Ukraine-gate

A

anatta

100% recycled karma
One of the animating chapters in the Trump-Russian collusion saga was the claim that Russia infiltrated the Democratic National Committee’s email server in the spring of 2016. That hack, according to collusion truthers, and the subsequent release of damaging emails exchanged between top Democratic Party officials was central to Vladimir Putin’s scheme to sway the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.

But the evidence to support this widely accepted claim is sketchy at best and appears to be under appropriate scrutiny by prosecutors now examining the origins of the FBI’s pre-election investigation into the Trump campaign for “colluding” with Russia.

According to the transcript of a July call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s newly elected president, Trump raised the issue of “CrowdStrike” and suggested Ukraine might be in possession of the “server,” a reference to the DNC server.

“I would like you to do us a favor,” Trump said. “I would like you to find out what happened with the whole situation with Ukraine, with CrowdStrike. The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation.”

To say the least.
CrowdStrike’s Ties to Democrats

While lawmakers and pundits on the Left and NeverTrump Right breezed past Trump’s mention of CrowdStrike—either out of subterfuge or ignorance—it is significant.

CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity firm with strong ties to the Democratic Party. After the DNC server was hacked in early 2016, Perkins Coie, a politically connected law firm, hired CrowdStrike on behalf of the DNC to find out who was behind the intrusion. (Perkins Coie is the same law firm that hired Fusion GPS on behalf of the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign to dig up Russia-related dirt on Team Trump before the election.)

That isn’t the extent of CrowdStrike’s dubious political ties. Its co-founder, Moscow-born Dmitri Alperovitch, is associated with the Clinton Foundation; in 2015, CrowdStrike received $100 million in funding from Google whose chairman, Eric Schmidt, was a generous supporter of Hillary Clinton. CrowdStrike’s president is Shawn Henry, who headed up the FBI’s cybercrimes division during the Obama Administration when Robert Mueller was director.

According to an October 2016 profile in Esquire, at the same time, the Obama Justice Department was concocting the Trump-Russia collusion ruse, Alperovitch and Henry were working with top Justice officials on cyber “war games.” In March 2016—as the DNC email system allegedly was compromised by the Russians—Alperovitch and Henry organized “four teams of ten people—representing the government, the private sector, European and Australian allies” for the exercise. (Another participant included a former member of GCHQ, the British intelligence agency working with former CIA Director John Brennan in 2016 on the Russian collusion scheme.)

President Trump has reason to believe Ukraine played some early, significant role in the Russian collusion hoax.

Among the officials working with CrowdStrike on the exercise was John Carlin, Mueller’s former chief of staff and then head of the Justice Department’s national security division. Carlin facilitated the October 2016 FISA warrant for Trump campaign aide Carter Page; he also received regular briefings from then-deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe on both the Clinton email investigation and the Trump-Russia collusion probe. (Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community’s inspector general at the center of the so-called whistleblower controversy, worked directly for Carlin in 2016 and 2017.)

Probably just a coincidence, right?

Then, in June 2016—around the same time Christopher Steele began compiling his anti-Trump dossier and James Comey’s FBI was investigating Trump campaign aides—Alperovitch authored a report that concluded hackers tied to the Kremlin were responsible for the DNC server breach.

“CrowdStrike stands fully by its analysis and findings identifying two separate Russian intelligence-affiliated adversaries present in the DNC network in May 2016,” he wrote.
Who Are You Going to Believe?

That report remains the only piece of evidence to support the claim that Putin apparatchiks stole thousands of emails from the Democrats just months before the presidential election.
But the document isn’t just part of political lore; it was legitimized both by the FBI and the CIA as the Obama Administration attempted to buttress its phony narrative about a conspiracy between Trump and Putin to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. The server, however, was never inspected by U.S. law enforcement or any other government agency.

In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2017, former FBI Director James Comey admitted that the DNC refused to surrender the server to his agents.

Senator Richard Burr (R-N.C.): Did the FBI request access to those devices to perform forensics on them?

Comey: [coughs] Yes, we did.

Burr: Were you given access to do the forensics?

Comey: We were not. A highly respected private company got access and shared with us what they saw there.

When pressed by Burr, Comey admitted that the DNC denied “multiple” requests by the FBI for the device. “Ultimately it was agreed to that the private company [Crowdstrike] would share with us what they saw.”

What a joke.

But Comey wasn’t the only top Obama official to take the word of a company working for the very same law firm that also was coordinating the Steele dossier and planting negative news articles about Trump weeks before the election.

Former CIA Director John Brennan lifted much of the CrowdStrike paper for his infamous January 2017 intelligence community assessment about Russian election interference. “Russia’s intelligence services conducted cyber operations against targets associated with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, including targets associated with both major US political parties,” the report claimed.

The CrowdStrike report even made an appearance in the Mueller investigation, specifically, its prosecution of Roger Stone. But when Stone’s defense team wanted the unredacted forensic reports that supported CrowdStrike’s conclusion, Team Mueller admitted they didn’t have them because CrowdStrike performed the redactions in-house.

“In other words, the government allowed CrowdStrike and the Democratic Party’s legal counsel to decide what it could and could not see in reports on Russian hacking,” reported Real Clear Investigation’s Aaron Mate in a lengthy exposé on CrowdStrike earlier this year. Mate questioned the government’s reliance on a “potentially biased and politically conflicted source like CrowdStrike.”
Bad Actors Exposed at Last?

Despite the latest outrage and hysteria over Trump’s otherwise innocuous conversation with Zelensky, the president is not backing down. It’s clear he is committed to exposing the bad actors behind the biggest political scandal in American history, which is how the world’s most powerful law enforcement and intelligence apparatus was weaponized against him to sabotage his campaign and derail his presidency.

Trump has reason to believe Ukraine played some early, significant role in the hoax: As I reported on Wednesday, Joe Biden, Obama’s emissary to the country during the final years of his presidency, was a key figure in the collusion operation in 2016 and early 2017.

The Justice Department also confirmed that it is investigating Ukraine’s involvement.

“A Department of Justice team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham is separately exploring the extent to which a number of countries, including Ukraine, played a role in the counterintelligence investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election,”
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a department spokeswoman told The Federalist this week.

Hunter Biden’s shady business dealings in Ukraine aren’t the only scandals Democrats have to worry about right now. Finally exposing all the fabricated elements of the Russia collusion hoax, including the CrowdStrike report, will be a far greater threat to their electoral chances in 2020.
https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/25/ukraine-gate-is-about-the-russian-hack-that-wasnt/
 
I knew it, "it's Hillary's fault," she just made Trump ask a foreign leader for a favor to dig up dirt on a potential political opponent, bitch
 
as usual everything is wrapped around itself ( a puzzle withn an enigma) which is how the Deep State operates.
Lies and concealment are it's trademark

But this is also how the "Russian cutout" was invented -to take the exercises that CS did, and use them for an explanation of Russian hacking ( Which Assange still denies) and add in the phantom "Cutout"
to tie WIKI and da Russians into a false narrative

go back and read it a couple times to let it sink in
 
CrowdStrike’s dubious political ties. Its co-founder, Moscow-born Dmitri Alperovitch, is associated with the Clinton Foundation; in 2015



:whoa:
 
anatta said:
as usual everything is wrapped around itself ( a puzzle withn an enigma) which is how the Deep State operates.
Lies and concealment are it's trademark

But this is also how the "Russian cutout" was invented -to take the exercises that CS did, and use them for an explanation of Russian hacking ( Which Assange still denies) and add in the phantom "Cutout"
to tie WIKI and da Russians into a false narrative

go back and read it a couple times to let it sink in
Click to expand...

The Russians spent 1.4 million a month on interfering in our elections. It was a military operation that included helping out with Trump rallies and anti-Hillary rallies. They created signage, brought in marchers and provided transportation. They also worked with Trump people to pinpoint the people they might sway with emails, tweets and facebook messages. They hacked the DNC computer system and the election systems of several states. Manafort was giving them current Repub data and polling to assist them.
Russia made Daffy president.
 
Gonzomin said:
The Russians spent 1.4 million a month on interfering in our elections. It was a military operation that included helping out with Trump rallies and anti-Hillary rallies. They created signage, brought in marchers and provided transportation. They also worked with Trump people to pinpoint the people they might sway with emails, tweets and facebook messages. They hacked the DNC computer system and the election systems of several states. Manafort was giving them current Repub data and polling to assist them.
Russia made Daffy president.
Click to expand...

Drop the crack pipe. Back away from it.
 
anatta said:
One of the animating chapters in the Trump-Russian collusion saga was the claim that Russia infiltrated the Democratic National Committee’s email server in the spring of 2016. That hack, according to collusion truthers, and the subsequent release of damaging emails exchanged between top Democratic Party officials was central to Vladimir Putin’s scheme to sway the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.

But the evidence to support this widely accepted claim is sketchy at best and appears to be under appropriate scrutiny by prosecutors now examining the origins of the FBI’s pre-election investigation into the Trump campaign for “colluding” with Russia.

According to the transcript of a July call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s newly elected president, Trump raised the issue of “CrowdStrike” and suggested Ukraine might be in possession of the “server,” a reference to the DNC server.

“I would like you to do us a favor,” Trump said. “I would like you to find out what happened with the whole situation with Ukraine, with CrowdStrike. The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation.”

To say the least.
CrowdStrike’s Ties to Democrats

While lawmakers and pundits on the Left and NeverTrump Right breezed past Trump’s mention of CrowdStrike—either out of subterfuge or ignorance—it is significant.

CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity firm with strong ties to the Democratic Party. After the DNC server was hacked in early 2016, Perkins Coie, a politically connected law firm, hired CrowdStrike on behalf of the DNC to find out who was behind the intrusion. (Perkins Coie is the same law firm that hired Fusion GPS on behalf of the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign to dig up Russia-related dirt on Team Trump before the election.)

That isn’t the extent of CrowdStrike’s dubious political ties. Its co-founder, Moscow-born Dmitri Alperovitch, is associated with the Clinton Foundation; in 2015, CrowdStrike received $100 million in funding from Google whose chairman, Eric Schmidt, was a generous supporter of Hillary Clinton. CrowdStrike’s president is Shawn Henry, who headed up the FBI’s cybercrimes division during the Obama Administration when Robert Mueller was director.

According to an October 2016 profile in Esquire, at the same time, the Obama Justice Department was concocting the Trump-Russia collusion ruse, Alperovitch and Henry were working with top Justice officials on cyber “war games.” In March 2016—as the DNC email system allegedly was compromised by the Russians—Alperovitch and Henry organized “four teams of ten people—representing the government, the private sector, European and Australian allies” for the exercise. (Another participant included a former member of GCHQ, the British intelligence agency working with former CIA Director John Brennan in 2016 on the Russian collusion scheme.)

President Trump has reason to believe Ukraine played some early, significant role in the Russian collusion hoax.

Among the officials working with CrowdStrike on the exercise was John Carlin, Mueller’s former chief of staff and then head of the Justice Department’s national security division. Carlin facilitated the October 2016 FISA warrant for Trump campaign aide Carter Page; he also received regular briefings from then-deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe on both the Clinton email investigation and the Trump-Russia collusion probe. (Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community’s inspector general at the center of the so-called whistleblower controversy, worked directly for Carlin in 2016 and 2017.)

Probably just a coincidence, right?

Then, in June 2016—around the same time Christopher Steele began compiling his anti-Trump dossier and James Comey’s FBI was investigating Trump campaign aides—Alperovitch authored a report that concluded hackers tied to the Kremlin were responsible for the DNC server breach.

“CrowdStrike stands fully by its analysis and findings identifying two separate Russian intelligence-affiliated adversaries present in the DNC network in May 2016,” he wrote.
Who Are You Going to Believe?

That report remains the only piece of evidence to support the claim that Putin apparatchiks stole thousands of emails from the Democrats just months before the presidential election.
But the document isn’t just part of political lore; it was legitimized both by the FBI and the CIA as the Obama Administration attempted to buttress its phony narrative about a conspiracy between Trump and Putin to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. The server, however, was never inspected by U.S. law enforcement or any other government agency.

In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2017, former FBI Director James Comey admitted that the DNC refused to surrender the server to his agents.

Senator Richard Burr (R-N.C.): Did the FBI request access to those devices to perform forensics on them?

Comey: [coughs] Yes, we did.

Burr: Were you given access to do the forensics?

Comey: We were not. A highly respected private company got access and shared with us what they saw there.

When pressed by Burr, Comey admitted that the DNC denied “multiple” requests by the FBI for the device. “Ultimately it was agreed to that the private company [Crowdstrike] would share with us what they saw.”

What a joke.

But Comey wasn’t the only top Obama official to take the word of a company working for the very same law firm that also was coordinating the Steele dossier and planting negative news articles about Trump weeks before the election.

Former CIA Director John Brennan lifted much of the CrowdStrike paper for his infamous January 2017 intelligence community assessment about Russian election interference. “Russia’s intelligence services conducted cyber operations against targets associated with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, including targets associated with both major US political parties,” the report claimed.

The CrowdStrike report even made an appearance in the Mueller investigation, specifically, its prosecution of Roger Stone. But when Stone’s defense team wanted the unredacted forensic reports that supported CrowdStrike’s conclusion, Team Mueller admitted they didn’t have them because CrowdStrike performed the redactions in-house.

“In other words, the government allowed CrowdStrike and the Democratic Party’s legal counsel to decide what it could and could not see in reports on Russian hacking,” reported Real Clear Investigation’s Aaron Mate in a lengthy exposé on CrowdStrike earlier this year. Mate questioned the government’s reliance on a “potentially biased and politically conflicted source like CrowdStrike.”
Bad Actors Exposed at Last?

Despite the latest outrage and hysteria over Trump’s otherwise innocuous conversation with Zelensky, the president is not backing down. It’s clear he is committed to exposing the bad actors behind the biggest political scandal in American history, which is how the world’s most powerful law enforcement and intelligence apparatus was weaponized against him to sabotage his campaign and derail his presidency.

Trump has reason to believe Ukraine played some early, significant role in the hoax: As I reported on Wednesday, Joe Biden, Obama’s emissary to the country during the final years of his presidency, was a key figure in the collusion operation in 2016 and early 2017.

The Justice Department also confirmed that it is investigating Ukraine’s involvement.

a department spokeswoman told The Federalist this week.

Hunter Biden’s shady business dealings in Ukraine aren’t the only scandals Democrats have to worry about right now. Finally exposing all the fabricated elements of the Russia collusion hoax, including the CrowdStrike report, will be a far greater threat to their electoral chances in 2020.
https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/25/ukraine-gate-is-about-the-russian-hack-that-wasnt/
Click to expand...

Anyone seen Brennan lately? ;)
 
Gonzomin said:
The Russians spent 1.4 million a month on interfering in our elections. It was a military operation that included helping out with Trump rallies and anti-Hillary rallies. They created signage, brought in marchers and provided transportation. They also worked with Trump people to pinpoint the people they might sway with emails, tweets and facebook messages. They hacked the DNC computer system and the election systems of several states. Manafort was giving them current Repub data and polling to assist them.
Russia made Daffy president.
Click to expand...

Come on, that was all a hoax, the Chinese started that, the Trump campaign didn't have over a hundred contacts with Russians, Junior didn't meet with Russians in Trump Tower, Manaford didn't exchange poling data with contacts in the Russian military, none of that really happened
 
archives said:
Come on, that was all a hoax, the Chinese started that, the Trump campaign didn't have over a hundred contacts with Russians, Junior didn't meet with Russians in Trump Tower, Manaford didn't exchange poling data with contacts in the Russian military, none of that really happened
Click to expand...
Manaford did NOT send polling data to a "Russian asset" or GRU .

Contacts with Russian is not conspiring with Russians
 
* The report uses qualified and vague language to describe key events, indicating that Mueller and his investigators do not actually know for certain whether Russian intelligence officers stole Democratic Party emails, or how those emails were transferred to WikiLeaks.

* The report's timeline of events appears to defy logic. According to its narrative, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced the publication of Democratic Party emails not only before he received the documents but before he even communicated with the source that provided them.

*There is strong reason to doubt Mueller’s suggestion that an alleged Russian cutout called Guccifer 2.0 supplied the stolen emails to Assange.

* Mueller’s decision not to interview Assange – a central figure who claims Russia was not behind the hack – suggests an unwillingness to explore avenues of evidence on fundamental questions.

* U.S. intelligence officials cannot make definitive conclusions about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer servers because they did not analyze those servers themselves. Instead, they relied on the forensics of CrowdStrike, a private contractor for the DNC that was not a neutral party, much as “Russian dossier” compiler Christopher Steele, also a DNC contractor, was not a neutral party. This puts two Democrat-hired contractors squarely behind underlying allegations in the affair – a key circumstance that Mueller ignores.

* Further, the government allowed CrowdStrike and the Democratic Party's legal counsel to submit redacted records, meaning CrowdStrike and not the government decided what could be revealed or not regarding evidence of hacking.

* Mueller’s report conspicuously does not allege that the Russian government carried out the social media campaign. Instead it blames, as Mueller said in his closing remarks, "a private Russian entity" known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA).

* Mueller also falls far short of proving that the Russian social campaign was sophisticated, or even more than minimally related to the 2016 election. As with the collusion and Russian hacking allegations, Democratic officials had a central and overlooked hand in generating the alarm about Russian social media activity.

* John Brennan, then director of the CIA, played a seminal and overlooked role in all facets of what became Mueller’s investigation: the suspicions that triggered the initial collusion probe; the allegations of Russian interference; and the intelligence assessment that purported to validate the interference allegations that Brennan himself helped generate. Yet Brennan has since revealed himself to be, like CrowdStrike and Steele, hardly a neutral party -- in fact a partisan with a deep animus toward Trump.
https://www.realclearinvestigations...ndercuts_its_core_russia-meddling_claims.html
 
domer76 said:
:lolup:

And the server is in Ukraine somewhere:rofl2:
Click to expand...

Yep, loose ends ... another thorn in the deep state's side. Deep State should have killed the guy and destroyed any severs.

They should have took some lessons from Hillary. :rofl2:
 
domer76 said:
:lolup:

Sure it is, stupid fuck. Maybe you can team up with Trump and find it.

What a fucking moron.:rofl2:
Click to expand...

The Deep State is more worried about finding the server... than Trump is.

And Comey is till looking for those "tapes", dumbass.


:rofl2:
 
Hundreds of pages of never-released memos and documents — many from inside the American team helping Burisma to stave off its legal troubles — conflict with Biden’s narrative.

And they raise the troubling prospect that U.S. officials may have painted a false picture in Ukraine that helped ease Burisma’s legal troubles and stop prosecutors’ plans to interview Hunter Biden during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

For instance, Burisma’s American legal representatives met with Ukrainian officials just days after Biden forced the firing of the country’s chief prosecutor and offered “an apology for dissemination of false information by U.S. representatives and public figures” about the Ukrainian prosecutors, according to the Ukrainian government’s official memo of the meeting. The effort to secure that meeting began the same day the prosecutor's firing was announced.

In addition, Burisma’s American team offered to introduce Ukrainian prosecutors to Obama administration officials to make amends, according to that memo and the American legal team’s internal emails.

The memos raise troubling questions:

1.) If the Ukraine prosecutor’s firing involved only his alleged corruption and ineptitude, why did Burisma's American legal team refer to those allegations as “false information?"

2.) If the firing had nothing to do with the Burisma case, as Biden has adamantly claimed, why would Burisma’s American lawyers contact the replacement prosecutor within hours of the termination and urgently seek a meeting in Ukraine to discuss the case?

Ukrainian prosecutors say they have tried to get this information to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) since the summer of 2018, fearing it might be evidence of possible violations of U.S. ethics laws. First, they hired a former federal prosecutor to bring the information to the U.S. attorney in New York, who, they say, showed no interest. Then, the Ukrainians reached out to President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, told Trump in July that he plans to launch his own wide-ranging investigation into what happened with the Bidens and Burisma.

“I’m knowledgeable about the situation,” Zelensky told Trump, asking the American president to forward any evidence he might know about. "The issue of the investigation of the case is actually the issue of making sure to restore the honesty so we will take care of that and will work on the investigation of the case.”

Biden has faced scrutiny since December 2015, when the New York Times published a story noting that Burisma hired Hunter Biden just weeks after the vice president was asked by President Obama to oversee U.S.-Ukraine relations. That story also alerted Biden’s office that Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin had an active investigation of Burisma and its founder.

Documents I obtained this year detail an effort to change the narrative after the Times story about Hunter Biden, with the help of the Obama State Department.

Hunter Biden’s American business partner in Burisma, Devon Archer, texted a colleague two days after the Times story about a strategy to counter the “new wave of scrutiny” and stated that he and Hunter Biden had just met at the State Department. The text suggested there was about to be a new “USAID project the embassy is announcing with us” and that it was “perfect for us to move forward now with momentum.”

I have sued the State Department for any records related to that meeting. The reason is simple: There is both a public interest and an ethics question to knowing if Hunter Biden and his team sought State’s assistance while his father was vice president.

The controversy ignited anew earlier this year when I disclosed that Joe Biden admitted during a 2018 videotaped speech that, as vice president in March 2016, he threatened to cancel $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, to pressure Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko to fire Shokin.

At the time, Shokin’s office was investigating Burisma. Shokin told me he was making plans to question Hunter Biden about $3 million in fees that Biden and his partner, Archer, collected from Burisma through their American firm. Documents seized by the FBI in an unrelated case confirm the payments, which in many months totaled more than $166,000.

Some media outlets have reported that, at the time Joe Biden forced the firing in March 2016, there were no open investigations. Those reports are wrong. A British-based investigation of Burisma's owner was closed down in early 2015 on a technicality when a deadline for documents was not met. But the Ukraine Prosecutor General's office still had two open inquiries in March 2016, according to the official case file provided me. One of those cases involved taxes; the other, allegations of corruption. Burisma announced the cases against it were not closed and settled until January 2017.

After I first reported it in a column, the New York Times and ABC News published similar stories confirming my reporting.

Joe Biden has since responded that he forced Shokin’s firing over concerns about corruption and ineptitude, which he claims were widely shared by Western allies, and that it had nothing to do with the Burisma investigation.

Some of the new documents I obtained call that claim into question.

In a newly sworn affidavit prepared for a European court, Shokin testified that when he was fired in March 2016, he was told the reason was that Biden was unhappy about the Burisma investigation.
“The truth is that I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors,”
Click to expand...
Shokin testified.

“On several occasions President Poroshenko asked me to have a look at the case against Burisma and consider the possibility of winding down the investigative actions in respect of this company but I refused to close this investigation,” Shokin added.

Shokin certainly would have reason to hold a grudge over his firing. But his account is supported by documents from Burisma’s legal team in America, which appeared to be moving into Ukraine with intensity as Biden’s effort to fire Shokin picked up steam.

Burisma’s own accounting records show that it paid tens of thousands of dollars while Hunter Biden served on the board of an American lobbying and public relations firm, Blue Star Strategies, run by Sally Painter and Karen Tramontano, who both served in President Bill Clinton’s administration.

Just days before Biden forced Shokin’s firing, Painter met with the No. 2 official at the Ukrainian embassy in Washington and asked to meet officials in Kiev around the same time that Joe Biden visited there. Ukrainian embassy employee Oksana Shulyar emailed Painter afterward: “With regards to the meetings in Kiev, I suggest that you wait until the next week when there is an expected vote of the government’s reshuffle.”

Ukraine’s Washington embassy confirmed the conversations between Shulyar and Painter but said the reference to a shakeup in Ukrainian government was not specifically referring to Shokin’s firing or anything to do with Burisma.

Painter then asked one of the Ukraine embassy’s workers to open the door for meetings with Ukraine’s prosecutors about the Burisma investigation, the memos show. Eventually, Blue Star would pay that Ukrainian official money for his help with the prosecutor's office.

At the time, Blue Star worked in concert with an American criminal defense lawyer, John Buretta, who was hired by Burisma to help address the case in Ukraine. The case was settled in January 2017 for a few million dollars in fines for alleged tax issues.

Buretta, Painter, Tramontano, Hunter Biden and Joe Biden’s campaign have not responded to numerous calls and emails seeking comment.

On March 29, 2016, the day Shokin’s firing was announced, Buretta asked to speak with Yuriy Sevruk, the prosecutor named to temporarily replace Shokin, but was turned down, the memos show.

Blue Star, using the Ukrainian embassy worker it had hired, eventually scored a meeting with Sevruk on April 6, 2016, a week after Shokin’s firing. Buretta, Tramontano and Painter attended that meeting in Kiev, according to Blue Star’s memos.

Sevruk memorialized the meeting in a government memo that the general prosecutor’s office provided to me, stating that the three Americans offered an apology for the “false” narrative that had been provided by U.S. officials about Shokin being corrupt and inept.

“They realized that the information disseminated in the U.S. was incorrect and that they would facilitate my visit to the U.S. for the purpose of delivering the true information to the State Department management,” the memo stated.

The memo also quoted the Americans as saying they knew Shokin pursued an aggressive corruption investigation against Burisma’s owner, only to be thwarted by British allies: “These individuals noted that they had been aware that the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine had implemented all required steps for prosecution … and that he was released by the British court due to the underperformance of the British law enforcement agencies.”

The memo provides a vastly different portrayal of Shokin than Biden's. And its contents are partially backed by subsequent emails from Blue Star and Buretta that confirm the offer to bring Ukrainian authorities to meet the Obama administration in Washington.

For instance, Tramontano wrote the Ukrainian prosecution team on April 16, 2016, saying U.S. Justice Department officials, including top international prosecutor Bruce Swartz, might be willing to meet. “The reforms are not known to the US Justice Department and it would be useful for the Prosecutor General to meet officials in the US and share this information directly,” she wrote.

Buretta sent a similar email to the Ukrainians, writing that “I think you would find it productive to meet with DOJ officials in Washington” and providing contact information for Swartz. “I would be happy to help,” added Buretta, a former senior DOJ official.

Burisma, Buretta and Blue Star continued throughout 2016 to try to resolve the open issues in Ukraine, and memos recount various contacts with the State Department and the U.S. embassy in Kiev seeking help in getting the Burisma case resolved.

Just days before Trump took office, Burisma announced it had resolved all of its legal issues. And Buretta gave an interview in Ukraine about how he helped navigate the issues.

Today, two questions remain.

One is whether it was ethically improper or even illegal for Biden to intervene to fire the prosecutor handling Burisma’s case, given his son’s interests. That is one that requires more investigation and the expertise of lawyers.

The second is whether Biden has given the American people an honest accounting of what happened. The new documents I obtained raise serious doubts about his story’s credibility. And that’s an issue that needs to be resolved by voters.
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaig...-memos-cast-doubt-on-joe-bidens-ukraine-story
 
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