Mediaboss Marketing

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. diplomat said on Wednesday that everyone was in the loop about a Trump administration effort to get Ukraine to carry out investigations that might ultimately benefit U.S. President Donald Trump, including Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Testifying before the Democratic-led impeachment inquiry, U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland said he followed the presidents orders to work with Trumps personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who in turn was pushing Ukraine to carry out two probes that could aid Trumps 2020 re-election campaign.

Sondlands appearance was significant in that it suggested that a wider array of top U.S. officials than previously known was aware of the pressure campaign against Ukraine, even though his comments prompted carefully worded denials.

A wealthy hotelier and Trump political donor, Sondland gave sworn testimony on the fourth day of public hearings in the inquiry.

The probe could lead the Democratic-led House of Representatives to approve formal charges against Trump - called articles of impeachment - that would be sent to the Republican-controlled Senate for a trial on whether to remove him from office. Few Republican senators have broken with Trump.

While Democrats said the envoys testimony had strengthened their case to impeach Trump, the White House and the president himself said it had exonerated him.

I think it was fantastic. I think they have to end it now, Trump told reporters of the impeachment inquiry.

White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said in a statement: Though much of todays testimony by Ambassador Sondland was related to his presumptions and beliefs, rather than hard facts, he testified to the fact that President Trump never told him that a White House meeting or the aid to Ukraine was tied to receiving a public statement from (Ukrainian) President (Volodymyr) Zelenskiy,

Sondland said he emailed officials including Pompeo, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and Energy Secretary Rick Perry on July 19 that the new Ukrainian president was ready to assure Trump he would run a fully transparent investigation and turn over every stone.

Everyone was in the loop. It was no secret, Sondland said of the email he sent ahead of the July 25 telephone call between Trump and Zelenskiy that triggered the impeachment inquiry.

The inquiry is focusing on Trumps request in the call that Zelenskiy investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a political rival; his son Hunter Biden, who had served on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma; and an unsubstantiated theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 U.S. election that brought Trump to office.

It is also examining whether Trump may have withheld $391 million in security aid to help Ukraine fight Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine as a way of pressuring Kiev to undertake the investigations.

Federal law prohibits candidates from accepting foreign help in an election.

Biden is a leading contender for the Democratic nomination to face Trump in the November 2020 presidential election. Trump has accused Biden of corruption without offering evidence. Biden has denied any wrongdoing.

Democrats accuse Trump of abusing his power by using the security aid and an offer to Zelenskiy of a prestigious visit to the White House as leverage to pressure a vulnerable U.S. ally to dig up dirt on domestic political rivals.

Sondland portrayed himself as a reluctant participant in the pressure on Ukraine and argued that he had kept his superiors at the State Department and White House abreast of his efforts.

The envoy quoted from an Aug. 22 email to Pompeo about his effort to get Zelenskiy to commit to undertake investigations, suggesting that might be a way to break the logjam over security aid as well as a Zelenskiy-Trump meeting.

Describing a group meeting he attended with Pence before the latters Sept. 1 meeting with Zelenskiy, Sondland said he had told Pence that I had concerns that the delay in aid had become tied to the issue of investigations.

In his testimony, Sondland said Pence had listened to his comments and nodded but did not reply.

Aides to Pompeo and Pence issued denials.

The vice president never had a conversation with Gordon Sondland about investigating the Bidens, Burisma, or the conditional release of financial aid to Ukraine based upon potential investigations, Marc Short, Pences chief of staff, said in a statement.

Gordon (Sondland) never told Secretary Pompeo that he believed the President was linking aid to investigations of political opponents. Any suggestion to the contrary is flat out false, said State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus.

Sondland described Trump in May telling him along with Perry and then-U.S. special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker to work with Giuliani - the former New York mayor who held no U.S. government job - on Ukraine policy.

We did not want to work with Mr. Giuliani. Simply put, we played the hand we were dealt. We all understood that if we refused to work with Mr. Giuliani, we would lose an important opportunity to cement relations between the United States and Ukraine. So we followed the presidents orders, Sondland said.

The efforts by Giuliani to get Zelenskiy to investigate the Bidens were a quid pro quo for arranging a White House visit for the Ukrainian leader, Sondland said, using a Latin term meaning to exchange a favor for another favor.

Trump has said he did nothing wrong in the Ukraine matter and specifically denied any quid pro quo.

Republicans defended Trump by pointing to a statement by Sondland that he was presuming the security aid for Ukraine was tied to investigations, but that no one had actually told him that.

This all is based on presumptions that turned out to be wrong, Steve Scalise, the No. 2 House Republican, wrote on Twitter. Why is this impeachment circus still going on?

Asked in Brussels about Sondlands testimony that he was in the loop, Pompeo told reporters: I didnt see the testimony.

Sondland, tapped as Trumps EU envoy after he donated $1 million to the presidents inauguration, said Trump told him on Sept. 9 there was no quid pro quo in the requests to Ukraine but that Zelenskiy should do the right thing.

The envoy also said Trump never told him directly the aid to Ukraine was conditioned on Kiev announcing investigations.

Sondland also said he eventually concluded that, absent any credible explanation for the aid suspension, the money would only flow when there was a public statement from Ukraine committing to the investigations of the 2016 election and Burisma, as Mr. Giuliani had demanded.

At the end of Sondlands roughly six hours of testimony, Democrat Adam Schiff, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee leading the inquiry, said he thought Trump was the one who decided whether a meeting would happen, whether aid would be lifted, not anyone who worked for him.

At the opening of a second hearing on Wednesday, where Undersecretary of State David Hale and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Laura Cooper testified, Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the panel, described the inquiry as an impeachment in search of a crime.

Cooper testified that Ukrainian officials may have known that Washington was withholding military aid as early as July 25, undercutting a Republican defense of the presidents actions that they did not learn this until later.

Reporting by Patricia Zengerle and Andy Sullivan; Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu, Susan Cornwell, Karen Freifeld, David Morgan, Andy Sullivan and Susan Heavey in Washington and Humeyra Pamuk in Brussels; Writing by Alistair Bell and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Will Dunham, Peter Cooney and Sonya Hepinstall

Go here to see the original:
'Everyone was in the loop' about Ukraine pressure campaign - Reuters

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday requesting documents related to Joe Bidens communications with Ukrainian officials. Grahams inquiry focuses on any calls Biden may have had with former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko about the firing of the countrys top prosecutor, or any calls that referenced Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company where Bidens son Hunter sat on the board. The Washington Post reports that Grahams letter appears to begin an investigation into Trumps widely debunked claim that Biden, who at the time was vice president, put pressure on Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor in an attempt to protect his son. Taylor Reidy, a spokeswoman for Graham, told the Post that the senator is now seeking the documents because [Rep.] Adam Schiff and the House Intel Committee have made it clear they will not look into the issues about Hunter Biden and Burisma. Graham is requesting documents which could shed additional light on that issue and hopes they will be able to answer some of the outstanding questions, Reidy said.

The rest is here:
Lindsey Graham Launches Senate Investigation Into Bidens and Ukraine - The Daily Beast

The addition of Mr. Holmes to the witness list follows a closed-door deposition he gave Friday describing a cellphone conversation he listened to in July. While sitting on the outdoor patio of a restaurant in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital also known as Kiev, Mr. Holmes said he heard the president ask Gordon D. Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, if President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine would move forward with the investigations Mr. Trump sought.

Late Monday, the House Intelligence Committee released transcripts of the testimony of Mr. Holmes and David Hale, the under secretary of state for political affairs.

Mr. Holmes called the cellphone conversation he overheard in Kyiv between the president and Mr. Sondland remarkable, and he testified that it was clear to him that officials in Ukraine gradually came to understand that they were being asked to do something in exchange for the meeting and the security assistance hold being lifted. His account underscored that, contrary to Mr. Trumps claim that Ukraines leaders never knew American aid was being withheld, top officials there were well aware that it was, and that they had to do what the president wanted before they could receive it.

Mr. Holmes gave a vivid account of the cellphone call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Sondland, and of a subsequent conversation in which the ambassador told Mr. Holmes that Mr. Trump did not care about Ukraine, only about big things, such as investigations of the Bidens.

Theres just so much about the call that was so remarkable that I remember it vividly, Mr. Holmes said, according to the transcript. He said he recounted the conversation to his boss at the embassy after the lunch and said she was shocked by it. Mr. Holmes said that in morning embassy staff meetings, he would often refer back to the call as a way of trying to explain Mr. Trumps reluctance to schedule a White House meeting with Mr. Zelensky.

I would say, Well, as we know, he doesnt really care about Ukraine. He cares about some other things, Mr. Holmes testified.

Mr. Hale offered new details about deliberations within the State Department over the recall of Marie L. Yovanovitch as ambassador to Ukraine. By the end of March, he said the department was debating whether to issue a statement of support for her amid unrelenting attacks by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the presidents personal lawyer, and others.

More:
Ex-Envoy to Testify He Didnt Know Ukraine Aid Was Tied to Investigations - The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) Federal prosecutors are planning to interview an executive with Ukraines state-owned gas company as part of an ongoing probe into the business dealings of Rudy Giuliani and two of his Soviet-born business associates.

A lawyer for Andrew Favorov confirmed Tuesday that he is scheduled to meet voluntarily with the U.S. Justice Department. Favorov is the director of the integrated gas division at Naftogaz, the state-owned gas provider in Ukraine.

Federal prosecutors in New York are investigating the business dealings of Giuliani, President Donald Trumps personal lawyer, including whether he failed to register as a foreign agent, according to people familiar with the probe. The people were not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Giulianis close associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were arrested last month at an airport outside Washington while trying to board a flight to Europe with one-way tickets. They were later indicted by federal prosecutors on charges of conspiracy, making false statements and falsification of records.

Following an inquiry from The Associated Press, Favorov lawyer Lanny Breuer confirmed his client is set to meet with prosecutors.

The Department of Justice has requested an interview, Breuer said. He has agreed and will voluntarily sit down with the government attorneys. At this time, it would not be appropriate to comment further.

Breuer declined to say when or where Favorov, who has dual U.S.-Russian citizenship and lives in Ukraine, will be meeting with prosecutors.

Jim Margolin, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorneys Office in the Southern District of New York, declined to comment.

According to a federal indictment filed last month, Parnas and Fruman are alleged to have been key players in Giulianis efforts earlier this year to spur the Ukrainian government to launch an investigation of Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

The two mens efforts included helping to arrange a January meeting in New York between Giuliani and Ukraines former top prosecutor, Yuri Lutsenko, as well as other meetings with top government officials.

While the House impeachment hearings have focused narrowly on Giulianis role in pursuing Ukrainian investigations into Democrats, the interest of federal prosecutors in interviewing Favorov suggests they are conducting a broader probe into the business dealings of Giuliani and his associates.

The Associated Press reported on Oct. 7 that while they were working with Giuliani to push for investigating the Bidens, Parnas and Fruman were also leveraging political connections to Trump and other prominent Republicans as part of an effort to enrich themselves.

In March, Parnas and Fruman approached Favorov while the Ukrainian executive was attending an energy industry conference in Texas. Over drinks and dinner, Giulianis associates told him they had flown in from Florida on a private jet to recruit him to be their partner in a new venture to export up to 100 tanker shipments a year of U.S. liquefied gas into Ukraine, where Naftogaz is the largest distributor, according to two people Favorov later briefed on the details.

As part of the plan, Parnas suggested backing Favorov to replace his boss, Naftogaz CEO Andriy Kobolyev. Parnas is reported to have also told Favorov that Trump planned to remove the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, and replace her with someone more open to aiding their business interests. Yovanovitch was recalled to Washington in May.

Giuliani, who has described Parnas and Fruman as his clients, has denied involvement in the two mens efforts to forge a gas deal in Ukraine.

___

Follow Associated Press investigative reporters Michael Biesecker at http://twitter.com/mbieseck and Desmond Butler at http://twitter.com/desmondbutler

___

Contact APs global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org.

Read the original post:
Ukrainian gas executive cooperating in US probe of Giuliani - The Associated Press

Sign Up for

Our free email newsletters

Republicans are getting to the rock-bottom of it.

They have defended President Trump throughout the public impeachment hearings by arguing his gangster efforts to force a Ukrainian investigation into its (imagined) interference in the 2016 election were actually completely legitimate. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) has made this point repeatedly, assailing Democrats for their alleged collaboration with Ukrainian election interference efforts and asking, as he did during former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch's testimony, "what is the full extent of Ukraine's election meddling against the Trump campaign?"

If you're unfamiliar with the paranoid depths of the right-wing media universe, this kind of talk probably puzzled you. But make no mistake: The Ukraine fantasies peddled by House Republicans are nothing less than a concerted attempt to do what the GOP has done with all of Trump's misconduct since the beginning of his presidency to use a combination of denial and redirection to foment skepticism and doubt about the underlying charges.

In this case, the Ukraine meddling red herring is used to justify Trump's obstructive acts and his attempts to extort the Ukrainian government into opening an investigation in exchange for military aid and a White House visit. And if Democrats don't begin a major effort to dismantle this nonsense in public, they may very well lose the battle for public opinion in the same way they allowed themselves to get outfoxed with the Mueller probe.

When referencing the Ukraine ideas, Democrats have called them "discredited" and "debunked" over and over again, which of course they are. But referring to them as such does nothing to prove it to voters who don't read Vox explainers and Washington Post investigative reports. To the kind of "pox on both houses" voters whose mood swings might determine the outcome of the 2020 election, all they hear is people from two parties they hate yelling at one another and accusing each other of the exact same things.

One important reason Democrats must be better prepared to fend off Ukraine-related conspiracy mongering is that Attorney General Barr is preparing some kind of ginned-up report that will line up neatly with Republican efforts in the hearings to pin 2016 election interference on Ukraine. It will suck all of the oxygen out of the proceedings for days or even weeks. Earlier this year, Barr tasked U.S. Attorney John Durham with investigating the origins of the various Trump-Russia investigations in 2016, which culminated in the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller in 2017. The Department of Justice recently revealed, ominously, that this was now a criminal probe. Barr himself has been jet-setting around the world looking for confirmatory evidence.

What's it all about? There are two Ukraine-related conspiracy theories, which are likely to converge in the coming weeks as GOP efforts to save Trump accelerate. The first involves the infamous Russian hacking of the DNC in the spring of 2016, which led to months of leaked emails disseminated via Wikileaks, whose release was often timed to inflict maximum damage on the Clinton campaign. In his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky, Trump asked him about "Crowdstrike" and the "server." This references a truly insane, far-right fantasy that in fact it was Ukraine, in collaboration with the Clinton campaign, that hacked the DNC and then blamed it on Russia to make the Trump campaign look guilty.

In this make-believe world, Crowdstrike cofounder Dmitri Alperovitch is a Ukrainian (he is actually an American citizen who serves as a fellow on the august Atlantic Council) who absconded back to his country with the server, and the FBI had to take their word for it that Russia was culpable. Back on Earth-1, on the other hand, Crowdstrike provided the FBI with all of its forensic data, no serious person disputes that Russia was responsible for the hacking, and there is no single "server" which can be physically transported to Kiev.

The Crowdstrike lunacy has not yet been affirmatively advanced by Republicans in these hearings, although no one should be surprised if it is. But the idea that Ukraine was responsible for triggering the FBI's counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign has now gone mainstream.

The story goes like this: Corrupt Ukrainians fabricated a "black ledger" implicating former Trump campaign director Paul Manafort in various forms of corruption when he was a key advisor to former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian stooge, so that the Trump campaign's May 2016 hiring of Manafort as campaign manager would look especially suspicious. In this telling, the incident in which Trump campaign staffer George Papadopoulos bragged to an Australian diplomat about how Russia had stolen dirt on Clinton was actually a CIA set-up.

The conspiracy theory then alleges that at the same time, Ukrainian embassy officials were working with a consultant named Alexandra Chalupa (who held a minor post with the DNC) to channel incriminating information about Trump and Manafort to reporters and intelligence agencies. CIA Director John Brennan then supposedly manipulated this information and baited the FBI into opening its investigation. (This is why House Republicans put Chalupa on a list of witnesses they wanted to testify.) The Clinton campaign, meanwhile, was using a firm called Fusion GPS, which paid former British spy Christopher Steele to produce a lurid dossier about Trump. (Though of course it wasn't released and was only made public by Buzzfeed after the election.) The FBI, supposedly at Brennan's behest, then improperly used information gleaned from Ukrainians via Chalupa and Steele to trigger its counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. (There's more, of course, but this is an article, not a book.)

To simplify for those who are still with me: Corrupt U.S. intelligence officials glommed onto false allegations pushed at them by Ukrainians terrified of a Trump administration and used them to launch years of phony investigations against both candidate and President Trump. The Mueller report, so this story goes, proved that this was all a hoax from the get-go, and now President Trump and Attorney General Barr just want to get to the truth about what really happened.

It should almost go without saying that this is all nonsense, the product of shut-ins decorating large poster boards with paranoid speculation and unsubstantiated rumors and then laundering it all through various luminaries in the right-wing media cocoon. None of it makes any real sense.

To have worked, it had to have involved former CIA director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch. The number of conspirators must have run into the hundreds, many of whom would have been career public servants (as opposed to political appointees) in the intelligence agencies and the FBI. Yet none of them are talking?

Second, if the FBI was part of a plot to destroy then-candidate Trump, why did FBI Director James Comey then go out of his way to assail Clinton as "extremely careless" in his June 5, 2016, press conference and then theatrically announce that he was looking at new emails just days before the presidential election, a maneuver that may have led directly to her loss?

Third, why would the Clinton campaign have conspired with Ukraine against itself to release a long series of damaging or distracting emails from people like John Podesta?

Lastly, in the closing days of the campaign, when the polls had tightened and there was a very real possibility of Trump winning the election, why didn't any of the conspirators do more to release this information to the media? Why would the conspirators bury their own conspiracy?

The problem for Democrats is that these questions don't immediately come to mind for most people. Americans, most of whom who have not read the 448-page Mueller Report and are only dimly aware of the many troubling details about the Trump campaign's efforts to work with Russian hackers to subvert the 2016 election, watched Democrats simply walk away and turn off the lights after Mueller's July 24 testimony before Congress, seemingly resigned to the president's triumphant efforts to obstruct justice. Now Democrats have to contend with this Republican counternarrative, which if not pushed back on aggressively, will appear just as credible to the modestly informed.

It might sound equally bonkers, but Democrats should think about tackling it all head-on, perhaps by calling in a leading Ukraine conspiracy advocate like Sean Hannity to testify before Congress, followed by witnesses like Brennan who can then dismantle it all piece by piece. There is no way that Hannity or anyone else would be able to hold it together through hours of interrogation by Daniel Goldman, who capably led some of the questioning for House Democrats in last week's hearings. Give Republicans their wish and bring in Chalupa, who is desperate to testify. Bring in Alperovitch. If they really want to stop the news cycle and force everyone to watch, bring in former President Obama himself. Take a week, and blow the whole kooky theory to pieces.

Remember: This is all one story. The Trump-Giuliani Ukraine caper was partly about screwing with the 2020 election, but it was also about fabricating evidence to support the administration's nutso counter-narrative that the real villains in 2016 weren't the Russians but rather Ukrainians and Obama administration officials from the "deep state" working together to smear Our Great President. The behavior that led to these impeachment hearings is part of a maximalist plot to completely exonerate both Russia and the president of any wrongdoing, all driven by Trump's thin-skinned obsession with legitimacy, and his administration's barely-concealed hunger to engage in further abuses of power.

If they get away with this, they can get away with anything, and they know it. That's why Democrats need to take the time to get this story right, and convince the public that there is nothing to the GOP's Ukraine fever dreams but sweaty sheets and bad faith.

Want more essential commentary and analysis like this delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for The Week's "Today's best articles" newsletter here.

See the article here:
The Republicans' Ukraine conspiracy theory is going mainstream - The Week