The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

[seemslikeadream]

Connecticut Post calls on Trump to resign.

Editorial: President Trump needs to step down
By Hearst Connecticut Media Editorial Board
11:43 pm EDT, Friday, September 27, 2019
President Donald Trump talks while meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the InterContinental Barclay New York hotel during the United Nations General Assembly, Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2019, in New York. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) Photo: Evan Vucci / Associated Press / Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Photo: Evan Vucci / Associated Press
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President Donald Trump talks while meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the InterContinental Barclay New York hotel during the United Nations General Assembly, Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2019, in New
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Even given the incredibly fast pace of news in the Trump era, the speed with which the Ukraine scandal has moved from vague complaint to impeachable offense has been stunning. Though we’re still at the beginning of the process, there is already a mountain of evidence implicating President Donald Trump with conduct far outside the accepted norms of a democratic leader.

The most damning evidence came from the president himself. It centers around a phone call with the president of Ukraine in which Trump raises the issue of investigating the son of presidential hopeful Joe Biden, and the implication of Trump’s words is clear as day. He asks for an investigation that would benefit him politically and has nothing to do with legitimate U.S. interests, and he brings it up repeatedly, including immediately upon the Ukrainian president mentioning the need for U.S. security aid.

This is an impeachable offense. Republicans spent Wednesday arguing there was no explicit quid pro quo, but there is seemingly no line the president can cross that would inspire them to put the public good ahead of politics. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, joined by the entirety of Connecticut’s congressional delegation, has called for impeachment proceedings, and that process must now begin in earnest.

The proper next step for the president is clear. He should resign. He has repeatedly proven himself unfit for office and appears to view the presidency as a position meant to benefit himself personally, not as one that must represent the interests of an entire nation.

Because there’s almost no chance he is going to step down, Congress’ work becomes that much more vital.

The truth is that Trump has been breaking laws and norms with impunity from the beginning. For instance, the U.S. Constitution forbids federal officeholders from receiving any gifts or payments from foreign entities, but in the same phone call with the Ukrainian president we see evidence that Trump is in violation. “I stayed at the Trump Tower,” President Volodymyr Zelensky says of his last trip to the U.S. Since Trump never divested himself from his business and continues to profit from it, he’s in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, according to many legal scholars, and it’s just one of countless examples on that score.

Further, the Mueller report into Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election details multiple occasions when the president apparently obstructed justice, and he was saved from criminal indictment only by virtue of the office he currently holds. The president, as is his wont, called the report a total exoneration. It wasn’t.

It’s not clear how much worse the Ukraine scandal will get. The summary of the phone call was released by the White House without need for a subpoena, but it is apparently abridged and does not represent all the whistleblower complaint that set the issue in motion. It’s easy to imagine that what we don’t know could be much worse than what we do.

But what we know is enough, and because it’s from the president himself, there’s no reason to question its veracity. There’s no going back from here. The long, bumpy ride of the Trump era may have turned a corner, but it’s nowhere near over.
https://www.ctpost.com/opinion/article/ ... 467704.php

[RocketMan]

https://thehill.com/homenews/administra ... hing-trump

Public opinion polls show shift toward impeaching Trump

Public opinion is shifting in favor of Democrats on impeachment, with new polls showing about half the nation supports a House inquiry into President Trump after revelations he pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.

The latest NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist survey found 49 percent approval for impeachment, against 46 percent who said they disapprove. That’s a 10-point jump in favor of impeachment over the same survey from April, around the time former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russia's election interference was released.

A Politico-Morning Consult survey found a similar bounce in a short period of time, with support for impeachment spiking 7 points in the week since the Ukrainian revelations came to light, although only 36 percent in that poll said they support impeachment, compared to 49 percent who said they oppose it.

The latest Hill-HarrisX survey found support for impeachment rising 12 points to 47 percent, against 42 percent who oppose it.

And a Harvard CAPS-Harris survey released Thursday shortly before the release of the whistleblower complaint confirmed the upward trend toward impeachment.

That survey found the public split at 50-50 on whether Trump should be impeached for “pressuring” the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden’s dealings in the country, including 52 percent of independents. The same poll conducted in July, around the time of Mueller’s testimony to Congress, found only 40 percent of voters overall and 24 percent of independents backing impeachment.

[seemslikeadream]

PUTIN’S GHOST: THE COUNTERINTELLIGENCE CALCULUS NOT INCLUDED IN THE OBSTRUCTION ANALYSIS

April 21, 2019/87 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, emptywheel, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

The Mueller Report does not include the investigation’s counterintelligence analysis. It says that explicitly here (see also this Ben Wittes report, though I think he gets a few things wrong).

From its inception, the Office recognized that its investigation could identify foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information relevant to the FBI’s broader national security mission. FBI personnel who assisted the Office established procedures to identify and convey such information to the FBI. The FBI’s Counterintelligence Division met with the Office regularly for that purpose for most of the Office’s tenure. For more than the past year, the FBI also embedded personnel at the Office who did not work on the Special Counsel’s investigation, but whose purpose was to review the results of the investigation and to send-in writing-summaries of foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information to FBIHQ and FBI Field Offices. Those communications and other correspondence between the Office and the FBI contain information derived from the investigation, not all of which is contained in this Volume. This Volume is a summary. It contains, in the Office’s judgment, that information necessary to account for the Special Counsel’s prosecution and declination decisions and to describe the investigation’s main factual results. [my emphasis]

These FBI Agents were only co-located for part of Mueller’s tenure, perhaps around the same time as the IRA indictment? And this description does not include the three NSD prosecutors described as detailees, Heather Alpino, Ryan Dickey, and Jessica Romero, as distinct from prosecutors originally assigned to Mueller.

Plus, we know there was always a counterintelligence focus to this investigation; all the initial subjects of it (Manafort, Page, Papadopoulos, and Flynn) were counterintelligence concerns. Other Trump associates got added in October 2017, but even there, the investigation into Michael Cohen started as a FARA investigation and Gates and probably others were brought in along with Manafort’s counterintelligence concerns. Then there’s Trump (who must have been brought in for obstruction, but I don’t think the report says how).

But the most significant thing that doesn’t show up in this report is whether Trump was undercutting the investigation as a favor to Russia, reportedly one of the concerns Rod Rosenstein had when he first hired Mueller. This report does not explicitly treat that concern, at all (to significant detriment to one area of its analysis, as I’ll show in a follow-up post).

That’s most evident in the way the report deals with Vladimir Putin in the post-inauguration period. The report itself invokes Putin at least 163 times, often describing the many different efforts to set up a meeting between Putin and Trump. But when Trump actually started meeting with top Russian officials — and Putin specifically — the report gets quiet.

WE FINALLY GET A READ-OUT OF THE JANUARY 28 PHONE CALL

Start with the phone call between Trump and Putin on January 28, 2017. The report describes that setting up this call was among the things Mike Flynn spoke to Sergey Kislyak about.

Flynn discussed multiple topics with Kislyak, including the sanctions, scheduling a video teleconference between President-Elect Trump and Putin, an upcoming terrorism conference, and Russia’s views about the Middle East.

That Kislyak asked him to set up the call was actually something Flynn told the FBI the truth about in his interview with the FBI. More importantly, the report reveals several details that previous reporting about the George Nader channel did not: first, the role of Jared Kushner’s hedge fund buddy Rick Gerson in that back channel with Kirill Dmitriev, and the role that a “reconciliation plan” that Dmitriev got to Kushner via Gerson played in that January 28 meeting.

On January 16, 2017, Dmitriev consolidated the ideas for U.S.-Russia reconciliation that he and Gerson had been discussing into a two-page document that listed five main points: (1) jointly fighting terrorism; (2) jointly engaging in anti-weapons of mass destruction efforts; (3) developing “win-win” economic and investment initiatives; (4) maintaining an honest, open, and continual dialogue regarding issues of disagreement; and (5) ensuring proper communication and trust by “key people” from each country. 1111 On January 18, 2017, Gerson gave a copy of the document to Kushner. 1112 Kushner had not heard of Dmitriev at that time. 1113 Gerson explained that Dmitriev was the head of RDIF, and Gerson may have alluded to Dmitriev’s being well connected. 1114 Kushner placed the document in a file and said he would get it to the right people. 1115 Kushner ultimately gave one copy of the document to Bannon and another to Rex Tillerson; according to Kushner, neither of them followed up with Kushner about it. 1116 On January 19, 2017, Dmitriev sent Nader a copy of the two-page document, telling him that this was “a view from our side that I discussed in my meeting on the islands and with you and with our friends. Please share with them – we believe this is a good foundation to start from.” 1117

Gerson informed Dmitriev that he had given the document to Kushner soon after delivering it. 1118 On January 26, 2017, Dmitriev wrote to Gerson that his “boss”-an apparent reference to Putin-was asking if there had been any feedback on the proposal. 1119 Dmitriev said, ” [w]e do not want to rush things and move at a comfortable speed. At the same time, my boss asked me to try to have the key US meetings in the next two weeks if possible.”1120 He informed Gerson that Putin and President Trump would speak by phone that Saturday, and noted that that information was “very confidential.”1121

The same day, Dmitriev wrote to Nader that he had seen his “boss” again yesterday who had “emphasized that this is a great priority for us and that we need to build this communication channel to avoid bureaucracy.” 1122 On January 28, 2017, Dmitriev texted Nader that he wanted “to see if I can confirm to my boss that your friends may use some of the ideas from the 2 pager I sent you in the telephone call that will happen at 12 EST,”1123 an apparent reference to the call scheduled between President Trump and Putin. Nader replied, “Definitely paper was so submitted to Team by Rick and me. They took it seriously!”1124 After the call between President Trump and Putin occurred, Dmitriev wrote to Nader that “the call went very well. My boss wants me to continue making some public statements that us [sic] Russia cooperation is good and important.” 1125 Gerson also wrote to Dmitriev to say that the call had gone well, and Dmitriev replied that the document they had drafted together “played an important role.” 1126 [my emphasis]

This was a meeting that the US side provided just a terse readout of (and, if I remember correctly, only after Russia released its readout). 27 months later, we’re learning that Dmitriev (whose bank was of questionable status because of sanctions) and convicted pedophile Nader were prepping the meeting less than an hour before it began (the report cites text messages between them from 11:05 and 11:11 AM the morning of the 12PM meeting, as well as texts involving Gerson). Between them, the two of them plus Gerson (none of whom had clearance) had a better sense of how the meeting went than the American public. Among the things they learned — but we did not — was that part of the reconciliation plan included “win-win” economic and investment initiatives pitched by the head of RDIF.

The lead-up to this meeting is the subject about which Steve Bannon and Erik Prince mysteriously lost the encrypted texts they exchanged discussing it.

While the report does describe this meeting in its assessment of links between Russians and Trump associates, it doesn’t focus on how it lines up with questions about firing Mike Flynn.

THE CORRELATION OF TRUMP’S DECISION TO FIRE COMEY AND HIS CONVERSATION WITH PUTIN

The report gets still more coy when it describes the role of a meeting with Sergey Lavrov and Sergey Kislyak the day after Trump fired Jim Comey. One of the most pregnant footnotes in the report (h/t Laura Rozen) notes that the May 10, 2017 meeting was planned in a call between Putin and Trump and confirmed the day Trump first dictated the Comey termination at Bedminster Golf Course.

468 SCR08_000353 (5/9/17 White House Document, “Working Visit with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of Russia”); SCR08_001274 (5/10/17 Email, Ciaramella to Kelly et al.). The meeting had been planned on May 2, 2017, during a telephone call between the President and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the meeting date was confirmed on May 5, 2017, the same day the President dictated ideas for the Comey termination letter to Stephen Miller. SCR08_001274 (5/10/17 Email, Ciaramella to Kelly et al.).

According to Don McGahn, in the leadup to Comey’s May 3 testimony to Congress, Trump told him that if Comey did not confirm that Trump was not under investigation it would “be the last straw” because it was “hurting his ability to … deal with foreign leaders.”

McGahn recalled that in the week leading up to the hearing, the President said that it would be the last straw if Comey did not take the opportunity to set the record straight by publicly announcing that the President was not under investigation.384 The President had previously told McGahn that the perception that the President was under investigation was hurting his ability to carry out his presidential duties and deal with foreign leaders.385

Trump brought up Comey at least 8 times with Bannon in the following two days, and Bannon warned Trump not to fire Comey.

Bannon recalled that the President brought Comey up with him at least eight times on May 3 and May 4, 2017 .399 According to Bannon, the President said the same thing each time: “He told me three times I’m not under investigation. He’s a showboater. He’s a grandstander. I don’t know any Russians. There was no collusion.”400 Bannon told the President that he could not fire Comey because “that ship had sailed.”401 Bannon also told the President that firing Comey was not going to stop the investigation, cautioning him that he could fire the FBI director but could not fire the FBI.402

On the 5th — the day (the report helpfully notes) the Russian meeting was confirmed — Trump dictated to Stephen Miller to start Comey’s termination letter by stating that the Trump-Russia story was fabricated.

[T]he President told Miller that the letter should start, “While I greatly appreciate you informing me that I am not under investigation concerning what I have often stated is a fabricated story on a Trump-Russia relationship – pertaining to the 2016 presidential election, please be informed that I, and I believe the American public – including Ds and Rs – have lost faith in you as Director of the FBI.”

Trump prohibited Miller from telling anyone at the White House about his plan to fire Comey.

All that would lead you to believe the report might make further note about this correlation, about the appearance (which had already been suggested, but the report makes far more clear) that Trump took action in advance of that meeting.

It doesn’t really. The description of the meeting does make clear that, in the wake of Trump’s comments to Lavrov boasting about firing Comey, the White House released a statement that incorporated and expanded on the language about Comey’s grandstanding from finalized Miller letter drafted at Bedminster.

In the morning on May 10, 2017, President Trump met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the Oval Office.468 The media subsequently reported that during the May 10 meeting the President brought up his decision the prior day to terminate Comey, telling Lavrov and Kislyak: “T just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off. … I’m not under investigation.”469 The President never denied making those statements, and the White House did not dispute the account, instead issuing a statement that said: “By grandstanding and politicizing the investigation into Russia’s actions, James Comey created unnecessary pressure on our ability to engage and negotiate with Russia. The investigation would have always continued, and obviously, the termination of Comey would not have ended it. Once again, the real story is that our national security has been undermined by the leaking of private and highly classified information.”470 Hicks said that when she told the President about the reports on his meeting with Lavrov, he did not look concerned and said of Comey, “he is crazy.”471 When McGahn asked the President about his comments to Lavrov, the President said it was good that Comey was fired because that took the pressure off by making it clear that he was not under investigation so he could get more work done.472 [my emphasis]

What the report doesn’t mention, at all, is that Trump shared sensitive Israeli intelligence with the Russians at this meeting, an obvious counterintelligence concern.

TRUMP’S SECRET CO-AUTHOR ON THE JUNE 9 MEETING STATEMENT

An even more remarkable silence in the report pertains to the conversation Trump had with Putin at the G20 while his team was working on drafting the statement about the June 9 meeting.

The description of Trump’s actions on this matter are fairly superlative, with Hope Hicks describing Trump in what is best described as denial, refusing to be included in conversations about it, yet strongly suggesting that it was Trump making the comment — suggesting they could withhold the damning emails — that Mark Corallo later attributed to her. Hicks even describes Trump as committing what he considered the ultimate sin, not commenting on a story.

On July 7, 2017, while the President was overseas, Hicks and Raffel learned that the New York Times was working on a story about the June 9 meeting.695 The next day, Hicks told the President about the story and he directed her not to comment.696 Hicks thought the President’s reaction was odd because he usually considered not responding to the press to be the ultimate sin.697

The report then describes how (in what would have been in the wake of Trump’s first face-to-face meeting with Putin) Trump instructed her to claim the meeting was just about adoptions. It then describes Trump dictating a statement, watering down the offer of dirt to just adoptions, something that not even Don Jr was willing to put out.

Later that day, Hicks and the President again spoke about the story.698 Hicks recalled that the President asked her what the meeting had been about, and she said that she had been told the meeting was about Russian adoption.699 The President responded, “then just say that.”700

On the flight home from the G20 on July 8, 2017, Hicks obtained a draft statement about the meeting to be released by Trump Jr. and brought it to the President.701 The draft statement began with a reference to the information that was offered by the Russians in setting up the meeting: “I was asked to have a meeting by an acquaintance I knew from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant with an individual who I was told might have information helpful to the campaign.”702 Hicks again wanted to disclose the entire story, but the President directed that the statement not be issued because it said too much.703 The President told Hicks to say only that Trump Jr. took a brief meeting and it was about Russian adoption.704 After speaking with the President, Hicks texted Trump Jr. a revised statement on the June 9 meeting that read:

It was a short meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at that time and there was no follow up. 705

Hicks’s text concluded, “Are you ok with this? Attributed to you.”706 Trump Jr. responded by text message that he wanted to add the word “primarily” before “discussed” so that the statement would read, “We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children.”707 Trump Jr. texted that he wanted the change because “[t]hey started with some Hillary thing which was bs and some other nonsense which we shot down fast. “708 Hicks texted back, “I think that’s right too but boss man worried it invites a lot of questions[.) [U]ltimately [d]efer to you and [your attorney] on that word Be I know it’s important and I think the mention of a campaign issue adds something to it in case we have to go further.” 709 Trump Jr. responded, “lfl don’t have it in there it appears as though I’m lying later when they inevitably leak something.” 710

The passage mentions nothing about Trump’s meeting, with no American aides, with Putin at the G20 dinner in between the first discussion of a statement about adoptions and the one Trump drafted personally.

Nor does the report, in repeated discussions of Trump’s unplanned interview with the NYT at which he admitted discussing adoptions with Putin that night, mention that admission.

Within hours of the President’s meeting with Lewandowski on July 19, 2017, the President gave an unplanned interview to the New York Times in which he criticized Sessions’s decision to recuse from the Russia investigation.630 The President said that “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job, and I would have picked somebody else.”631 Sessions’s recusal, the President said, was “very unfair to the president. How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I can’t, you know, I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair, and that’s a mild word, to the president.”632 Hicks, who was present for the interview, recalled trying to “throw [herself] between the reporters and [the President]” to stop parts of the interview, but the President “loved the interview.”633

[snip]

On July 19, 2017, the President had his follow-up meeting with Lewandowski and then met with reporters for the New York Times. In addition to criticizing Sessions in his Times interview, the President addressed the June 9, 2016 meeting and said he “didn’t know anything about the meeting” at the time.734 The President added, “As I’ve said-most other people, you know, when they call up and say, ‘By the way, we have information on your opponent,’ I think most politicians – I was just with a lot of people, they said … , ‘Who wouldn’t have taken a meeting like that?”‘735

Trump’s admission that he spoke to Putin about adoptions in the same interview where he prepared the ground to fire Sessions and insisted that everyone would take a meeting with foreigners offering dirt on your opponent would seem important to the discussion of whether in attempting to fire Sessions, Trump was obstructing not a criminal investigation into his own conduct, but a counterintelligence investigation into his own ties with Putin.

But the report not only doesn’t consider it, the report doesn’t mention it.

Nor does the report discuss some of the other bizarre Trump interactions with Putin, most of all the Helsinki meeting that took place in the wake of the release of the GRU indictment, leading Trump to yet again very publicly deny Russia’s role in the attack, that time in the presence of Putin himself.

Now, there may be very good constitutional reasons why the analysis of Trump’s weird relationship with Putin as President is not part of this report. The President is empowered with fairly unlimited authority to conduct foreign policy and to declassify information, which would cover these instances.

Plus, if Mueller conducted this analysis, you wouldn’t want to share that publicly so the Russians could read it.

But it must be noted that the report doesn’t answer what a lot of people think it does: whether Trump has been compromised by Russia, leading him to pursue policies damaging to US interests. Let me very clear: I don’t think Trump is a puppet being managed by Vladimir Putin. But contrary to a great number of claims that this report puts those concerns to rest, the report does the opposite. With the limited exception of the suggestion of a tie between firing Comey and the meeting with Lavrov, the report doesn’t even mention the key incidents that would be the subject of such analysis.

If anything, new details released in this report provide even further reason to think Trump obstructed the Russian investigation to halt the counterintelligence analysis of his ties with Russia. But the report itself doesn’t ever explicitly consider whether that’s why Trump obstructed this investigation.

Update: As TC noted, one thing the report does include is the detail that during a period he was trying to fire Sessions, Trump wanted him to limit Mueller’s mandate to future elections, which would have the effect of limiting the investigation into Russia’s crime as well as any potential exposure of his own.

During the June 19 meeting, Lewandowski recalled that, after some small talk, the President brought up Sessions and criticized his recusal from the Russia investigation.605

The President told Lewandowski that Sessions was weak and that if the President had known about the likelihood of recusal in advance, he would not have appointed Sessions.606 The President then asked Lewandowski to deliver a message to Sessions and said “write this down.” 607 This was the first time the President had asked Lewandowski to take dictation, and Lewandowski wrote as fast as possible to make sure he captured the content correctly.608 The President directed that Sessions should give a speech publicly announcing: I know that I recused myself from certain things having to do with specific areas. But our POTUS . .. is being treated very unfairly. He shouldn’t have a Special Prosecutor/Counsel b/c he hasn’t done anything wrong. I was on the campaign w/ him for nine months, there were no Russians involved with him. I know it for a fact b/c I was there. He didn’t do anything wrong except he ran the greatest campaign in American history.609

The dictated message went on to state that Sessions would meet with the Special Counsel to limit his jurisdiction to future election interference:

Now a group of people want to subvert the Constitution of the United States. T am going to meet with the Special Prosecutor to explain this is very unfair and let the Special Prosecutor move forward with investigating election meddling for future elections so that nothing can happen in future elections.610

EMPTYWHEEL’S MUELLER REPORT COVERAGE

The Significance of Trump’s Obstruction of Investigation of His Family’s Campaign Finance Crimes, Plural

How “Collusion” Appears in the Mueller Report

Putin’s Ghost: The Counterintelligence Calculus Not Included in the Obstruction Analysis

Working Twitter Threads on the Mueller Report

The Trump Men and the Grand Jury Redactions

Mueller’s Language about “Collusion,” Coordination, and Conspiracy

The Many Lies and Prevarications of Bill Barr

As I disclosed last July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/04/21/p ... -analysis/

[RocketMan]

Ah, emptywheel, your friendly FBI snitch... Nice.

[seemslikeadream]

Ah, emptywheel, your friendly FBI snitch... Nice.

yes you and Mate are best buds I know that no need to prove that to me

I like her and I will continue to post from her blog and her twitter account and I could get a fuck what Mate thinks of her.

can't argue the facts so you take the easy peasy way out


I guess you can't list the facts that Marci got wrong so you took the easy way out

Gholinani is a good guy and emptwheel is a snitch whatever floats your boat RocketMan

you are free to say anything you want in my threads so be my guest continue on your merry way and bless your heart carry on as you do ....slander whoever

I will NOT censor your views in this thread either because they are off topic or something I disagree with, I do NOT fear anything you post. I will NEVER ask that you be banned from any of my threads for off topic replies or for any other reason except for personal attacks because they of course are against the rules

you have yourself a lovely afternoon and keep bumping my threads it's really helpful








Just a reminder that trump isn't a racist, he just play plays one on...

Oh wait.

trump is a fucking racist.

southpaw
‏
Retweeted Mike Balsamo
So angry that he sanctioned efforts to keep the whistleblower complaint under wraps? (and flew off to Italy as it became clear that the facts would come to light)
southpaw added,

Mike Balsamo

NEWS: AG Bill Barr was “surprised and angry” when he learned Trump lumped him together with Rudy Giuliani in a call with Ukraine’s president suggesting they would investigate Joe & Hunter Biden. https://apnews.com/7d134da3dadd497e9af37c60278d68dc …

Trump blurs lines between personal lawyer, attorney general

WASHINGTON (AP) — As Washington plunges into impeachment, Attorney General William Barr finds himself engulfed in the political firestorm, facing questions about his role in President Donald Trump’s outreach to Ukraine and the administration’s attempts to keep a whistleblower complaint from Congress.

Trump repeatedly told Ukraine’s president in a telephone call that Barr and Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani could help investigate Trump’s Democratic rival Joe Biden, according to a rough transcript of that summertime conversation. Justice Department officials insist Barr was unaware of Trump’s comments at the time of the July 25 call.

When Barr did learn of that call a few weeks later, he was “surprised and angry” to discover he had been lumped in with Giuliani, a person familiar with Barr’s thinking told The Associated Press. This person was not authorized to speak about the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Giuliani, a former New York City mayor, often appears in rambling television interviews as a vocal defender of the president. Giuliani represents Trump’s personal interests and holds no position in the U.S. government, raising questions about why he would be conducting outreach to Ukrainian officials.

Barr is the nation’s top law enforcement officer and leads a Cabinet department that traditionally has a modicum of independence from the White House.

Yet to Trump, there often appears to be little difference between the two lawyers.

“I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it,” Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, according to the memo of the call that was released by the White House this past week.

Since becoming attorney general in February, Barr has been one of Trump’s staunchest defenders. He framed special counsel Robert Mueller’s report in favorable terms for the president in a news conference this year, even though Mueller said he did not exonerate Trump.

Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics professor at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, said Trump is treating the country’s attorney general as if he’s just another personal lawyer.

“I think it represents a larger problem with President Trump,” she said. “To him, it appears Giuliani and Barr both have the same job.”

Trump has frequently lauded Barr and his efforts to embrace the president’s political agenda. That’s in stark contrast to Trump’s relationship with his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, whom the president repeatedly harangued in public.

Trump’s frustration with Sessions made clear how the president views the Justice Department — as a law enforcement agency that exists to carry out his wishes and protect him. Despite a close relationship during the 2016 campaign, Trump never forgave Sessions for withdrawing from the government’s investigation into 2016 election interference, a move that ultimately cleared the way for Mueller’s investigation.

Barr has come under the scrutiny of congressional Democrats who have accused him of acting on Trump’s personal behalf more than for the justice system. Democrats have also called on Barr to step aside from decisions on the Ukraine matter. Those close to Barr, however, have argued there would be no reason to do so because he was unaware of the Trump-Zelenskiy conversation.

The department insists Barr wasn’t made aware of the call with Zelenskiy until at least mid-August.

Barr has not spoken with Trump about investigating Biden or Biden’s son Hunter, and Trump has not asked Barr to contact Ukranian officials about the matter, the department said. Barr has also not spoken with Giuliani about anything related to Ukraine, officials have said.

Trump has sought, without evidence, to implicate the Bidens in the kind of corruption that has long plagued Ukraine. Hunter Biden served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company at the same time then-Vice President Joe Biden was leading the Obama administration’s diplomatic dealings with Ukraine. Though the timing raised concerns among anti-corruption advocates, there has been no evidence of wrongdoing by either Biden. There is no evidence that Hunter Biden was ever under investigation in Ukraine.

The Justice Department was first made aware of Trump’s call when a CIA lawyer mentioned the complaint from the unidentified CIA officer on Aug. 14. Other Justice Department lawyers were later also made aware of the accusations after the whistleblower filed a complaint with the intelligence community’s internal watchdog.

The watchdog later raised concerns that Trump may have violated campaign finance law. The Justice Department said there was no crime and closed the matter.
https://apnews.com/7d134da3dadd497e9af37c60278d68dc

April 25, 2019: "Trump told Fox News' "Hannity" in a wide-ranging interview Thursday night that Attorney General Bill Barr is handling the "incredible" and "big" new revelations that Ukrainian actors apparently leaked damaging information about [Manafort]"

Clinton-Ukraine collusion allegations 'big' and 'incredible,' will be reviewed, Trump says
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump- ... -collusion

‏
Here's the Hannity interview. The pertinent discussion is in the first 2:20; Trump clearly and repeatedly says AG Barr will be taking the lead on dealing with Ukraine.


https://twitter.com/MikeBalsamo1/status ... 6061168641

[seemslikeadream]

The Ukraine scandal is not a phone call. It's Trump spending months corrupting US foreign policy into a weapon against Biden

The Ukraine Scandal Is Not One Phone Call. It’s a Massive Plot.
Jonathan ChaitSept. 25, 2019

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer. Photos: Getty Images

On July 25, President Trump held a phone call in which he repeatedly leaned on Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden and Paul Manafort’s prosecutors. The episode is so blatantly inappropriate even Trump’s most fervent apologists are, with a few exceptions, having trouble defending it. What they are trying to do, instead, is define this phone call as the entire scandal. Trump emphasizes that he “didn’t specifically mention the explicit quid pro quo” of military aid in return for the investigation.

That is true, as far as it goes. The quid pro quo in the call, though perfectly apparent, is mostly implicit. But the real trick in Trump’s defense is framing the call as the entire scandal. The scandal is much more than that. The call is a snapshot, a moment in time in a months-long campaign that put American policy toward Ukraine at the disposal of Trump’s personal interests and reelection campaign.

Last spring, Rudy Giuliani was openly pressuring Kiev to investigate Joe Biden. Giuliani told the New York Times, “We’re meddling in an investigation … because that information will be very, very helpful to my client.” The key word there was “we’re.” The first-person plural indicated Giuliani was not carrying out this mission alone. A series of reports have revealed how many other government officials were involved in the scheme.

When Trump ordered military aid to Ukraine to be frozen, he went through his chief of staff and budget director Mick Mulvaney. Congress had passed the aid, and Ukraine was under military attack from Russia, a fact that made the halting of the assistance worrisome to numerous officials in two branches of government. As the Times reported, lawmakers and State Department staffers were asking why the money hadn’t gone through.

They were given cover stories: Lawmakers “were first told the assistance was being reviewed to determine whether it was in the best interest of foreign policy,” the Times reported this week. “Other administration officials said, without detail, there was a review on corruption in Ukraine, according to current and former officials. Then, as August drew to a close, other officials told lawmakers they were trying to gauge the effectiveness of the aid, a claim that struck congressional aides as odd.”

Lots of officials were involved in disseminating these cover stories to hide the fact that Trump held back the aid to leverage Ukraine to investigate Biden. One of them was Mike Pence, who told some confused officials that the aid was being held up “based on concerns from the White House about ‘issues of corruption.’” Pence knew perfectly well what this really meant — asked point blank if the aid was being held up over Ukraine’s failure to investigate Biden, he replied “as President Trump had me make clear, we have great concerns about issues of corruption.” In other words, yes, Ukraine needed to investigate Biden if it wanted the money.

Giuliani, though is the central figure. He has employed very little subterfuge. Giuliani told the Washington Post he kept Trump informed of his work in Ukraine for months, and declared, “My narrow interest is for the benefit of my client.” The apparent reason for his candor was to make it known to Ukraine that he was not a goofy cable-television blatherer but the president’s designated representative for Ukraine policy. If Ukraine wanted to get anything done, it had to work with Rudy.

Ukraine got the message. Its officials “expressed concern to U.S. senators that the aid had been held up as a penalty for resisting that pressure” to investigate Biden, reports the Wall Street Journal.

American foreign policy operates in regimented and bureaucratized ways. Turning over the machinery to the president’s personal attorney, who is not a foreign-policy expert or even a government employee, distorted the entire process, in ways that were noticeable throughout the government. The Washington Post has the most detailed account of the contortions. Giuliani circumvented unhelpful diplomats, even replacing one deemed troublesome. Several meetings on Ukraine policy at the White House leading up to the July 25 call “led some participants to fear that Trump and those close to him appeared prepared to use U.S. leverage with the new leader of Ukraine for Trump’s political gain.”

The White House–issued summary of Trump’s phone call with Zelensky shows the American president pressing his counterpart to undertake the twin investigations. After Trump asks Zelensky to investigate Biden, and Zelensky makes accommodating noises in response, Trump promises to have Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr call him. Barr also was involved in preventing Congress from seeing the whistle-blower complaint, and the call summary shows that he had a personal interest in doing so. Add Barr to the list of impeachment witnesses.

There may be many others. Last night on Fox News, Giuliani held up a phone he said included messages with official authorization for his activities. “You know who I did it at the request of? The State Department,” he said. The scheme to shake down Ukraine was a massive plot, spreading through the government and corrupting multiple officials. Trump had a lot of accomplices.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/ ... hment.html

Trump whistleblower scandal, explained from Ukraine
Published Sept. 23. Updated Sept. 23 at 9:32 pm


Mayor Rudy Giuliani introduces then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at a rally on August 18, 2016 at the Charlotte Convention Center in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Photo by AFP

Talks of impeachment are again echoing through Washington. On Sept. 22, U.S. President Donald Trump confirmed that he had discussed his political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, in a July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Earlier, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump pressured his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate Biden’s son Hunter and his work with a controversial energy tycoon in Ukraine. The U.S. president reportedly urged Zelensky to investigate the younger Biden in cooperation with his attorney, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, eight times during the conversation.

Meanwhile, in August, an intelligence official submitted an official whistleblower complaint over Trump’s phone call with a foreign leader, and the country in question is Ukraine, the Washington Post reported.

These latest developments suggest that a well-worn international scandal — one the Kyiv Post has covered since it broke — has risen from the grave to haunt American politics once more.

The scandal centers around claims made by Giuliani that, if proven true, might help Trump win re-election in 2020 against his most probable Democratic competitor, Biden.

But there’s a problem: the claims are not backed up by any evidence. Still, they threaten to harm Ukraine’s relations with the U.S.

The Biden controversy will certainly be at the center of U.S. media attention during Zelensky’s first in-person meeting with Trump this week.

And, unsurprisingly, everyone involved in the controversy is denying strong-arming their interlocutors or being strong-armed. Trump termed the conversation with Zelensky “a perfect call.” Meanwhile, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko said, “I know what the conversation was about. I don’t think there was any pressure (from President Trump).”



What’s going on here? Why is Ukraine suddenly on the front page of virtually every American newspaper? The Kyiv Post has broken down the scandal into questions and answers to help you understand what’s true, what isn’t, and why we’re all talking about it now.

What are Giuliani and Trump alleging?

Specifically, Giuliani alleges that: 1) Biden pressured Ukraine to fire its prosecutor general in order to hamper an investigation into Burisma Holdings, the oil and gas company where his son Hunter worked, and 2) that Ukrainian officials conspired to help Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election.

What is Burisma, the company that hired Biden’s son?

Burisma Holdings is the largest private oil and gas extraction company in Ukraine. It was founded in 2002 by Mykola Zlochevsky, a Ukrainian businessman and former top government official who was later investigated for alleged illegal enrichment and money laundering.

Hunter Biden, a lawyer by trade, served on Burisma’s board of directors from 2014 to 2019. Other notable figures on the board included former Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski, investment banker Alan Apter, and the former head of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, Joseph Cofer Black.

Back in the day, Biden’s decision to join the company raised eyebrows: the owner was an ally of Ukraine’s ex-president Viktor Yanukovych, ousted in 2014, just two months before Biden joined the company’s board. The West supported the EuroMaidan Revolution, the movement that ousted Yanukovych.

Did Joe Biden get the prosecutor who was investigating his son fired?

No.

There was no investigation of Biden’s son in Ukraine. Ukrainian authorities did investigate Burisma Holdings, the company he worked for, and its owner Zlochevsky for alleged fraud and money laundering.

In 2016, Biden indeed pressured Ukraine to fire its Prosecutor General at the time, Viktor Shokin, threatening to withhold over $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees if the official wasn’t removed. There is footage of Biden bragging about doing this.

But Biden was not alone in calling for Shokin’s ouster. He was simply expressing the longstanding consensus in Ukraine’s pro-reform circles and among its partners.

Most importantly, there is no indication that Shokin was investigating Burisma, the company affiliated with Biden’s son.

Who was the prosecutor general in question?

Viktor Shokin, 66, was Ukraine’s prosecutor general from February 2015 to April 2016. By the end of his term he was likely one of the most unpopular figures in Ukraine, having earned a bad reputation for inaction and obstructing top cases.

Shokin was the third prosecutor general to take the office after the EuroMaidan Revolution. As Yanukovych and his allies fled Ukraine in 2014, the new authorities launched investigations into their wrongdoings. Almost none of the investigations brought any results, and many were eventually closed.

This continued under Shokin. None of the investigations against corrupt former top officials moved forward during his tenure, and he also appeared to drag out the case against Yanukovych himself and the investigation of the murders of EuroMaidan activists.

Public pressure to remove Shokin started mounting several months after his appointment in 2015.

Calling for Shokin to be fired were anti-graft activists, non-profit government watchdogs, and top members of the ruling coalition in parliament. By the time the U.S. joined in, the calls to fire Shokin had been going on for months.

The first known instance when Biden said that the prosecutor general needed to go was in December 2015 at a meeting with several Ukrainian lawmakers. Then-lawmaker Svitlana Zalishchuk, who was in the meeting, wrote about it on Facebook.

By that time, top Ukrainian lawmakers had been saying that the prosecutor general had to be fired for at least two months.

Shokin was eventually fired in April 2016. Biden later said that he pushed for the firing, threatening to withhold a U.S. aid package if Ukraine didn’t remove him from office. Apparently it was the last straw.

However, Shokin’s firing didn’t change much. He was replaced by Yuriy Lutsenko, a politician and former Interior Minister. Lutsenko earned a reputation no better than Shokin’s, but stayed on the job till 2019 due to his political alliance with then-President Petro Poroshenko.

Was the fired prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, really a threat to Biden’s son?

Not really.

It was Burisma Holdings and its owner, Zlochevsky, who were investigated for alleged money laundering, illegal enrichment, and fraud.

Shokin gave no indication that his agency was focusing on Burisma. The Kyiv Post wasn’t able to find any public comments that Shokin made about the company during his 14 months in office.

Moreover, the investigations against Zlochevsky and Burisma have been dying off under every prosecutor general that Ukraine has had since 2014, including Shokin.

What were the cases?

There were four criminal cases involving Zlochevsky and subsidiaries of his Burisma Holdings.

One case against Zlochevsky for alleged illegal enrichment and money laundering was closed. The ex-official was taken off the wanted list in Ukraine in 2017. (Zlochevsky left Ukraine in 2014 and returned in 2018.)

Another case against Burisma’s subsidiaries was re-qualified from fraud to tax evasion in August 2016, which means it can be closed if the company pays back the losses to the state budget.

Two cases prosecuting corruption by officials of the Ministry of Ecology during Zlochevsky’s tenure as minister are active but are not going well, according to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, which received the cases from the General Prosecutor’s Office in 2016. In one of the cases, subsidiaries of Burisma Holding were allegedly issued licenses illegally by ministry officials.

The Anti-Corruption Action Center (AntAC) watchdog has repeatedly accused Ukraine’s former prosecutors general⁠ — Vitaly Yarema, Viktor Shokin, and Yuriy Lutsenko⁠ — of sabotaging the investigations against Burisma and its owner.

All three prosecutors contributed to the collapse of the money laundering case against Zlochevsky. First initiated by the British Serious Fraud Office, the case fell apart due to a lack of cooperation by the Ukrainian side.

Under Yarema, in early 2015, a U.K. court lifted the freeze on $23.5 million of Zlochevsky’s accounts, frozen on suspicion of money laundering, after the Ukrainian prosecutors weren’t cooperative in providing evidence.

Under Shokin, a Ukrainian court lifted the freeze of Zlochevsky’s property in Ukraine.

Under Lutsenko, the money laundering case against Zlochevsky was closed in 2016.

Vitaliy Kasko, who worked as deputy prosecutor general under Shokin, said in a 2017 interview with the Gordon new site that the prosecutors had been sabotaging the case against Zlochevsky since 2014, a year before Shokin came into office.

In the meantime, Burisma continues to expand, drill wells and hold conferences on energy and security in association with the Atlantic Council and the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation.

Finally, Zlochevsky’s shoe company, Zlocci, continues to run its store in Kyiv freely.

Where did the accusations against Biden first come from? Is the source credible?

In March 2019, Ukraine’s then-prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, implied in an interview with the Hill’s John Solomon that Biden had pressured the Ukrainian government to fire his predecessor, Shokin, to protect Burisma Holdings.

However, neither Solomon, nor Lutsenko are particularly credible sources.

Solomon is executive vice president for video at The Hill. His interview with Lutsenko and subsequent writing on Ukraine have been exceedingly provocative. But Solomon has also demonstrated a clear pro-Trump bias in his columns.

Solomon has also misrepresented Lutsenko. The former prosecutor general was “widely regarded as a hero in the West for spending two years in prison after fighting Russian aggression in his country,” he wrote.

This isn’t true. Lutsenko indeed spent time in prison under Yanukovych. In 2012, well before Russia launched its war on Ukraine, he was sentenced to four years behind bars on corruption charges. That same year, the European Court of Human Rights concluded that Lutsenko’s arrest was “arbitrary and unlawful” and violated several articles of the Convention on Human Rights.

Lutsenko was one of several opposition politicians imprisoned on politically motivated charges under Yanukovych. However, his imprisonment was not connected to his opposition to Russian aggression in Ukraine.

In April 2013, Yanukovych granted him a pardon after coming under pressure from the West.

In 2016, Lutsenko was appointed to replace Shokin as prosecutor general. However, his tenure proved to be an utter disappointment. He failed to achieve any convictions for large-scale corruption. Under his watch, Ukraine also failed to make progress in investigating the murders of journalist Pavel Sheremet in 2016 and whistleblower Kateryna Gandziuk in 2018.

At the time of his interview with Solomon, Lutsenko was on the way out and he probably knew it. President Petro Poroshenko was heading for a spectacular defeat in the 2019 presidential election. By burnishing his image in the West, Lutsenko was likely angling to keep his job in a new administration. With little knowledge of Ukrainian politics, Solomon appears to have taken his claims at face value.

How is it connected to the Manafort case?

Let’s go back to the second claim Giuliani has made: Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to help Trump’s opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

This narrative stems from an article published in January 2017 by the Politico news site, which claimed that Ukrainian officials tried to undermine confidence in Trump’s fitness for the presidency and published documents implicating lobbyist Paul Manafort, who served as Trump’s campaign chair for six months in 2016, in corruption.

Manafort had previously worked as a consultant for Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, helping the former president clean up his image both in Ukraine and the West.

Since the 2017 Politico article, Trump and Giuliani have picked up this narrative, likely to counter clear evidence that Russia interfered in the U.S. election with the aim of helping Trump. The so-called RussiaGate scandal — which became the subject of an investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller — has been a perpetual thorn in Trump’s side and, for many of his opponents, evidence that his presidency is illegitimate.

Starting earlier this year, Giuliani began to raise the matter in media interviews. At some points, his claims seemed almost incoherent.

In a May interview with Fox News, Giuliani mentioned “an already convicted person who has been found to be involved in assisting the Democrats with the 2016 election.”

He was referring to ex-Ukrainian lawmaker Serhiy Leshchenko, a former investigative journalist who used his time in office to back many reformist and anti-corruption initiatives. In May 2016, Leshchenko published information from the Party of Region’s “black ledger,” which showed the party paying Manafort over $12 million off the official books between 2007 and 2012. These revelations would lead to Manafort’s resignation from the Trump campaign in August 2016. Later, he would be sentenced to 7.5 years in prison for tax and bank fraud, amongst other charges.

Was Leshchenko convicted of interfering in the U.S. presidential election? No, he wasn’t — although a Ukrainian court attempted.

In December 2018, the Kyiv Administrative District Court ruled against Leshchenko and Artem Sytnyk, head of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, in a suit initiated by lawmaker Boryslav Rozenblat. The court concluded that both Leshchenko and Sytnyk had interfered in Ukraine’s foreign policy when they revealed that Manafort was listed in the “black ledger.” The court also concluded that these actions “led to interference in the electoral processes of the United States in 2016.”

The verdict was strange because 1) it seemed outside the purview of a Ukrainian court and 2) Rozenblat, a lawmaker who has faced accusations of corruption in the past, had seemingly no reason to take the two men to court.

For his part, Leshchenko argued that Rozenblat had no right to file the lawsuit because he had not been the victim of the actions in question and administrative courts cannot consider lawsuits against lawmakers. He also said that Lutsenko and ex-President Petro Poroshenko were using the ruling to ingratiate themselves with Trump.

Giuliani has regularly cited this ruling, including last week. But it is no longer in force. Why?

The Kyiv District Administrative Court has a reputation for delivering strange rulings that benefit corrupt officials. And, in July, the Sixth Administrative Court of Appeals canceled the previous ruling. So, no, Leshchenko was not found guilty of interfering in the U.S. presidential election.

What is AntAC, the organization Giuliani accused of being Soros-funded?

In his interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Sept. 19, Giuliani misrepresented the Anti-Corruption Action Center (AntAC), a well-respected non-governmental organization in Ukraine, as one controlled by financier and philanthropist George Soros. He said it “developed the dirty information that ended up being a false document that was created in order to incriminate Manafort.”

AntAC is the leading Ukrainian civic watchdog that exposes political corruption. The center was founded in 2012 by two Ukrainians, Daria Kaleniuk and Vitaly Shabunin.

The organization has criticized former Prosecutor General Shokin and his successor, Yuriy Lutsenko, for failure to investigate high-profile cases against Yanukovych cronies, including Zlochevsky.

AntAC indeed received funding from George Soros’ grant-giving organization, the Open Society Foundation. But its main donors over the years have been the National Endowment for Democracy, the European Union, USAID, the governments of the UK, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic as well as individuals and private companies.

Between 2012 and 2018, Soros’ foundation provided 17 percent of AntAC’s funding. For this reason, one can hardly argue the organization is controlled by Soros — a claim more in line with popular conspiracy theories than any clear evidence.

Who helped Giuliani in his Ukraine efforts?

In May, Giuliani announced that he would take a trip to Ukraine where he planned to meet with the new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and try to persuade him to investigate Biden. However, in the face of harsh criticism in the U.S., Giuliani soon decided to cancel the trip.

How did Trump’s personal lawyer plan to organize his trip? It turns out that Giuliani used some help from two Soviet-born Florida businessmen, an investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and Buzzfeed found. The two men are well-connected in Republican circles and have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican causes and pro-Trump groups.

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman set up meetings for Giuliani with Ukrainian officials, including Shokin, Nazar Kholodnytsky, head of the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, and Lutsenko, the OCCRP reported.

They also unsuccessfully tried to organize a meeting for Giuliani with Zelensky through oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, the president’s former business partner.

Editor’s Note: This story has been corrected to clarify the criminal cases against Zlochevsky and Burisma subsidiaries and include additional information.
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[Iamwhomiam]

Trump's phone call was the key that opened his hissing can of worms.

[seemslikeadream]

southpaw

How one FBI insider reacted to WaPo’s new details of Trump’s Oval Office meeting last night

https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw

Collusion After the Fact
The Washington Post reported last night:

President Trump told two senior Russian officials in a 2017 Oval Office meeting that he was unconcerned about Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election because the United States did the same in other countries, an assertion that prompted alarmed White House officials to limit access to the remarks to an unusually small number of people, according to three former officials with knowledge of the matter.

The comments, which have not been previously reported, were part of a now-infamous meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, in which Trump revealed highly classified information that exposed a source of intelligence on the Islamic State. He also said during the meeting that firing FBI Director James B. Comey the previous day had relieved “great pressure” on him.

A memorandum summarizing the meeting was limited to a few officials with the highest security clearances in an attempt to keep the president’s comments from being disclosed publicly, according to the former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

Shortly after the story broke, I received a message from a person directly involved with the FBI’s decision to open a counterintelligence and obstruction investigation of President Trump in the immediate aftermath of the firing of FBI Director James Comey. To say this person, who had clearly learned about the matter for the first time from the Post, was angered by the story would be to understate the matter.

The message read in relevant part: “None of us had any idea. Multiple people had opportunity and patriotic reason to tell us. Instead, silence.”

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It is a big deal that the FBI did not know when it opened its investigation that the president—in addition to boasting about relieving pressure on himself by firing Comey—had specifically disclaimed concern over Russian electoral interference to senior Russian officials.

The public already knew that the FBI was concerned about the national security implications of Comey’s dismissal when it opened its investigation in the chaotic days after the firing. We’ve known this since January 2019, when the New York Times reported that the bureau had opened both a counterintelligence and an obstruction probe of the president’s conduct. Central to the Times story were transcripts of former FBI General Counsel James Baker’s closed testimony before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees, which have now been publicly released. As Baker put it in that interview, “[N]ot only would it be an issue about obstructing an investigation, but the obstruction itself would hurt our ability to figure out what the Russians had done, and that ... would be the threat to the national security.”

In other words, the bureau was concerned, as the Times put it, about “whether [Trump] had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests.” The bureau’s “counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.”

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe—who was serving as the bureau’s acting director during the period when the FBI opened the counterintelligence and obstruction probes into the president—has stated publicly that the Oval Office meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak played a role in his decisionmaking:

There were a number of things that caused us to believe that we had adequate predication or adequate reason and facts, to open the investigation. The president had been speaking in a derogatory way about our investigative efforts for weeks, describing it as a witch hunt … publicly undermining the effort of the investigation. The president had gone to Jim Comey and specifically asked him to discontinue the investigation of Mike Flynn which was a part of our Russia case. The president, then, fired the director. In the firing of the director, the president specifically asked Rod Rosenstein to write the memo justifying the firing and told Rod to include Russia in the memo. Rod, of course, did not do that. That was on the president's mind. Then, the president made those public comments that you've referenced both on NBC and to the Russians which was captured in the Oval Office. Put together, these circumstances were articulable facts that indicated that a crime may have been committed. The president may have been engaged in obstruction of justice in the firing of Jim Comey.

… It's many of those same concerns that cause us to be concerned about a national security threat. And the idea is, if the president committed obstruction of justice, fired the director of the FBI to negatively impact or to shut down our investigation of Russia's malign activity and possibly in support of his campaign, as a counterintelligence investigator you have to ask yourself, “Why would a president of the United States do that?” So all those same sorts of facts cause us to wonder, is there an inappropriate relationship, a connection between this president and our most fearsome enemy, the government of Russia?

It seems obvious, in the context of these concerns, that information that the president informed Russian officials that he did not care about Russian election interference would have been key to this analysis on the FBI’s part—and, later, on the part of Robert Mueller.

But it seems preponderantly likely that Mueller never learned of this information. His report includes plenty of material on Trump’s Oval Office meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak the day after Comey’s firing, including Trump’s comments that, “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” And it includes detail about Trump’s exchange with an apparently concerned White House Counsel Don McGahn following the meeting. But there is nothing in the report about any comment by Trump informing the Russian delegation that he did not care about election interference. And there are no redactions in this section whatsoever where such information might be hiding.

In the wake of the Post’s reporting, there has been a great deal of speculation among journalists and commentators as to whether Mueller was aware of this information, and if so, why it didn’t make it into the report. “[A]pparently the ‘Lavrov memo’ never reached Robert Mueller,” tweeted New York Times political reporter Trip Gabriel. My colleague Susan Hennessey wondered “whether one motivation for putting things like the Lavrov meeting memo and the Putin call transcripts in the codeword system was to hide them from Mueller.”

I don’t know for sure that Mueller never learned of this information, but I know his investigation began without it, and I know what is obvious to everyone who has read his report: that it plays no role in his analysis of collusion. This raises a significant question to me about the completeness of the Mueller’s collusion analysis.

Consider what happened in that meeting—assuming for a moment that the Post’s report is accurate. The president of the United States, acting in his capacity as president in a meeting with two senior officials of an adversary state that had just interfered in an American election on his behalf, retroactively declared that this wasn’t a significant source of bilateral problem between that adversary country and the one he leads. Here’s the Post’s account of the meeting:

White House officials were particularly distressed by Trump’s election remarks because it appeared the president was forgiving Russia for an attack that had been designed to help elect him, the three former officials said. Trump also seemed to invite Russia to interfere in other countries’ elections, they said.

...

According to the fourth former official, Trump lamented to Lavrov that “all this Russia stuff” was detrimental to good relations. Trump also complained, “I could have a great relationship with you guys, but you know, our press,” this former official said, characterizing the president’s remarks.

...

On some areas, Trump conveyed U.S. policy in a constructive way, such as telling the Russians that their aggression in Ukraine was not good, one of those former officials said.

“What was difficult to understand was how they got a free pass on a lot of things — election security and so forth,” this former official said. “He was just very accommodating to them.”

Such actions by the president would surely have raised the question for the bureau, and likely for Mueller, about whether the president was retroactively absolving the Russians of electoral interference. It also would have raised the question of whether he was in some sense greenlighting future electoral intervention, at least tacitly. Both possibilities would have obviously heightened concerns that he was in some sense working with or for the Russians, knowingly or unknowingly, in a fashion that threatened American national security.

I actually doubt that this fact would have fundamentally changed the criminal analysis in the Mueller report on “collusion.” The fundamental finding that there, after all, was that there was no evidence of any agreement between the Trump campaign, or Trump himself, and the Russians to violate U.S. law. I’m not sure I see how this would have changed that, it not being evidence of an agreement, just a kind of mutual aid without one. It also takes place after the fact, which would complicate things.

But it rather dramatically affects the “no collusion” narrative. And had Mueller been aware of it, I feel certain that it would have warranted investigation and discussion. The fact that nobody privy to the fact of its having happened came forward even though Comey had publicly announced that the bureau was investigating possible collusion represents—as my correspondent indicated—a triumph of omertà over patriotism.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/collusion-after-fact

Seth Abramson
‏
What would they know? They're just... federal prosecutors

Giuliani under fire for role in Ukraine phone call
Sept. 27, 2019, 7:26 PM CDT

On a Friday in late July, boarded a plane to Spain to meet with an adviser to the Ukrainian president about a plan to investigate Joe Biden.

The trip was described in . Several former Giuliani colleagues said they believe it should appear in a future indictment.

Giuliani’s role in the scandal that has is still coming into focus. But several legal experts who used to work with the former U.S. attorney-turned New York City mayor-turned chief President Donald Trump defender told NBC News they believe his conduct likely broke the law.

"This is certainly not the Giuliani that I know," said Jeffrey Harris, who worked as Giuliani’s top assistant when he was at the Justice Department in the President Ronald Reagan administration. "I think the Giuliani that I know would prosecute the Giuliani of today."

Harris and the other former Justice Department lawyers said they believe Giuliani has potentially exposed himself to a range of offenses — from breaking federal election laws to bribery to extortion — through his efforts to assist the Ukrainians in probing Biden, Trump’s top political opponent.

NBC News reached out to seven former colleagues of Giuliani's. Of the six who offered comments on or off the record, none defended him.

Download the NBC News app for full coverage of the impeachment inquiry

At the heart of the whistleblower's complaint is the allegation that Trump abused his power by soliciting "interference from a foreign country" in the 2020 elections — with Giuliani acting as the president’s point person in the effort.

"There’s a whole apparatus of the United States government that’s set up to deal with foreign officials and Rudy Giuliani’s not one of them," said Harris, now a lawyer in private practice in Washington D.C.

"To the extent that you could look at this as using government resources for your benefit, there are a number of crimes that this conduct would answer to."

Giuliani’s trip to Spain came one day after Trump urged Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to probe Biden and his son Hunter, according to the whistleblower's complaint.

The president has been pushing the claim that Biden helped to force out a Ukrainian prosecutor because the man was probing a gas company that employed Hunter Biden as a consultant. The prosecutor was ousted amid calls from top officials of several Western nations over concerns he wasn’t doing enough to root out deep-seated corruption.

In addition to his trip in Spain, the whistleblower's complaint says, Giuliani had other contacts with Ukrainian officials as part of the effort to dig up dirt on Biden. Giuliani met with Ukraine’s prosecutor general on at least two occasions — in New York in January and in Warsaw, Poland in February, according to the complaint.

Bruce Fein, who worked at the Justice Department with Giuliani in the early 1980s, said he believes Giuliani could be prosecuted for breaking federal election laws.

"He was soliciting a foreign government to help Trump’s 2020 campaign. That’s a problem," said Fein, a former special assistant to the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel under President Richard Nixon and associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan.

"Federal election laws make it illegal to solicit anything of value from a foreign government or persons to influence the outcome of an election."

Fein said Giuliani could also have opened himself up to bribery charges in connection with the president allegedly withholding military funds in order to pressure the Ukraine to launch an investigation of the Bidens.

"If Giuliani was privy to that, he could be complicit with Trump in conspiring to solicit a bribe," Fein said.

Giuliani, who has said he’s been working as an unpaid attorney for Trump, has told NBC News that he went to Spain on his own dime on a trip he described as a mix of business and pleasure. Giuliani is not listed as receiving any money from the Trump campaign, according to FEC filings.

President-elect Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani shake hands following a meeting at Trump International Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., on Nov. 20, 2016.Drew Angerer / Getty Images file
Reached for comment on Friday night, Giuliani scoffed at the suggestion that he had broken the law.

"Bulls--t," Giuliani texted. "They don’t know what they are talking about. What crimes."

Giuliani followed up with a phone call in which he used colorful language to defend his actions and attack his former colleagues.

He said he could not have committed bribery because he didn’t offer the Ukrainians anything of value. "Are these guys lawyers or are they morons?" Giuliani said.

Giuliani also pushed back against the claims that he tried to pressure the Ukrainians or influence the upcoming presidential election.

"I did not threaten them. I didn’t tell them what to do," Giuliani told NBC News. "I recommended that it would be a good thing to complete the investigations."

He added: "I wasn’t going there to affect the 2020 elections. I was going there to clear my client. It’s totally absurd."

Giuliani does have his defenders from his time working for the Justice Department, including Joseph diGenova, a prominent Fox News contributor.

Daniel Richman, who worked under Giuliani in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan in the late 1980s, said he needed to see more evidence before making a conclusive determination. But he agreed that an effort to assist in a plot to withhold funds from a foreign power in exchange for a personal or political favor could expose Giuliani to criminal charges.

"An effort to use congressionally allocated funds as a club to extract a personal benefit could easily fit within some combination of fraud, extortion, and perhaps bribery statutes," said Richman, now a professor at Columbia Law School.

Other former prosecutors who worked with Giuliani raised the issue of him seemingly conducting American foreign policy in apparent violation of the Logan Act, which bars private citizens from negotiating with a foreign government on behalf of the U.S.

But no one has been convicted under the law, which dates back to 1799, and a potential case would likely be complicated by the fact that Giuliani was authorized by the president, the ex-prosecutors said.

"I’m of the view that this is probably less criminal than it is outrageous," said a former prosecutor who requested anonymity because he didn’t want to be seen as publicly criticizing his one-time colleague.

Former federal prosecutor John Flannery, who worked with Giuliani in the mid-1970s, said he was taken aback by what he described as Giuliani’s flagrant abuse of the law.

"He’s put himself in a position of aiding and abetting, and perhaps initiating, an exchange of favors with a foreign government for an American political campaign at the behest of the candidate himself," Flannery said. "Neither of them deny it, and in fact they’re profusely, repeatedly, painfully, admitting to it."

Flannery said the Giuliani of today is nothing like the man he worked with some 40 years ago. "He’s a shadow of the best Rudy he was, and he's not the great lawyer I thought he’d be," said Flannery.

While many of the former prosecutors interviewed by NBC News expressed skepticism that the Justice Department would ever charge Giuliani, Flannery said he wasn’t so sure.

"Right now, it seems like we’re looking at a system where crimes we believed to have happened will not be prosecuted." Flannery said. "But history teaches us that can turn around as quickly as the impeachment inquiry did this week."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justic ... s-n1059861

Conflict of interest questions add to scrutiny of Trump’s Ukraine envoy
Kurt Volker, who resigned from his post on Friday, had an unusual job arrangement at the State Department.

DAVID HERSZENHORN09/28/2019 06:50 PM EDT
Kurt Volker is pictured
Kurt Volker.
Mediating peace between Russia and Ukraine was supposed to be a part-time job for Kurt Volker. But he's now at the center of a full-blown scandal — with questions about his own conduct that are separate from the alleged pressure campaign that could lead to President Donald Trump's impeachment.

As Trump's special representative for Ukraine negotiations, Volker strongly supported a shift in policy to send lethal weapons to Kyiv, including tank-busting Javelins, described by its manufacturer as "the world's most versatile and lethal one-man-portable, anti-tank, guided munition and surveillance weapon system."

But at the same time Volker was pushing to convince Trump to arm Ukraine, he also held positions with a major lobbying firm, BGR Group, and with a think tank, the McCain Institute, that both had financial ties to Raytheon Company, which manufactures the Javelin system and earned millions from Trump's decision.

Volker, a career diplomat and former U.S. ambassador to NATO, resigned on Friday, a day after he was referenced in the whistleblower complaint alleging that Trump improperly pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the business dealings of former Vice President Joe Biden's son.

The whistleblower complaint has emboldened congressional Democrats in Washington to push forward with an impeachment inquiry against Trump. But it has also drawn uncomfortable attention to Volker and the unusual arrangement by which he served as Trump's special envoy — essentially as a volunteer while maintaining other paid jobs, including as executive director of the McCain Institute, a Washington think-tank named for the late Republican senator, John McCain, of Arizona.

Volker has not been accused of violating any conflict-of-interest rules. But his resignation is likely to fuel further investigations beyond his unorthodox role working with Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, in pressing Ukrainian officials on Trump's behalf. Congress is now all but certain to scrutinize his conduct as special envoy after being appointed to the post on July 7, 2017, by former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — a job he now leaves with Ukraine and Russia no closer to peace.

Supporters of Volker point to his distinguished record as a career diplomat and national security official in Washington, and say that his actions were likely well-intentioned.

In his written complaint, the whistleblower wrote that Volker visited Kyiv on July 26, the day after a controversial phone call in which Trump asked Zelesnky for a "favor” and to work with Giuliani who was pushing for the investigation of the Bidens. The whistleblower said that Volker was accompanied by the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, and that they met with Zelensky and other officials and tried to help them understand and deal with Giuliani's requests. The complaint also says that Volker and Sondland spoke to Giuliani in an effort to "contain the damage" to U.S. national security from Giuliani's seemingly freelance foreign policy efforts.

But in a television appearance on Thursday, Giuliani held up an iPad to display text messages allegedly from Volker and insisted that Volker and others in the State Department were fully aware of what he was doing in Ukraine.

“He should step forward and explain what he did,” Giuliani said of Volker. “The whistleblower falsely alleges that I was operating on my own. Well, I wasn’t operating on my own!”

Volker and Sondland did not respond to messages requesting comment. Sondland, who is based in Brussels, also declined a request for an interview about his role in visiting Ukraine.

But some foreign policy experts have said questions should have been raised about Volker's arrangement from the moment he was appointed, effectively to act as a part-time mediator for the Ukraine crisis, while also retaining his other jobs, including at the McCain Institute and the BGR Group lobbying firm, where he was a paid outside consultant.

And at least one good government group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said it was reviewing the matter. “We think it raises a lot of questions and we’re looking into it,” Noah Bookbinder, the group’s executive director, said.

The State Department did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday.

Jeffrey Birnbaum, a spokesman for BGR has told POLITICO that Volker had recused himself from any issues related to the firm’s work for the Ukrainian government. Volker had been employed previously by the firm, in 2011 and 2012 as a managing director — a fact noted on his official State Department biography.

BGR’s contract with the Ukrainian government began in January 2017, at a time when Volker was a paid consultant but before he was named as special representative. But while BGR stressed that Volker had recused himself from issues related to Ukraine, Volker’s remit as special envoy was far wider, giving him broad responsibilities in discussions with Russia as well as privileged access to information about U.S. and EU sanctions policies — matters of intense interest to military defense contractors, energy companies, financial firms and an array of other commercial sectors.

Birnbaum said that he was unaware of Volker’s broader role, and could not comment on whether the wider portfolio had been taken into account when deciding he should recuse from issues related to Ukraine — a step that might be more fitting had Volker been ambassador in Kyiv.

According to federal disclosure records, Raytheon, the maker of the Javelin shoulder-fired anti-tank weapon, has retained BGR for lobbying services for years.

And disclosure records also show that Raytheon, like many U.S. military and defense contractors, has been a corporate donor to the McCain Institute. John McCain, the late senator, was a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, and long served as chairman or the senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and was heavily active on defense issues and in military contracting.

Raytheon and its partner, Lockheed Martin, have multi-million-dollar contracts to manufacture the Javelin, including for Ukraine. The Javelin is built at a plant in Tuscon, Arizona, the late McCain's home state.

A message sent to Raytheon’s public relations department was not immediately answered on Saturday.

Volker began advocating for sending lethal weapons to Ukraine almost immediately after he was named as the special representative for Ukraine negotiations.

"Defensive weapons, ones that would allow Ukraine to defend itself, and to take out tanks for example, would actually help" deter Russian aggression against Ukraine, Volker said in a BBC interview on July 25, 2017, just three weeks after taking up the post. "I'm not again predicting where we go on this. That's a matter for further discussion and decision. But I think that argument that it would be provocative to Russia or emboldening of Ukraine is just getting it backwards."

Within days of that interview, the Pentagon and State Department presented a plan to Trump recommending sending weapons to Ukraine. The U.S. Congress had already authorized arming the Ukrainian military through legislation adopted in 2014 but President Barack Obama had refused to send lethal weapons, siding instead with advisers who warned that arming the Ukrainian military would only enflame the conflict and cause more casualties, because the U.S. could not provide sufficient arms to match Russia's overwhelming military superiority.

Volker's position in favor of providing weapons was consistent with his longstanding hawkish views toward Russia, so there is no suggest that any financial arrangement had swayed his views.
In a press conference call in May, Volker strongly defended the Trump administration’s decision to supply lethal weapons and said he expected support to continue.

“Ukraine, as any other country in the world, has a right to self-defense.,” Volker said in a response to a question about whether the supply of weapons would continue. “For some reason, there was a decision here in a previous administration not to help Ukraine with its defensive capabilities, at least lethal defensive capabilities. That is something that has now been lifted, and the United States is prepared to work with Ukraine, just as we do with countries around the world in supporting their legitimate defense needs.”

Asked for information about specific new weapons systems that might be sent to Kyiv in 2020, Volker said he did not know.

“I do not know the names of the specific systems,” he said. “I do know that the process here is one where the Congress appropriates the funding, the Pentagon sits down Ukrainian defense leadership, we talk through exactly what the needs are, how they should be addressed and what systems are best in doing so.”

But if there is little doubt that Volker was a longtime hawk on Russia policy, questions still remain about whether his private business associates might have benefited from his role as the special representative, just as Giuliani, the president’s private lawyer, was apparently gaining access to Ukrainian officials through Volker’s contacts.

While other former diplomats have returned to active service, they typically take steps to eliminate any conflicts. As an example, William Taylor, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, has now returned to Kyiv as charges d' affaires, to replace Maria Yovanovitch, who was ousted by Trump and branded by him as "bad news." But in doing so, Taylor gave up a position as vice president at the U.S. Institute for Peace in Washington and is no longer listed on its web site.

In yet another sign of how tangled relations can be in the murky world of post-Soviet diplomacy, Volker is also a senior adviser at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank that has extensive ties in Ukraine, and receives financial support for some of its Ukraine-related work from Burisma, the gas company whose board Hunter Biden joined in 2014.

Whatever Volker, Sondland and Giuliani were up to in recent months, there is sober recognition in Kyiv that little, if any, of it was actually focused on helping Ukraine in any substantive way to end its conflict with Russia.

At a joint press appearance with Zelensky in New York on Wednesday, Trump boasted about his decision to supply Javelins but also made clear that he has little interest in the ongoing conflict, and expected Kyiv to work out its issues with Moscow. He told Zelensky that he should demand more help from EU countries.

"Well, we're working with Ukraine. And we want other countries to work with Ukraine," Trump said. "When I say 'work,' I'm referring to money. They should put up more money. We put up a lot of money. I gave you anti-tank busters that — frankly, President Obama was sending you pillows and sheets. And I gave you anti-tank busters. And a lot of people didn’t want to do that, but I did it."

Nahal Toosi and Blake Hounshell contributed to this report.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/ ... er-1517874

AS DEMOCRATS ENTERTAIN A UKRAINE-ONLY IMPEACHMENT, JACK GOLDSMITH LAYS OUT IMPORT OF IMPEACHING FOR CLEMENCY ABUSE

September 28, 2019/18 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, 2020 Presidential Election /by emptywheel
As June Bug the Terrorist Foster Dog and I drove the last leg of our epic road trip over the last few days, I listened to Jack Goldsmith’s book on his stepfather, Chuckie O’Brien, In Hoffa’s Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth.

It’s a fascinating book I’m pondering how to write about: Imagine a book written by a top surveillance lawyer describing how he learned things his beloved stepfather was lying about by reading old FBI transcripts of wiretaps targeted at top mobsters.

The entire point of the book is to exonerate O’Brien of any role in Jimmy Hoffa’s murder, and it fairly convincingly does that. As Goldsmith describes, the FBI admitted privately to him that they belatedly realized his father couldn’t have had a role in Hoffa’s disappearance, but because the FBI is the FBI, they refused to state that in an official letter (though it was Barb McQuade, then as Detroit’s US Attorney, who made the final call).

But in Goldsmith’s effort to exonerate his step-father on the Hoffa murder, he implicates him in a shit-ton of other crimes … including being the bagman for a $1 million bribe to Richard Nixon so he would commute Hoffa’s sentence for jury tampering (which Chuckie was also a key player in). Here’s how Goldsmith describes O’Brien’s claims about the payoff.

Chuckie nonetheless insists there was a payoff. And he says he was the delivery boy.

Chuckie told me that in early December 1971, he received a telephone call in Detroit from Fitzsimmons’s secretary, Annie. “Mr. Fitzsimmons would like to see you,” she said. Chuckie got on the next plane, flew to Washington, and went straight to Hoffa’s former office at the foot of Capitol Hill. After small talk, Fitzsimmons got to the point. “He’s coming home, and it’s going to cost this much,” Fitzsimmons whispered to Chuckie, raising his right index finger to indicate $1 million. “There will be a package here tomorrow that I want you to pick up and deliver.”

The following afternoon, Annie called Chuckie, who was staying at a hotel adjacent to the Teamsters headquarters near the Capitol building. “Mr. Fitzsimmons asked me to tell you that you left your briefcase in his office,” she said. Chuckie had not left anything in Fitzsimmons’s office, but he quickly went there. Fitzsimmons was not around, but Annie pointed Chuckie to a leather litigation bag next to Fitzsimmons’s desk—a “big, heavy old-fashioned briefcase,” as Chuckie described it. Chuckie picked up the bag, and Annie handed him an envelope. Inside the envelope was a piece of paper with “Madison Hotel, 7 p.m.” and a room number written on it.

It was about 5:00 p.m., and Chuckie took the bag to his hotel room. He had delivered dozens of packages during the past two decades, no questions asked, mostly for Hoffa, sometimes for Giacalone, and very occasionally for Fitzsimmons. But this time was different. Chuckie knew of the strain between Fitzsimmons and Hoffa. He wasn’t sure what game Fitzsimmons was playing, especially since Hoffa had not at this point discussed a payoff with him. Chuckie was anxious about what he was getting into. And so he did something he had never done before: he opened the bag.

“I wanted to see what was in the briefcase,” Chuckie told me. “I didn’t trust these motherfuckers. I needed to look; it could have been ten pounds of cocaine in there and the next thing I know a guy is putting a handcuff on me.”

What Chuckie saw was neatly stacked and tightly wrapped piles of one-hundred-dollar bills. He closed the bag without counting the money.

The Madison Hotel, where Chuckie was supposed to deliver the bag, was two miles away, six blocks north of the White House. It “was a very famous hotel” in the early seventies, a place where “political big wheels” and “foreign dignitaries” stayed, Chuckie told me. At about 6:45 p.m., Chuckie took a taxi to the Madison, went to the designated floor, walked to the room (he doesn’t remember the number), and knocked on the door. A man opened the door from darkness. Chuckie stepped in one or two feet. He sensed that the room was a suite, but could not tell for sure.

“Here it is,” Chuckie said, and handed over the bag.

“Thank you,” said the man. Chuckie turned and left. That was it. The whole transaction, from the time he left his hotel to the delivery on the top floor of the Madison, took less than twenty minutes. The actual drop was over in seconds.

If O’Brien is telling the truth, it means that in addition to locking in Teamster support for 1972, Nixon got a chunk of money for the election (just as Trump just hit up Wayne LaPierre for fundraising support in exchange for killing gun control).

Goldsmith’s step-father claims that the money for the payoff came directly from Hoffa — but he either didn’t know or wouldn’t say whom he delivered it to.

“Where did the money come from?” I asked. “From the Old Man,” Chuckie answered. “Through Allen Dorfman. It was the Old Man’s money. Dorfman had a lot of his money. Fitz wouldn’t give you a dime if you were dying.”

[snip]

“Did Fitz tell you who you were delivering the bag to?” I asked. “No. I took the fucking briefcase to where it’s supposed to go, I never asked any questions. You never ask, Jack.”

This is something that John Mitchell lied about to prosecutors, just as the stories of Rudy Giuliani and Jay Sekulow regarding the pardons they’ve negotiated with Russian investigation witnesses don’t hold up.

Since that time, presidential abuses of pardons have only gotten worse. Say what you will about the Marc Rich pardon (and I agree it was ridiculous), both Poppy Bush (Cap Weinberger) and W (Scooter Libby) provided clemency to witnesses to silence them about actions of the Bush men. Bill Barr was a key player in the Poppy pardons, and he seems all too willing to repeat the favor for Trump.

Until Congress makes reining in the abuse of executive clemency a priority, the claim that no one is above the law will be a pathetic joke. Plus, there are at least allegations that Trump’s effort to dig up Ukrainian dirt stemmed from an effort to make pardoning Paul Manafort easier. And the Ukraine corruption involves someone — Rudy — who was intimately involving in bribing witnesses with pardons in the past.

More generally, any decision to narrowly craft impeachment would be catastrophically stupid, not least because other impeachable acts — such as Trump’s treatment of migrants — will be far more motivating to Democratic voters than Ukraine. But to leave off Trump’s abuse of the pardon power would be a historic failure.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/09/28/a ... ncy-abuse/

[seemslikeadream]

Mulvaney on shaky ground in wake of whistleblower fallout, sources say
(CNN) — Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney is on shaky ground in the wake of a bad week for President Trump, according to multiple sources with knowledge of discussions surrounding the whistleblower fallout.

The sources say the President is not upset with Mulvaney for the White House releasing the summary of his July 25 call with Ukraine's leader or the whistleblower complaint because he had been convinced that it was necessary.

What Trump and other aides are frustrated with, according to the sources, is that Mulvaney did not have a strategy for defending and explaining the contents of those documents as soon as they were publicly released.

One of the sources says it's not just the President, but also widespread frustration in the White House about the lack of a response plan to deal with the fallout after the release of the whistleblower complaint ignited more controversy surrounding the President. The sources say Mulvaney is taking the heat for that.

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said Saturday in a statement, "This story is manufactured palace intrigue.

"The fact is that President Trump and this Administration have done nothing wrong," the statement continued. "Why would we need to implement a strategy to explain the contents of a document we willingly released? Sounds to me like more anonymous troublemakers working to stir the pot for their own selfish reasons."

The feeling among some working to contain the controversy is that some aides who pushed for a response felt Mulvaney was getting in the way of allowing it.

The frustration over a lack of a response plan poured over into a series of meetings at the White House Friday between the President and top aides, including his personal counsel and White House lawyers, to figure out a strategy moving forward.

Sources caution that despite Mulvaney not being in a good place right now, the President may not be eager to fire Mulvaney anytime soon given the amount of tumult, even for a White House used to that.

Mulvaney allies are dismissing the notion that he is in trouble.

"That literally has no basis in reality," said John Czwartacki, a senior adviser to Mulvaney.

William Consovoy, who has been part of the Trump legal team on various issues, will continue to assist private Trump counsel Jay Sekulow in responding to congressional legal issues, one of the sources tells CNN. Consovoy did not immediately return a request for comment.

In a statement to CNN, Sekulow says, "There is no war room being established. This is not a war. This is a skirmish. I am confident that our existing legal team will be in a position to respond appropriately to any developments."

The reporting about Mulvaney comes weeks after Trump abruptly fired his then-national security adviser John Bolton. Trump's administration has been marked by a series of exits by high-ranking officials, and the President has already cycled through two White House chiefs of staff.

Mulvaney has not lost the "acting" part of his title since stepping into the role after John Kelly left the post at the end of last year.

The conservative former South Carolina congressman became the third chief of staff in less than two years to take on the task of running a White House besieged by a drumbeat of investigations. He took over just before Democrats took control of the House of Representatives, and before former special counsel Robert Mueller delivered his report on Russia's interference in the 2016 election.

Mulvaney previously represented South Carolina's 5th District in the House of Representatives, where he rose to prominence as a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, a group of hardline conservatives.

CNN's Kate Sullivan contributed to this report.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/28/politics ... %3A05%3A06

Embarrassing Leaks Led to Clampdown on Trump’s Phone Records
After blowup over calls with Mexican, Australian leaders, officials moved toward greater secrecy, now an issue in impeachment inquiry

Vivian Salama
Sept. 28, 2019 6:48 pm ET

Back-to-back leaks of controversial remarks by President Trump during calls with leaders of Mexico and Australia resulted from an unusually loose record-distribution policy in the first days of the Trump White House, one of these people said, leading to the secret server’s eventual use for records of calls involving leaders of Saudi Arabia, Russia and Ukraine.

White House officials also moved to significantly limit the number of individuals who could listen in on many of his calls, or who could access the records after those calls were concluded, the people said.

Both the Mexico and Australia calls early in 2017 were damaging for the new president. He warned Mexico’s then-President Enrique Peña Nieto that he might send U.S. troops to take on the “tough hombres” driving the Mexican drug trade. In his call to Australia’s then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Mr. Trump lashed out at a “stupid,” “disgusting” and “horrible” Obama-era refugee deal with Australia under which the U.S. agreed to take up to 1,250 refugees housed in detention camps on the Pacific island nations of Nauru and Papua New Guinea.

Around the same time, it was revealed that in his first call as president with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Mr. Trump denounced the New START treaty that caps U.S. and Russian deployment of nuclear warheads as a bad deal for the U.S., according to a report by Reuters.

Then, in May 2017, a day after firing James Comey as Federal Bureau of Investigation director, Mr. Trump met in the White House Oval Office with Russian officials including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and then-Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak, and shared then-classified details of U.S. efforts to counter the Islamic State extremist group, U.S. officials said at the time. Those disclosures led to further restrictions, according to the people with knowledge of the actions.

The disclosure this week of a complaint by an unidentified whistleblower revealed concern among White House officials over alleged attempts by the administration to “lock down” access to internal information, including the president’s July 2019 discussion with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

That call has prompted allegations from lawmakers that Mr. Trump improperly asked Mr. Zelensky to investigate political rival Joe Biden, and that officials at the time hid records of it by using the national security computer server instead of systems where such records normally are maintained. An impeachment inquiry announced Tuesday by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is likely to delve into both issues.

0:00 / 3:24


Four Takeaways From the Whistleblower Complaint
Four Takeaways From the Whistleblower Complaint
A whistleblower complaint released Thursday alleges President Trump sought to use the powers of his office to coerce Ukraine to investigate a political rival. WSJ's Gerald F. Seib examines four key takeaways from the report. Photo: JIM LO SCALZO/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
The White House said Friday that the record of the Trump-Zelensky call was added to the highly secure server at the direction of National Security Council lawyers. Mr. Trump has denounced the impeachment inquiry as a “witch hunt.”

According to the whistleblower’s complaint, White House officials were “directed” to remove the electronic records from the computer system where such documents are normally stored “for coordination, finalization and distribution to Cabinet-level officials.”

The complaint added that the record of the president’s phone call with Ukraine was “loaded into a separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature.”

In some cases, including the president’s calls with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, restrictions were agreed upon in advance, and the number of officials allowed to listen in on the call was greatly limited, one of the people with knowledge of the situation said.

Presidents generally make phone calls on one of several secure phone lines, including those in the White House Situation Room, the Oval Office or the presidential limousine. A number of national security officials, including NSC and Situation Room staffers, traditionally listen in to the calls.

The standard practice under former President Obama was to distribute records strictly to the relevant offices, according to people who served in the White House under both presidents.

But in the first few months of the Trump White House, the National Security Council, which had been in disarray during national security adviser Michael Flynn’s three weeks of service, utilized far more broad distribution lists, according to former White House officials.

The subsequent disclosures of details of Mr. Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders fueled conspiracy theories among some within the administration that “deep state” actors were involved in an effort to derail the Trump presidency.

Following the Mexico and Australia leaks, the National Security Council “severely cut back” on broad dissemination of records, instead sending them only to those who were directly involved in the issues discussed in the call, according to the people knowledgeable of the situation.

Mr. Flynn was asked to resign in mid-February 2017 for failing to disclose the true nature of his meetings with Russian officials to the president and Vice President Mike Pence. He didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

When H.R. McMaster took over as Mr. Trump’s second national security adviser, those distribution lists grew smaller, officials said, although certain individuals, on a need-to-know basis, still could access records from the NSC traditional computer portal, which handled everything except CIA operational information, one official explained.

It couldn’t immediately be determined whether the records of Mr. Trump’s conversations with Mexico’s president were stored in the highly secure computer system, but access to its content was virtually blocked, the officials said.

Two ranking officials who served in the Obama administration said transcripts then were limited to only the top people on the national security team and officials overseeing policy areas that came up during a phone call. The officials said they weren’t aware of an instance in which a record was put into a stand-alone computer system, such as the secure system used by the Trump White House. “That is for the highest secret assets,” said Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama’s former chief of staff. “I’d be shocked.”

Asked Friday about the publication of the record of the conversation between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky, Mr. Lavrov said that those who pushed for it were undermining the confidentiality crucial for diplomacy.

“Diplomatic matters suppose a certain degree of diplomatic confidentiality,” he said following a United Nations speech.

Beyond the existence of official records from the president’s official calls, many senior officials have expressed concern over phone calls the president has had with foreign leaders on his cellphone.

Early in his presidency, the president handed his cellphone number out to several world leaders, including the heads of Mexico, Canada and France, and urged them to call him directly, an unusual invitation that breaks with diplomatic protocol and raised concerns about the security and secrecy of his communications, according to people with direct knowledge.

Even if the president conducted business on his government-issued cellphone, the calls are vulnerable to eavesdropping, particularly from foreign governments, officials said.

One former senior administration official said the president’s advisers tried the best they could to manage the president’s discussions with world leaders, “but once he’s up in the residence, we never know who he’s speaking to.”

At the start of his presidency, Mr. Trump’s freewheeling conversations with world leaders prompted consternation among the president’s senior aides, who took steps to keep him from making inappropriate comments or divulging sensitive information.

On more than one occasion, John Kelly, the White House’s then-chief of staff, who was often in the room during calls with world leaders, briefly muted the line so he could caution Mr. Trump against continuing to talk about sensitive subjects, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The small group of advisers in the room for the calls would also often pass the president notes offering guidance, the person said.

—Alex Leary and Andrew Restuccia in Washington contributed to this article.

Write to Vivian Salama at vivian.salama@wsj.com
https://www.wsj.com/articles/embarrassi ... 1569710889

[RocketMan]

In a just world "The Ukraine Scandal" would be a sub-scandal of the one that happened when the US sent its consultants and "economic experts" to scour the patrimony of the Soviet Union. To paint Biden and his nepotism-enabled son as some sort of innocent victims here is gross.

[seemslikeadream]

post away RM

I am not afraid of dissenting opinion like Mac is, unlike Mac I will not demand that you be banned from my OP. I am not sure if the new rule only applies to Mac....awaiting clarity from both mods

I have no FEAR of you or anything you post it's just like if trump was posting here reading your posts and I am definitely not afraid of him



have a lovely day and bless your heart


AND THANKS FOR THE BUMP

UKRAINIAN POLITICIAN FUNNELED POLLING DATA FROM UKRAINE TO PRAGUE OIL COMPANY VIA WYOMING SHELF COMPANY
BY SCOTT STEDMAN AND JESS COLEMAN ON SEPTEMBER 13, 2019
Last updated on September 23, 2019

Listen to this article:

A former Ukrainian politician scrutinized by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Andrey Artemenko, is behind the purchase of a shelf company in Wyoming which subsequently bought Ukrainian polling data and resold it to a fake oil company. The shelf company is part of a large portfolio of once-inactive businesses sold out of a single address in Wyoming, while the oil company, purportedly run out of Prague, is masked via an Armenian man and has its internet traffic re-routed through Moscow and a Russian state-owned company.

The wild story – based on Department of Justice files, corporate documents, financial records, website registrant data, interviews, and other evidence collected by Forensic News – sheds new light on the recent activities of the enigmatic ex-Ukrainian politician Andrey Artemenko.

Shortly before Christmas Day 2018, Gerald Pitts’ Wyoming Corporate Services Inc. received an offer for one of the many shelf companies listed for sale on its website. The blandly-named company, Garden Resources Inc., was incorporated in 2008 – making it one of the more expensive options due to its age. The parties negotiated a price tag of $4,395, and soon the company was in the hands of the wives of Andrey Artemenko and an-Atlanta based businessman, Nabil Bader.

The original registered address for Garden Resources, 2710 Thomas Avenue, is traced to the headquarters of Wyoming Corporate Services, run by Pitts. The company specializes in the sale of inactive “shelf” companies, “which comes with years of regulatory filings behind it, lending a greater feeling of solidity,” according to an investigation by Reuters. The entity can be used much like a traditional shell company, used to hide assets and transactions. For years, Pitts has made a living by incorporating hundreds or thousands of LLCs, keeping them on the “shelf”, and then selling them years later for a large profit.

Though shelf companies are often tied to criminal activity, the purchase of a shelf company could include legitimate reasons. For instance, shelf companies do not require the weekslong incorporation process as they were already registered years prior. So, if one is in a rush to open the company for business then a shelf company could be an option. Additionally, people buy shelf companies to gain access to credit or to make their businesses look more attractive because they have technically been “in business” for years.

Andrey Artemenko


The Artemenko shelf company in question

Some LLCs incorporated and sold by Pitts have been tied to nefarious activities. Pitts has never been charged with any wrongdoing, mainly because he is not responsible for the shelf company once it is sold. Per the Reuters report, “former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, who was once ranked the eighth-most corrupt official in the world by watchdog group Transparency International,” registered a shelf company involved in a major embezzlement scheme to Pitts’ office. Other cases of financial crime reportedly originated from companies with which Pitts was involved.



Oksana Kuchma Andrey Artemenko and Hanadi Bader purchase Garden Resouces
Oksana Kuchma-Artemenko and Hanadi Bader purchase Garden Resouces
Garden Resources was incorporated in 2008 by Pitts and remained dormant until late 2018, when it was sold to an unknown party. Pitts, in emails to Forensic News, stated that Artemenko’s wife Oksana Kuchma was not the buyer of the shelf company. Though, as seen in the document from the Wyoming Secretary of State, the management of the company was transferred from Pitts himself to Kuchma and Hanadi Bader.

When asked again if anyone on the Wyoming document purchased the company, Pitts responded with one word: No. On the question of ownership, Pitts said, “We do not give that information out, except under due process or if the State of Wyoming asks for it.”

Months later, the company declared in a Department of Justice document that Kuchma owned 75% of the shares (mentioned in more detail later).

The purchase of the shelf company cost over $4,000, while it would have cost just $125 to incorporate a new company. This indicates that the purchasers may have been in a hurry to get into business or to obtain a company with access to credit.

Kuchma is married to Artemenko, a former far-right-wing Ukrainian politician. He was questioned by Mueller’s team and grand jury in June 2018, and reportedly passed a Kremlin-approved plan to remove sanctions on Russia to Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, who subsequently delivered it to Michael Flynn. Artemenko faced additional scrutiny for his attendance at the Trump inauguration, as it is unclear how he got the tickets. Artemenko is also reportedly associates with Felix Sater.

Kuchma is also the front-person of another company controlled by Artemenko, the Florida-based Global Assets, Inc, which has real estate holdings in Florida. A source with knowledge of the situation told Forensic News that Kuchma, who works as a model, isn’t behind any of these businesses, but rather acts as a front-woman for her husband.

Hanadi Bader is married to Nabil Bader, who runs an Atlanta-based consulting firm and has ventures tied to the Middle East financial sector. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Bader responded to requests for comment from Forensic News regarding this story.

With the purchase of Garden Resources completed, Kuchma and Bader changed the name of the company to Global Management Association, Corp.



That name change, finalized in January 2019, was just three months before the company acted as a middleman to buy Ukrainian Presidential polling data and resell it to a Prague-based oil company for a $50,000 profit.

After the Wyoming-based Global Management Association added a branch out of a virtual office in Washington DC, the company began its only known transaction. In May 2019, Global Management Association (the Washington DC branch) registered as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The six-page FARA, filed by the Atlanta businessman Nabil Bader, lists him as President and Partner of the company, though it is stipulated that Kuchma owns 75% of the shares with Hanabi Bader holding the other 25%. The FARA filing was first spotted by investigative journalist Wendy Siegelman and citizen researcher @Agenthades1.

According to the FARA filing, Global Management Association purchased Ukrainian Presidential polling data from a firm located in Kharkiv, and then essentially funneled the material to a Prague-based oil company for a $50,450 profit. The purchase of the polling data by Global Management Association and the subsequent resale to the Prague oil company occurred on the same day: April 17, 2019.



The type of data purchased from the Kharkiv, Ukraine-based polling company New Image Marketing Group and sold to Oil Prom in Prague remains unclear. The only known polling conducted by New Image Marketing Group was reportedly an exit poll from the April 21 Presidential elections. Given that the data was purchased and sold to Oil Prom on April 17, it raises questions on what type of polling data was indeed given to the oil company or why a purported oil company would want internal polling data for an election in Ukraine. New Image Marketing Group and their CEO did not respond to requests for comment.

Oil Prom

A deeper dive into Oil Prom SRO, the Prague, Czech Republic-based company purporting to offer global oil trading, as well as aviation fuel and other products, reveals that the company may not even be in the oil business at all, and has multiple ties to Moscow.

The company’s main website, which was created just two months ago, according to domain records, boasts of outlandish success, such as the following:

Oil Prom S.R.O ’s is one of the Central & Eastern Europe’s largest global crude oil sellers, trading above two million barrels of crude and condensate (light oil) every day.

When it comes to managing the logistics of oil and gas, safety and efficiency are the greatest concerns. At At Oil Prom S.R.O, we have extensive experience of providing specialized logistic services for this industry. We offer comprehensive management concepts and flexible solutions for all kinds of support needed.

An analysis of Oil Prom’s financial records, acquired and analyzed by Forensic News, tells a much different story. Corporate records show that the company was incorporated in August 2017 and the following year reported nearly $680k in assets but was deeply in the red, with a $64,000 loss. Moving two million barrels every day, as the website suggests, would inevitably result in tens of millions of dollars of assets and revenue. In addition to the financial records posted below, Forensic News scoured shipping records for Oil Prom and found just one public shipment in May of 2019: a movement of nylon mesh/mesh-like fabrics to a Ukrainian company.


The corporate documents also show that an Armenian citizen by the name of Arman Simonyan holds 100% of Oil Prom’s shares. (The corporate documents shared by a source with Forensic News are unable to be published for the time being, though we are working on this regularly.)

Forensic News was unable to track down Simonyan or find anyone in the oil business by that name. A common tactic among those who attempt to shroud their businesses in secrecy is to use a “nominee” shareholder to hold the shares of their company. By using this nominee, who often gets a small cut of the money, the ultimate owner can remain hidden and his ownership cannot be revealed. The question of why a purported oil company in Prague would be interested in Ukrainian polling data to the tune of $75,000 remains unanswered.

Adding to the intrigue is the fact that the company banks not in the Czech Republic but with UniCredit Bank in Bratislava, Slovakia, according to other internal Oil Prom documents seen by Forensic News.



The website and internet traffic

WHOIS data for Oil Prom’s website.



Oil Prom’s website is key in another line of inquiry followed by Forensic News. A search on the website’s domain address reveals that the website is not hosted in Prague or anywhere in the Czech Republic for that matter, but instead in Moscow, Russia.

The IP address for the website shows that the company is hosted in the center of Moscow. In fact, one IP geolocation service places the IP address inside the walls of the Kremlin complex, as seen below. Multiple IT experts cautioned that these IP address locations can be manipulated and aren’t extremely accurate in general.


Another IP location service placed the Oil Prom IP in the same general area, about a mile away from the Kremlin. The domain registration data also shows that the Internet Service Provider (ISP) for Oil Prom’s website is a small Moscow-based firm about which little is known, called Avguro Technologies.
An analysis of a tracert record, or the route through the internet from one network device to another, when visiting the Oil Prom website reveals another possible connection to the Russian government. A tracert “is a network tool used to determine the ‘path’ packets take from one IP address to another.” Each connection is a step on a path from your computer to the website. The route taken from any computer to the Oil Prom website makes a couple of stops (or steps) into a Russian government-controlled telecommunications giant, Rostelecom.



Tracert of the path from a US based computer to Oil Prom’s website. Note the two IP’s owned by Russian state-controlled company Rostelecom.
While the exact purpose of Global Management Association’s existence is unknown, its story paints a troubling picture: a far-right Ukrainian politician, under scrutiny for interfering in U.S. politics, used a shelf company to move valuable information in and out of the U.S., turning a profit in the process.

The Russian-connected nebulous oil company raises further questions about what Global Management Association sought to achieve. Above all, the apparent ease with which these events took place highlights how seamlessly nefarious foreign influence and money can operate within U.S. borders.

Click here for a chart mapping out the various Artemenko connections.

Artemenko has previously employed political consultant Andrii Telizhenko, who has met with President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani in recent months as the Trump camp pushes Ukraine to open investigations into the DNC and the Biden family.


Giuliani and Telizhenko in May 2019.

According to the Washington Post, Telizhenko “from December 2015 to June 2016…served as third secretary in the political section in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington. During that time, he claims, he witnessed examples of Ukrainian officials openly favoring Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.”

A source familiar with Telizhenko’s activities in 2016 and 2017 indicated that he was involved in many more dubious events than previously reported. The source said that Telizhenko might have connections to the Trump transition team. Artemenko and Telizhenko remain ardent supporters of President Trump.
https://forensicnews.net/2019/09/13/ukr ... f-company/

Moscow might consider revealing phone call discussions on a case-by-case basis — but officials haven't received a request, a Kremlin spokesperson said.

Nervous Kremlin Warns U.S. Against Releasing Transcripts Of Trump's Calls With Putin
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says his mother taught him that sharing private conversations is "indecent."

Mary Papenfuss
A Kremlin official warned Friday that any release of transcripts of phone calls between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin could exacerbate problems that already exist between the nations.

“We would like to hope that things won’t come to such situations in our bilateral relations, which already have plenty of quite serious problems,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters Friday in a conference call, Bloomberg reported.

“This is a rather unusual practice,” Peskov said. “As a rule, the materials from conversations on the level of the head of state are considered secret or top secret.”

Peskov was responding to a question about the Kremlin’s reaction to the White House decision to release a summary of the controversial July 25 call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Trump’s repeated requests in the call to Zelensky to launch an investigation into his political rival Joe Biden and his son are now the target of an impeachment inquiry.

Despite his warning about U.S. actions, Peskov also said Moscow would consider exposing the contents of phone calls with Trump on a case-by-case basis, according to Bloomberg. “No one has turned to us with such requests,” he added.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also said Friday that sharing Trump-Putin conversations would be “indecent.”

“As for transcripts of phone conversations, my mother when bringing me up said that reading other people’s letters is inappropriate,” Lavrov told reporters at the United Nations, Agence France-Presse reported.

“It is indecent,” he said. “For two people elected by their nations to be at the helm, there are diplomatic manners that suppose a certain level of confidentiality.”

Trump has been accused of being exceptionally secretive about face-to-face conversations with Putin. On at least one occasion in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017, Trump took possession of the notes taken by his own interpreter, whom he instructed not to reveal what was discussed to other administration officials, sources told The Washington Post. By early this year, officials said there was no detailed record of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with Putin at five locations since Trump became president.

The Washington Post reported Friday that access was also limited to comments Trump made to Kremlin officials in 2017 that Russian interference in U.S. elections didn’t bother him because America did the same elsewhere.

Former special counsel Robert Mueller found during his investigation that the Russian government “interfered in the 2016 presidential election in a sweeping and systematic fashion” in an effort to secure a victory for Trump.
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/kre ... ooo9wqtham

[RocketMan]

So you believe that the Bidens' activities in the Ukraine are perfectly kosher, above board and beyond reproach? Got it.

[seemslikeadream]

this thread is about the impeachment of trump

although trump did say Biden should get the electric chair....that should make you tingley all over

regrettable that you can not follow the off topic rule but here we are post any off topic reply you want

There is a special Biden thread for that discussion

Mac actually has his own special private OP (meaning only I am banned from posting in it) for your query, regrettably I can not answer you in his thread he does not like opposing views no matter how polite, on topic the non rule breaking reply is...I am not sure what he is afraid of but I won't be answering any off topic questions in this thread.

I completely understand how amusing it is for you to post off topic questions in my thread

have a great day and bless your heart

thanks for the bump with your off topic reply, much appreciated, love chit chatting with you

[seemslikeadream]

FROM THE INTERCEPT

CrowdStrike has nothing to do with Ukraine, except in conspiracyland

........

At a public event last year, Biden boasted of how he had delivered an ultimatum from the Obama administration to Ukraine in late 2015: Remove Shokin and pursue an anti-corruption agenda or risk losing $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees. Biden was proud of his successful intervention, which was supported by other international donors to Ukraine and local anti-corruption activists who also demanded Shokin’s ouster for failing to pursue cases against former officials and crooked businesses that profited from state contracts.

How Trump Pushed Ukraine’s President to Probe Conspiracy Theories About Democrats
Robert Mackey
September 26 2019, 12:04 a.m.
Donald Trump pressed Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to help legitimize conspiracy theories about his Democratic rivals during a private telephone conversation in July, and again at a public meeting at the United Nations on Wednesday.

White House notes on the July call, released before the two presidents met in New York, showed that Trump urged his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate false claims about the theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee’s servers in 2016, as well as former Vice President Joe Biden’s role in getting Ukraine’s chief prosecutor fired the same year.

All the President’s Crimes
Read our Complete CoverageAll the President’s Crimes
The summary of the call shows that when Zelensky said that his country wanted to buy Javelin antitank missiles from the United States — using millions of dollars in American military aid the White House was blocking at the time — Trump responded, “I would like you to do us a favor though.” The American president then presented shards of a conspiracy theory he’s invoked before: that the DNC computers were not hacked by Russian intelligence agents, as special counsel Robert Mueller concluded — rather, Democrats had framed Russia for the crime, with the help of a Ukrainian-owned cybersecurity firm.


“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine,” Trump said “they say Crowdstrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people … The server, they say Ukraine has it.” This is a frankly baffling sequence of sentences for anyone not deeply versed in the alternative-reality explanations broadcast nightly on Fox News in support of Trump’s refusal to acknowledge that Russia sabotaged Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign to help elect him president.

CrowdStrike, as Kevin Poulsen explained in the Daily Beast, “enters the picture because it’s the security firm the DNC hired to investigate the breach back in 2016, and the first of many to identify Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, as the perpetrator. A publicly traded company headquartered in California, CrowdStrike has nothing to do with Ukraine, except in conspiracyland, which pretends that CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch is Ukrainian, and that he framed Russia for election interference both on the DNC’s orders and to punish Putin for invading his homeland.”

Alperovitch, however, is not Ukrainian. He is an American citizen who was born in Russia and emigrated to the U.S. as a child.

The theory “is absurd for many reasons,” the New York Times cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth observed on Twitter. “The server is not in Ukraine; it’s sitting in the DNC basement. Despite Trump’s repeated claims Democrats withheld the server from the FBI, CrowdStrike and the DNC actually gave all their forensic evidence to the FBI.”

“This DNC-didn’t-give-the-server-to-the-FBI idea makes no sense,” Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, tweeted last year.


Thomas Rid
✔
@RidT
This DNC-didn't-give-the-server-to-the-FBI idea makes no sense.

Investigators want:
—disk images of many machines *in the network*
—memory dumps of *connected* boxes
—the adversary's movement in situ (network logs)
—other data, eg exfil behavior

*Not* some disconnected server

2,050
6:40 PM - Apr 20, 2018
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Trump previously raised the supposedly missing server while standing next to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, at their summit in Helsinki last year. Asked by a reporter why he took Putin at his word that Russia had nothing to do with the hacking, despite evidence gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies, Trump suggested that the matter was still in doubt because the Democrats had concealed evidence.

“You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why haven’t they taken the server?” Trump asked. “Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the Democratic National Committee? I have been wondering that, I have been asking that for months and months, and I have been tweeting it out, and I have been calling it out on social media. Where is the server? I want to know. Where is the server and what is the server saying?”

In Helsinki, the president also seemed to conflate the DNC server with the home email server Hillary Clinton used as secretary of state. On Wednesday in New York, as his Ukrainian counterpart shifted uneasily in his seat, Trump told reporters that he believed Clinton’s deleted personal emails “could very well be” hidden in Ukraine.


The Hill
✔
@thehill
President Trump rails against Hillary Clinton over emails at #UNGA: "It's corrupt government. Because we have corruption also... We have a lot of corruption in our government."
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Trump also referred in his call with Zelensky in July and, at their news conference on Wednesday, to a false claim that has become an article of faith among his supporters: that Ukrainian officials had tried to help Clinton defeat him in 2016 by fabricating evidence of money-laundering by Paul Manafort, his then-campaign chair. If those documents were false, the thinking goes, the entire Mueller investigation should be called into question.

Related
Reporters Should Stop Helping Donald Trump Spread Lies About Joe Biden and Ukraine
Although there is no evidence that this is true, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani claimed on CNN last week that records of $12.7 million in secret payments to Manafort from the Ukrainian political party of his former client, Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian president who was toppled in a popular uprising in 2014, had been forged. In fact, as Andrew Kramer of the New York Times reported at the time, others named in the secret ledger where the payments to Manafort were documented have confirmed the records are genuine.

“Our country has been through a lot, and Ukraine knows a lot about it,” Trump told Zelensky in the call. “There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation.” He then referred to Mueller’s testimony to Congress about his investigation, which took place the day before the July call, and added, “They say a lot of it started with Ukraine.”

Trump expanded on that idea while sitting with Zelensky on Wednesday, telling reporters that he had asked Ukraine’s president to cooperate with an investigation into the origins of the Mueller probe by Giuliani.


Josh Marshall
✔
@joshtpm
Trump: Rudy will get to the bottom of the Russia hoax.
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“Rudy is looking to also find out where the phony witch hunt started, how it started. You had a Russian witch hunt that turned out to be two and half years of phony nonsense,” Trump said. “And Rudy has got every right to go and find out where that started. And other people are looking at that too. Where did it start? The enablers — where did it all come from?”

Murray Waas reported in the New York Review of Books on Wednesday that notes from “a person who participated in the joint defense agreement between President Trump and others under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, including Manafort” indicated that “Manafort exhorted the White House to press Ukrainian officials to investigate and discredit individuals, both in the U.S. and in Ukraine, who he believed had published damning information about his political consulting work in the Ukraine.” Giuliani, Waas learned, was involved in those discussions, which lasted from early 2017 until May of this year, and began working “to obtain information that might provide a pretext and political cover for the president to pardon his former campaign chairman.”

According to Giuliani himself, it was in the course of this effort to find evidence that Ukrainians had colluded with the Clinton campaign to frame Manafort that he came across another baseless conspiracy theory he and Trump have pushed for five months now: that Joe Biden, as vice president, had abused his power to get Ukraine’s chief prosecutor fired to shield his son from criminal investigation there.

As I reported in May, and again this week, while Biden’s son, Hunter, was asked to join the board of a Ukrainian gas firm suspected of corruption in 2014, his father pressed Ukraine to fire its chief prosecutor the following year because that official, Viktor Shokin, had failed to pursue corruption cases — including one against the same firm. In other words, the evidence shows that the then-vice president had acted to make the prosecution of the firm paying his son more likely, not less likely.

Related
A Republican Conspiracy Theory About a Biden-in-Ukraine Scandal Has Gone Mainstream. But It Is Not True.
At a public event last year, Biden boasted of how he had delivered an ultimatum from the Obama administration to Ukraine in late 2015: Remove Shokin and pursue an anti-corruption agenda or risk losing $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees. Biden was proud of his successful intervention, which was supported by other international donors to Ukraine and local anti-corruption activists who also demanded Shokin’s ouster for failing to pursue cases against former officials and crooked businesses that profited from state contracts.

Speaking to Zelensky in July, Trump said, “I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair.” In the context of the conversation, it was possible that Trump was referring either to Shokin, the prosecutor Biden worked to oust, or his successor, Yuriy Lutsenko, who had sought to curry favor with Trump by meeting with Giuliani earlier this year. Lutsenko, like Shokin, was also criticized by reformers and activists in Ukraine, including Sergii Leshchenko, a lawmaker and journalist Giuliani attacked by name last week. “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,” Trump told Zelensky.

(The text of the complaint from the intelligence community whistleblower, which was released on Thursday, the anonymous official says that Trump was referring to Lutsenko, and trying to encourage the new president to keep him in his job since he had demonstrated a willingness to cooperate with Giuliani and promised to investigate the Bidens.)


The Ukrainian activists who faulted Lutsenko for failing to investigate corrupt former officials reportedly had the support of the former U.S. ambassador in Kiev, Marie Yovanovitch, who was recalled to Washington two months early in May. “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 added.

He then pressed Ukraine’s new president to open an investigation into Biden, the man he currently trails in general election polls.


“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great,” Trump said, referring to a suggestion that Attorney General William Barr would aid in the investigation of the former vice president. “Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it. … It sounds horrible to me.”

Remarkably, Trump has successfully misled many of his supporters into believing that the video of Biden’s on-camera comments at the Council of Foreign Relations last year, recorded before a room filled with reporters and policy experts, meant that he was somehow caught on tape admitting wrongdoing, rather than simply speaking in public about something that was above board.

“The whole thing with the prosecutor in Ukraine,” Trump said while sitting with Zelensky on Wednesday, “this isn’t like, ‘Maybe he did it, maybe he didn’t.’ He’s on tape doing this.”


Robert Mackey
✔
@RobertMackey
Trump tries to mislead people into thinking Biden was caught on tape admitting wrongdoing, rather than speaking in public. "The whole thing with the prosecutor in Ukraine.... This isn’t like 'maybe he did it, maybe he didn't.' He's on tape doing this."
Embedded video

3
8:43 PM - Sep 25, 2019
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Keeping up the fiction that Biden’s public comments were some sort of smoking gun, Trump added: “I saw this a while ago. I looked at it and I said, ‘That’s incredible. I’ve never seen anything like that.’ Now, either he’s dumb, or he thought he was in a room full of really good friends, or maybe it’s a combination of both, in his case.”

While Trump’s supporters pointed to the lack of any explicit statement from the president that he would release blocked military aid in return for helping to smear Democrats, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, co-chair of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus, suggested that the arms-for-investigations offer was clear.


Marcy Kaptur
✔
@RepMarcyKaptur
Zelensky: We’re ready to buy more anti-tank missiles.

Trump responds: I would like you to do us a favor though.

Quid-pro-quo.
View image on Twitter

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Trump made his demand for “a favor,” right after Zelensky raised the issue of buying more Javelin antitank missiles with the aid money the White House had put a hold on before the call.

Ukraine’s need for Javelin missiles, to defend its territory from armored vehicles supplied to the Russian-backed separatists who hold much of the east of their country, has been central to its diplomatic relations with the U.S. for the past five years.

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In February 2015, Michèle Flournoy, a former senior Pentagon official who was then a leading candidate to serve as defense secretary if Clinton was elected president, and seven other former senior American officials issued a report urging the Obama administration to send $3 billion in defensive arms and equipment to Ukraine. The authors wrote that Ukrainian military leaders “had two primary requests for lethal military assistance: sniper weapons and precision anti-armor weapons, specifically the Javelin anti-tank missile. The current stocks of Ukrainian anti-tank/anti-armor weapons are at least 20 years old and reportedly have a 70 percent out of commission rate.”

The following month, President Barack Obama, under pressure from German Chancellor Angela Merkel to avoid escalating the conflict in Ukraine into a proxy war with Russia, ignored the advice of Biden and decided to instead provide a much smaller amount of nonlethal aid to Ukraine’s military.

Republicans in Congress were scathing about Obama’s refusal to provide weapons to Ukraine’s military at the time. A year later, however, when a delegate to the Republican National Convention’s platform committee, a Ted Cruz supporter named Diana Denman, submitted language calling for the next president to commit to “providing lethal defensive weapons,” she was shocked that the plank was removed by Trump staffers.

Although both Trump and Manafort denied at the time that they had directed the commitment to Ukraine to be watered down, J.D. Gordon, a national security adviser to the Trump campaign later admitted that he had pushed to have the promise of lethal aid removed to better align with the Republican nominee’s aim for warmer relations with Russia.

“The Trump campaign was, for the most part, hands off except one strange issue, and that was Ukraine,” Randall Dunning, an alternate Ted Cruz delegate from Texas told Voice of America in July 2016. “I don’t understand why, with all the tough defense talk coming out of Mr. Trump, why he would object to giving Ukraine the arms necessary to defend their nation.”

Seven months into Trump’s term, when Defense Secretary Jim Mattis visited Kiev in August, 2017, he said that he supported sending weapons to Ukraine, but a Pentagon proposal to provide Javelin anti-tank missiles had still not been approved by Trump.

It was not until March 2018 that the Pentagon announced the final approval for the sale of 210 Javelins and 35 launching units to Ukraine. A month later, the New York Times reported that a Ukrainian special prosecutor appointed to pursue corruption in the former administration, Serhiy Horbatyuk, had been ordered to freeze four investigations related to Manafort’s consulting for the former president of Ukraine and his political party. The cases were not officially closed, but the prosecutor general’s office issued an order that blocked Horbatyuk from issuing subpoenas for evidence or interviewing witnesses.

Ukraine’s then-president, Petro Poroshenko announced on April 30 that the Ukrainian Army had finally received “the long-awaited” missiles.

Two days later, Andrew Kramer of the Times reported that David Sakvarelidze, a former deputy in the prosecutor general’s office, “did not believe that the general prosecutor had coordinated with anybody in the United States on the decision to suspend the investigations in Ukraine, or that there had been a quid pro quo for the missile sale.”
https://theintercept.com/2019/09/26/don ... democrats/

“At the same time Volker was pushing to convince Trump to arm Ukraine, he also held positions with lobbying firm BGR Group and the McCain Institute, that both had financial ties to Raytheon Company—which manufactures the Javelin system and earned millions from Trump's decision.”
https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand

Conflict of interest questions add to scrutiny of Trump’s Ukraine envoy
Kurt Volker, who resigned from his post on Friday, had an unusual job arrangement at the State Department.

DAVID HERSZENHORN09/28/2019 06:50 PM EDT
Kurt Volker is pictured
Kurt Volker.
Mediating peace between Russia and Ukraine was supposed to be a part-time job for Kurt Volker. But he's now at the center of a full-blown scandal — with questions about his own conduct that are separate from the alleged pressure campaign that could lead to President Donald Trump's impeachment.

As Trump's special representative for Ukraine negotiations, Volker strongly supported a shift in policy to send lethal weapons to Kyiv, including tank-busting Javelins, described by its manufacturer as "the world's most versatile and lethal one-man-portable, anti-tank, guided munition and surveillance weapon system."

But at the same time Volker was pushing to convince Trump to arm Ukraine, he also held positions with a major lobbying firm, BGR Group, and with a think tank, the McCain Institute, that both had financial ties to Raytheon Company, which manufactures the Javelin system and earned millions from Trump's decision.

Volker, a career diplomat and former U.S. ambassador to NATO, resigned on Friday, a day after he was referenced in the whistleblower complaint alleging that Trump improperly pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the business dealings of former Vice President Joe Biden's son.

The whistleblower complaint has emboldened congressional Democrats in Washington to push forward with an impeachment inquiry against Trump. But it has also drawn uncomfortable attention to Volker and the unusual arrangement by which he served as Trump's special envoy — essentially as a volunteer while maintaining other paid jobs, including as executive director of the McCain Institute, a Washington think-tank named for the late Republican senator, John McCain, of Arizona.

Volker has not been accused of violating any conflict-of-interest rules. But his resignation is likely to fuel further investigations beyond his unorthodox role working with Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, in pressing Ukrainian officials on Trump's behalf. Congress is now all but certain to scrutinize his conduct as special envoy after being appointed to the post on July 7, 2017, by former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — a job he now leaves with Ukraine and Russia no closer to peace.

Supporters of Volker point to his distinguished record as a career diplomat and national security official in Washington, and say that his actions were likely well-intentioned.

In his written complaint, the whistleblower wrote that Volker visited Kyiv on July 26, the day after a controversial phone call in which Trump asked Zelesnky for a "favor” and to work with Giuliani who was pushing for the investigation of the Bidens. The whistleblower said that Volker was accompanied by the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, and that they met with Zelensky and other officials and tried to help them understand and deal with Giuliani's requests. The complaint also says that Volker and Sondland spoke to Giuliani in an effort to "contain the damage" to U.S. national security from Giuliani's seemingly freelance foreign policy efforts.

But in a television appearance on Thursday, Giuliani held up an iPad to display text messages allegedly from Volker and insisted that Volker and others in the State Department were fully aware of what he was doing in Ukraine.

“He should step forward and explain what he did,” Giuliani said of Volker. “The whistleblower falsely alleges that I was operating on my own. Well, I wasn’t operating on my own!”

Volker and Sondland did not respond to messages requesting comment. Sondland, who is based in Brussels, also declined a request for an interview about his role in visiting Ukraine.

But some foreign policy experts have said questions should have been raised about Volker's arrangement from the moment he was appointed, effectively to act as a part-time mediator for the Ukraine crisis, while also retaining his other jobs, including at the McCain Institute and the BGR Group lobbying firm, where he was a paid outside consultant.

And at least one good government group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said it was reviewing the matter. “We think it raises a lot of questions and we’re looking into it,” Noah Bookbinder, the group’s executive director, said.

The State Department did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday.

Jeffrey Birnbaum, a spokesman for BGR has told POLITICO that Volker had recused himself from any issues related to the firm’s work for the Ukrainian government. Volker had been employed previously by the firm, in 2011 and 2012 as a managing director — a fact noted on his official State Department biography.

BGR’s contract with the Ukrainian government began in January 2017, at a time when Volker was a paid consultant but before he was named as special representative. But while BGR stressed that Volker had recused himself from issues related to Ukraine, Volker’s remit as special envoy was far wider, giving him broad responsibilities in discussions with Russia as well as privileged access to information about U.S. and EU sanctions policies — matters of intense interest to military defense contractors, energy companies, financial firms and an array of other commercial sectors.

Birnbaum said that he was unaware of Volker’s broader role, and could not comment on whether the wider portfolio had been taken into account when deciding he should recuse from issues related to Ukraine — a step that might be more fitting had Volker been ambassador in Kyiv.

According to federal disclosure records, Raytheon, the maker of the Javelin shoulder-fired anti-tank weapon, has retained BGR for lobbying services for years.

And disclosure records also show that Raytheon, like many U.S. military and defense contractors, has been a corporate donor to the McCain Institute. John McCain, the late senator, was a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, and long served as chairman or the senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and was heavily active on defense issues and in military contracting.

Raytheon and its partner, Lockheed Martin, have multi-million-dollar contracts to manufacture the Javelin, including for Ukraine. The Javelin is built at a plant in Tuscon, Arizona, the late McCain's home state.

A message sent to Raytheon’s public relations department was not immediately answered on Saturday.

Volker began advocating for sending lethal weapons to Ukraine almost immediately after he was named as the special representative for Ukraine negotiations.

"Defensive weapons, ones that would allow Ukraine to defend itself, and to take out tanks for example, would actually help" deter Russian aggression against Ukraine, Volker said in a BBC interview on July 25, 2017, just three weeks after taking up the post. "I'm not again predicting where we go on this. That's a matter for further discussion and decision. But I think that argument that it would be provocative to Russia or emboldening of Ukraine is just getting it backwards."

Within days of that interview, the Pentagon and State Department presented a plan to Trump recommending sending weapons to Ukraine. The U.S. Congress had already authorized arming the Ukrainian military through legislation adopted in 2014 but President Barack Obama had refused to send lethal weapons, siding instead with advisers who warned that arming the Ukrainian military would only enflame the conflict and cause more casualties, because the U.S. could not provide sufficient arms to match Russia's overwhelming military superiority.

Volker's position in favor of providing weapons was consistent with his longstanding hawkish views toward Russia, so there is no suggest that any financial arrangement had swayed his views.
In a press conference call in May, Volker strongly defended the Trump administration’s decision to supply lethal weapons and said he expected support to continue.

“Ukraine, as any other country in the world, has a right to self-defense.,” Volker said in a response to a question about whether the supply of weapons would continue. “For some reason, there was a decision here in a previous administration not to help Ukraine with its defensive capabilities, at least lethal defensive capabilities. That is something that has now been lifted, and the United States is prepared to work with Ukraine, just as we do with countries around the world in supporting their legitimate defense needs.”

Asked for information about specific new weapons systems that might be sent to Kyiv in 2020, Volker said he did not know.

“I do not know the names of the specific systems,” he said. “I do know that the process here is one where the Congress appropriates the funding, the Pentagon sits down Ukrainian defense leadership, we talk through exactly what the needs are, how they should be addressed and what systems are best in doing so.”

But if there is little doubt that Volker was a longtime hawk on Russia policy, questions still remain about whether his private business associates might have benefited from his role as the special representative, just as Giuliani, the president’s private lawyer, was apparently gaining access to Ukrainian officials through Volker’s contacts.

While other former diplomats have returned to active service, they typically take steps to eliminate any conflicts. As an example, William Taylor, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, has now returned to Kyiv as charges d' affaires, to replace Maria Yovanovitch, who was ousted by Trump and branded by him as "bad news." But in doing so, Taylor gave up a position as vice president at the U.S. Institute for Peace in Washington and is no longer listed on its web site.

In yet another sign of how tangled relations can be in the murky world of post-Soviet diplomacy, Volker is also a senior adviser at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank that has extensive ties in Ukraine, and receives financial support for some of its Ukraine-related work from Burisma, the gas company whose board Hunter Biden joined in 2014.

Whatever Volker, Sondland and Giuliani were up to in recent months, there is sober recognition in Kyiv that little, if any, of it was actually focused on helping Ukraine in any substantive way to end its conflict with Russia.

At a joint press appearance with Zelensky in New York on Wednesday, Trump boasted about his decision to supply Javelins but also made clear that he has little interest in the ongoing conflict, and expected Kyiv to work out its issues with Moscow. He told Zelensky that he should demand more help from EU countries.

"Well, we're working with Ukraine. And we want other countries to work with Ukraine," Trump said. "When I say 'work,' I'm referring to money. They should put up more money. We put up a lot of money. I gave you anti-tank busters that — frankly, President Obama was sending you pillows and sheets. And I gave you anti-tank busters. And a lot of people didn’t want to do that, but I did it."

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/ ... er-1517874

[seemslikeadream]

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff has reached an agreement to have the actual whistleblower himself testify before the committee



WALLACE: How specifically did the Bidens break the law in Ukraine?

STEPHEN MILLER: [dissembles, can't cite a singe reason]


Republicans angry about Hunter Biden are really going to surprised when they find out who Jared Kushner is and what he's in charge of...