Now that the Mueller investigation has finally ended, one would expect the mainstream media to be giving the same endless coverage to Obama’s apparent collusion with Ukraine to swing the presidential election in Hillary’s favor. Don’t hold your breath … .
By Donald Jeffries
While a two-year investigation into President Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russian officials has produced no evidence of any “collusion,” the mainstream media continues to ignore troubling connections between the Obama administration and foreign governments.
The most recent example involves former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig and how he allegedly misled the U.S. Justice Department about his law firm’s work in Ukraine. Craig is charged with providing false and misleading information to the Foreign Agent Registration Act office regarding the trial of Yulia Tymoshenko, a political rival of the country’s then-president, Viktor Yanukovych. Former Trump campaign head Paul Manafort was seemingly held to a different standard under the same act during Robert Mueller’s investigation.
A recent story in The Hill described how the Obama White House attempted to use Ukraine to give an early boost to the whole Russian “collusion” narrative. A January 2016 meeting in the Oval Office between some of the top Ukrainian prosecutors and investigators and representatives of the National Security Council, FBI, State Department, and Department of Justice has been documented by contemporary memos and testimony of multiple participants. Ukrainians who were at the meeting have stated that it quickly became apparent the meeting’s purported agenda of training and cooperation was a front. Instead, U.S. officials were clearly interested in two hot political controversies.
One of these involved Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s affiliation with Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings. Bank records revealed that more than $3 million went from the Ukraine to an American firm tied to Hunter Biden during 2014-2015. U.S. officials asked the Ukrainians if they would drop the Burisma probe and turn it over to the FBI. The Ukrainians refused, but Biden went on to pressure Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire the country’s chief prosecutor in March 2016. This resulted in the Burisma case being transferred and eventually shut down.
According to Andrii Telizhenko, a political official in the Ukrainian embassy in Washington, who organized the meeting, U.S. officials “kept talking about how important it was that all of our anti-corruption efforts be united.” The Americans stated that they had no interest in reviving a 2014 investigation into then-GOP lobbyist Manafort and others in the U.S. receiving payments from Ukraine’s Russia-backed Party of Regions. At that time, the FBI had questioned Manafort about any improper foreign lobbying but stopped the investigation without charging him. Telizhenko was unable to recall if Manafort’s name was mentioned at the meeting, but other Ukrainian attendees remembered that Department of Justice representatives had asked investigators from Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau about finding new evidence regarding the Party of Regions’ payments and associations with Americans.
“It was definitely the case that led to the charges against Manafort and the leak to U.S. media during the 2016 election,” Telizhenko declared. Spokespersons in the Department of Justice, National Security Council, and FBI declined to comment on The Hill’s article, and a representative for former Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice did not return their emails.
Nazar Kholodnytsky, Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, told The Hill that he attended some of the January 2016 meetings in Washington. He described seeing a ledger showing payments from the Party of Regions to Manafort and said that Ukrainian authorities had known about it since 2014.
Commenting on the sudden release of this evidence by the U.S.-friendly National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) in May 2016, right after Manafort was named Trump’s campaign chairman, Kholodnytsky declared: “Somebody kept this black ledger secret for two years and then showed it to the public and the U.S. media. It was extremely suspicious. . . . I ordered the detectives to give nothing to the mass media considering this case. Instead, they had broken my order and published themselves these one or two pages of this black ledger regarding Paul Manafort. . . . For me it was the first call that something was going wrong and that there is some external influence in this case.”
Kostiantyn Kulyk, deputy head of the Ukraine prosecutor general’s international affairs office, corroborated this, noting, “Yes, there was a lot of talking about needing help and then the ledger just appeared in public.” Kulyk also said that Ukrainian authorities had evidence that others, like former Obama White House Counsel Gregory Craig, had also received money from Yanukovych’s party. But the Americans weren’t interested in any of that. “They just discussed Manafort. This was all and only what they wanted. Nobody else,” Kulyk said.
A Ukrainian court concluded, in December 2018, that NABU’s release of the ledger was an illegal attempt to influence the U.S. election. A member of Ukraine’s parliament even released a recording of a NABU official commenting that the agency released the ledger to help Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
In an April 25 appearance on Fox News, President Donald Trump chimed in: “It sounds like big stuff. It sounds very interesting with Ukraine. . . . I’m not surprised.”
Donald Jeffries is a highly respected author and researcher whose work on the JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations and other high crimes of the Deep State has been read by millions of people across the world. Jeffries is also the author of two books currently being sold by the AFP Online Store.
