Dan gives the OK to have his 1st Chapter posted. Links (unaffiliated) are throughout to buy the book that I have already done.
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Link to buy book (non affiliate link – just buy it as you will see how good it is from the 1st chapter reproduced below – see his permissions above). This was written ages ago – long before the official narrative is now coming out.
The Hunter Biden Laptop – some more of the story
New video released 5th March 2022 – proving the Biden crime connections even more
CHAPTER 1 – Insane in Ukraine excerpt from – Follow The Money by Dan Bongino
Link to buy book (non affiliate link – just buy it as you will see how good it is from the 1st chapter reproduced below – see his permissions above). This was written ages ago – long before the official narrative is now coming out.
I’m going to start in the two places I ended my last book: Ukraine and Washington, DC.
Those are the locations where a group I call the Scandal Manufacturers of America (SMA) sources its best material.
The SMA is the unofficial coalition of crybaby Democrats, holier-than-thou liberal media pundits, and delusional Never-Trumpers who have dedicated themselves to the takedown of the elected president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.
I’ve already devoted two books to documenting and dismantling the SMA’s work. The first, Spygate, revealed how this group manufactured a bogus Russia-collusion story, which, fortunately, failed to stop or discredit the election of Trump.
The second, Exonerated, documented the plug-and-play efforts by Clinton operatives and senior law enforcement officials in the FBI and the Department of Justice to remove Trump from office by fabricating and laundering misleading “evidence” of a supposed conspiracy. As the world now knows, special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s mission to uncover that “evidence” was an utter failure.
For the record, much of that second book’s assertions about FBI and special investigator chicanery have been proven correct in a report issued by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General Michael Horowitz. That report concluded that applications used to obtain warrants used by the FBI to spy on Trump campaign advisor Carter Page contained seventeen major errors and omissions.
As for the infamous “Steele dossier,” the collection of fabrications, rumors, and lies about the Trump campaign, Horowitz concluded, “the FBI failed to reassess the Steele reporting relied upon in the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] applications, and did not fully advise the [National Security Division] or [Office of Intelligence], We also found that the FBI did not aggressively seek to obtain certain potentially important information from Steele.’-
Undaunted by two elaborate failures, the shameless Scandal Manufacturers of America pivoted to a new chapter in its senseless saga. Just months after the pointless Mueller probe came to an end, they decided to waste thousands of man-hours paralyzing Capitol Hill by launching impeachment proceedings to
remove the president.
As everyone knows, Ukraine was at the center of that effort. Or should I say, failed effort?
I’ll get into the absurdity of the impeachment case mounted against the president, but let’s zoom in on Ukraine. Why is this nation so important? Why is it a magnet for trouble? Why should a few sentences from the president of the United States to his counterpart in Kyiv, Volodymyr Zelensky, detonate hand-
wringing, sky-is-falling statements about the collapse of our republic?
Trump was doing what presidents do. But here are some quotes from the Ukraine experts trotted out by Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee to expose the so-called heinous behavior of the president. Let’s see if these excerpts fully explain this Eastern European enigma.
Ukraine is a battleground for great power competition, with a hot war for the control of territory and a hybrid war to control Ukraine’s leadership. —FORMER AMBASSADOR TO UKRAINE MARIE YOVANOVITCH.
Ukraine is a genuine and vibrant democracy and an example to other post-Soviet countries and beyond—from Moscow to Hong Kong. —DAVID HOLMES, Counselor for Political Affairs, U.S. Embassy, Ukraine.
Ukraine is a valued partner of the United States, and it plays an important role in our national security. —FIONA HILL, SENIOR DIRECTOR FOR EUROPEAN AND RUSSIAN Affairs, National Security Council.
Ukraine is making progress. —LIEUTENANT COLONEL ALEXANDER VINDMAN, DIRECTOR FOR EUROPEAN AFFAIRS, NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL-
The most accurate and honest description of Ukraine that I heard during the hearings didn’t actually come from the hearings. It came from a Seinfeld episode that someone emailed me.
You don’t have to be a fan of that particular sitcom to appreciate the prophetic political analysis that aired on January 19, 1995. In the key scene, Kramer, the show’s tall, gangly hipster, is playing the board game Risk on the subway—a funny image in and of itself—and he’s taunting his opponent.
“You know what Ukraine is?” he laughs. “It’s a sitting duck. It’s a road-apple.”
At least that is in the ballpark. Ukraine is a lot of things, obviously. It’s a country populated by wonderful, hard-working people who are desperate for honest leadership. Yet, the Ukrainians have been consistently let down by a broken political class eager for power and riches, and lacking in the one trait that could turn the political tide: morality.
The experts on the Hill weren’t actually wrong with their passing summaries. But they weren’t right, either. They didn’t tell the whole picture. As we dig deeper and deeper into the story and unravel the corrupt connections surrounding this chaotic country, no description may be more accurate than the one the creatures of the DC swamp should have offered under oath:
Ukraine is a giant, twenty-four-hour ATM. A broken slot machine that spewed out money to greedy politicos, lobbyists, and, yes, a son of the vice president of the United States.
That would have been accurate. Maybe not so much right now, when everyone is on their best behavior with the spotlight on Kyiv. But understanding the vast, money-printing, influence-peddling, backstabbing, dog-eat-dog corruption of Ukraine would have helped the world understand why Donald Trump was
having the conversation that set off the entire, absurd, impeachment charade.
Ukraine was an influence-peddling paradise. It was vital to Russian interests. It was vital to American interests. And that made it vital to anyone with self-interests in generating cash.
By now, Hunter Biden, the son of former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden, is the most famous of these human handout homing devices. But there were many swamp rats—from both sides of the aisle—who swooped into Kyiv to make mega-withdrawals.
I’ve documented a bunch of this, but we now know far more about the players and the sinister connections many of them shared.
Let’s start with the man who is really ground zero for all the manufactured Trump scandals: Paul Manafort.
Seriously. I’m not here to defend Manafort. He brought damaging baggage with him to the Trump campaign—serving first as a consultant and then the campaign chairman—and it cast a toxic shadow over the candidate’s entire organization.
Collusion hoaxers were all too happy to leverage Manafort’s shady dealings for political gain. In Exonerated, I explained how and why Manafort’s presence raised huge flags for Fusion GPS, the company hired by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to conduct “opposition research”—his links to Putin’s pals, billionaire Oleg Deripaska, and former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych were suspect.
Now Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson has confirmed all this in his own book, which came out two months after my book, noting the very same Wall Street Journal articles that I cited—imagine that!—and revealing he’d been tracking Manafort for years:
To Fusion, Manafort wasn’t just another Beltway bandit from yesteryear. He was a seminal figure in the annals of Washington consulting, a famously avaricious and venal operative…. Here was a consultant who had a history of blending foreign lobbying with his work on presidential campaigns, and, more
recently, had spent more than a decade working actively against U.S. interests in Europe….
Manafort lasted about six months with the Trump campaign. While Simpson and his operatives were scouring for dirt, Democratic National Committee consultant Alexandra Chalupa was also ringing alarm bells, telling anyone she could that Manafort was linked to Ukraine’s personal Putin puppet president
Yanukovych and his corrupt administration—which had been overthrown in a popular uprising.
But what brought Manafort down was a report in the New York Times about a mysterious black ledger.
“Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau,” the Times reported.
The Ukraine anti-corruption cops were also examining offshore companies that may have been used to funnel cash to Yanukovych’s cronies and hundreds of “murky” transactions, including an “$18 million deal to sell Ukrainian cable television assets to a partnership put together by Mr. Manafort” and his old Russian billionaire client Oleg Deripaska.
The allegations of possible wrong-doing involving Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, combined with a dip in polling numbers for the Trump campaign, forced Manafort to resign just five days after the black ledger report.
Here’s the thing: the initial reports of the black ledger strained credibility from day one. This giant, incriminating piece of evidence initially surfaced out of nowhere, just as Paul Manafort joined Team Trump. Ukrainian Parliament member Sergii Leshchenko said he received twenty-two pages of mysterious financial transactions in his mailbox in February 2016. Three months later, Viktor Trepak, former deputy head of the Security Service of Ukraine, revealed the ledger had been left on his doorstep, abandoned like a helpless orphan! It was eight hundred pages long and documented shocking transactions from 2007 to 2012.—Why would the thing exist at all?
Unless Ukraine gives tax deductions for illegal payouts, why leave a paper trail? Leshchenko offered up this explanation: “Perhaps the idea was that a paper document was safer because it can’t be stolen by hacking into the computer and law enforcement officers won’t find it if they seize equipment during a search.”— Okay. That’s possible. These guys aren’t all rocket scientists. And to be totally honest, the idea that someone would fabricate eight hundred pages is a little nuts when a hundred pages would suffice.
But if Leshchenko’s explanation is plausible, is it also within the bounds of reason that someone with scores to settle fabricated the document, too, and then circulated it? The provenance of the document has never been established. In terms of being verifiable, there is a legitimate argument that it’s as “real” as the Loch Ness Monster.
Manafort’s business partner Rick Gates, who was also a member of the Trump campaign team, told FBI agents and prosecutors from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team that the black ledger was a fake.
Gates had no reason to lie; he became a cooperating witness for the hapless Mueller team and eventually copped a plea deal.
“The ledger was completely made up,” Gates said in a written summary of an April 2018 special counsel’s interview, according to reporter John Solomon.— Gates then confirmed the veracity of the summary, telling Solomon, “The black ledger was a fabrication. It was never real, and this fact has since been proven
true.”
As for the New York Times story that set the black ledger narrative in motion? “The article was completely false,” he told Mueller’s team. “As you now know, there were no cash payments. The payments were wired. The ledger was completely made up.”
Gates also claimed the ledger didn’t fit with how Yanukovych’s party kept records. And if it did fit, it still should never have surfaced. “All the real records were burned when the party headquarters was set on fire when Yanukovych fled the country,” Gates told the investigators, according to the interview summary.—
So, what was the point of the black ledger? Who benefited from its existence?
The fact is, if the transactions in the ledger were true, they exposed Manafort’s failure to declare enormous sums of income, exposing him to potential money laundering charges. They also offered proof that Manafort had failed to register as a foreign agent working for Ukraine—although prosecuting anyone for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act was practically unheard of before the
Spygate scandal broke.
Seen in this light, the answer to the question of who benefited from the black ledger is: anyone who wanted to blow the whistle on Manafort’s legal problems.
That begs the question, who would want to see Donald Trump’s campaign chairman get in big trouble? Obviously, Trump’s opponents at this time were the likely suspects: Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, and a legion of Obama and Clinton loyalists who would be out of office and out of power if a Republican were to sit in the Oval Office.
In other words, hurting Trump’s campaign chief would unquestionably hurt Trump. But let’s cast a wider net. Damaging Trump wasn’t the original goal of the Scandal Manufacturers of America. Stopping him was.
So, getting the goods on Paul Manafort was ideal for a prosecutor looking to collect damning testimony.
And if you were a political operative looking to ruin an election campaign or cripple a presidency, cataloguing Manafort’s misdeeds was just what you needed.
For prosecutors and biased FBI agents hunting down evidence of Trump-campaign collusion with Russia, the black ledger was a dream come true. It created legal leverage to exert on Paul Manafort, the guy running the campaign, and Rick Gates, who was not only Manafort’s business partner but also served as the deputy campaign chairman.
If there was collusion, these would be the guys investigators would want to talk to. And the ledger provided a way to force Manafort and Gates to cooperate with the Trump-obsessed prosecutors and tell investigators everything they wanted to know.
Gates became a cooperating witness, pleading guilty to charges of conspiring to defraud the United States of millions he earned working for a political party in Ukraine and of lying to the FBI during an interview.— In terms of delivering evidence of collusion, Gates, despite his plea bargain deal, provided the Mueller witch hunters with zero damning evidence tying the president to collusion. The closest he came to any untoward Moscow mixing was a revelation that Manafort had Gates provide Konstantin Kilimnik—an employee of Deripaska—with meaningless campaign polling updates.
Yes, the FBI believed Kilimnik had ties to Russian intelligence, but it is also worth noting he was once a source for the Obama-era State Department. Here’s the Mueller Report’s own “blockbuster”
Manafort instructed Rick Gates, his deputy on the Campaign and a longtime employee, to provide Kilimnik with updates on the Trump Campaign—including internal polling data, although Manafort claims not to recall that specific instruction. Manafort expected Kilimnik to share that information with others in
Ukraine and with Deripaska.
Gates periodically sent such polling data to Kilimnik during the campaign.
Again, Manafort is no hero. He told Gates that steering information to Deripaska, who had reportedly launched a number of lawsuits against Manafort for missing funds, might help the campaign chair resolve his disputes with the powerful Russian oligarch.
But Mueller clearly gave both Gates and Manafort a pass on this issue—here’s the report’s discussion of the polling data:
…the Office could not assess what Kilimnik (or others he may have given it to) did with it. The Office did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort’s sharing polling data and Russia’s interference in the election, which had already been reported by U.S. media outlets at the time of the August 2
meeting. The investigation did not establish that Manafort otherwise coordinated with the Russian government on its election-interference efforts.
All this leads me to two points.
The first is that whatever the questionable black ledger revealed, it had nothing to do with Spygate and Russiagate. It was what mystery and movie writers call a “MacGuffin”—the issue, question, or event that sets a whole plot in motion. It’s the titular bird in The Maltese Falcon—the statue that every character covets.
It’s the search for the missing future groom Doug in bachelor-party-gone-wrong movie The Hangover. It’s the mystery behind the meaning of the “Rosebud,” the last word the protagonist utters before dying in the classic film Citizen Kane. The black ledger drove the collusion narrative. Manafort was a target as soon as he joined the Trump team, as I’ve previously documented. But the ledger cast a dark cloud of suspicion over Paul Manafort and the campaign, and it provided a way to disparage Trump and investigate Manafort and Team Trump.
And yet, what did it prove besides Manafort’s financial chicanery? Nothing. But it was just what
investigators needed to begin working on their failed takedown.
The second point is that the FBI and Mueller prosecutors used the information in the ledger to probe Manafort and create a blizzard of negative press reports about a top Trump associate. They followed his money, from Ukraine to shell companies and hidden bank accounts in Cyprus, Seychelles, and the Caribbean nation Saint Vincent and the Grenadines to the U.S.12Manafort and Gates weren’t the only ones abusing the 24/7/365 money machine that was Ukraine.
They were far from the only Americans with suspicious connections to corrupt officials with ties to both Moscow and Washington. And, as I’m going to reveal, others who were ready to dive into the cash-rich political world of Kyiv had plenty of presidential connections.
Not with Trump—but with Obama and Clinton.
And many of these players knew each other. They shared allegiances to previous administrations. Some were colleagues. Some were careerists. Some were craven operatives.
The Scandal Manufacturers of America conveniently ignored the unfortunate optics emanating from these citizens of the swamp and their behavior. But that’s It’s time to follow their money and connections.
THE SOROS CIRCLE, PART I
Just a month after the black ledger surfaced, other disturbing big money influencing operations were building up steam in the shadows of Ukraine. One of them involved figures who would turn up at the center of the Trump impeachment proceedings, including George Soros, the billionaire Democratic Party
underwriter, who has rarely met a liberal cause he didn’t like.
Soros has admitted that his foundation fund, at least originally, was formed out of self-interest. “A charitable lead trust is a very interesting tax gimmick,” he admitted in a bout of shocking candor. “The idea is that you commit your assets to a trust and you put a certain amount of money into charity every year. And then after you have given the money for however many years, the principal that remains can be left [to one’s heirs] without estate or gift tax.
So this was the way I set up the trust for my children.” Soros reportedly began by planning to donate up to $3 million a year for twenty years.— Since then, he has given away many multiples of that contribution plan by launching Open Society and providing it with $32 billion, while also donating at least $75 million to various political candidates.—
One of the places he donated to, at least indirectly, was Ukraine. In 2017, Soros gave $1 million to the Democracy Integrity Project (TDIP), a group founded by Daniel J. Jones to supposedly investigate interference in Western elections by hostile foreign powers. Jones, a former FBI analyst and staffer for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), wrangled over $7 million in revenue for his nonprofit, according to tax filings.
His group then paid $3,323,924 for “research consulting” to Bean LLC—the parent company of Fusion GPS.— But let’s reverse engineer this: Jones, it turns out, didn’t just hire the firm that kicked off the entire Spygate fiasco; Fusion GPS hired itself. Here, verbatim, is Glenn Simpson describing—in the third person—how The Democracy Integrity Project (TDIP) was born after Simpson reached out to Jones:
The two met in the conference room of Jones’s downtown office on the Sunday after the inauguration period.
Simpson told Jones the whole story from Fusion’s initial assignment, in 2015, to the events of the final days of the campaign. Jones had worked on various Russia-related security issues at the Intelligence Committee. He agreed that the United States was as unprepared to counter the new Russian security threat as it had been to cope with al-Qaeda 15 years before.
Simpson raised the idea of setting up a new group that could work with Fusion and other investigators around the world to expose Russian subversion operations in the United States and other western democracies. Jones said he thought it needed to be done—right away.
Okay. So, George Soros, who in 2015 gave $16 million to groups supporting Hillary Clinton, also gave $1 million to a group conceived of by Glenn Simpson.
Then, Simpson’s company, Fusion GPS, which initiated Spygate, was paid more than $3 million—almost half TDIP’s budget—to research how the Russian intelligence operations were influencing elections around the globe. I have no doubt Russian intelligence is trying to influence elections. The U.S. does it. China does it. That is what superpowers do. But Glenn Simpson, who obviously couldn’t figure out the difference between national interest and self-interest, was not the guy to spearhead this project. There is a preponderance of evidence that suggests he was a profiteering partisan hack.
Curiously, Soros wasn’t the only Clintonista to surface in the TDIP story. When Simpson and Jones appealed to the tech community, John Podesta—the former chief of staff for Bill Clinton and the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign—was “one of the most helpful,” according to Simpson.
Are you dizzy yet? Stay with me.
Podesta’s involvement is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, his personal Gmail account was compromised in a basic phishing attack that has been attributed to Russian hacking. Both Podesta and the DNC’s emails were widely released on Wikileaks, leading to a number of huge embarrassments for the
campaign Podesta ran. Among the revelations: interim DNC chair Donna Brazile obtained debate questions ahead of time for Hillary Clinton; the party was discussing creating liberal Catholic groups as part of its get-out-the-vote campaign, a potentially explosive covert campaign operation; and senior campaign leaders stated that supposed ally Saudi Arabia was backing ISIS’s war against the West. Never mind the irony of the man who suffered the most basic of online attacks making introductions to big tech firms; it is clear Podesta had a vested interest in Simpson’s project.
It’s not at all clear that the email interference helped Trump beat toxic Hillary, but nobody had a bigger revenge motive against Russian operatives than Podesta—unless you count Clinton.
The second curious thing is that John Podesta’s brother, Tony Podesta, was under investigation for cashing in on the Ukraine money train. As chairman of the Podesta Group, Tony was one of the biggest lobbying forces in the backwater known as Washington, DC. Although he worked both sides of the aisle, in 2016 he ponied up or raised nearly $900,000 in donations to Clinton and the Democratic Party.— In 2018, investigators probed the Podesta Group chairman for his ties to Paul Manafort and for possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. From 2012 to 2014, Podesta was paid at least $1.2 million to promote a Ukraine campaign conceived by Manafort and Gates, and backed by Viktor Yanukovych, the deposed pro-Russian Ukrainian president, and the Party of Regions.
About five years after cashing those checks, the Podesta Group filed with the FARA Registration Unit, claiming it had previously been told by the European Centre for Modern Ukraine that it was not “directly or indirectly supervised, directed, controlled, financed or supervised” by a foreign government or political
party.
Tony Podesta resigned from his post as this story broke. In September 2019, investigators closed the investigation without pressing charges. Former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig, however, was indicted for lying to the Justice Department and concealing information about work he did on the same project.
Craig beat the charges, but all of this speaks to the larger point: Ukraine was a fountain of funding for the denizens of the swamp, many of whom worked together on many different levels.
And few are woven as complexly as Soros.
THE SOROS CIRCLE, PART II
In 1990, Soros’s Open Society Foundation created the International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) in Ukraine to help foster the former Eastern Bloc country’s transition to democracy and a market economy. Four years later, the Open Society was pouring in $14 million a year for the IRF to distribute to various projects in Ukraine. Thirty years later, the IRF was still receiving nearly $8 million in funds from Soros’s group.
In 2014, the IRF “and its grantees were active supporters” in the creation of the Anti-Corruption Centre of Ukraine (AntAC).
AntAC, which received $289,285—that’s 17 percent of its total annual funding through the end of 2018—from Soros’s group,— was started when rampant corruption was plaguing Ukraine. It was instrumental in the creation of the National Anticorruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU)—a new, independent, government law-enforcement agency, separate from the prosecutor general’s office—to handle the biggest corruption cases.
NABU was set up with funding from Western governments. The Federal Bureau of Investigation also provided support.
In February 2015, Viktor Shokin was appointed the prosecutor general of Ukraine. As I reported in Exonerated, he quickly came under fire for helping the owner of energy company Burisma Holdings, Mykola Zlochevsky, regain control of $23 million that had been frozen by UK authorities. Zlochevsky, who
famously struck a deal appointing Hunter Biden, the train-wreck son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, to Burisma’s Board of Directors in May 2014, had been the ecology minister under former Putin pal Yanukovych.
Shokin later told investigative reporter John Solomon he had begun to initiate a Burisma probe. This “included interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.”
Shokin did not get to question anyone, however, because Joe Biden, the vice president of the United States at the time, threatened to withhold a $ 1 billion loan to Ukraine unless Shokin was removed.
According to bragging Biden’s own videotaped account, he attended a meeting with Ukrainian president Poroshenko and then-Prime Minister Yatsenyuk and said, ‘“I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.
And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”
Interestingly, nobody accused Biden of an illicit quid pro quo when he proudly told the story at an event for the Council on Foreign Relations in early 2018. But even more interesting is that by targeting Shokin for removal, Biden was pushing out a man on record as saying he was going to investigate Burisma and
interview his son Hunter. I blew the whistle on Biden’s incredibly suspect behavior in Exonerated, but it can’t be overstated just how inappropriate his actions were.
Biden responded by claiming Shokin was corrupt, as have some other Shokin critics, and that may or may not be accurate. But what is absolutely undeniable is that Biden was forcing a foreign government—our ally—to conduct itself in a certain way (by firing the prosecutor looking into the company his
son was working for) or lose access to a massive financial aid package in the form of a loan.
Fast-forward to May 2020 and the extent to which the removal of Shokin was a quid pro quo deal, engineered by Biden, became even more clear than it was before and more shocking in Biden’s brazen “my-way-or-the-highway” behavior.
On May 19, 2020, Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach released tapes of alleged calls between Biden and Ukrainian president Poroshenko. In one call, Poroshenko admits doing Biden’s dirty work. In another, Biden states that he is releasing a $ 1 billion loan because Shokin was bounced.
“Despite the fact that (Shokin) didn’t have any corruption charges, we don’t have any information about him doing something wrong, I especially asked him…to resign,” Poroshenko told Biden in a recording from February 18, 2016.
In another recording—apparently made on March 22, 2016, the date the White House issued a press release confirming the two leaders talked22—Biden and Poroshenko discussed who could be appointed prosecutor general, and the eventual replacement, Yuriy Lutsenko, was mentioned. Poroshenko even offered to find another candidate if Biden wanted.
After the deal was done, Biden made explicit he would deliver the quid for Poroshenko’s quo: “I’m a man of my word. And now that the new prosecutor general is in place, we’re ready to move forward to signing that new $1 billion loan guarantee.”
Can Biden’s inappropriate actions—for his son’s personal gains—get ANY clearer?
And yet the mainstream media continues to act like Biden’s behavior is perfectly acceptable, swallowing Biden camp dismissals wholesale.
Ladies and gentlemen, Joe Biden committed a quid pro quo deal in full daylight and admitted it. He is the true Teflon politician. If this won’t stick, what will?
In 2016, as the U.S. presidential election heated up, Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office began an investigation into AntAC (which was heavily funded by Soros) about the possible misuse of $2.2 million of funds and had an inquiry sent to then-U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt. George Kent, the charge d’affaires
that’s diplomatic-speak for the second-in-command at an embassy—responded to Deputy Prosecutor General Yuriy Stolyarchuk with a two-page letter that said the United States had “no concerns about the use of our assistance funds” and noted “we have accounted for every single foreign assistance dollar” spent on projects in Ukraine.
Deep into the letter, however, Kent then pressured Stolyarchuk about AntAC. “The investigation into the Anti-Corruption Action Center, based on the assistance they have received from us, is similarly misplaced,” Kent wrote on April 4, 2016,— less than a week after Shokin was removed from office. So, at the time, the letter arrived with a void at Ukraine’s top legal office as no replacement had been named.
Kent was obviously applying pressure to the agency over Soros’s pet project. This pressure from American diplomats didn’t stop, according to Yuri Lutsenko, Shokin’s replacement. The new prosecutor general attended a meeting with the new U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, and said he was shocked when she “gave me a list of people whom we should not prosecute.” He claimed the list included a founder of AntAC and two members of Parliament who supported the group, according to a John Solomon report.
The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv called Shokin’s charge a fabrication. But Solomon has reported that numerous Ukrainian sources confirmed there was American pressure to back off AntAC. The message to Ukraine officials, Solomon relayed, was “Don’t target AntAC in the middle of an American presidential election in
which Soros was backing Hillary Clinton to succeed another Soros favorite, Barack Obama.”
Or as another top Ukrainian official put it: “We ran right into a buzzsaw and we got bloodied.”
Lutsenko, the former minister of interior affairs of Ukraine, said he thought American embassy bigwigs didn’t want to call attention to Ukrainian anti-corruption measures. “At the time, Ms. Ambassador thought our interviews of the Ukrainian citizens, of the Ukrainian civil servants who were frequent visitors
in the U.S. Embassy could cast a shadow on that anti-corruption policy,” he said.
Why would Charge d’Affaires George Kent and Ambassador Yovanovitch try to influence the investigations occurring in a sovereign country? To answer that question, it helps to remember the probe was focused on an organization that had the backing of the Obama administration, the State Department, some in the FBI, and a certain billionaire private citizen who has injected himself into U.S. and global politics at an almost unprecedented level.
Nobody wanted an investigation because it might expose sinister connections that defy coincidence and destroy a false liberal narrative that they are the movement looking to defeat and expose monied influences in politics.
This becomes clear in light of the memos Solomon uncovered from Soros’s Open Society Foundations advocating U.S. involvement in Ukraine and offering “behind the scenes advice and support to Ukrainian partner Anti-Corruption Action Centre’s efforts to generate corruption litigation in Europe and the U.S.
respecting state assets stolen by senior Ukrainian leaders.”
Solomon reported the memo contained a chart of Ukrainians to be investigated, “including some with ties to Manafort.”— Although he doesn’t name names, it is highly likely that the memo mentioned Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian billionaire. Soros has energy interests in Europe, as does Firtash. And there is little doubt the men are rivals.
But in 2015, a year before all this drama, Firtash beat civil charges asserting he had engaged in money laundering with Manafort.
Remember, all this pressure on Ukrainian prosecutors was happening in the spring of 2016 just when Paul Manafort had joined Team Trump and the underdog candidate was shocking the world by trouncing all-comers in the Republican primaries to become the presumptive nominee. Also at this time, Glenn Simpson was padding his bank account while conducting “opposition research” on Trump and setting up his hit on Manafort.
Meanwhile, Alexandra Chalupa, the DNC Ukraine expert, was yapping to anyone who would listen about Manafort’s dirty money connections. And now, it turns out that a foundation owned by Soros, the biggest liberal donor in the universe, was interested in probing Manafort’s other Ukraine associates and was actually funding the perfect vehicle to do that: AntAC.
Is anyone surprised that the U.S. embassy wanted to stop inquiries that might look into and derail AntAC’s work? Especially if that organization might “uncover” more dirt to kick on the Trump campaign chairman—and if that dirt-digging operation was backed by a man who was giving Hillary Clinton millions of dollars for her failed campaign?
The connections are staggering.
They make you think Ukraine isn’t the only country with a corruption problem.
THE SOROS CIRCLE, PART III
AntAC wasn’t the only Soros-funded group to target Firtash. In 2018, the Open Society-backed Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission charging that a Russian-speaking Ukrainian businessman named Igor Fruman and a Russian-born businessman named Lev Parnas created Global Energy Producers, LLC as a shell corporation to anonymously funnel $325,000 to a pro-Trump super PAC.
This kicked off an investigation into Parnas and Fruman which uncovered a $1 million payment to Parnas’ wife from Firtash’s lawyer. I don’t want to spend too much time on this. But again, here we have Ukraine big shots with millions of dollars engaging in corrupt behavior, and others vying for influence with top
American leadership. Duped by Parnas and Fruman’s questionable credentials, Firtash may have been under the impression that they had the pull and clout to make his legal hassles vanish. Instead, the donation-happy duo are now being prosecuted.
Infuriatingly, when the head of Burisma does something very similar, like showering absurd amounts of cash on Hunter Biden, the establishment response is “Nothing to see here. Move along.”
If AntAC had focused on the Biden fiasco, it might have turned up a newly surfaced document from early 2016 that flagged “suspicious” transactions involving Burisma and voiced concern about the company’s ties to the vice president’s son. An alarming memo dated February 18, 2016, from a Latvian
investigative agency alerted Ukraine’s financial authorities to a probe.
“The Office for Prevention of Laundering of Proceeds Derived from Criminal Activity…is currently investigating suspicious activity of Burisma Holdings Limited,” read the notice from the Latvian watchdog agency. As John Solomon reported: The Latvian law enforcement memo identified a series of loan payments totaling about $16.6 million that were routed from companies in Belize and the
United Kingdom to Burisma through Ukraine’s PrivatBank between 2012 and 2015.
The flagged funds were “partially transferred” to Hunter Biden, a board member at Burisma since May 2014, and three other officials working for the Ukrainian natural gas company, the Latvian memo said.—
The Latvian inquiry stalled when Ukrainian officials failed to respond.—But this just adds to the dark cloud of suspicion and possible malfeasance surrounding the Bidens and their questionable ties to a company engulfed in widespread allegations of corruption.
Given that, you’d think that AntAC, the so-called anti-corruption champion, would be interested in probing this relationship. But when your benefactor is an enormous investor in the Democratic Party committed to spending millions to try and stop Trump, maybe that investigation isn’t very appealing.
Anyone who thinks Soros isn’t fixated on stopping Trump is dreaming. In March 2020, as America was besieged by COVID-19, the lethal coronavirus that started in China and nearly crippled the entire world, Soros’s Democracy political action committee donated $3 million to Priorities USA Action, the Democratic
Party’s super PAC. The money was earmarked to fund a series of ads in four swing states attacking Trump’s response to the virus.— Amazing. Instead of donating that money to hospitals or struggling workers or small businesses, Soros remained fixated on removing the president.
Instead of purchasing respirators and ventilators with his vast wealth, he used the cash to pump out ads insulting Trump. If Soros wants to complain about the spread of the virus in the U.S., he should start with the totalitarian communist country that locked itself down and then foisted the virus on the world by refusing to seal its borders.
That country is China, and its ruling party is hell-bent on destabilizing the West. The blame for COVID-19 starts and ends with Beijing, as I explain more fully in Chapter 9 of this book.
Soros’s contribution to this ignoble cause was his second donation to Priorities USA Action in 2020. His PAC had given $2 million in JanuaryIt is anyone’s guess how many more millions he will spend in the run-up to the November election that, as of June 2020, will have him backing quid pro quo Joe Biden, the
proud father of handout happy Hunter Biden.
THE WIDENING CIRCLE
There are other characters in the Ukraine story who are worth noting. They orbit between the Obama White House, U.S. law enforcement and intelligence divisions, the world of Soros, and, of course, Ukraine.
FBI agent Karen Greenaway, a veteran money-laundering expert, was sent to Ukraine during the Obama administration to help the Prosecutor General’s Office track funds. Senior members of the FBI, as I documented in Exonerated, and as Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirmed, have been instrumental in waging a campaign against Trump.
But I have every belief the vast majority of agents at the bureau are nonpartisan law enforcement professionals. I have no way of knowing what Agent Greenaway’s politics are. But I do know that she recently retired from the bureau and promptly signed on to become a board member of AntAC.
Assuming this is a paid position—most board gigs are—Greenaway is now also part of the Soros cabal, whether she likes it or not.
AntAC is run by Daria Kaleniuk, an American-educated lawyer. She has been, as you might expect, an outspoken defender of her organization, noting that “the E.U., the U.S., the governments of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic, the Global Fund” have supplied her organization with financial support.— And, while that is no doubt true, it doesn’t diminish the clout or influence of America’s premiere political patron. In fact, AntAC lists its donors on its website in apparent decreasing order:
U.S. government
EU and Member States governments
Private international funds
Charitable donations from companies and individuals.
This makes it seem that the contribution from Soros’s foundation would be the least significant. But that is misleading since we know that it gave millions in previous years, including 2019 when Soros donations accounted for 17 percent of the budget. If the six entities Kaleniuk names gave as much as Soros—6 x 17
percent—well, that would come to 102 percent. And that’s without including Soros’s donation!
All of which is to say that AntAC’s efforts to distance itself from Soros should be taken with a mountainous grain of salt.
What is also true—and this is very important—is that, according to White House logs, Kaleniuk visited the White House on December 9, 2015. While there, she reportedly met with Eric Ciaramella, a CIA employee working on the National Security Council. Getting meetings in the White House is no easy thing. You
need connections. How did Kaleniuk rate? Who opened those doors for her? Why did she meet with Ciaramella? We don’t know exactly. But we do know that Ciaramella was very interested in Ukraine.
Very, very interested.
How do we know this? Forgive me, but I don’t want to get too far ahead of the story.
The Obama White House, it turns out, was an unofficial club for Ukraine obsessives. The logs also reveal that Alexandra Chalupa visited the White House twenty-seven times. Was she there on DNC business or her crusade to expose Manafort? Did she meet with the CIA’s Ciaramella?
Because as it turns out, the enigmatic CIA operative Ciaramella met with several leading members of the Scandal Manufacturers of America. Keep him in the back of your mind because he will reappear in a very prominent role by the end of this book.
Update added 7th April 2022 copied from X22report.com
Joe Biden’s Released Tax Returns Don’t Explain Millions In Income. Where Did It Come From?
- “While (Joe Biden’s) financial disclosures reasonably support the $2.7 million of net income reported by CelticCapri in 2018, a notable $8.7 million gap exists between its $9.5 million net income in 2017 and the $809,709 of disclosed income in that year from book tour and related speaking events. Since his disclosure covers only part of 2017, we lack the insight into other income that may explain it.”
- Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., recently showed proof of payments from what they said were CCP-controlled firms “that prove just how connected the Bidens were and how compromised President Biden probably is.” An August 2017 wire receipt showed $100,000 sent from CEFC Infrastructure Investment to Owasco, and a copy of a November 2017 check from CEFC Limited revealed $1 million paid to Hudson West III, LLC. Both recipient entities were tied to the president’s son.
- Did any of that money, or other overseas income, go to Joe or Jill? We would know if the president provided a copy of their S-Corp. tax returns with all partner K-1’s that flowed through them. But the only detail we have is aggregate numbers reported on the couple’s individual returns.
As it stands, we’re left to trust USA Today that Jill grossed $3 million (royalties plus about $700,000 from speaking fees) for a book that sold only 7,000 copies in its first week, and that from that book deal she netted more than $1 million in the two years prior to its release, but only $175,319 in the year it was published (2019). It’s possible an advance was paid, but could a publisher have justified that amount?
- The Numbers Don’t Add Up
- We are told that Joe netted $12.2 million (after expenses) in the same deal for a book that sold 300,000 copies. Excluding the $4.2 million earned from touring and speaking, that yields $8 million of income that we are to assume came from book royalties (higher if we know his gross revenues before expenses).
- For analysis purposes, consider that his book had a retail price of $27 for hardcover and $18 for paperback, and assume a reasonable mix of sales so the average price was $23 (with no discounting). On 300,000 books sold, gross revenues would’ve been just under $7 million. As an author, Joe would’ve likely received about 12 percent of that using a blended royalty rate (15 percent hardcover and 7.5 percent paperback typical from publishers), yielding about $800,000 income. Round it up to $1 million if you prefer. Double it. It’s still not close to $8 million.
