November 14, 2019
Ukraine and the fine hand of George Soros
There was a missing person in yesterday's testimony in the "impeachment inquiry": George Soros. One person who noticed was Joe DiGenova, who brought up the involvement of the Hungarian-born billionaire yesterday on Lou Dobbs's Fox Business Network show, only to be attacked viciously for daring to mention Him Who Must Not Be Named, on Mediaite by Reed Richardson, who called it a "bonkers conspiracy."
The husband-and-wife Trump defense team of Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing appeared on Fox Business' Lou Dobbs Tonight to push an outlandish conspiracy theory about Ukraine, baselessly alleging that left-wing billionaire George Soros "controls a large part of the foreign service part of the State Department and the activities of FBI agents overseas."
Photo credit: Nicolo Caranti.
Here's what was said:
Transcript via Grabien:
RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
Lou: Let's go to Ukraine. Rudy Giuliani, I love the fact he's defending the president in an op-ed. All the work he has done. I hear all the testimony today at least from those who want to quiet him and quiet the president, and try to state that they think this is outrageous that people should have truth and justice in far away places like sue crane. Crane — places like Ukraine. What do you think, Victoria?
>> That what Rudy Giuliani has been doing since he has begun representing the president. He called me earlier this year to tell me what he discovered about Ukraine. He was told that these people in Ukraine were working to frame the president. You. Our sweet Ambassador told everyone not to talk to us, and so did George kernt. Kernt — George Kent. He flew into Kiev to do that.Lou: As I watch and I'm thinking, I am going to give them credit for being well intentioned public servants. But for all the world it was because they weren't in the special super duper irregular chain and no one patted them on the back or had a sip of tea with them. That's what they seemed upset about. It was outrageous to me that they have this sort of petty reaction to not being in the regular chain as well as the irregular chain. And it didn't seem either were too disturbed by it. George Kent is a separate issue. His motives seem peculiar to me. John Solomon reported in March that George Kent pressured Ukrainian investigators to back off an investigation from the anti-corruption center that George Soros group sponsored. This is a complicated deal here. And it seems he wanted to keep an investigation of Ukrainian corruption with limits on it, even as he answered questions today.
>> There is no doubt that George Soros controls a large part of the foreign service part of the State Department and the activities of FBI agents overseas who work with ngos. That was very effort in Ukraine. Kent was part of that. He was a big protector of Soros. His testimony today shows his stern kind of discomfort with not being included in certain discussions. But George Soros had a daily opportunity to tell the State Department through Victoria Newland what to do in the Ukraine. Soros ran it. He corrupted FBI officials and foreign service officers. George Soros wants to run Ukraine and he's doing everything he can to use every lever of the United States government for business purposes.
>> His organization is anti-competitive. It goes after people who compete with George Soros in the name of anticorruption.Lou: It was quite a moment in which he walked right up to the boundary but wouldn't say this should be a comprehensive investigation of these activities that of course is precisely what the president of the United States made clear to president zelensky that he wanted, bringing in the U.S. Justice Department to work with the Ukrainian authorities and government.
[emphasis added]
John Solomon yesterday published further information about Soros, the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, and "foreign influence in elections" in a piece titled "The real Ukraine controversy: an activist U.S. embassy and its adherence to the Geneva Convention."
Key Soros-related excerpts (you should read the whole thing):
I had focused months of reporting on Ukraine on the U.S. government's relationship with a Ukraine nonprofit called the AntiCorruption Action Centre, which was jointly funded by liberal megadonor George Soros' charity and the State Department. I even sent a list of questions to that nonprofit all the way back in October 2018. It never answered.
Given that Soros spent millions trying to elect Hillary Clinton and defeat Donald Trump in 2016, I thought it was a legitimate public policy question to ask whether a State Department that is supposed to be politically neutral should be in joint business with a partisan figure's nonprofit entity.
State officials confirmed that Soros' foundation and the U.S. embassy jointly funded the AntiCorruption Action Centre, and that Soros' vocal role in Ukraine as an anticorruption voice afforded him unique access to the State Department, including in 2016 to the top official on Ukraine policy, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. (That access was confirmed in documents later released under FOIA to Citizens United.)
Soros' representatives separately confirmed to me that the Anti-Corruption Action Centre was the leading tip of the spear for a strategy Team Soros devised in 2014 to fight corruption in Ukraine and that might open the door for his possible business investment of $1 billion. You can read the Ukraine strategy document here and Soros' plan to invest $1 billion in Ukraine here. [snip]
George Kent, the embassy's charge d'affaires in 2016 and now a deputy assistant secretary of state, confirmed in impeachment testimony that he personally signed the April 2016 letter demanding Ukraine drop the case against the Anti-Corruption Action Centre.
He also testified he was aware of pressure the U.S. embassy also applied on Ukraine prosecutors to drop investigations against a journalist named Vitali Shabunin, a parliamentary member named Sergey Leschenko and a senior law enforcement official named Artem Sytnyk.
Shabunin helped for the AntiCorruption Action Centre that Soros funded, and Leschenko and Sytnyk were criticized by a Ukrainian court for interfering in the 2016 US election by improperly releasing or publicizing secret evidence in an ongoing case against Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
It's worth letting Kent's testimony speak for itself. "As a matter of conversation that U.S officials had with Ukrainian officials in sharing our concern about the direction of governance and the approach, harassment of civil society activists, including Mr. Shabunin, was one of the issues we raised," Kent testified.
As for Sytnyk, the head of the NABU anticorruption police, Kent addded: "We warned both Lutsenko and others that efforts to destroy NABU as an organization, including opening up investigations of Sytnyk, threatened to unravel a key component of our anti-corruption cooperation."
As the story of the U.S. embassy's pressure spread, a new controversy erupted. A Ukrainian news outlet claimed Lutsenko recanted his claim about the "do-not-prosecute" list. I called Lutsenko and he denied recanting or even changing his story. He gave me this very detailed response standing by his statements.
But American officials and news media eager to discredit my reporting piled on, many quoting the Ukrainian outlet without ever contacting Lutsenko to see if it was true. One of the American outlets that did contact Lutsenko, the New York Times, belatedly disclosed today that Lutsenko told it, like he told me, that he stood by his allegation that the ambassador had provided him names of people and groups she did not want to be targeted by prosecutors. You can read that here.
It is neither a conspiracy theory nor a debunked or retracted story. U.S. embassy officials DID apply pressure to try to stop Ukrainian prosecutors from pursuing certain cases.
November 14, 2019
Dems' star witnesses bungle Hunter Biden's Burisma bounty
It's hard to decide which of the two star witnesses the Democrats chose to kick off their impeachment show was more embarrassing when it comes to the central question underlying the entire inquiry: the alleged impropriety — the Dems now call it "bribery" — of asking Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden's spectacularly lucrative ($50K/month) involvement with Burisma. If Biden's Burisma bounty deserves investigation, then it is more than a bit silly to castigate the POTUS for promoting a Ukrainian investigation of it. Touting such a request as worthy of overriding a presidential election with impeachment and conviction is a hard sell.
Of the two witnesses, deputy assistant secretary of state George Kent was more forthright. He admitted there was a "perception of a conflict of interest":
And he is all in favor of investigating what happened to taxpayer dollars:
George Kent: "To summarize, we thought the [CEO of Burisma] had stolen money. We thought a prosecutor had take an bribe to shut the case."
— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) November 13, 2019
GOP counsel: "Are you in favor of that matter being fully investigated and prosecuted?" https://t.co/Tbcm4X2OaU pic.twitter.com/RybEdDQuZN
Of course, as Tristan Justice of The Federalist points out, he was already on the record about this in the closed door testimony whose transcripts have been released:
Kent also testified in a private deposition that he voiced his discomfort over the situation to the White House in 2015 where administration officials brushed off Kent’s concerns.
"I raised my concerns that I had heard that Hunter Biden was on the board of a company owned by somebody that the U.S. Government had spent money trying to get tens of millions of dollars back and that could create the perception of a conflict of interest," Kent told lawmakers behind closed doors in October. "The message that I recall hearing back was that the vice president's son Beau was dying of cancer and that there was no further bandwidth the deal with family related issues at that time... That was the end of that conversation."
Kent's State Department colleague Ambassador William Taylor was even more damaging, at least in one way. He just sat there in silence — five whole seconds of it, an eternity on national television:
This clip. Five solid seconds of awkward silence when Taylor is asked whether Hunter Biden's appointment to Burisma board "raises questions." pic.twitter.com/s05HbdfaXK
— Caleb Howe (@CalebHowe) November 13, 2019
Neither witness had an answer when Rep. Ratcliffe asked them where the impeachable offense is:
Graphic credit: Twitter video screen grab.
November 17, 2019
The Bidens and Burisma
By John Leonard
Mykola Zlochevsky is the (allegedly) corrupt owner of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural gas provider. Hunter Biden accepted a position on the board of directors with Burisma in April of 2014. By August of the same year, Vitaly Yurema, prosecutor general of Ukraine at the time, opened an official investigation of Zlochevsky and Burisma. By February 2015, Yurema had been replaced by a man named Viktor Shokin. Only four months later, U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt allegedly warned Shokin to "handle the Biden investigation with kid gloves."
Apparently Shokin didn't listen so good, or maybe Pyatt didn't tell him eight or nine times that he was supposed to clear Burisma and Hunter Biden of any potential wrongdoing. In either event, Joe Biden wasn't happy, because in March of 2016, he threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. foreign aid to Ukraine unless Shokin was fired within the next six hours. How do we know this? Why, Joe told us himself.
Biden had the audacity to brag about it during a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. He boasted, "[I told the Ukrainians,] 'You're not getting the billion. I'm gonna be leaving here in six hours, and if the prosecutor [Shokin] is not fired, you're not getting the money. Well, son of a b----, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid."
Who was Shokin's "solid" replacement? Yuriy Lutsenko, who subsequently declared there was "no evidence of wrongdoing" by the Bidens and closed the investigation only ten months after taking over the job. According to Lutsenko, there isn't a law against a company paying a board member more than fifty thousand dollars a month (CNBC claims that it was $83,000 per month) to a man who knew nothing about the energy business, doesn't speak the language, and never even set foot in the country to attend a couple of board meetings in Europe each year.
The evidence is indisputably clear and incontrovertible, in the form of a videotaped confession to an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations. One billion dollars in U.S. aid (quid) was offered on condition (pro) that Shokin, the prosecutor allegedly investigating Burisma, be fired (quo). The replacement clears the case.
Cui bono? Who benefits? Lutsenko gets a plum job. The Ukrainian government gets another billion dollars in U.S. foreign aid. Hunter Biden gets three million bucks for about a week's worth of work spread over five years. Joe Biden gets the benefit of having Hunter's corrupt business deal swept under the rug. Everybody wins...except the U.S. taxpayer, of course.
The American people have been asked to believe that Joe Biden demanded that Shokin be fired because he wasn't aggressively investigating Burisma. We have been told there is nothing wrong or unusual about an American citizen who happens to be the son of a powerful politician being paid millions of dollars by a foreign business with economic and political interests directly related to the United States for essentially a "do-nothing" job. We the people are expected to believe that the actions (and specific threats) of Hunter Biden's influential and politically connected father had nothing at all to do with shutting down the investigation of Burisma.
Frankly, it is ludicrous even to suggest that Joe Biden wanted Burisma investigated more thoroughly, because if that was true, why didn't he complain when Lutsenko shut down the investigation only ten months after Shokin had been fired?
How stupid do the liberal media elitists think we are? Laughably, the legal eagles at the NYU School of Law would have us believe that Biden was on an "anti-corruption" campaign against Ukraine that may have harmed his son's company. Try this thought experiment: change the name of the people involved from "Biden" to "Trump," and simply imagine what the headlines would be if Donald Trump had threatened to withhold foreign aid from Ukraine to keep Eric Trump from being investigated for corruption. Pundits wouldn't just be clamoring for Trump's impeachment; they would probably be calling for his public execution, clamoring to hang him for treason or perhaps even to burn him at the stake.
Yet the media have been working overtime to convince the American public that there was absolutely nothing wrong with Hunter Biden "earning" millions of dollars from a Ukrainian company without even setting foot in Ukraine. Reuters reported that "[Rudy] Giuliani has alleged, without providing evidence, that Joe Biden pushed for the firing of Ukraine's top prosecutor to end an investigation into Burisma and Zlochevsky in order to protect his son." FactCheck.org, Bloomberg, and pretty much all the other lamestream media outlets all reported that there was nothing illegal, wrong, or improper about Hunter Biden getting paid $83,000 per month to do nothing by a foreign company being investigated for corruption that involves the theft of U.S. foreign aid money. Nothing to see here; move along.
Which part of the allegation was not supported by evidence? Joe Biden claimed that he not only pushed for the firing of Shokin, but absolutely insisted upon it and threatened to withhold U.S. foreign aid unless his demands were immediately met. Biden didn't specifically give a reason for why he wanted the prosecutor fired, but is it easier to believe that he was trying to find corruption in the company paying his son millions of dollars to do nothing or that he wanted to protect his son and the income stream produced by that corrupt company? Biden's defenders have claimed that Shokin himself was corrupt and not investigating Burisma, but the fact is that Joe Biden's preferred choice, Yuriy Lutsenko, shut down the investigation and cleared everybody involved without solving the mystery of the missing foreign aid money.
Why does Burisma need to be investigated? Deputy assistant secretary of state George Kent just testified in the so-called impeachment hearings that Zlochevsky and Burisma need to be investigated because they had stolen billions of dollars and possibly bribed a prosecutor to shut down the investigation that dated back to the period when Zlochevsky served as minister of ecology and natural resources and gave his own business government licenses and contracts.
Yet, astonishingly, Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of an alleged Ukrainian "Anti-Corruption Action Center," made an extraordinary claim to Radio Free Europe: "ironically, Joe Biden asked Shokin to leave because the prosecutor failed to pursue the Burisma investigation, not because Shokin was tough and active with the case."
Okay, so everybody wants us to believe that Shokin wasn't tough enough or doing the job...but who in his right mind would claim that Lutsenko is any tougher?
AUTHOR’S NOTE: An article written by John Solomon published in The Hill reported that Daria Kaleniuk and her organization AntAC were funded by Barack Obama’s State Department and the International Renaissance Foundation, a George Soros organization. It makes sense Kaleniuk would claim Biden was getting tougher on corruption by replacing Shokin when the opposite appears to be true. It isn’t clear that Lutsenko is corrupt, however, because he complained that Ambassador Yovanovich verbally issued a "do not prosecute" list included Hunter Biden and Burisma that apparently came indirectly from Barack Obama himself.
John Leonard writes novels, books, and the occasional article for American Thinker. John also blogs at his website southernprose.com, where he may be contacted.