Here they go again. Facts be damned, the progressive Left is determined to overturn the 2016 election. They hate Donald Trump, and they’re going to keep flinging every phony scandal they can concoct at him, hoping that the public will be gullible enough to fall for one of them.
After years of dogged effort, the “Russian collusion” scam just didn’t pan out, so now they’ve moved to Ukraine. Same neighborhood. The fact is, the Democrat’s themselves are so plugged into the corrupt elements in both countries they no doubt figure they can count on their network of connections to provide cover and corroboration for these most recent baseless allegations.
We already know Joe Biden pulled twisted strings get his unqualified son a job with natural gas firm Burisma Holdings (target of a 2015-16 wide-ranging corruption probe by the Ukraine government. Energy companies in Ukraine are notoriously corrupt.) But then there’s this under-reported story, evidence that the devious scheming goes much deeper ~ 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.
So the Democrats get to issue veiled threats to foreign leaders, but Trump’s request for cooperation from the same people is an impeachable offense?
John Solomon at The Hill has been investigating Ukrainian intrigues for the past year ~
The Murphy anecdote is a powerful reminder that, since at least 2016, Democrats repeatedly have exerted pressure on Ukraine, a key U.S. ally for buffering Russia, to meddle in U.S. politics and elections.
As I have reported, the pressure began at least as early as January 2016, when the Obama White House unexpectedly invited Ukraine’s top prosecutors to Washington to discuss fighting corruption in the country.
The meeting, promised as training, turned out to be more of a pretext for the Obama administration to pressure Ukraine’s prosecutors to drop an investigation into the Burisma Holdings gas company that employed Hunter Biden and to look for new evidence in a then-dormant criminal case against eventual Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, a GOP lobbyist.
U.S. officials “kept talking about how important it was that all of our anti-corruption efforts be united,” said Andrii Telizhenko, the former political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington who organized and attended the meetings.
Nazar Kholodnytsky, Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, told me that, soon after he returned from the Washington meeting, he saw evidence in Ukraine of political meddling in the U.S. election. That’s when two top Ukrainian officials released secret evidence to the American media, smearing Manafort.
The release of the evidence forced Manafort to step down as Trump’s top campaign adviser. A Ukrainian court concluded last December that the release of the evidence amounted to an unlawful intervention in the U.S. election by Kiev’s government, although that ruling has since been overturned on a technicality.
Shortly after the Ukrainian prosecutors returned from their Washington meeting, a new round of Democratic pressure was exerted on Ukraine — this time via its embassy in Washington.
Valeriy Chaly, the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States at the time, confirmed to me in a statement issued by his office that, in March 2016, a contractor for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) pressed his embassy to try to find any Russian dirt on Trump and Manafort that might reside in Ukraine’s intelligence files.
The DNC contractor also asked Chaly’s team to try to persuade Ukraine’s president at the time, Petro Poroshenko, to make a statement disparaging Manafort when the Ukrainian leader visited the United States during the 2016 election.
Chaly said his embassy rebuffed both requests because it recognized they were improper efforts to get a foreign government to try to influence the election against Trump and for Hillary Clinton.
There’s more ~
Democrats continued to tap Ukraine for Trump dirt throughout the 2016 election, my reporting shows.
Nellie Ohr, the wife of senior U.S. Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, worked in 2016 as a contractor for Fusion GPS, the same Hillary Clinton–funded opposition research firm that hired Christopher Steele, the British spy who wrote the now-debunked dossier linking Trump to Russia collusion.
Nellie Ohr testified to Congress that some of the dirt she found on Trump during her 2016 election opposition research came from a Ukrainian parliament member. She also said that she eventually took the information to the FBI through her husband — another way Ukraine got inserted into the 2016 election.
Politics. Pressure. Opposition research. All were part of the Democrats’ playbook on Ukraine long before Trump ever called Zelensky this summer. And as Sen. Murphy’s foray earlier this month shows, it hasn’t stopped.
Yes, this is how things work in Leftist land. If you want America to turn into a Banana Republic, keep voting for the party of corrupt-o-crats. If not, stick with the guy who’s trying to drain the swamp.
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Related:
Crooked Joe and his Ukraine hustle
Complaint From So-Called ‘Whistleblower’ Is Riddled With Gossip, Blatant Falsehoods
Andrew McCarthy: Triangulating Manafort — Obama, Clinton and Ukraine ~ It all makes maddening sense when you connect the dots.
