Former Vice President Joe Biden was personally paid $900,000 for lobbying activities from Burisma Holdings, according to Ukrainian MP Andriy Derkach.
Derkach publicized the documents at a press conference at the Interfax-Ukraine agency Wednesday as he said the records, “describe the mechanism of getting money by Biden Sr.”
“This was the transfer of Burisma Group’s funds for lobbying activities, as investigators believe, personally to Joe Biden through a lobbying company. Funds in the amount of $900,000 were transferred to the U.S.-based company Rosemont Seneca Partners, which according to open sources, in particular, the New York Times, is affiliated with Biden. The payment reference was payment for consultative services,” Derkach said.
He also publicized sums that were transferred to Burisma Group representatives, in particular Hunter Biden, a son of the former U.S. vice president.
“According to the documents, Burisma paid no less than $16.5 million to [former Polish President, who became an independent director at Burisma Holdings in 2014] Aleksander Kwasniewski, [chairman of the Burisma board of independent directors] Alan Apter, [Burisma independent director] Devon Archer and Hunter Biden [who joined the Burisma board of directors in 2014],” Derkach said.
“Using political and economic levers of influencing Ukrainian authorities and manipulating the issue of providing financial aid to Ukraine, Joe Biden actively assisted closing criminal cases into the activity of former Ukrainian Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky, who is the founder and owner of Burisma Group,” he said.
“Biden’s fifth visit to Kyiv on December 7-8, 2015 was devoted to making a decision on the resignation of [then Ukrainian Prosecutor General] Viktor Shokin over the case of Zlochevsky and Burisma. Loan guarantees worth $1 billion that the United States was to give to Ukraine was the point of pressure. Biden himself admitted exerting pressure in his speech at the Council of Foreign Relations in January 2018, calling Shokin ‘son of a bitch who was fired’,” Derkach said.
Hunter Biden co-founded Rosemont Seneca Partners in 2009 with Christopher Heinz, stepson of John Kerry, the former secretary of state, and scion of the Heinz processed food fortune, and Devon Archer, a financier and former Abercrombie & Fitch model who attended Yale with Mr Heinz.
In 2014, Rosemont Seneca was involved in an attempted $1.5bn fundraise for a new fund launched by Harvest Fund Management and Bohai Industrial Group, the Chinese asset manager, according to a Wall Street Journal report at the time. The Bank of China International Holdings was one of the biggest stakeholders in Bohai at the time.
Mr Archer first connected with Mykola Zlochevsky, co-founder of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, in 2014 when he travelled there to pitch a Rosemont-linked real estate fund that he managed. Mr Archer joined Burisma’s board in 2014. Hunter joined soon after.
If what Derkach is saying is true, then Rosemont Seneca served as a pass-through by which this Ukrainian bribery was laundered, creating “plausible deniability” for Joe Biden, who can claim that the money he got from his son’s partnership had nothing to do with the Ukraine deal. But we shall wait to see if this story is further confirmed.
James Clapper, who was Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in the Obama administrations, was on CNN yesterday and was asked, “Are you concerned that Barr or Durham’s investigation will find wrongdoing and seek to punish former intelligence officials like you?”
The message I’m getting from all this is, apparently what we were supposed to have done was to ignore the Russian interference, ignore the Russian meddling and the threat that it poses to us, and oh, by the way, blown off what the then commander in chief, President Obama, told us to do, which was to assemble all the reporting that we could that we had available to us and put it in one report that the president could pass on to the Congress and to the next administration. And while we’re at it, declassify as much as we possibly could to make it public, and that’s what we did. It’s kind of disconcerting now to be investigated for, you know having done our duty and done what we were told to do by the president.
Rush Limbaugh went off on this yesterday, because what we now know about the “Russian interference” — an illusion of “collusion” created as a pretext to spy on the Trump campaign — exposes Clapper’s investigation as part of political hit-job orchestrated by Democrats. For Clapper to twice say this was done on Obama’s orders is huge.
On Sunday’s broadcast of “This Week,” host George Stephanopoulos opened his show with a report proclaiming a second “whistleblower.”
Stephanopoulos said, “Good morning. Welcome to ‘This Week,’ a week of head-snapping developments. The first key witness testimony to Congress. the first release of text messages from administration officials confirming the pressure campaign or Ukraine outlined in the original whistleblower complaint. That public request from President Trump calling on China to investigate Joe Biden. A new request for documents from Vice President Pence. This morning more breaking news. ABC News has learned that the legal team representing the first whistle-blower is now representing a second whistleblower. Attorney Mark Zaid said he is a member of the intelligence community with firsthand information on some of the allegations at issue.”
Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who changed the rules governing “whistleblowing” to accommodate this hearsay gossip, will rue the day he did this. He said he was unaware that the “whistleblower,” reportedly a CIA functionary assigned to the White House years ago where he worked with anti-Trump Ukrainians to stop Trump and who has not worked there for two or three years, had first talked to congressional staff. He was unaware of it, perhaps because the whistleblower complaint form asks if he had previously told anyone, including congressional staff, about this and lied about that, subjecting himself to possible felony charges. Moreover, allowing in such unsubstantiated gossip by a liar who had no firsthand knowledge of the substance of the complaint will only unleash a flood of these baseless charges, tying up more government resources on nonsense.
It’s all a big psyops scheme, a partisan propaganda campaign, an orchestrated collusion between media, Democrats and “deep state” hacks.
The IC IG refused to explain to Congress last week why his office backdated to August changes it made to its whistleblower rules and forms in late September. https://t.co/yoBpnGhh8E
Each of these headlines is significant in making an important point: Democrats are trying to impeach President Trump for allegedly doing the same stuff Democrats always do. Conflicts of interest and using federal power for partisan political purposes? Suddenly Democrats say that’s wrong? As if Obama didn’t do it for eight years?
The report by Paul Sperry that the whistleblower was meeting with Ukrainian operatives to get dirt on Trump in 2016 seems almost too good to be true, so everybody’s waiting to see if it’s confirmed but OH BOY! If this proves to be true, it’s going to be HUGE! Because I’ve got a hunch that, if that’s how it works out, we will eventually find Alexandra Chalupa‘s fingerprints somewhere on this. And then the report that this whistleblower, said to be a CIA analyst, once worked for a current Democrat presidential candidate? Well, what does that tell us about staffing decisions in the our intelligence community, if they’re hiring Democrat operatives as “analysts”? And yes, of courseNancy Pelosi’s son is knee-deep in Ukraine — it’s very lucrative to be the offspring of a powerful Democrat. But if President Trump tries to clear up this corruption? Impeach him!
Judicial Watch on Wednesday released 145 pages of former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s communications which include a one-line email from Rosenstein to Robert Mueller stating “The boss and his staff do not know about our discussions.” That email came just five days before Rosenstein appointed Mueller to take over the FBI’s Russia investigation as special counsel, roiling Trump’s presidency.
The communications — which include “off the record” emails with major media outlets around the date of Mueller’s appointment — show that Rosenstein did not just dispassionately go along with the fraudulent probe in an attempt to get at the truth, but was an active participant in the deep state coup, secretly plotting with other FBI and DOJ officials against the president of the United States. . . .
On May 8, 2017, Rosenstein wrote a memo to President Trump recommending that FBI Director James Comey be fired. The next day, President Trump fired Comey. Just three days later, on May 12, Rosenstein sent an email assuring Robert Mueller that “The boss and his staff do not know about our discussions.”
In a May 16, 2017 email, sent the day before Mueller’s appointment, Rosenstein emailed former Bush administration Deputy Attorney General and current Kirkland & Ellis Partner, Mark Filip stating, “I am with Mueller. He shares my views. Duty Calls. Sometimes the moment chooses us.”
And on May 17 Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
During the same time period, between May 8 and May 17, according to then-acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, Rosenstein met with McCabe and other senior Justice Department and FBI officials to discuss wearing a wire into the oval office to spy on Trump, as well as invoking the 25th Amendment to remove the president. . . .
The documents released by Judicial Watch also show that Rosenstein had a cozy relationship with reporters from the anti-Trump news outlets 60 Minutes, New York Times and Washington Post.
Remember that the firing of Comey was the pretext for launching the Mueller “Russian collusion” witch-hunt. What we now see is that Rosenstein, who wrote the memo supporting Comey’s firing, was the entire time working with anti-Trump forces — the whole thing was a set-up, a frame job, from the start. The “deep state” is real, my friends.
As I explained there, the New York Times reported in August 2016 how Ukraine’s “newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau” took an interest in Donald Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort — what a coincidence! — and guess what they found? A handwritten ledger allegedly showing cash payments to Manafort. Except this was ridiculous, for several reasons, and the ledger was obviously a forgery:
Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Konstantin Kilimnik, a regular informer for the State Department, told the U.S. government almost immediately after The New York Times wrote about the ledger in August 2016 that the document probably was fake.
Manafort “could not have possibly taken large amounts of cash across three borders. It was always a different arrangement — payments were in wire transfers to his companies, which is not a violation,” Kilimnik wrote in an email to a senior U.S. official on Aug. 22, 2016.
He added: “I have some questions about this black cash stuff, because those published records do not make sense. The timeframe doesn’t match anything related to payments made to Manafort. …It does not match my records. All fees Manafort got were wires, not cash.”
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team and the FBI were given copies of Kilimnik’s warning, according to three sources familiar with the documents.
It’s illegal to submit, as part of an official record, evidence to a judge — for example, in seeking a warrant against Paul Manafort– which the person submitting knows to be fraudulent, or which may be fraudulent.
It can result in an actual criminal charge being filed.
So, what did Mueller and Weismann do?
They could not submit the “black cash ledger” as evidence in seeking probable cause warrants against Manafort — that could expose their own corrupt asses to federal charges.
But they were determined to jam it in there anyway. So they submitted media reports as evidence supporting the warrant, based on leaks about the likely fraudulent ledger, as part of their application. They effectively submitted the contents of the “ledger,” without submitting the ledger itself — in order to avoid having to tell the judge, straight up, that they’d been warned by several informed sources that the thing was a forgery and a sham.
So, by leaking this “Ukraine ledger” story to the New York Times, the FBI in effect manufactured “evidence” to use to get a warrant to conduct surveillance on Manafort, a pattern of misconduct very similar to what the FBI did with the infamous “Steele dossier.”
Former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy noted at National Review [Sept. 26] that then-President Barack Obama’s administration asked Ukraine to investigate Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, in 2016. . . .
McCarthy notes that “the Obama administration’s law-enforcement agencies pressured their Ukrainian counterparts to revive a dormant corruption investigation of Paul Manafort” in the middle of the 2016 presidential election.
The results were soon clear: leaks about Manafort’s activities in Ukraine began to appear in the U.S. media, spun in the worst possible light. He was replaced at the Trump campaign and became a target in the phony “collusion” narrative.
McCarthy notes the glaring double standard: “When the Obama administration leans on Ukraine for help in an investigation of political opponents, the Democrats and the media say, ‘But look how corrupt Paul Manafort was!’ When the Trump administration leans on Ukraine for help in an investigation of political opponents, the Democrats and the media say, ‘Abuse of power — impeach him!’”
The whole Russian “collusion” thing was a set-up — a frame job — and Attorney General William Barr has ordered an investigation to find out what happened in 2016, which is why Democrats panicked and started this not-really-an-impeachment over the Ukraine “whistleblower.”
Republican congressional leaders accused Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Democrats of rigging the impeachment scheme after news broke that Schiff was in contact with the whistleblower before the complaint against President Donald Trump was filed.
The report from the New York Times claimed that Schiff received an “early account by the future whistleblower” days before the person filed the complaint accusing Trump of presidential misconduct.
The report seemed to be confirmed by a Schiff spokesman, who said: “Like other whistle-blowers have done before and since under Republican and Democratic-controlled committees, the whistle-blower contacted the committee for guidance on how to report possible wrongdoing within the jurisdiction of the intelligence community.”
Schiff said during a Sept. 17 interview on MSNBC that he did not have “direct contact” with the person who filed the complaint.
Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the minority whip, was among those reacting to the news, telling a Fox News reporter that he was “deeply concerned” that the whistleblower went to Schiff’s staff instead of waiting for the CIA whistleblower process to work through its conclusion. The person, who has not been identified publicly, reportedly filed the complaint initially with the CIA.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) shared the report and wrote in a statement: “Chairman Adam Schiff just got caught orchestrating with the whistleblower before the complaint was ever filed. Democrats have rigged this process from the start.”
Keep in mind, nobody was talking about the Biden-Ukraine thing before Schiff tried to turn this “whistleblower” into an impeachment. What Schiff never expected was that Trump would react by declassifying the transcript of his phone call and releasing it so everybody could see for themselves what he’d said to the Ukrainian president. And once he did that, most people looked at the transcript and said, “What scandal?”
If it was not wrong to ask Ukraine to investigate Paul Manafort, why is it wrong to ask Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden? Oops. And once people start asking those questions, who knows what they’ll become curious about next?
Two top Republican senators on Monday asked the Justice Department to investigate claims that Democrats worked with Ukrainian officials to dig up dirt on President Trump ahead of the 2016 election.
GOP Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Charles E. Grassley of Iowa sent a letter to Attorney General William P. Barr asking for more information about whether Ukrainian officials sought to undermine Mr. Trump’s campaign. They also want to know more about 2020 Democratic presidential front-runner, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s interactions with Ukrainian officials.
“Ukrainian efforts abetted by a U.S. political party to interfere in the 2016 election should not be ignored,” the senators wrote. “Such allegations of corruption deserve due scrutiny, and the American people have a right to know when foreign forces attempted to undermine our Democrat processes.”
The letter comes just days after the Justice Department revealed U.S. Attorney John Durham is investigating whether Ukraine was involved in any efforts to meddle in the 2016 election.
At the center of this plan was Alexandra Chalupa, described by reports as a Ukrainian-American operative “who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee” and who reportedly met with Ukrainian officials during the presidential election for the express purpose of exposing alleged ties between then-candidate Donald Trump, Paul Manafort, and Russia. Politico also reported on a Financial Times story that quoted a Ukrainian legislator, Serhiy Leschenko, as saying that Trump’s candidacy caused “Kiev’s wider political leadership to do something they would never have attempted before: intervene, however indirectly, in a U.S. election.”
The July 20, 2017 letter further noted that the Democratic National Committee encouraged Chalupa to work with Ukrainian embassy staff to “arrange an interview in which Poroshenko [the president of Ukraine] might discuss Manafort’s ties to Yanukovych.” In March 2016, Chalupa met with Valeriy Chaly, Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., and Oksana Shulyar, a top aid to the Ukrainian ambassador, to share her alleged concerns about Manafort. Reports state that the purpose of that initial meeting was to “organize a June reception at the embassy to promote Ukraine.” However, another Ukrainian embassy official, Andrii Telizhenko, told Politico that Shulyar instructed him to assist Chalupa with research to connect Trump, Manafort, and the Russians. He reportedly said, “[t]hey were coordinating an investigation with the Hillary team on Paul Manafort with Alexandra Chalupa” and that “Oksana [Shulyar] was keeping it all quiet…the embassy worked very closely with” Chalupa. In a May 2019 article, Telizhenko was quoted as saying,
[Chalupa] said the DNC wanted to collect evidence that Trump, his organization and Manafort were Russian assets, working to hurt the U.S. and working with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin against the U.S. interests. She indicated if we could find the evidence they would introduce it in Congress in September and try to build a case that Trump should be removed from the ballot, from the election.
Reportedly, Telizhenko was instructed by the Ukrainian government to meet with an American journalist about Paul Manafort’s ties to Ukraine. In addition, in May 2016, Chalupa emailed a DNC official stating that she met with 68 Ukrainian investigative journalists about Manafort and that there would be “[a] lot more coming down the pipe.”
Alexandra Chalupa was a DNC staffer who left that job in summer 2016 to focus full-time on the Trump/Russia angle. Her association with Kimberlin was reported in 2017. Yet until Lee started poking around, no one seems to have caught the significance of her Facebook post, in which she asserted that “The Protectors” (apparently an online front for Kimberlin’s tax-exempt Justice Through Music Project, and likely involving Neal Rauhauser) had “teamed up” with federal agencies to encourage investigation of the phony Russian “collusion” narrative. Such a connection, if proven, would almost certainly be of interest to current DOJ officials trying to get to the bottom of so-called “Deep State” efforts by federal employees to sabotage the Trump administration.
Glenn Reynolds: “We need to get to the bottom of this — and the fear that we will is why the Democrats and their press enablers are getting so crazy.” After her name was mentioned by Rep. Devin Nunes last week, Alexandra Chalupa had a meltdown on Twitter. Stay tuned . . .
The Central Intelligence Agency on Monday evening slammed what it called CNN’s “misguided” and “simply false” reporting, after the cable channel’s chief national security correspondent authored a hole-filled piece claiming that the CIA had pulled a high-level spy out of Russia because President Trump had “repeatedly mishandled classified intelligence and could contribute to exposing the covert source as a spy.”
The extraordinary CIA rebuke came as The New York Times published a bombshell piece late in the evening, which largely contradicted CNN’s reporting. According to the Times, CIA officials “made the arduous decision in late 2016 to offer to extract the source from Russia” — weeks before Trump even took office. Concerns about media reporting on Russian election interference drove the decision, according to the Times, which described the source as “the American government’s best insight into the thinking of and orders” from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Former intelligence officials said there was no public evidence that Mr. Trump directly endangered the source, and other current American officials insisted that media scrutiny of the agency’s sources alone was the impetus for the extraction,” the Times wrote.
In other words, what really endangered the source was the media asking questions about where the CIA was getting its Russia information, and let us ask, why was the media asking those questions? Could it be because Obama administration officials, including CIA Director John Brennan, were feeding the media the “Russian collusion” narrative, which naturally led reporters to try confirming the leaks from Brennan & Co.?
