Ukraine Has Widened Its Investigation Into Fugitive, Wherabouts-Unknown Founder of Burisma

"No evidence" of anything worth investigating, the media keeps telling me.

- Ukraine has widened its investigation into the founder of energy company Burisma to include suspicion of embezzling state funds, Prosecutor General Ruslan Ryaboshapka said on Wednesday.

...

The prosecutor who has investigated Burisma is Kostiantyn Kulyk, who previously met Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to discuss accusations against the Bidens.

After he took office in late August, Ryaboshapka launched a wide-ranging audit of criminal cases to see whether they had been conducted properly. Thirteen of them relate to Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky, Ryaboshapka told reporters at a briefing on Wednesday.

"No evidence" of corruption at Burisma. No substantiation for any allegation and hence no reason to be suspicious or to want investigations.

None at all.

Apparently he's a fugitive.

Nothing to see here. No reason to investigate.

"No evidence" of any corruption.
Apart, that is, from all the evidence.

The media is fond of claiming that there's no evidence that Ukraine interfered with US elections.

But this report from December 12, 2018, notes that a Ukranian court ruled that Ukranian officials had interfered in the US elections of 2016... against Trump.

Ukraine Court Rules Manafort Disclosure Caused 'Meddling' in U.S. Election

MOSCOW -- A court in Ukraine has ruled that officials in the country violated the law by revealing, during the 2016 presidential election in the United States, details of suspected illegal payments to Paul Manafort.

In 2016, while Mr. Manafort was chairman of the Trump campaign, anti-corruption prosecutors in Ukraine disclosed that a pro-Russian political party had earmarked payments for Mr. Manafort from an illegal slush fund. Mr. Manafort resigned from the campaign a week later.

What right-wing, fringe fake-news Trumpist conspiracy site is that from?

Well, it's from the best right-wing, fringe fake-news Trumpist conspiracy site: The New York Times.

And of course most are familiar with this fake-news conspiracy theory from the right-wing Trumpalo site Politico:

Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire

Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton.

Donald Trump wasn’t the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by officials of a former Soviet bloc country.

Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton's allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.

A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort's resignation...

More accurate phrasing would be, "engineering Manafort's resignation."

...and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine's foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia's alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails.

That's some CYA liberal spin.

They're trying to minimize Ukraine's meddling to support the narrative that OMG TRUMP RUSSIA COLLUSION.

But Ukraine directly "meddled," working with Hillary Clinton's campaign.

Yet even after minimizing Ukrainian meddling, Politiico has to report they did, in fact, interfere with our elections, in ways that sovereign nations usually do not find acceptable:

...

Yet Politico's investigation found evidence of Ukrainian government involvement in the race that appears to strain diplomatic protocol dictating that governments refrain from engaging in one another's elections.

Russia's meddling has sparked outrage from the American body politic....

But only Russia's.

Because the media and the DNC are one and the same.

When Ukraine meddles on behalf of Hillary Clinton, working with DNC official Alexandria Chalupa, the media and "American body politic" says "no big deal."

It's not that Russian meddling is different than Ukranian meddling.

It's that who was claimed to have benefit is different. The media are outraged that anyone tried to help Trump; but they're very understanding about a foreign country subverting our precious elections for Hillary.

A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort (pictured) and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.
...

The Ukrainian antipathy for Trump’s team -- and alignment with Clinton's -- can be traced back to late 2013....

Manafort's work for Yanukovych caught the attention of a veteran Democratic operative named Alexandra Chalupa, who had worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison during the Clinton administration. Chalupa went on to work as a staffer, then as a consultant, for Democratic National Committee. The DNC paid her $412,000 from 2004 to June 2016, according to Federal Election Commission records, though she also was paid by other clients during that time, including Democratic campaigns and the DNC's arm for engaging expatriate Democrats around the world.

...

She occasionally shared her findings with officials from the DNC and Clinton’s campaign, Chalupa said. In January 2016 -- months before Manafort had taken any role in Trump’s campaign -- Chalupa told a senior DNC official that, when it came to Trump's campaign, "I felt there was a Russia connection," Chalupa recalled....

She said she shared her concern with Ukraine's ambassador to the U.S., Valeriy Chaly, and one of his top aides, Oksana Shulyar, during a March 2016 meeting at the Ukrainian Embassy.

...

The day after Manafort's hiring was revealed, she briefed the DNC's communications staff on Manafort, Trump and their ties to Russia, according to an operative familiar with the situation.

So let's sum up:

A Ukranian-American operative got dirt from Ukranian officials about Paul Manafort, who they were at political war with for having done a deal with a politician who was pro-Russian.

This Ukranian-American operative cooks up the "RUSSIAN COLLUSION" narrative, and spreads it to the DNC and to Hillary Clinton.

As always, I have to mention this operative partnered up with another leftwing conspiracy theorist. NeverTrumpers never mention him, of course, but then, they also never mentioned him in the past, either.

Now, this RUSSIAN COLLUSION conspiracy theory is taken so seriously by the liberal cadre that dominates the federal government as thoroughly as the leftwing dominates college administrations that they actually spy on two officials tangentially related to a presidential campaign precisely so they can use the two-hop rule to spy on Trump's communications.

The threat of foreign interference, they thought, was so serious that it justified spying on an actual presidential candidate during an election.

The threat of foreign interference was so serious, they further thought, that it justified the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC paying a foreign spy (Steele) and giving him money with which he would pay Russian intelligence assets and informers for dirt.

So yeah: Hillary and the DNC paid, indirectly but inarguably, Russians for information.

And meanwhile, Obama used official government means against Trump.

All necessary, we're told, because the threat of RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE was just that serious.

So now Trump sees multiple news reports about direct Ukranian interference, interference itself admitted to by Ukraine, and he asks Ukraine to get to the bottom of it.

And, I'm sure, he wants to send the signal: Further interference by a foreign country in our elections will not be tolerated and may result in some official penalties.

You know -- like the official penalties Obama and then Trump imposed on Russia for interfering.

And now the same people who told us that the threat of foreign interference was so intolerable that it justified Obama lying to FISA courts to spy on a presidential candidate and Hillary Clinton bankrolling actual Russian covert operatives for dirt... say that asking Ukraine investigate its own interference is... illegal and impeachable?!

More "No Evidence" From JackStraw:

Why nobody mentions that Nellie Ohr testified under oath to Congress that Fusion GPS was getting dirt directly from Ukraine is a mystery to me.

It's not contestable. It's direct sworn testimony.

Posted by: JackStraw

posted by Ace of Spades at 06:06 PM

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