Foreign Collusion, Confirmed: Ukranian Embassy Confirms That DNC Contractor Asked Ukraine to Provide Negative Oppo On Trump She Could Use in the Election Against Him

You can tell how much the media actually cares about collusion by their complete silence about acknowledged collusion, confirmed by the Ukranian Embassy.

In its most detailed account yet, the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington says a Democratic National Committee (DNC) insider during the 2016 election solicited dirt on Donald Trump’s campaign chairman and even tried to enlist the country's president to help.

In written answers to questions, Ambassador Valeriy Chaly's office says DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa sought information from the Ukrainian government on Paul Manafort’s dealings inside the country, in hopes of forcing the issue before Congress.

Chalupa later tried to arrange for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to comment on Manafort's Russian ties on a U.S. visit during the 2016 campaign, the ambassador said.

Chaly says that, at the time of the contacts in 2016, the embassy knew Chalupa primarily as a Ukrainian-American activist and learned only later of her ties to the DNC. He says the embassy considered her requests an inappropriate solicitation of interference in the U.S. election.

...

Chaly's written answers mark the most direct acknowledgement by Ukraine’s government that an American tied to the Democratic Party sought the country's help in the 2016 election, and they confirm the main points of a January 2017 story by Politico on Chalupa’s efforts.

Gee, I wonder if Chalupa has any other unsavory associations.

And I wonder if those unsavory associations have any connections to Cody Shearer, partner of Hillary Clinton's Chief Conspiracy Theorist Sydney Bluementhal.

Shearer was last in the news in 2015, when a bombshell ProPublica report on hacked emails from longtime Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal revealed that the longtime Clinton confidant and aide was running a "secret spy network" network feeding Clinton information on, among other things, Benghazi and Libya while she was secretary of State. Recall that Blumenthal is a known liar and rumormonger so disreputable that the Obama White House put their foot down and nixed her attempt Blumenthal at the State Department.

Even John Podesta says Blumenthal is "lost in his own web of conspiracies." As it happens, Podesta was one of many Democratic officials that recently received a letter from the Senate Judiciary Committee demanding copies of any communications they've had with Blumenthal and Shearer, among others.

...

The third member of the "secret spy network," was Cody Shearer. Among other things, the three men were trying to leverage their connections to Hillary Clinton when was secretary of State in order to get a lucrative contract in Libya for Osprey Global Solutions, a government contractor that does everything from intelligence assessments to arms dealing. Emails show that Clinton took the advice and assessments of Blumenthal's crew seriously. It’s further worth noting that Jonathan Winer was appointed the State Department’s Special Envoy for Libya in September of 2013, after Clinton stepped down as secretary of State and his longtime boss John Kerry took over. However, given his position specifically involved overseeing what was going on in Libya, it’s likely he was apprised of what Blumenthal, Shearer, and Drumheller were up to, years before he helped get Shearer's anti-Trump opposition research to Steele.

The fact that Shearer was involved in all of this should raise alarm bells, but we're just scratching the surface of what h'’s done over the years.... His brother was an ambassador during Bill Clinton’s presidency--Derek Shearer went so far as to write a letter to Bill Clinton demanding an ambassadorship as a reward for "working behind-the-scenes with Cody and with Sid Blumenthal to promote your candidacy, to defend you and to attack your enemies." Cody Shearer's sister is married to Strobe Talbott, Deputy Secretary of State during the Clinton administration and a friend of Bill Clinton's since they were at Oxford together.

For some reason, Shearer keeps popping up at the center of Clinton scandals. The most notorious episode is this one:

In 1998, just before Kathleen Willey--who claimed she was sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton--was to testify in the Paula Jones trial, Willey reportedly had a disturbing encounter where she was approached by a jogger near her home. The complete stranger asked her menacing questions about her children, before Willey blurted out "What do you want? What is it you want to know? Who are you and what do you want to know?" According to Willey, "I'll never forget that look in his eyes . . .

He just looked at me and he said, 'You're just not getting the message, are you?'"

On Hardball in 1999, MSNBC host Chris Matthews identified the mysterious jogger as Cody Shearer. Journalist Joe Conason--who has a pro-Clinton bias, to put it mildly--later interviewed Shearer, who said he was in San Francisco the day Willey was approached. Shearer provided some details about his stay including bank withdrawals and the place he stayed, including that he by chance ended up sitting next to former Clinton Secretary of State Warren Christopher--who happens to be his brother-in-law's former boss--on the flight home. The story took an even weirder turn when Pat Buchanan's mentally ill brother showed up at his house waving a gun the week after Matthews made his allegation that Shearer had intimidated Willey. Matthews would later apologize for naming Shearer, though he claimed that Willey had been the one who originally identified Shearer.

Shearer was also at the center of the Democrats 1996 fundraising scandal:

During Sen. Fred Thompson's long, comprehensive, and inconclusive hearings into the Democratic Party's 1996 campaign fundraising shenanigans . . . Shearer's name popped up in the course of Sen. Don Nickles' angry questioning of Terry Lenzner, the private investigator who would later, in the thick of the Jones/Lewinsky/Willey/Who Knows Who Else matter, be accused (by Dick Morris, among others) of coordinating efforts to smear and intimidate those women. Shearer had apparently acted as a liaison between Lenzner's firm, Investigative Group International, and the Cheyenne-Arapaho tribe. The tribe had donated more than $100,000 to the Democratic Party, hoping, according to testimony, that the administration would intervene on its behalf in a dispute over drilling rights on tribal land. Lenzner had been retained to uncover compromising links between Nickles--who opposed the tribe's claims--and local oil interests. Lenzner, while he admitted that he had accepted the tribe's retainer, has denied that Cody Shearer had ever worked for IGI--though the firm did once employ his sister Brooke.

Put them all under oath and make them answer questions.

What I think that would show, among other things, is this: The "Steele Dossier" is just a rewrite of Cody Shearer's and Blumenthal's conspiracy theories, with a small amount of "research" by Steele -- contacting his Kremlin pals for more dirt -- but mostly just the Sheaerer/Blumenthal conspiracy theory newsletter with the name of alleged (but dubious) SuperSpy Chris Steele at the top to give it credibility.

That's all this ever was: the conspiracy theories collected by Sydney Blumenthal, known for being a conspiracy theorist, and known further for playing to Hillary Clinton's thirst for self-justifying conspiracy theories by selling her just the sort of conspiracy theories she was in the market for.

posted by Ace of Spades at 06:28 PM

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