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Trump meddled in Ukraine, and he’s not alone
As Donald Trump appears caught attempting a quid pro quo, Max Blumenthal argues that the Ukrainegate scandal also highlights a web of corruption and meddling inside Ukraine implicating other prominent US figures and institutions.
MAX BLUMENTHAL:
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Ukraine absolutely did interfere in the 2016 election, and its interference was possibly more consequential than anything Russia allegedly did, starting with the interference by Serhiy Leshchenko, who was the head of the national corruption board, basically a US creation in Ukraine which was supposed to crack down on corruption internally. The…it was set up with the assistance from the FBI and in many ways it’s a US vehicle for influencing Ukrainian domestic politics, which are pretty much playing out completely under the watch of the US.
What happened with Leshchenko and with the Ukrainian government in general under Petro Poroshenko, which was a very sort of Nationalist government, ah, deeply opposed to any collaboration, ah, ties with their historic trading partner Russia, their neighbor to the east, was that they wanted Hillary Clinton to be elected. Hillary Clinton was considered more anti-Russian than Trump, more supportive of the post-Maidan government. Donald Trump was, you know, being branded as Putin’s puppet in Washington, and so the Ukrainian government, through this anti-corruption board, interfered.
Serhiy Leshchenko released the “black ledger” on Paul Manafort, who was then Trump’s campaign manager, who had worked for the Party of Regions and Viktor Yanukovych, who was the predecessor to Poroshenko, who was considered more friendly with Russia, and the black ledger’s documented off-the-books payments from the Party of Regions to Manafort and his firm. These were handwritten notes. And here’s what the Financial Times had to say about the takedown of Manafort by the Ukrainian government, by Serhiy Leshchenko, who is a Ukrainian legislator and the head of a Ukrainian government institution: “The prospect of Mr. Trump, who has praised Ukraine’s arch-enemy Vladimir Putin, becoming leader of the country’s biggest ally has spurred not just Mr. Leshchenko but Kiev’s wider political leadership to do something they would never have attempted before: intervene, however indirectly, in a US election.” This is the Financial Times in 2016. “But Mr. Leshchenko and other political actors in Kiev say they will continue their efforts to prevent a candidate…from reaching the summit of American political power.” So it’s an open admission by Leshchenko, the government in Kiev that they were interfering to prevent Trump from gaining power, and they were essentially responsible for the takedown of Manafort.
Now, how did Manafort become an issue for Trump? And this is no defense of Manafort, who’s worked for some of the worst tyrants in the world, who’s, you know, as corrupt as they come in Washington. Although you know there are thousands of mini-Manaforts and major-Manaforts in this city. How did…how did Manafort, how did the US media get interested in Manafort? It was through a Democratic operative, who is also a Ukrainian nationalist, named Alexandra Chalupa, who was working for the Democratic National Committee on opposition research. She helped Michael Isikoff shape his stories on Manafort, and it was Politico in January 2017, before Trump had even taken office, that Ken Vogel, who it seemed like he was using Chalupa as his own source and he decided to burn her when he didn’t need her anymore — that’s just my reading — but Ken Vogel turns around this story, “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire.” And here’s what Ken Vogel wrote: “Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election.” “A Ukrainian American operative,” referring to Alexandra Chalupa, “who was consulting for the DNC, met with top officials in the Ukrainian embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, Manafort and Russia.” So it’s right there. This is not, you know, something people can dismiss because it was printed in, you know, The Grayzone, although we’re probably much more factual than Politico. But this is just clear evidence, plain as day, that the Ukrainian government interfered in the 2016 election and helped influence the Russiagate narrative that Trump was secretly colluding with Russia. And so this definitely deserves investigation. And that was really the source of Trump’s phone call with Zelensky. And so this is kind of being left out, especially on CNN and MSNBC, but it’s really being left out of the discussion.
Then you have Trump going to Australia, asking the Australian government, which is another tool of the United States, just like Ukraine, and you can see the way that they prostrate themselves before Trump, these leaders. It’s just so pathetic and says everything about the way the US operates in the world. But Trump is asking Australia for information about its own meddling in or involvement in the 2016 election, and that relates to a conversation between an Australian diplomat who has ties to the intelligence community, and Australia is a member of the Five Eyes global intelligence collaboration network. Alexander Downer and George Papadopoulos, where Papadopoulos supposedly spilled the beans and got all excited about Mifsud, another very shady character who’s been involved in this saga, who’s really kind of the key to Russiagate, because there is very clear indication that Mifsud has been working for Western intelligence — while he was described as a Russian agent, falsely, by Robert Mueller. You know, Mifsud had been kind of entrapping George Papadopoulos and working on him because they…Papadopoulos was loosely connected to the Trump foreign policy team. He was the coffee boy. He was kind of an easy rube. And Papadopoulos sits down with Downer and says, “You know, this guy Mifsud told me that there’s all these Hillary emails that are coming out soon,” and Downer, of course, spreads that information to his connections. And Downer is an Australian government official. So that, that’s what’s going on here. And those, those parts, this critical context is being left out. So there’s no denying that what Trump did was improper, but there’s also no denying that foreign governments have been also, besides Russia, have interfered in a US political campaign.
And let me make one last point about foreign interference in the US. Every four years the US chooses the person who will interfere in governments around the globe, so it kind of makes sense that those governments would want to have an influence over who the US selects. That’s kind of part of the blowback of Empire. We should consider that one third of the world is currently living under US sanctions and that they might want a different leadership. So the US has sort of made itself a target by the way it behaves around the world, by being…representing this unprecedented global meddling machine.
AARON MATÉ: Yeah, and on that point, you know, this is not the only time where the US leverages foreign aid to achieve its goals.
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So let’s talk about Joe Biden here and his involvement with this story. One facet of this that I find striking is that once again, kind of like Russiagate, Democrats are centering a scandal that forces the highlighting of their own corruption. So in the case of Russiagate, by talking about the stolen Democratic Party emails, that brought attention to the fact that those emails revealed corruption by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party in their bias against Bernie Sanders. Now again the victim, purported victim here, is Joe Biden, so now Democrats are in this awkward position where they have to defend the fact that Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, got a $50,000 a month seat on a Ukrainian gas company’s board of directors, months after his father helped back a coup in Ukraine. And Democrats have to defend that once again, and I guess my read on this, Max, is even if the suspicions from Giuliani, that the prosecutor that Biden got fired was fired because he was investigating Hunter Biden’s company, even if that’s not true, which I don’t have a reason to believe that at this point because it’s hard to trust what comes out of Ukraine. But even if Giuliani’s suspicions are not true, just what is established is damning enough: the fact that Hunter Biden got this gig, I mean, imagine if one of Trump’s kids had gotten a comparable gig in Venezuela had, say, Trump’s coup in Venezuela had been successful, like Biden’s coup in Ukraine was.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, the Democrats, by driving towards impeachment, you know, they might help their prospects winning some Senate seats, they might impeach Trump in the House, who knows? But they’re going to keep this story out there, and it’s a story that is incredibly harmful for Joe Biden, because it is largely true, it is a case of legal corruption in Washington, and it’s something that Biden largely can’t deny.
So what Giuliani has done, and I think maybe his mistake is he’s, he’s gone overboard and tried to allege that Biden, going in, in late 2015, early 2016, to Ukraine and demanding the firing of the general prosecutor, the attorney general of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, was related to an investigation Shokin was carrying out against Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company that had hired Biden’s son Hunter Biden as a board member to the tune of $50,000 a month, in order to cover for his own son. Now that may have happened, it may be true. It wouldn’t surprise me at all. The problem is there’s no concrete evidence to prove it, and so the Democrats are hammering Giuliani about that and saying it’s completely meritless. And right now, it is.
What isn’t meritless is the fact that the same month that Joe Biden made his first big visit to Ukraine in April 2014 to raise the morale of this flailing government that had been installed by a coup that Biden personally midwifed, his son Hunter Biden was appointed to the board of this insanely corrupt company, by its oligarch founder Mykola Zlochevsky, who was currently under investigation in the UK and had $23 million of his assets frozen by the UK government because he was considered to be so corrupt. So Zlochevsky wanted to not only get out from that UK investigation but also to improve his name in Washington, because he was associated with the previous government of Yanukovych, who is considered pro-Russian. And so he hires Hunter Biden, he brings on Devon Archer, who, you know, is close to the Heinz family, basically close to John Kerry, and he basically starts paying anyone he can to whitewash his corruption. Hunter Biden then enlists a law firm, a powerful law firm run by David Boies, where he’s a co-counsel, to start advising Burisma on how to supposedly improve its ethics. And The New York Times, at the time, in an editorial board op-ed written by the whole editorial board, wrote this, “It should be plain to Hunter Biden that any connection with a Ukrainian oligarch damages his father’s efforts to help Ukraine. This is not a board he should be sitting on.”
So the issue is, you’re Joe Biden, the New York Times editorial board calls you out for your son’s intimate association with one of the most corrupt oligarchs in one of the most corrupt countries in the world, where you have just implemented regime change as a personal project that you deeply believe in, and you have never spoken with him about his business dealings once. I find that completely unbelievable. I find that totally unbelievable. And the timing of Hunter Biden’s appointment to the Burisma board is very fishy, so this is a real issue for Joe Biden, and for anyone to say “Oh, there’s nothing there. Let’s move on,” they’re not holding Biden up to the scrutiny he deserves. He’s running for president, and this is someone who I think is not trustworthy. And Trump is doing what he did to Hillary Clinton, pointing to, using the Peter Schweizer Clinton Cash investigation, about all of the money that the Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Foundation were…was pumping in from the Gulf States. And then, you know, doing these arms deals that Hillary Clinton was authorizing as, as Secretary of State, to those very same theocratic monarchies in the Gulf, and, you know, every…it gets framed in a partisan way, but the fact is the Clinton Global Initiative was an influence peddling operation and it did great damage to public trust in Hillary Clinton. And so this whole narrative is coming back on Joseph Biden, and it’s doing damage to him no matter whether no…whether or not Giuliani is able to come up with the evidence, that Biden fired Shokin to protect his son.
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