Russians running yearslong Trolling operation to project their blame onto Ukraine.
- Thread starter hanimmal
- Start date
UncleBuck
Well-Known Member
Would you like it better if he just posted racist drivel like you do
DIY-HP-LED
Well-Known Member
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
It is hilarious watching Lindsay Graham trying to say to not trust anything coming out of Ukraine (because it is Russian propaganda) on one side of his mouth, while pushing the Russian generated conspiracy theory on Biden to help Trump run against anyone but him out of the other.
He has lost every shred of credibility, it is just sad watching Trump convert these cult members.
He has lost every shred of credibility, it is just sad watching Trump convert these cult members.
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DIY-HP-LED
Well-Known Member
Should Facebook and Twitter Stop Trump's Lies? with Robert Reich
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich explains why Facebook and Twitter need to take responsibility for the lies being spread on their platforms.
Watch More: Why We Need to Break Up Big Tech
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich explains why Facebook and Twitter need to take responsibility for the lies being spread on their platforms.
Watch More: Why We Need to Break Up Big Tech
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
It looks like the Republicans are going to help propagate the known Russian troll on Biden from 2014. It must suck to have to stick to their trolls when they know they are exposed and shamelessly spewing outed lies for Dear Leader's re-election chances.
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/07/21/democrats-cite-ron-johnson-probe-demand-fbi-briefing/5477849002/
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/07/21/democrats-cite-ron-johnson-probe-demand-fbi-briefing/5477849002/
DIY-HP-LED
Well-Known Member
Joe sums it up for public digestion
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Biden Campaign On Offensive Against Senator Ron Johnson’s Burisma Probe | Morning Joe | MSNBC
didn't we know this?
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
I did because I posted this last year. But the Republicans keep on trying to get it to stick so I figured it is worth bumping this with the updated story.
DIY-HP-LED
Well-Known Member
I'm a liberal, though not an American, I'm also a constitutionalist, The US constitution and bill of rights and it's subsequent amendments are quintessential liberal documents written by liberals, some of them even owned slaves and most knew it was morally wrong too, an imperfect world inhabited by imperfect people, but a process was underway that was driven by compassion and empathy. However it is a bottom up demand for change and a top down implementation process of that change, as far as practical or possible. A detailed look at history will reveal much and even an overview can help. Here is an overview of the process of getting rid of slavery in the Empire, which was large and very multicultural, administered by very few layers of bureaucracy. The liberal ideals of the times were reflected in the American and French revolutions, a fate the British wished to avoid an thus change evolved driven from the bottom up, administered from the top down. Slave owners were compensated and slaves were not, many were screwed over by apprenticeships, see how older black protesters were dealt with by the British in the early 19th century and contrast it with Portland.
en.wikipedia.org
"Protests against apprenticeships[edit]
On 1 August 1834, an unarmed group of mainly elderly people being addressed by the governor at Government House in Port of Spain, Trinidad, about the new laws, began chanting: "Pas de six ans. Point de six ans" ("Not six years. No six years"), drowning out the voice of the governor. Peaceful protests continued until a resolution to abolish apprenticeship was passed and de facto freedom was achieved. Full emancipation for all was legally granted ahead of schedule on 1 August 1838.[33]"
Slavery Abolition Act 1833 - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
"Protests against apprenticeships[edit]
On 1 August 1834, an unarmed group of mainly elderly people being addressed by the governor at Government House in Port of Spain, Trinidad, about the new laws, began chanting: "Pas de six ans. Point de six ans" ("Not six years. No six years"), drowning out the voice of the governor. Peaceful protests continued until a resolution to abolish apprenticeship was passed and de facto freedom was achieved. Full emancipation for all was legally granted ahead of schedule on 1 August 1838.[33]"
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/23/gops-own-star-witness-just-blew-up-trumps-huntergazi-smear/
President Trump has spent over two years trying to “prove” that Joe Biden’s activities in Ukraine were corrupt. He and lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani schemed over this for many months, with Trump ultimately trying to strong-arm the Ukrainian president into announcing an investigation into those activities, which got Trump impeached even as the smears they manufactured crashed and burned.
Now Trump has been counting on Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) to validate these narratives, via an inquiry conducted by the Homeland Security committee, which Johnson chairs. The goal was to use the official sheen of a Senate probe — one also conducted with the Finance Committee — to manufacture the impression of wrongdoing on Biden’s part.
But as befits this cast of bumblers and incompetents, the star witness in the GOP’s own investigation has actually further undermined those smears.
Johnson has now released his long-awaited (by Trump, anyway) report on his investigation. One of its big revelations is supposed to be that George Kent, a top State Department official, testified that he “raised concerns” inside the Obama administration about appearances of conflicts of interest surrounding the business activities of the then-vice president’s son Hunter.
But, while that itself is true, there’s a big problem here: Kent also gave the committee testimony that completely undermines the larger narrative that Trump and Republicans have tried to spin into political gold for over a year.
The story they try to tell
The basic story they have long tried to tell goes like this. As vice president, Biden sought the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor to protect Burisma, an energy company that was paying Hunter Biden a lucrative salary to sit on its board, from investigation. Joe Biden also conditioned foreign aid on that prosecutor’s ouster.
All this is supposed to show that Biden corrupted Obama administration foreign policy on his son’s behalf.
But this “Hunterghazi” tale has been widely debunked. In reality, Burisma was not even being investigated at the time, and the vice president was working to oust that Ukrainian prosecutor because the prosecutor himself was corrupt.
That was the actual Obama administration policy, and this goal was backed by international institutions precisely because they had a stake in a corruption-free Ukraine. GOP senators were briefed by Obama officials about this policy at the time, including about the conditioning of foreign aid, and had no objections to it.
Kent himself — that would be the Republicans’ own star witness — has now confirmed much of this, in testimony to the committee as part of the GOP’s own investigation.
In that testimony, as the Democratic response to the GOP report details, Kent knocked down every key pillar of the GOP story line:
Appearances versus realities
The Johnson report purports to use Kent’s concerns about appearances of conflict of interest to create the impression of corruption on Joe Biden’s part. It notes that in the last years of the Obama administration, Kent raised concerns to officials in Biden’s office about the “perception” of a conflict of interest, which he called “awkward.”
The GOP report notes that Kent testified about this before the committee. But as the GOP report itself shows, in that testimony Kent worried that critics would use Hunter Biden’s involvement to question the true motives behind administration policy, not that the motives themselves were problematic.
To be fair, the part of the story concerning appearances is problematic. Hunter Biden should not have taken the Burisma money. It did create perceptions of a conflict. State Department officials were in fact preoccupied with these appearances.
And such perceptions themselves are bad. They undermine public faith in the integrity of government, even if there are no genuine underlying conflicts — that is, no actual cases of public officials using the government for private gain — as in this case there aren’t.
It’s also fair to question the judgment of the vice president in allowing this to happen, though it’s unclear what control he might have exercised over his son, who had other personal problems that reportedly anguished his father.
But the bottom line here is that the central holy grail that Trump and Republicans have been pursuing just isn’t there.
Comically, the GOP report deals with this by slipping in the following line:
Indeed, the line itself constitutes a striking admission: After pouring extraordinary amounts of effort into making this seem like a scandal, they could not produce evidence of their central claim.
The ultimate irony here is that this effort to prove that Joe Biden abused official resources for personal gain is itself an example of exactly this — but on the part of Trump and his co-conspirators.
Just as Trump subverted U.S. foreign policy to his personal gain by attempting to bulldoze a foreign ally under duress into helping validate his campaign messaging, the GOP report is yet another attempt to manipulate a government product for Trump’s benefit. It may be dressed up with vague insinuations and the imprimatur of an oversight committee, but it’s just one more crass, shameless misuse of official resources.
President Trump has spent over two years trying to “prove” that Joe Biden’s activities in Ukraine were corrupt. He and lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani schemed over this for many months, with Trump ultimately trying to strong-arm the Ukrainian president into announcing an investigation into those activities, which got Trump impeached even as the smears they manufactured crashed and burned.
Now Trump has been counting on Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) to validate these narratives, via an inquiry conducted by the Homeland Security committee, which Johnson chairs. The goal was to use the official sheen of a Senate probe — one also conducted with the Finance Committee — to manufacture the impression of wrongdoing on Biden’s part.
But as befits this cast of bumblers and incompetents, the star witness in the GOP’s own investigation has actually further undermined those smears.
Johnson has now released his long-awaited (by Trump, anyway) report on his investigation. One of its big revelations is supposed to be that George Kent, a top State Department official, testified that he “raised concerns” inside the Obama administration about appearances of conflicts of interest surrounding the business activities of the then-vice president’s son Hunter.
But, while that itself is true, there’s a big problem here: Kent also gave the committee testimony that completely undermines the larger narrative that Trump and Republicans have tried to spin into political gold for over a year.
The story they try to tell
The basic story they have long tried to tell goes like this. As vice president, Biden sought the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor to protect Burisma, an energy company that was paying Hunter Biden a lucrative salary to sit on its board, from investigation. Joe Biden also conditioned foreign aid on that prosecutor’s ouster.
All this is supposed to show that Biden corrupted Obama administration foreign policy on his son’s behalf.
But this “Hunterghazi” tale has been widely debunked. In reality, Burisma was not even being investigated at the time, and the vice president was working to oust that Ukrainian prosecutor because the prosecutor himself was corrupt.
That was the actual Obama administration policy, and this goal was backed by international institutions precisely because they had a stake in a corruption-free Ukraine. GOP senators were briefed by Obama officials about this policy at the time, including about the conditioning of foreign aid, and had no objections to it.
Kent himself — that would be the Republicans’ own star witness — has now confirmed much of this, in testimony to the committee as part of the GOP’s own investigation.
In that testimony, as the Democratic response to the GOP report details, Kent knocked down every key pillar of the GOP story line:
- Kent debunked the idea that Burisma was protected from investigation, stating that “I did not witness any effort by any U.S. official to shield Burisma from scrutiny.”
- Kent debunked the idea that the U.S. effort to oust the Ukrainian prosecutor was about stopping an investigation into Burisma, flatly stating that it was not.
- Kent confirmed that the quest for that ouster was about purging Ukraine of corruption, noting that “Ukrainian society” wanted the prosecutor gone because he was “protecting corrupt friends.”
- Kent confirmed that the conditioning of aid as leverage had nothing to do with Hunter Biden and that it originated with those involved in formulating “Ukraine policy.”
Appearances versus realities
The Johnson report purports to use Kent’s concerns about appearances of conflict of interest to create the impression of corruption on Joe Biden’s part. It notes that in the last years of the Obama administration, Kent raised concerns to officials in Biden’s office about the “perception” of a conflict of interest, which he called “awkward.”
The GOP report notes that Kent testified about this before the committee. But as the GOP report itself shows, in that testimony Kent worried that critics would use Hunter Biden’s involvement to question the true motives behind administration policy, not that the motives themselves were problematic.
To be fair, the part of the story concerning appearances is problematic. Hunter Biden should not have taken the Burisma money. It did create perceptions of a conflict. State Department officials were in fact preoccupied with these appearances.
And such perceptions themselves are bad. They undermine public faith in the integrity of government, even if there are no genuine underlying conflicts — that is, no actual cases of public officials using the government for private gain — as in this case there aren’t.
It’s also fair to question the judgment of the vice president in allowing this to happen, though it’s unclear what control he might have exercised over his son, who had other personal problems that reportedly anguished his father.
But the bottom line here is that the central holy grail that Trump and Republicans have been pursuing just isn’t there.
Comically, the GOP report deals with this by slipping in the following line:
Not clear? Actually it is clear: Hunter Biden’s role didn’t affect U.S. policy toward Ukraine.
Indeed, the line itself constitutes a striking admission: After pouring extraordinary amounts of effort into making this seem like a scandal, they could not produce evidence of their central claim.
The ultimate irony here is that this effort to prove that Joe Biden abused official resources for personal gain is itself an example of exactly this — but on the part of Trump and his co-conspirators.
Just as Trump subverted U.S. foreign policy to his personal gain by attempting to bulldoze a foreign ally under duress into helping validate his campaign messaging, the GOP report is yet another attempt to manipulate a government product for Trump’s benefit. It may be dressed up with vague insinuations and the imprimatur of an oversight committee, but it’s just one more crass, shameless misuse of official resources.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/14/hunter-bidens-alleged-laptop-an-explainer/
What’s new?
The key thrust of the article is that an April 17, 2015, email suggests Hunter Biden arranged for a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm to meet with the then-vice president when he was in charge of U.S. policy toward Ukraine. “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” reads the email, supposedly written by Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma.
Why would that be important?
Hunter Biden in 2014 became a board member of Burisma, which news reports at the time suggested was a conflict of interest, given his father’s position. The former vice president has said he did not discuss Burisma with his son. The email is not specific about the nature of the meeting and is written in a way that it could be talking about a possible future meeting. Nevertheless, Republicans have long sought to tie Joe Biden to his son’s business interests, even launching a Senate investigation, so any indication that the vice president helped his son could be politically damaging. The New York Post claimed it was a “smoking-gun email.”
How do we know the email is authentic?
We do not. The New York Post published PDF printouts of several emails allegedly taken from the laptop, but for the “smoking-gun” email, it shows only a photo made the day before the story was posted, according to Thomas Rid, the author of “Active Measures,” a book on disinformation. “There is no header information, no metadata.” The Washington Post has not been able to independently verify or authenticate these emails, as requests to make the laptop hard drive available for inspection have not been granted. The New York Post said it obtained the material from former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a personal lawyer to President Trump.
There also is no indication that Hunter Biden replied to the email.
Moreover, another alleged email published by the New York Post contradicts the notion that Hunter Biden could influence his father.
“What he will do and say is out of our hands,” Hunter Biden wrote in an email that the New York Post said was sent April 13, 2014.
What does the Biden campaign say?
Andrew Bates, a campaign spokesman for Joe Biden, said a review of Biden’s schedules from 2015 finds no record of any such meeting. Officials who worked for Biden at the time told The Fact Checker that no such meeting took place.
“I was with the vice president in all of his meetings on Ukraine,” said Michael Carpenter, Biden’s foreign policy adviser in 2015. “He never met with this guy. In fact, I had never heard of this guy until the New York Post story broke.”
The New York Post article also cites an email from Pozharskyi to Hunter Biden saying he was “going to share this information with the US embassy here in Kyiv, as well as the office of Mr Amos Hochstein in the States.”
“I know for a fact he never contacted me or my office,” said Hochstein, who at the time worked closely with Biden as special envoy and coordinator for international energy affairs. “I provided every record to the Senate investigation, and no mention of this guy was ever made, no emails, no correspondence. I know almost every player in the energy sector in Ukraine. I never met this guy.”
Carpenter said that the vice president wouldn’t have had a meeting with a company executive. “He was the vice president of the United States,” he said. “He met with prime ministers.”
This does not exclude the possibility that Biden briefly shook hands and chatted with Pozharskyi during a public event. Hunter Biden, for instance, helped arrange for a potential business partner, Jonathan Li, to shake hands with his father in the lobby of a Beijing hotel when the vice president made an official trip to China.
Pozharskyi, in the April 17 email, mentions that he spoke to Hunter “yesterday evening.” At the request of The Fact Checker, a Biden aide reviewed Biden’s schedule for April 16, 2015. The vice president gave remarks at the White House Greek Independence Day Reception, between 5 and 6 p.m., and then spoke to the Congressional Fire Services Institute Gala, from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., the aide said.
What does Hunter Biden say?
Asked to verify whether the email is genuine, Hunter Biden’s attorney George Mesires told The Fact Checker: “We have no idea where this came from, and certainly cannot credit anything that Rudy Giuliani provided to the NY Post, but what I do know for certain is that this purported meeting never happened.”
Are there errors in the New York Post report?
A separate article, about another email, claims that a public relations company that worked for Burisma was allowed to take part in a conference call about an upcoming visit by Joe Biden to Ukraine. But there was nothing secret about this call, and the transcript was released publiclyand posted on the White House website.
More broadly, the New York Post repeats the falsehood, advanced by Trump, that the “elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”
We have fact-checked this repeatedly. During President Barack Obama’s second term, Biden was in charge of the Ukraine portfolio, keeping in close touch with the country’s president, Petro Poroshenko. Biden’s brief was to sweet-talk and jawbone Poroshenko into making reforms that Ukraine’s Western benefactors wanted to see as part of Ukraine’s escape from Russia’s orbit. But the Americans saw an obstacle to reform in Viktor Shokin, the top Ukrainian prosecutor, whom the United States viewed as ineffective and beholden to Poroshenko and Ukraine’s corrupt oligarchs. In particular, Shokin had failed to pursue an investigation of the founder of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky.
The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv proposed that Biden, during his 2015 visit there, use a pending delivery of $1 billion of loan guarantees as leverage to force reform. Biden addressed the Ukrainian parliament, decrying the “cancer of corruption” in the country and criticizing the prosecutor’s office. During that visit, Biden privately told Poroshenko the loan guarantees would be withheld unless Shokin was replaced.
After repeated calls and meetings between the two men over several months, Shokin was removed and the loan guarantees were provided.
Pavlo Klimkin, Ukrainian foreign minister from 2014 until Aug. 29, 2019, said that the firing of Shokin was universally urged by Ukraine’s benefactors. “The demand came not just from the U.S., and not just from Biden,” he said. “I heard it in every meeting with the international financial institutions, especially the IMF and World Bank. It was not just Biden. Clearly.”
Colin H. Kahl, Biden’s national security adviser at the time, told The Fact Checker that “our policy on corruption and Shokin in Ukraine kept getting tougher across 2015, so the whole theory of the case [in the New York Post] makes no sense.”
Why is this coming out now?
Good question. The FBI supposedly obtained the hard drive earlier this year from John MacIsaac, who said he owns the Wilmington Mac Shop.
MacIsaac told reporters on Wednesday that a MacBook laptop was dropped off at his shop in Wilmington, Del., in April 2019. MacIsaac, who said he was legally blind, said that he was almost certain that it was Hunter Biden who dropped off the computer. He said that he made several attempts to get in touch with Hunter Biden but the equipment was still in his hands 90 days after it had been left there, and he said that he became curious about what he’d seen.
He made a copy of the hard drive and gave it to Giuliani. This past weekend, Giuliani passed a copy to the New York Post. But presumably the laptop would have been of use to the year-long Senate investigation, which found no wrongdoing by Biden.
As Giuliani has sought to locate information about Hunter Biden and Ukraine, he has regularly interacted with a Ukrainian lawmaker who was recently sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department as being an “active Russian agent for over a decade” and was engaged in an influence operation to affect the 2020 election. Those interactions have given rise to fears that the emails could be part of a broader disinformation campaign.
What’s new?
The key thrust of the article is that an April 17, 2015, email suggests Hunter Biden arranged for a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm to meet with the then-vice president when he was in charge of U.S. policy toward Ukraine. “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” reads the email, supposedly written by Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma.
Why would that be important?
Hunter Biden in 2014 became a board member of Burisma, which news reports at the time suggested was a conflict of interest, given his father’s position. The former vice president has said he did not discuss Burisma with his son. The email is not specific about the nature of the meeting and is written in a way that it could be talking about a possible future meeting. Nevertheless, Republicans have long sought to tie Joe Biden to his son’s business interests, even launching a Senate investigation, so any indication that the vice president helped his son could be politically damaging. The New York Post claimed it was a “smoking-gun email.”
How do we know the email is authentic?
We do not. The New York Post published PDF printouts of several emails allegedly taken from the laptop, but for the “smoking-gun” email, it shows only a photo made the day before the story was posted, according to Thomas Rid, the author of “Active Measures,” a book on disinformation. “There is no header information, no metadata.” The Washington Post has not been able to independently verify or authenticate these emails, as requests to make the laptop hard drive available for inspection have not been granted. The New York Post said it obtained the material from former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a personal lawyer to President Trump.
There also is no indication that Hunter Biden replied to the email.
Moreover, another alleged email published by the New York Post contradicts the notion that Hunter Biden could influence his father.
“What he will do and say is out of our hands,” Hunter Biden wrote in an email that the New York Post said was sent April 13, 2014.
What does the Biden campaign say?
Andrew Bates, a campaign spokesman for Joe Biden, said a review of Biden’s schedules from 2015 finds no record of any such meeting. Officials who worked for Biden at the time told The Fact Checker that no such meeting took place.
“I was with the vice president in all of his meetings on Ukraine,” said Michael Carpenter, Biden’s foreign policy adviser in 2015. “He never met with this guy. In fact, I had never heard of this guy until the New York Post story broke.”
The New York Post article also cites an email from Pozharskyi to Hunter Biden saying he was “going to share this information with the US embassy here in Kyiv, as well as the office of Mr Amos Hochstein in the States.”
“I know for a fact he never contacted me or my office,” said Hochstein, who at the time worked closely with Biden as special envoy and coordinator for international energy affairs. “I provided every record to the Senate investigation, and no mention of this guy was ever made, no emails, no correspondence. I know almost every player in the energy sector in Ukraine. I never met this guy.”
Carpenter said that the vice president wouldn’t have had a meeting with a company executive. “He was the vice president of the United States,” he said. “He met with prime ministers.”
This does not exclude the possibility that Biden briefly shook hands and chatted with Pozharskyi during a public event. Hunter Biden, for instance, helped arrange for a potential business partner, Jonathan Li, to shake hands with his father in the lobby of a Beijing hotel when the vice president made an official trip to China.
Pozharskyi, in the April 17 email, mentions that he spoke to Hunter “yesterday evening.” At the request of The Fact Checker, a Biden aide reviewed Biden’s schedule for April 16, 2015. The vice president gave remarks at the White House Greek Independence Day Reception, between 5 and 6 p.m., and then spoke to the Congressional Fire Services Institute Gala, from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., the aide said.
What does Hunter Biden say?
Asked to verify whether the email is genuine, Hunter Biden’s attorney George Mesires told The Fact Checker: “We have no idea where this came from, and certainly cannot credit anything that Rudy Giuliani provided to the NY Post, but what I do know for certain is that this purported meeting never happened.”
Are there errors in the New York Post report?
A separate article, about another email, claims that a public relations company that worked for Burisma was allowed to take part in a conference call about an upcoming visit by Joe Biden to Ukraine. But there was nothing secret about this call, and the transcript was released publiclyand posted on the White House website.
More broadly, the New York Post repeats the falsehood, advanced by Trump, that the “elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”
We have fact-checked this repeatedly. During President Barack Obama’s second term, Biden was in charge of the Ukraine portfolio, keeping in close touch with the country’s president, Petro Poroshenko. Biden’s brief was to sweet-talk and jawbone Poroshenko into making reforms that Ukraine’s Western benefactors wanted to see as part of Ukraine’s escape from Russia’s orbit. But the Americans saw an obstacle to reform in Viktor Shokin, the top Ukrainian prosecutor, whom the United States viewed as ineffective and beholden to Poroshenko and Ukraine’s corrupt oligarchs. In particular, Shokin had failed to pursue an investigation of the founder of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky.
The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv proposed that Biden, during his 2015 visit there, use a pending delivery of $1 billion of loan guarantees as leverage to force reform. Biden addressed the Ukrainian parliament, decrying the “cancer of corruption” in the country and criticizing the prosecutor’s office. During that visit, Biden privately told Poroshenko the loan guarantees would be withheld unless Shokin was replaced.
After repeated calls and meetings between the two men over several months, Shokin was removed and the loan guarantees were provided.
Pavlo Klimkin, Ukrainian foreign minister from 2014 until Aug. 29, 2019, said that the firing of Shokin was universally urged by Ukraine’s benefactors. “The demand came not just from the U.S., and not just from Biden,” he said. “I heard it in every meeting with the international financial institutions, especially the IMF and World Bank. It was not just Biden. Clearly.”
Colin H. Kahl, Biden’s national security adviser at the time, told The Fact Checker that “our policy on corruption and Shokin in Ukraine kept getting tougher across 2015, so the whole theory of the case [in the New York Post] makes no sense.”
Why is this coming out now?
Good question. The FBI supposedly obtained the hard drive earlier this year from John MacIsaac, who said he owns the Wilmington Mac Shop.
MacIsaac told reporters on Wednesday that a MacBook laptop was dropped off at his shop in Wilmington, Del., in April 2019. MacIsaac, who said he was legally blind, said that he was almost certain that it was Hunter Biden who dropped off the computer. He said that he made several attempts to get in touch with Hunter Biden but the equipment was still in his hands 90 days after it had been left there, and he said that he became curious about what he’d seen.
He made a copy of the hard drive and gave it to Giuliani. This past weekend, Giuliani passed a copy to the New York Post. But presumably the laptop would have been of use to the year-long Senate investigation, which found no wrongdoing by Biden.
As Giuliani has sought to locate information about Hunter Biden and Ukraine, he has regularly interacted with a Ukrainian lawmaker who was recently sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department as being an “active Russian agent for over a decade” and was engaged in an influence operation to affect the 2020 election. Those interactions have given rise to fears that the emails could be part of a broader disinformation campaign.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/nyregion/trump-ukraine-rudy-giuliani-2020-presidential-election.html
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have been investigating whether several Ukrainian officials helped orchestrate a wide-ranging plan to meddle in the 2020 presidential campaign, including using Rudolph W. Giuliani to spread their misleading claims about President Biden and tilt the election in Donald J. Trump’s favor, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
The criminal investigation, which began during the final months of the Trump administration and has not been previously reported, underscores the federal government’s increasingly aggressive approach toward rooting out foreign interference in American electoral politics. Much of that effort is focused on Russian intelligence, which has suspected ties to at least one of the Ukrainians now under investigation.
The investigation is unfolding separately from a long-running federal inquiry in Manhattan that is aimed at Mr. Giuliani. While the two investigations have a similar cast of characters and overlap in some ways, Mr. Giuliani is not a subject of the Brooklyn investigation, the people said.
Instead, the Brooklyn prosecutors, along with the F.B.I., are focused on current and former Ukrainian officials suspected of trying to influence the election by spreading unsubstantiated claims of corruption about Mr. Biden through a number of channels, including Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer at the time. It is unclear whether the Brooklyn prosecutors will ultimately charge any of the Ukrainians.
At one point in the investigation, the authorities examined a trip Mr. Giuliani took to Europe in December 2019, when he met with several Ukrainians, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing inquiry.
At least one of the current and former officials Mr. Giuliani met, a Ukrainian member of parliament named Andriy Derkach, is now a focus of the Brooklyn investigation, the people said.
The trip was the culmination of a yearlong effort by Mr. Giuliani, with support from Mr. Trump, to undermine Mr. Biden’s presidential campaign. The effort proceeded primarily on two parallel tracks: collecting information from Ukraine to attack Mr. Biden’s diplomatic efforts there as vice president, and pressing Ukraine to announce investigations into Mr. Biden and other Trump critics.
The effort ultimately backfired, leading to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment.
Amid the impeachment proceedings, U.S. intelligence officials warned Mr. Trump that Mr. Derkach was seeking to use Mr. Giuliani to spread disinformation. Mr. Giuliani, who has said he did not receive a similar warning at the time, continued to vouch for the authenticity of information he received, even after Mr. Trump’s Treasury Department imposed sanctions against Mr. Derkach for election interference, and accused him of being “an active Russian agent.”
In an interview last year, Mr. Giuliani said there was nothing to dissuade him from meeting with Mr. Derkach, who was not under sanctions at the time. “I have no reason to believe he is a Russian agent,” Mr. Giuliani said.
On Thursday, Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer defended the search for information about Mr. Biden, disputing that he relied on misleading information. “When you investigate allegations of corruption, you talk to all sorts of people; some are credible, and some are not,” the lawyer, Robert J. Costello, said. He added that “some day the truth will come out” about Mr. Biden’s dealings in Ukraine.
Together, the Manhattan and Brooklyn investigations present a challenge for the Biden Justice Department, which has pledged to remain above the political fray even as it inherited a number of sensitive investigations linked to Ukraine and Russia.
Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, for example, is facing a federal criminal tax investigation that appears to be partly related to work he did in Ukraine, and a Justice Department special counsel is investigating the origins of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.
The investigation into Mr. Giuliani in Manhattan — which entered an aggressive new phase last month when F.B.I. agents executed search warrants at his home and office — centers on whether he lobbied the Trump administration to remove the U.S. ambassador to Kyiv on behalf of Ukrainian officials who wanted her gone. It is a violation of federal law to lobby the U.S. government on behalf of foreign officials without registering with the Justice Department, and Mr. Giuliani never registered.
Federal agents searched Mr. Giuliani’s apartment last month as part of a separate investigation into his efforts on behalf of Mr. Trump. Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times
Mr. Giuliani, who has not been accused of wrongdoing, has denied that he worked for any Ukrainians. He has cast his interactions with them as part of his effort to help Mr. Trump, and he denounced the F.B.I. searches as a “corrupt double standard” by the Justice Department, which he said had ignored “blatant crimes” by Mr. Biden and other Democrats.
It is unclear why the Manhattan prosecutors are not also handling the investigation into the Ukrainians, though Mr. Trump’s Justice Department regularly clashed with that office and steered some cases involving Ukraine to the Brooklyn office instead.
A spokesman for the United States attorney’s office in Brooklyn declined to comment, as did spokesmen for the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan and the F.B.I.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
Here we go. Russia acting like a bully attacking Ukraine with their bullshit military trolls, while lying that it is really Ukraine attacking itself.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-rebels-accuse-govt-forces-mortar-shelling-report-2022-02-17/
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-rebels-accuse-govt-forces-mortar-shelling-report-2022-02-17/