigHeroGhouliani but how long that association has run has always been an open question. Giuliani previously said he hooked up with them in November 2018, and by December, they had started hooking him up with the various corrupt officials and con-men who formed the basis of Trump's insane conspiracism regarding the Ukraine and his political rivals. The date of their earliest known association has just been pushed back several months and with a remarkably revelation:
"President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, was paid $500,000 for work he did for a company co-founded by the Ukrainian-American businessman arrested last week on campaign finance charges, Giuliani told Reuters on Monday.
"Giuliani said Parnas’ company, Boca Raton-based Fraud Guarantee, whose website says it aims to help clients “reduce and mitigate fraud”, engaged Giuliani Partners, a management and security consulting firm, around August 2018. Giuliani said he was hired to consult on Fraud Guarantee’s technologies and provide legal advice on regulatory issues... The New York Times reported last week that Parnas had told associates he paid Giuliani hundreds of thousands of dollars for what Giuliani said was business and legal advice. Giuliani said for the first time on Monday that the total amount was $500,000.
"Giuliani told Reuters the money came in two payments made within weeks of each other. He said he could not recall the dates of the payments."
He just didn't know the dates on which these guys paid him half a million dollars! Here's part of what that leg of this matters:
"According to an indictment unsealed by U.S. prosecutors, an unidentified Russian businessman arranged for two $500,000 wires to be sent from foreign bank accounts to a U.S. account controlled by Fruman in September and October 2018. The money was used, in part, by Fruman, Parnas and two other men charged in the indictment to gain influence with U.S. politicians and candidates, the indictment said.
"Foreign nationals are prohibited from making contributions and other expenditures in connection with U.S. elections, and from making contributions in someone else’s name.
"Giuliani said he was confident that the money he received was from 'a domestic source,' but he would not say where it came from.
"'I know beyond any doubt the source of the money is not any questionable source,' he told Reuters in an interview. 'The money did not come from foreigners. I can rule that out 100%,' he said.
"He declined to say whether the money had been paid directly to him by Fraud Guarantee or from another source."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-whistleblower-giuliani-excl/exclusive-trump-lawyer-giuliani-was-paid-500000-to-consult-on-indicted-associates-firm-idUSKBN1WU07Z
UPDATE (15 Oct., 2019) - Vice President Mike Pence just gave congress the grounds to impeach him for obstruction, announcing he won't comply with a request from the House for documents related to this Ukraine fiasco and citing, as rationale, the same legally baseless claims Trump has repeatedly made:
"In a letter to the chairmen of the House Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees, Pence counsel Matthew Morgan called the request part of a 'self-proclaimed impeachment inquiry,' noting that the House of Representatives has not yet taken a vote to open the inquiry and asserting that the request was part of a process that 'calls into question your commitment to fundamental fairness and due process rights.... Never before in history has the Speaker of the House attempted to launch an "impeachment inquiry" against a president without the majority of the House of Representatives voting to authorize a constitutionally acceptable process,' the letter says, echoing the same argument used by White House counsel Pat Cipollone in the White House’s reason for not cooperating with Congress."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-impeachment-inquiry/pence-refuses-house-request-provide-documents-related-ukraine-call-n1066651
UPDATE (16 Oct., 2019) - "A senior State Department official in charge of Ukraine policy told impeachment investigators on Tuesday that he was all but cut out of decisions regarding the country after a May meeting organized by Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, describing his sidelining by President Trump’s inner circle as 'wrong,' according to a lawmaker who heard the testimony.
"The revelation from George P. Kent, the deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, emerged as he submitted to hours of closed-door testimony to the House committees investigating how President Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rivals.
"Despite an edict by the White House not to cooperate with what it has called an illegitimate inquiry, Mr. Kent was one of a procession of top officials who have made the trip to the secure rooms of the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill, unspooling a remarkably consistent tale. They have detailed how Mr. Trump sought to manipulate American policy in Ukraine to meet his goals, circumventing career diplomats and policy experts and inserting his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani into the process, raising alarms in the West Wing and throughout the government... After the May 23 meeting called by Mr. Mulvaney, Mr. Kent told investigators, he and others whose portfolios included Ukraine were edged out by Gordon D. Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union; Kurt D. Volker, the special envoy for Ukraine; and Rick Perry, the energy secretary, who 'declared themselves the three people now responsible for Ukraine policy,' Mr. Connolly said."
Kent turned over documents showing that the diplomatic corps was deeply alarmed by what Trump was doing with the Ukraine. Kent had previously "served as an anticorruption coordinator in the State Department’s European Bureau in 2014 and 2015, and then as deputy chief of mission in the United States Embassy in Kiev from 2015 until 2018.
In his earlier roles, Mr. Kent had aggressively pushed Ukrainian prosecutors to pursue investigations into Mykola Zlochevsky, an oligarch who owned a gas company that started paying Hunter Biden, the presidential candidate’s younger son, as a board member in 2014. He was pressed at length on his views of the case on Tuesday, a personal familiar with his testimony said.
When a British case against Mr. Zlochevsky for money laundering was dismissed in January 2015 for lack of evidence, Mr. Kent and others in the State Department blamed Ukrainian prosecutors. The Ukrainian prosecutors had refused to provide evidence to British prosecutors, Mr. Kent told associates, because they and other officials were being paid off by Mr. Zlochevsky or his allies.
"Tensions boiled over at a previously unreported meeting in early February 2015 in Kiev, in which Mr. Kent scolded a deputy prosecutor in the office of Vitaly Yarema, who was the general prosecutor of Ukraine--the nation’s top law enforcement post, similar to that of the attorney general of the United States.
"According to a Ukrainian and an American with knowledge of the meeting, Mr. Kent demanded of the deputy prosecutor, 'Who took the bribe and how much was it?'
"The Ukrainian deputy replied--perhaps jokingly--that a $7 million bribe had been paid just before Mr. Yarema took office.
"The F.B.I. looked into the bribe allegation, according to people familiar with it, but--as is common in the world of Ukrainian corruption investigations--the inquiry stalled amid contradictory and evolving stories.
"In the days after the heated meeting with Mr. Kent, Mr. Yarema was fired and eventually replaced by another prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, whom American officials came to view as similarly problematic."
UPDATE (16 Oct., 2019) - Follow this: The swamp deepens. The core Team Trump in this sorry business is Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, the latter two of whom have been indicted on an illegal campaign finance scheme. Parnas and Fruman had been workign with Giuliani since some time in 2018 and, in fact, paid Gilulian half-a-million dollars that appears to have been provided by a Russian "businessman." Parnas and Fruman are the guys who hooked up Giluliani with the corrupt former officials, con-men, etc. that formed the basis of Trump's outlandish conspiracy claims re:his political rivals and the Ukraine. They were the ones who worked to smear and remove the U.S. Ambassador to that country, seeing her anti-corruption stance as a potential hindrance to their schemes. The AP reported that Parnas, Fruman, and perhaps Giuliani were also involved in a scheme to replace the CEO of Ukraine's state gas company with an executive friendlier to their ambitions, with the idea of steering contracts toward Trump-friendly businesses. Trump's Energy Secretary Rick Perry appears to have been roped into this, and suggested replacing the American representative on the board with a man who had contributed $200,000 to his own campaign the new CEO.
Without covering these matters in that much detail, NBC News is now reporting that Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash is tied to all of this. Firtash controls 70% of Ukraine's gas distribution network. He's living in Austria and battling extradition to the U.S. on federal bribery charges. It's worth noting that when Parnas and Fruman attempted to flee the U.S., they had one-way tickets to Austria. Rudy Giuliani, who dined with them the same day they decided to run, also, it turned out, intended to leave for Austria less than 24 hours after Parnas and Fruman.
Can ya' dig it?
"In March, at a meeting in Houston, Parnas and Fruman mentioned Firtash as they made a proposal to an official of Ukraine's natural gas company, according to Dale Perry, an American gas executive who does business in Ukraine and was briefed on the meeting. Perry told NBC News the pair was urging that the gas company pay Firtash a debt of more than $200 million that Firtash believes he is owed by the company.
"Though the meeting has been described in news accounts, that element has not previously been reported, and it raises the question of whether Firtash had a business arrangement with Parnas and Fruman. His lawyer says he did not.
"Yet Firtash, still a major player in Ukraine's gas sector, stood to benefit handsomely from the plan Parnas and Furman were proposing.
At the same time, the oligarch was playing a key role in the effort by Parnas, Fruman and Giuliani to hunt for dirt on Donald Trump's political opponents in Ukraine.
Firtash's lawyers in Vienna were the ones who obtained an affidavit from a fired Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, that Giuliani and other Trump allies have used as a basis to accuse Biden of corruption. Shokin is the prosecutor whom then Vice President Joe Biden urged be removed, in keeping with U.S. policy at the time that viewed him as a bad actor."
Guess who Firtash has as a lawyer? Why, it's Victoria Toensing! Toensing and her husband Joe diGenova are professional smear-merchants and demagogues who have made a career of traveling the media--particularly Fox News--throwing slime at Democrats. They've been one of Trump's staunchest defenders throughout the Ukraine scandal. It turned out they'd been working with Giuliani--something they didn't bother to disclose in those many appearances.
Were Giuliani, Parnas and Fruman in business with Firtash?
"A lawyer for Firtash, Victoria Toensing, told NBC News the oligarch was not in business with Parnas and Fruman. 'That's a crock,' she said.
"Toensing did acknowledge a financial tie between Firtash and Parnas, through her. She says she brought Parnas to the Firtash legal team as a paid translator... Toensing and her husband, Joe diGenova, were talking about Ukraine and Trump long before they began representing Firtash in July. Once briefly considered for a role as Trump's personal lawyers in the Russia investigation, they say they sought to represent 'Ukrainian whistleblowers' who had information about misdeeds by Democrats, including Vice President Biden. They said they were blocked from going to Ukraine by the then-U.S. ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, whom Toensing said 'we all wanted to get rid of.'
"But Firtash was able to help Trump try to discredit the Bidens, through the Shokin affidavit, which the former prosecutor said he made 'at the request of lawyers acting for Dmytro Firtash.'
"The president's allies have used it as a weapon."
Since 2014, Firtash is wanted in the U.S. for allegedly bribing Indian officials to score a lucrative deal to sell titanium to Boeing. Federal prosecutors have publicly stated that Firtash and Andras Knopp, his partner in that scheme, "have been identified by United States law enforcement as two upper-echelon associates of Russian organized crime."
"In August 2016, NBC News reported that in 2008, according to court records, then Trump aide Paul Manafort's firm was involved with Firtash in a plan to redevelop a famous New York hotel, the Drake. Firtash's company planned to invest over $100 million, the records say.
"That same year, Firtash acknowledged to the U.S. ambassador in Ukraine that he got his start in business with the permission of a notorious Russian crime lord, according to a classified State Department cable. Other U.S. cables say Firtash made part of his fortune through sweetheart natural gas deals between Russia and the Ukraine."
UPDATE (17 Oct., 2019) - Trump's top goon, Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, appeared at a press conference today and made all kinds of news. Trump withheld congressionally approved aid to Ukraine in an apparent effort to pressure its government into manufacturing an investigation into Trump's political rivals but for weeks, Trump has, on perhaps dozens of occaions, denied there was any quid pro quo. Today, Mulvaney went to that press conference and not only openly talked about the situation as a quid pro quo but said it was something Trump does all the time!
Mulvaney was replying to ABC's Jonathan Karl:
Mulvaney: "Did [Trump] also mention to me in the past that the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely, no question about that. But that’s it and that’s why we held up the money.”
Karl: "So the demand for an investigation into the Democrats was part of the reason that he ordered you to withhold funding to Ukraine?"
Mulvaney: "Look back to what happened in 2016,’ certainly was part of the thing that he was worried about in corruption with the nation. And that is absolutely equivalent."
Karl: "What you described is a quid pro quo. It is: Funding will not flow unless the investigation into the Democrats’ server happens as well."
Mulvaney: "We do that all the time with foreign policy."
Asked about George Kent's testimony yesterday, Mulaney offered another jaw-dropper: "I'm sorry. I don't know who that is. Is that-- is that somebody who testified this week? I don't believe I have ever talked to anybody named George Kent in my life."
Kent is Trump's deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs--a specialist in Ukrainian anti-corruption effort who runs--or did run--the U.S. embassy in the Ukraine after Trump recalled Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.
Yesterday, Michael McKinley, a former top State Department adviser testified to the impeachment inquiry and lamented that there was political influence in foreign policy. Mulvaney jumped on this but didn't seem to know who McKinley was either--he repeatedly called him "McKinney":
"McKinney said yesterday that he was really upset with the political influence in foreign policy. That was one of the reasons he was so upset about this. And I have news for everybody. Get over it. There's going to be political influence in foreign policy."
Mulvaney attempted to synthesize the various and conflicting lies Trump has offered as after-the-fact rationale for the aid suspension. He repeated Trump's false claim that Europe wasn't doing much to help Ukraine. In reality, Europe sends more aid to the Ukraine than the U.S. but not as much lethal aid, and Mulvaney reshaped Trump's intial tale to say Trump was, in reality, pouty about lethal aid. But that's the division that has worked out in recent years; the U.S. handles lethal aid while Europe handles most everything else; the administration's tale is fundamentally dishonest.
Hilariously, Jay Sekulow, one of Trump's own attorneys, attempted to distance himself from Mulvaney's comments:
"In a terse statement issued Thursday evening, Trump's personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow, said, 'The President's legal counsel was not involved in acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney's press briefing.'"
After this, Mulvaney suddenly did a complete 180, denying what he had earlier VERY plainly said and gaslighting anyone who points out that fact:
"'Once again, the media has decided to misconstrue my comments to advance a biased and political witch hunt against President Trump. Let me be clear, there was absolutely no quid pro quo between Ukrainian military aid and any investigation into the 2016 election,' Mulvaney noted. 'The president never told me to withhold any money until the Ukrainians did anything related to the server. The only reasons we were holding the money was because of concern about lack of support from other nations and concerns over corruption... There was never any connection between the funds and the Ukrainians doing anything with the server - this was made explicitly obvious by the fact that the aid money was delivered without any action on the part of the Ukrainians regarding the server,' he said. 'There never was any condition on the flow of the aid related to the matter of the DNC server.'
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/mulvaney-admits-quid-pro-quo-military-aid-withheld/story?id=66353143
UPDATE (18 Oct., 2019) - Gordon Sondland is a Trump loyalist. He became Trump's Ambassador to the EU by giving a million dollars to Trump's inauguration fund (he had no diplomatic qualifications). He testified before congress this week and helped bury Trump:
"US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland was directed by President Donald Trump to work with Rudy Giuliani on Ukraine, he told Congress on Thursday, and was left with a choice: Abandon efforts to bolster a key strategic alliance or work to satisfy the demands of the President's personal lawyer... Sondland's revealing testimony is a clear break with Trump over Giuliani--he said he was 'disappointed' that Trump wouldn't commit to a meeting sought by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky until they spoke with Giuliani, who was pursuing an investigation into Biden, a potential political rival in Trump's reelection campaign. And the ambassador's testimony showcases how Trump put on hold an effort to strengthen relations with Ukraine until top US officials were in contact with his personal attorney.
"'Based on the President's direction, we were faced with a choice: We could abandon the goal of a White House meeting for President Zelensky, which we all believed was crucial to strengthening U.S.-Ukrainian ties and furthering long-held U.S. foreign policy goals in the region; or we could do as President Trump directed and talk to Mr. Giuliani to address the President's concerns,' Sondland said in his opening statement.
"'We chose the latter path, which seemed to all of us--Secretary (Rick) Perry, Ambassador (Kurt) Volker, and myself--to be the better alternative,' Sondland continued."
Sondland came down hard on trying to get foreign governments to aid in campaigns:
"'Let me state clearly: Inviting a foreign government to undertake investigations for the purpose of influencing an upcoming U.S. election would be wrong,' Sondland said, according to the statement. 'Withholding foreign aid in order to pressure a foreign government to take such steps would be wrong. I did not and would not ever participate in such undertakings. In my opinion, security aid to Ukraine was in our vital national interest and should not have been delayed for any reason'... Sonland testified that virtually every time he mentioned Ukraine to the President, the refrain from Trump was to talk to Giuliani, the source said. Trump repeatedly said he had 'no interest in Ukraine' and to talk to Giuliani whenever it came up in conversations, the source said of Sondland's testimony."
Marie Yovanovitch, then Ambassador to the Ukraine, was ousted from her position as Ambassador to Ukraine after a smear-campaign orchestrated by Giuliani and his thugs Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman--presently under indictment for campaign finance violations.
"Sondland expressed his support for Yovanovitch, the Ukrainian ambassador who was attacked by Giuliani and fired by Trump--and whose ouster has been a sore point for the career State Department officials who have testified in the impeachment inquiry thus far.
"'I found her to be an excellent diplomat,' Sondland said, adding: 'I was never a part of any campaign to disparage or dislodge her, and I regretted her departure.'"
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/17/politics/sondland-deposition-impeachment-inquiry/index.html
UPDATE (19 Oct., 2019) - Some particularly explosive news came out of Gordon's Sondland's testimoney before congress this week: Sondland was involved in the scheme to replace the leadership of Naftogaz, the Ukrainian state gas company.
Background: The leadership of Naftogaz was considered a relative success story--restored order, rooted out corruption. The Trump gang saw this as a problem and set out to oust the CEO and board and replace them with a more pliable leadership that would steer lucrative contracts toward Trump-friendly businesses. The scheme was to replace the reform-minded CEO to this end, and was carried out by Lev Parnas, Igor Fruman and probably Rudy Giuliani. Trump's Energy Secreatary Rick Perry also got in on the action, reportedly traveling to Kyiv to repeatedly demand that President Zelenskiy fired the Naftogaz supervisory board and replace them with Republican cronies, including a fellow who had given Perry's own campaign $200,000 (Perry has tried to put a different spin on these events).
"The U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, backed a Trump administration effort to change the leadership at Ukraine’s main energy company, despite objections from career diplomats who saw the move as undermining anti-corruption efforts, three sources familiar with the matter told NBC News.
"The push coincided with efforts by President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to pressure Ukraine's newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to conduct investigations into Democrats to help the president’s re-election campaign.
"U.S. diplomats in Kyiv and Washington were blindsided and confused by the new position on Ukraine’s state-owned energy company, Naftogaz, because they saw the new CEO and independent supervisory board as having cleaned up much of the firm’s corrupt practices, the sources said... Given the company’s positive trajectory in recent years, it remains unclear why Sondland was pushing for a change in the supervisory board... Sondland 'was generally unhappy with their governance (at Naftogaz), and encouraged them to shake up the board, but not necessarily replace specific individuals,' said a source familiar with the ambassador’s view... The subject of Ukraine’s state gas company, Naftogaz, came up in meetings in May with Zelenskiy and Sondland, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and the U.S. special envoy to Ukraine, Kurt Volker, who flew to Kyiv for the Ukrainian president’s inauguration, the sources said.
"Perry made clear there needed to be a 'fundamental change' in the leadership of Naftogaz, two former U.S. officials with knowledge of the meeting said... The approach by Sondland and Perry seemed to fly in the face of longstanding U.S. policy, which had viewed the new management at Naftogaz as a relative success story... The focus on Naftogaz’s board also raised alarms among Ukrainian officials because the effort came at the same time Giuliani’s associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were pushing for the removal of the company’s reform-minded CEO... The two wanted new management as part of a scheme to sell liquified natural gas to the company, according to two industry sources familiar with the proposal... Even if they had managed to push out the CEO, the plan by Parnas and Fruman could only have succeeded with changes to the supervisory board, which has the power to veto a project it deems suspect. Any weakening of the independence of the board also would play into the hands of Ukraine’s corrupt actors, who in years past siphoned off huge sums of money from the company, according to former U.S. officials and regional experts.
"It’s not clear if the bid by Sondland to make changes in the leadership at Naftogaz was coordinated in any way with Giuliani or his associates, and no evidence has emerged to demonstrate a direct link. But whether intentional or not, the outcome could have benefited Parnas and Fruman and corrupt elements in Ukraine seeking to strip away the company’s independence... [T]he suggestion from Trump’s envoys to change up the board did not appear to follow past practice. Nominees for the international members of the board are supposed to come after consultations between the IMF and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, who in turn submit a list to the Ukraine government. But the Trump team simply raised the issue directly with the Ukraine government, sources said."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/sondland-backed-effort-shake-leadership-ukraine-s-state-energy-company-n1068711
UPDATE (23 Oct., 2019) - After Trump's minions carried out their lie campaign against Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine, she was recalled by Trump. Trump pulled William Taylor, a former ambassador, out of retirement to take over the U.S. Embassy. Taylor has now testified to the impeachment inquiry, and those present have called his the most damning testimony yet. His opening statement has been relased to the press, and it takes no prisoners.
Taylor arrives in the middle of July and of the story and describes finding "two channels of U.S. policy-making and implementation, one regular and one highly irregular."
"The latter, he writes, 'was well-connected in Washington, [but] operated mostly outside of official State Department channels' and included 'then-Special Envoy Kurt Volker, Ambassador [Gordon] Sondland, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, and... [Rudolph] Giuliani.' Both channels were eager to arrange a telephone call between Trump and Zelensky as well as a promised White House visit for the latter in hopes of strengthening the U.S.-Ukraine bilateral relationship. But as Taylor describes, it soon became clear that the two had in fact 'diverged in their objectives.'"
The irregular channel was trying to limit knowledge of its participants' activities.
"Taylor describes how Sondland sought to exclude other inter-agency participants from a June 28 call with Zelensky, for the express purpose of 'mak[ing] sure no one was transcribing or monitoring... the call.'"
Taylor said there was unanimous agreement among the relevant agencies that U.S. security aid to Ukraine was effective and should continue but the aid package was inexplicably held up by Trump for months. "The irregular policy channel [had begun] running contrary to the goals of longstanding U.S. policy."
"Strangely, even though I was Chief of Mission and was scheduled to meet with [Zelensky] along with Ambassador Volker the following day [after Trump's call to Z], I received no readout of the call from the White House.'" A few days later, an NSC official told him Trump had suggested Z meet with Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr.
"On Aug. 16, after hearing from Volker that Ukrainian officials had asked that the United States submit an official request to reopen a Ukrainian investigation into Burisma, Taylor strongly advised that the United States 'stay clear'... At the suggestion of then-National Security Advisor John Bolton, Taylor first sent a cable to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo 'describing the folly" I saw in withholding military aid to Ukraine' and stating that he 'could not and would not defend such a policy' on August 29. That same day, the story of the hold on security assistance [publicly] broke, leading Ukrainian officials to contact Taylor for an explanation--something he was 'embarrassed' he could not give them. As for his cable, Taylor 'received no specific response[,]' other than a report that Pompeo had carried the cable into a related meeting at the White House.
"A few days later, Taylor learned from Morrison of a conversation Sondland had had with a senior advisor to Zelensky a few days earlier, in which Sondland asserted that 'the security assistance money would not come until [Zelensky] committed to pursue the Burisma investigation.' An alarmed Taylor texted Sondland and Volker seeking confirmation, to which Sondland replied 'call me.'
"On the subsequent call, Sondland confirmed 'that President Trump had told him that he wants [Zelensky] to state publicly that Ukraine will investigate Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.' As Sondland told Taylor, 'everything” was dependent on a public announcement of investigations, not just a White House meeting. According to Sondland, 'President Trump wanted [Zelensky] "in a public box" by making a public statement about ordering such investigations.' Taylor urged Sondland to push back on Trump’s demand, and Sondland reportedly agreed to try."
This underscores Trump's very bad faith throughout all of this. He wanted a public announcement of an investigation--a thing he could use for his own political ends. He wanted it to come from Zelensky himself, to make it more effective. And, as we know from previous reporting, he wanted specific mention of the Bidens and this other nonsense; a general stateement about committing to anti-corruption investigations wouldn't do.
On 7 Sept., Taylor received word of a conversation between Sondland and Trump in which, while denying he was asking for a quid pro quo, Trump insisted that Zelensky himself announce the opening of these investigations. The next day, Sondland told Taylor he'd taken this to Zelensky, noting that "Trump was adamant that [Zelensky] himself 'clear things up and do it in public.'"
"This exchange resulted in a commitment by Zelensky to publicly announce the investigations in an interview with CNN."
This never happened but the Trump regime, having, as we've learned from previous reporting, been informed that holding up aid to Ukraine beyond September would violate the law, finally released it.
"Taylor writes that, on Sept. 11, the hold on security assistance for Ukraine was lifted without explanation. Taylor conveyed the news to Zelensky and his advisors and sought to confirm that neither Zelensky nor anyone in his government planned to follow through on his reported commitment to Sondland to announce investigations on CNN. Zelensky’s advisors indicated that they did not, though Taylor notes that one official who had been Giuliani’s main interlocutor 'looked uncomfortable[.]'"
Later, Trump met with Zelensky and released the White House notes on the call. In the latter matter, Trump "gave the Ukrainians virtually no notice of the release,' leaving them 'livid.'"
https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-bill-taylors-testimony-adds-ukraine-story
UPDATE (23 Oct., 2019) - Taylor's opening statement (pdf file):
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6509022/Bill-Taylor-Opening-Statement.pdf
UPDATE (23 Oct., 2019) - "To Democrats who say that President Trump’s decision to freeze a $391 million military aid package to Ukraine was intended to bully Ukraine’s leader into carrying out investigations for Mr. Trump’s political benefit, the president and his allies have had a simple response: There could not have been any quid pro quo because the Ukrainians did not know the assistance had been blocked... But in fact, word of the aid freeze had gotten to high-level Ukrainian officials by the first week in August, according to interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times... The timing of the communications about the issue, which have not previously been reported, shows that Ukraine was aware the White House was holding up the funds weeks earlier than United States and Ukrainian officials had acknowledged. And it means that the Ukrainian government was aware of the freeze during most of the period in August when Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, and two American diplomats were pressing President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to make a public commitment to the investigations being sought by Mr. Trump."
Details:
"In conversations over several days in early August, a Pentagon official discussed the assistance freeze directly with a Ukrainian government official, according to records and interviews. The Pentagon official suggested that Mr. Mulvaney had been pushing for the assistance to be withheld, and urged the Ukrainians to reach out to him.
"The Pentagon official described Mr. Mulvaney’s motivations only in broad terms but made clear that the same Ukrainian official, Andriy Yermak, who had been negotiating with Mr. Giuliani over the investigations and a White House visit being sought by Mr. Zelensky should also reach out to Mr. Mulvaney over the hold on military aid."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/us/politics/ukraine-aid-freeze-impeachment.html
UPDATE (24 Oct., 2019) - "More than two months before the phone call that launched the impeachment inquiry
into President Donald Trump, Ukraine’s newly elected leader was already
worried about pressure from the U.S. president to investigate his
Democratic rival Joe Biden.
"Volodymyr
Zelenskiy gathered a small group of advisers on May 7 in Kyiv for a
meeting that was supposed to be about his nation’s energy needs.
Instead, the group spent most of the three-hour discussion talking about
how to navigate the insistence from Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy
Giuliani for a probe and how to avoid becoming entangled in the American
elections, according to three people familiar with the details of the
meeting... The meeting came before Zelenskiy was inaugurated but about two weeks
after Trump called to offer his congratulations on the night of the
Ukrainian leader’s April 21 election."
UPDATE (25 Oct., 2019) - As covered earlier in this thread, when, in talking about this ugly Ukraine business, Trump talks about "corruption," he really only means his own false allegations re:the Bidens and so on. He uses "corruption" to try to shield himself from criticism and make his efforts to get the Ukrainians to manufacture investigations into his political rivals as excusable or even noble. But he doesn't actually care about corruption, which, in reality, he was both practicing and very enthusiastically encouraging throughout this entire affair.
Trump:
"This is about corruption, and this is not about politics. This is about corruption. And if you look and you read our Constitution and many other things, we-- I have an obligation to look at corruption. I have an actual obligation and a duty."
But while he's droning on about this, he has consistently tried to cut--and massively cut--funding aimed at carrying out anti-corruption efforts there:
"The Trump administration has sought repeatedly to cut foreign aid programs tasked with combating corruption in Ukraine and elsewhere overseas, White House budget documents show, despite recent claims from President Trump and his administration that they have been singularly concerned with fighting corruption in Ukraine... 'I don’t care about politics, but I do care about corruption. And this whole thing is about corruption,' Trump told reporters earlier this month when discussing the Ukraine issue. 'This whole thing-- this whole thing is about corruption'...
"Trump, acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and other administration officials have insisted repeatedly that their goal in delaying the military aid package to Ukraine was to ensure corruption was addressed in that country--not to produce political benefit to Trump.
"'There were two reasons that we held up the aid. We talked about this at some length. The first one was the rampant corruption in Ukraine,' Mulvaney said on 'Fox News Sunday.' 'Corruption is a big deal; everyone knows it,' he said. (The second reason was to ensure that other nations contributed to Ukraine’s defense, Mulvaney said.)
"The administration’s professed interest in fighting corruption in Ukraine has not been reflected in its annual budget requests to Congress."
The International Narcotics and Law Enforcement program is described in White House documents as a programed aimed at "helping U.S. partners address threats to U.S. interests by building resilience and promoting reform in the justice and law enforcement sectors through support to new institutions and specialized offices, such as Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau and Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office." Trump wanted to cut the portion of this program that goes to Ukraine from $30 million down to $13 million. The only reason this didn't happen is because congress rejected it. When, earlier this year, Trump submitted his 2020 budget request, he had once again chopped the $30 million down to $13 million, something that--again--congress is unlikely to approve.
The Economic Support and Development Fund "is aimed at fighting corruption in countries around the world, among other goals, according to White House budget documents. Spending in Ukraine for the accounts in question was $250 million in 2018; the White House has asked for $145 million in 2020 under the new iteration of the program."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/10/23/trump-administration-sought-billions-dollars-cuts-programs-aimed-fighting-corruption-ukraine-abroad/
UPDATE (26 Oct., 2019) - In attempting to deny congress access to the unredacted Mueller report and its underlying evidence, Trump sent Justice lawyers into court to argue his position that without a formal vote on an impeachment inquiry, no impeachment inquiry was underway, and thus the secrecy of this material (which includes grand jury testimony) shouldn't be breached. The lawyers for the administration could provide no real basis for their position and the court has very rapidly ruled against them, ordering them to turn over the material.
https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2019/10/federal-judge-orders-doj-to-hand-over-unredacted-mueller-report-and-underlying-materials-to-judiciary-committee/
UPDATE (27 Oct., 2019) - "Philip Reeker, a U.S. diplomat who oversees European affairs, told House members he had plans of defending former Ukrainian Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch in the face of a smear campaign against her, but Reeker was overruled by top State Department officials, according to a person familiar with Reeker's testimony.
"In a rare Saturday hearing, Reeker sat for more than eight hours of questions from lawmakers running the impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Reeker appeared under a subpoena issued by House lawmakers, despite being ordered not to cooperate by Trump.
"Reeker, a career foreign servicer officer, was named the acting assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of European and Eurasian affairs in March, a few months before Yovanovitch became a political target and was removed from her post.
"Just before her ouster, however, Reeker wanted to draft a strongly-worded statement from State Department officials to strike back at the attacks she was enduring in conservative media and by allies of Trump. But that letter was scotched by David Hale, the No. 3 official in the State Department, according to the person familar with Reeker's testimony.
"Yovanovitch was seen by Trump allies as an obstacle to conducting a back-channel foreign policy with Ukraine, including the freezing of nearly $400 million in military aid until Ukraine agreed to investigate Trump's political rival Joe Biden and his son... Reeker testified he was aware of a plan to freeze the military aid to Ukraine, but he did not know why it was being held up..."
https://www.npr.org/2019/10/26/773761689/u-s-diplomat-state-department-nixed-plan-to-support-former-ukrainian-ambassador
UPDATE (27 Oct., 2019) - One of the villains in the ongong Trump/Ukraine scandal is right-wing hack "journalist" John Solomon. ProPublica has been working this angle:
"Last March, a veteran Washington reporter taped an interview with a Ukrainian prosecutor that sparked a disinformation campaign alleging Joe Biden pressured Ukrainians into removing a prosecutor investigating a company because of its ties to the former vice president’s son. The interview and subsequent columns, conducted and written by a writer for The Hill newspaper, John Solomon, were the starting gun that eventually set off the impeachment inquiry into the president.
"Watching from the control booth of The Hill’s TV studio was Lev Parnas, who helped arrange the interview.
"Parnas and his partner Igor Fruman were working with the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to promote a story that it was Democrats and not Republicans who colluded with a foreign power in the 2016 election. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan indicted the duo this month on allegations that they illegally funneled foreign money into U.S. political campaigns.
"Interviews and company records obtained by ProPublica show Parnas worked closely with Solomon to facilitate his reporting, including helping with translation and interviews. Solomon also shared files he obtained related to the Biden allegations with Parnas, according to a person familiar with the exchange. And the two men shared yet another only recently revealed connection: Solomon’s personal lawyers connected the journalist to Parnas and later hired the Florida businessman as a translator in their representation of a Ukrainian oligarch... Parnas’ unusual and extensive involvement in the production of [Solomon's] stories has not been previously reported."
The details:
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-a-veteran-reporter-worked-with-giuliani-associates-to-launch-the-ukraine-conspiracy
UPDATE (27 Oct., 2019) - The Wall Street Journal has gotten a look at the private Instagram account of Lev Parnas, who, with his "business partner" Igor Fruman, helped Rudy Giuliani and Trump--and right-wing "journalist" John Solomon--assemble the various baseless conspiracies that led the current Ukraine scandal. Parnas and Fruman are now under indictment for a massive campaign finance scheme aimed at moving hundreds of thousands of foreign dollars into Republican coffers in the U.S. The two are up to their ass in what seems like an endless array of shady dealings, and Parnas' Instagram reveals how very deeply they were involved with both Trump and, most especially, Giuliani. Trump has recently claimed he doesn't even know the men, despite the extensive photographic record of his having repeatedly met with them, even dined with them at the White House. The Instagram account contains a pic of a signed personal note Trump sent to Parnas thanking him for his help. There are pictures and check-ins of Parnas trekking all over the U.S. and the world with Giuliani in what was clearly a VERY close relationship from at least November 2018 forward.
https://www.wsj.com/video/private-photos-of-indicted-donor-depict-ties-to-trump-giuliani/7EED4946-5201-4D70-A8FF-0516DCC1488E.html
UPDATE (27 Oct., 2019) - Follow this: Parnas and Fruman worked in some not-exactly-clear capacity for Dmytro Firtash, Ukrainain oligarch and Russian Mafia figure. Firtash is currently in Vienna, where he has been for 5 years, battling extradition the U.S. on an array of criminal charges. Firtash is the source of that affidavit that Rudy Giliani waved all over television, the one from former Ukranian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in which Shokin falsely claims he was fired because he was investigating Burisma Holdings, Hunter Biden's employer. Firtash solicited Shokin to create that affidavit, which also went to right-wing hack "journalist" John Solomon, who dutifully put it in the Hill.
By the way, Firtash's lawyers in resisting extradition to the U.S. are Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova, the slimy right-wing D.C. legal duo who are among Trump's most fervent and deranged defenders on Fox News. The pair had been working with Giuliani in his anti-Joe Biden efforts. Lev Parnas reportedly recommended that Firtash hire them, which Firtash did, paying them $1 million. Firtash then set his operatives in the Ukraine to digging dirt on Biden. That Shokin affidavit was one of the fruits of the effort. Toensing and diGenova employed Lev Parnas as their translator on the extradition case.
The scheme by Parnas and Fruman to replace the head of Ukraine's state gas company, reported a few weeks ago by the AP and which also involved Trump administration figures, would have aided Firtash, who controls 70% of Ukraine's gas distribution network. When Parnas and Fruman were arrested, they were at the airport with one-way tickets to Vienna. Where Firtash is. They'd dined earlier in the day with Rudy Giuliani. And Giuliani himself was set to travel to Vienna less than 24 hours after Parnas and Fruman were to depart.
UPDATE (28 Oct., 2019) - Naftogaz is the Ukrainian state gas company. Its current leadership is considered a relative success story--it cleared out the rampant corruption that had marked the prior regime. Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman wanted to change that. They were involved in a scheme to replace the leadership of Naftogaz with one that would steer lucrative contracts toward Trump-friendly businesses--principally, a gas compay owned by Parnas and Fruman themselves. This was a straight-up money-making shcheme. Both Gordon Sondland, Trump's Ambassador to the EU, and Rick Perry, Trump's Energy Secretary, were also leaning on the Ukrainians to replace the leadership of Naftogaz. Perry reportedly recommended, as the American official at the company, a big Republican donor who had given Perry's most recent campaign $200,000. Rudy Giuliani was present in at least some of the meetings in which Parnas and Fruman were trying to sell their scheme with various other parties and it's not unreasonable to suspect he was up to his ass in it all along, but he has denied involvement in it. As the plot unfolded, Parnas and Fruman had inside knowledge of things Trump was about to do in advance of Trump doing them--they were clearly wired in to Trump--and were using this knowledge as leverage to try to convince others to go along with their scheme.
Well, there's some news:
"The White House was alerted as early as mid-May--earlier than previously known--that a budding pressure campaign by Rudy Giuliani and one of President Donald Trump's ambassadors was rattling the new Ukrainian president, two people with knowledge of the matter tell NBC News.
"Alarm bells went off at the National Security Council when the White House's top Europe official was told that Giuliani was pushing the incoming Ukrainian administration to shake up the leadership of state-owned energy giant Naftogaz, the sources said. The official, Fiona Hill, learned then about the involvement of Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two Giuliani associates who were helping with the Naftogaz pressure and also with trying to find dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
"Hill quickly briefed then-national security adviser John Bolton about what she'd been told, the individuals with knowledge of the meeting said.
"The revelation significantly moves up the timeline of when the White House learned that Trump's allies had engaged with the incoming Ukrainian administration and were acting in ways that unnerved the Ukrainians--even before President Volodymyr Zelenskiy had been sworn in. Biden had entered the presidential race barely three weeks earlier.
"In a White House meeting the week of May 20, Hill was also told that the ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, a major Republican donor tapped by Trump for the coveted post in Brussels, was giving Zelenskiy unsolicited advice on who should be elevated to influential posts in his new administration, the individuals said. One of them said it struck the Ukrainians as 'inappropriate'... Hill learned of Zelenskiy's concerns from former U.S. diplomat Amos Hochstein, now a member of Naftogaz's supervisory board. Hochstein had just returned from a pre-inauguration meeting with Zelenskiy and his advisers in Kyiv in which they discussed Giuliani's and Sondland's overtures and how to inoculate Ukraine from getting dragged into domestic U.S. politics.
"Zelenskiy's early concern about pressure from Trump and his allies, expressed in the May 7 meeting with his advisers and Hochstein, was earlier reported by The Associated Press. The fact that those concerns were then quickly relayed to the White House National Security Council has never previously been reported... Zelenskiy's May 7 Kyiv meeting with Hochstein and top aides in which he voiced dismay about Giuliani and Sondland included Andriy Kobolev, Naftogaz's CEO. It took place the day after the State Department announced then-Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was returning home ahead of schedule.
"'The message was clear: "You better listen to us. If we tell you to investigate Biden, you better do it. Look at what happened to (Yovanovitch),"' said one individual familiar with the outlook of Zelenskiy's office at the time. 'They saw that Giuliani went after her — and he won'... Yovanovitch's abrupt recall months ahead of schedule left no doubt for Zelenskiy and his aides that Giuliani's agenda had Trump's full backing and that his government would have to somehow address the demands for investigations and changes at Naftogaz, individuals familiar with the matter said."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-impeachment-inquiry/white-house-told-may-ukraine-president-zelenskiy-s-concerns-about-n1072776
UPDATE (28 Oct., 2019) - Army Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council who sat in on the now-infamous 25 July call between Trump and Zelensky, is scheduled to testify to congress on Tuesday that, in the words of the New York Times, he "twice registered internal objections about how Mr. Trump and his inner circle were treating Ukraine, out of what he called a 'sense of duty,' he plans to tell the inquiry, according to a draft of his opening statement obtained by The New York Times."
"'I did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen, and I was worried about the implications for the U.S. government’s support of Ukraine,' Colonel Vindman said in his statement. 'I realized that if Ukraine pursued an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma it would likely be interpreted as a partisan play which would undoubtedly result in Ukraine losing the bipartisan support it has thus far maintained... This would all undermine U.S. national security,' Colonel Vindman added, referring to Mr. Trump’s comments in the call."
Vindman, who earned a Purple Heart in Iraq, says he isn't the whistleblower whose complaint began the process that exposed Trump but the Times suggests he may have been one of the officials who talked to the whistleblower.
"'I did convey certain concerns internally to national security officials in accordance with my decades of experience and training, sense of duty, and obligation to operate within the chain of command,' he plans to say.
"He will testify that he watched with alarm as “outside influencers” began pushing a 'false narrative' about Ukraine that was counter to the consensus view of American national security officials, and harmful to United States interests. According to documents reviewed by The Times on the eve of his congressional testimony, Colonel Vindman was concerned as he discovered that Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, was leading an effort to prod Kiev to investigate Mr. Biden’s son, and to discredit efforts to investigate Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and his business dealings in Ukraine... He will also testify that he confronted Gordon D. Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union, the day the envoy spoke in a White House meeting with Ukrainian officials about 'Ukraine delivering specific investigations in order to secure the meeting with the president.'"
Some new details:
"Even as he expressed alarm about the pressure campaign, the colonel and other officials worked to keep the United States relationship with Ukraine on track. At the direction of his superiors at the National Security Council, including John R. Bolton, then the national security adviser, Colonel Vindman drafted a memorandum in mid-August that sought to restart security aid that was being withheld from Ukraine, but Mr. Trump refused to sign it, according to documents reviewed by the Times. And he drafted a letter in May congratulating Mr. Zelensky on his inauguration, but Mr. Trump did not sign that either, according to the documents."
On two different occasions, Vindman brought his concerns about all of this to John A. Eisenberg, the top laywer at the NSC who is also Deputy Assistant to the President. He was present for the 10 July meeting in which John Bolton is said to have become very angry with Gordon Sondland over Trump's shadow players' continuing demand for politically motivated investigations. At a debriefing he attended later that same day, Sondland, as the Times put it, "again urged Ukrainian officials to help with investigations into Mr. Trump’s political rivals... 'I stated to Ambassador Sondland that his statements were inappropriate' and that the 'request to investigate Biden and his son had nothing to do with national security, and that such investigations were not something the N.S.C. was going to get involved in or push,' he added... The colonel went to Eisenberg with his concerns that day.
He did so again a few weeks later, after Trump's call with Zelensky, this time accompanied by his brother, who is also a lawyer for the NSC.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/28/us/politics/Alexander-Vindman-trump-impeachment.html
For an indication of how all of this is playing on Fox News, Laura Ingraham broke the story about Vindman's upcoming testimony on her show tonight. She said the New York Times had "buried" the fact that Vindman spoke Russian and Ukrainian and that the Ukranians would talk to him. She and her panel immediately concluded that Vindman--a decorated vet and Army colonel who sits on Trumps National Security Council--was acting against Trump in his conversations in these languages and had committed espionage.
The Impeachment Inquiry saga continues in Part 2.
