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John Solomon this evening...

 

Ukrainian who meddled against Trump in 2016 is now under Russia-corruption cloud
 

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The country’s chief corruption prosecutor on Thursday opened an investigation into “suspicions” that Serhiy Leshchenko, a crusading anti-corruption member of Ukraine’s parliament and former investigative journalist, accepted bribes in 2016 from a Russian source that enabled him to buy a luxury condo far above his means.
 

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1 hour ago, Buffalo_Gal said:

John Solomon this evening...

 

Ukrainian who meddled against Trump in 2016 is now under Russia-corruption cloud
 

</snip>
 

The country’s chief corruption prosecutor on Thursday opened an investigation into “suspicions” that Serhiy Leshchenko, a crusading anti-corruption member of Ukraine’s parliament and former investigative journalist, accepted bribes in 2016 from a Russian source that enabled him to buy a luxury condo far above his means.
 

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First rule of being corrupt: Don't make it ***** obvious that you're corrupt.

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Ukraine is gonna be an "interesting".

The PM is resigning Wednesday, the Defense Minister resigned via Facebook,  what else is going to happen I wonder?

 

Ukrainian TV star Volodymyr Zelenskiy has sought to capitalize on his huge popularity, dissolving the country's parliament Monday minutes after he was sworn in as president.
 

Zelenskiy, who won 73% of the vote last month in his landslide victory, slammed parliament as a hot-bed of self-enrichment, and promised to stop the war in the east against Russian-backed separatists.
 

The president's bold move to dissolve the Supreme Rada followed the failure of a majority of lawmakers to use parliamentary ruses to hamper Zelenskiy's plans.

Zelenskiy's victory reflected Ukrainians' exhaustion with widespread corruption and the country's political elite. 
 

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After he was sworn in but before he moved to dissolve parliament, Zelenskiy asked the Supreme Rada to adopt a bill against illegal enrichment and support his motions to fire the country's defense minister, the head of the Ukrainian Security Service and the Prosecutor General. All of them are allies of former President Petro Poroshenko, who lost the election to the comedian with no previous political experience but who played the Ukrainian president on a popular TV show for years.
 

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  • 4 weeks later...

@Deranged Rhino put the ABC article in another thread, so I will toss this article in here:

 

Former Ukrainian Prosecutor: ‘No Doubt’ Joe Biden Forced Me Out to Protect Hunter Biden
 

A former Ukrainian prosecutor general is speaking out after Vice President Joe Biden forced him out of his job.

Speaking to ABC News, former Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin said he has “no doubt” Biden wanted him gone to help protect Hunter Biden’s employer.

At the time, Shokin was investigating Burisma Holdings while Biden’s son Hunter was on the board earning as much as $50,000 a month.
 

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...
On 4/13/2019 at 12:52 PM, Deranged Rhino said:

*Starting a mega-thread for all the Ukrainian related tentacles of this story. Will do a proper OP write up for it, but I'm still putting my arms around the whole story. 

 

Will be adding more, but these are relevant stories:

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/gregory-craig-former-obama-white-house-counsel-indicted-for-offering-false-statements-related-to-ukraine-work-in-latest-mueller-fallout/2019/04/11/f9aa260e-5c53-11e9-a00e-050dc7b82693_story.html


Since we almost never hear anything about Gregory Craig in the news, I thought I publish some links about what is going on leading up to his trial. Very little is out there on any of the search engines. Kinda... odd. A sign of things to come? 
 

Judge blocks evidence that Greg Craig sought job for Manafort daughter

A federal judge on Wednesday granted a defense motion to keep jurors from hearing about former White House Counsel Greg Craig’s efforts to get a job for Paul Manafort’s daughter at Craig’s law firm while Craig was engaged in a multimillion-dollar assignment for the government of Ukraine.
 

Craig is set to go on trial in Washington next month on two felony charges alleging that he made false and misleading statements to the Justice Department in connection with the project to prepare a report for public release on a controversial prosecution in Ukraine that many critics regarded as politically motivated.
 

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What's been going on << paid subscription 

Greg Craig, Feds Say Ukraine Trial Should Last 2½ Weeks (mid August trial date, I could not find the start date)
Former Skadden partner Gregory Craig and federal prosecutors have released a joint pretrial statement, voir dire, and jury instructions, agreeing Monday that a looming trial to determine whether Craig lied to U.S. Department of Justice officials about 

Jury Instructions

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Looks like Politico is covering...
 

Trial of former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig delayed over jury issue
 

The trial of former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig on a criminal false-statement charge hit a last-minute snag Tuesday after prosecutors and the defense raised belated concerns about the jury selection process.
 

Opening statements in the case — which was investigated by former special counsel Robert Mueller’s office — were expected Tuesday morning, but U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson shocked many in the courtroom by announcing that limits she placed on public access to jury selection Monday may have violated Craig’s constitutional right to a public trial.

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Longtime lobbyist and former congressman Vin Weber resigns from consulting firm
 

Vin Weber, the former Minnesota congressman who has provided guidance to Republican presidential candidates and corporate executives, resigned his position Friday as a partner in a prominent consulting firm amid ongoing questions about lobbying work he did for Ukrainian interests.
 

In a letter to the chief executive of Mercury LLC, where he has worked since 2011, Weber wrote that continued attention on his Ukrainian work “has become a distraction for me and for the important work that Mercury is doing.” Weber said he would now “focus my time and energy on protecting my reputation.”
 

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Separately, prosecutors in the Southern District of New York have been examining Weber and Podesta’s lobbying work.
 

The Podesta Group and Mercury had reported in lobbying disclosures that they represented the European Center for a Modern Ukraine, a Brussels-based nonprofit organization that sought to help Ukraine improve its image in the West from 2012 to 2014.
 

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1 hour ago, Deranged Rhino said:

Interesting strategy here ... kicking over the hornets nest in Ukraine will sully more on the left than Trump, including Joe Biden. But I presume the calculus at play here is, "if we do it first, then we can claim whatever Trump/Barr brings up is retaliatory!" 

 

 

Won't work.

 

How stupid is it that they completely forgot the whole "Trump is doing Putin's bidding threatening Ukraine?"  This would have been the perfect time to stoke the Russia fires.

 

You know what the biggest part of selling a credible conspiracy theory is?  A coherent narrative.  Democrats don't have one.  They just have random spasms of outrage.  They think they're writing Goodfellas, when they're actually writing Aquaman.

 

 

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23 minutes ago, DC Tom said:

 

How stupid is it that they completely forgot the whole "Trump is doing Putin's bidding threatening Ukraine?"  This would have been the perfect time to stoke the Russia fires.

 

You know what the biggest part of selling a credible conspiracy theory is?  A coherent narrative.  Democrats don't have one.  They just have random spasms of outrage.  They think they're writing Goodfellas, when they're actually writing Aquaman.

 

 

  I thought is was more like F Troop.

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:lol: Because of course it is. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/whistleblower-complaint-about-president-trump-involves-ukraine-according-to-two-people-familiar-with-the-matter/2019/09/19/07e33f0a-daf6-11e9-bfb1-849887369476_story.html

 

The Ukraine is in so many ways the *****-up that exposed the whole rotten cabal of corruption on both sides of the aisle. The probability that this story will blow up in Schiff's face just went up 100%. 

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JOHN SOLOMON: Democrats were first to enlist Ukraine in US elections.

Earlier this month, during a bipartisan meeting in Kiev, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) delivered a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

 

While choosing his words carefully, Murphy made clear — by his own account — that Ukraine currently enjoyed bipartisan support for its U.S. aid but that could be jeopardized if the new president acquiesced to requests by President Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to investigate past corruption allegations involving Americans, including former Vice President Joe Biden’s family.

 

Murphy boasted after the meeting that he told the new Ukrainian leader that U.S. aid was his country’s “most important asset” and it would be viewed as election-meddling and “disastrous for long-term U.S.-Ukraine relations” to bend to the wishes of Trump and Giuliani.

 

 

That’s different because shut up.

 
 
 
 
 
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Again:

 

WASHINGTON POST: Democrats’ Double Standard On Ukraine.

We don’t yet know whether President Trump delayed some military aid to Ukraine as leverage to get Ukraine’s president to reopen an investigation into Hunter Biden. But if we are concerned about U.S. officials inappropriately threatening aid to Ukraine, then there are others who have some explaining to do.

 

It got almost no attention, but in May, CNN reported that Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote a letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four investigations they said were critical to the Mueller probe. In the letter, they implied that their support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine was at stake. Describing themselves as “strong advocates for a robust and close relationship with Ukraine,” the Democratic senators declared, “We have supported [the] capacity-building process and are disappointed that some in Kyiv appear to have cast aside these [democratic] principles to avoid the ire of President Trump,” before demanding Lutsenko “reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this important investigation.”

 

So, it’s okay for Democratic senators to encourage Ukraine to investigate Trump, but it’s not okay for the president to allegedly encourage Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden?

 

 

That’s different because shut up. Plus:

 

And then there is Joe Biden. In 2016, the then-vice president threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to Ukraine if the government did not fire the country’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. According to the New York Times, “Among those who had a stake in the outcome was Hunter Biden … who at the time was on the board of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had been in the sights of the fired prosecutor general.” The Post reports that it is “unclear how seriously Shokin — who was under fire by U.S. and European officials for not taking a more aggressive posture toward corruption overall — was scrutinizing Burisma when he was forced out.” But what is clear is that Biden bragged about getting him fired, declaring last year: “I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a b—-. He got fired.”

 

This weekend, Biden told reporters, “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” That is flatly untrue. Hunter admitted in an interview with the New Yorker that his father expressed concern about the Burisma post at least once: “Dad said, ‘I hope you know what you are doing,’ and I said, ‘I do.’” Moreover, the New Yorker reports that, “In December, 2015, as Joe Biden prepared to return to Ukraine, his aides braced for renewed scrutiny of Hunter’s relationship with Burisma. Amos Hochstein, the Obama Administration’s special envoy for energy policy, raised the matter with Biden.” That same month, the New York Times published an article about how Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine undermined the vice president’s anti-corruption message, which quoted a Biden spokesman saying it had no impact.

 

So, Biden was fully aware of his son’s involvement with Burisma when he pressured Ukraine to fire the prosecutor in 2016. He should have known that his using U.S. aid as leverage to force the prosecutor’s dismissal would create, at a bare minimum, the appearance of a conflict of interest. Federal ethics regulations require “all employees to recuse themselves from participating in an official matter if their impartiality would be questioned.” Biden violated these rules. Imagine if Trump pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating a company that employed Donald Trump Jr. as a board member. No one would be giving Trump a pass.

 

Again, that’s different because shut up.

 
 
 
 
 
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