The Biden clan still needs to explain why a vice president’s son was enjoying a $50,000-per-month gig for which his principal qualification appears to have been his last name. But Joe Biden isn’t the only pillar of the Democratic establishment who won’t enjoy the new spotlight on American relations with Ukraine. And President Donald Trump isn’t the only one who wants a fuller accounting of that country’s role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
In a letter released on Monday morning, Republican senators Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin ask U.S. Attorney General William Barr if he’s trying to answer the lingering questions:
We write to follow up on Senator Grassley’s July 20, 2017 letter, which highlighted brazen efforts by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign to use the government of Ukraine for the express purpose of finding negative information on then candidate Trump in order to undermine his campaign. That letter also highlighted news reports that, during the 2016 presidential election, “Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump” and did so by “disseminat[ing] documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggest[ing] they were investigating the matter[.]” Ukrainian officials also reportedly “helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.”
The senators aren’t relying on reports from conservative bloggers. The quotations come from a 2017 story in Politico, hardly a pro-Trump outfit. “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire,” read the headline on the article by Kenneth P. Vogel and David Stern. “Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton,” said the subhead of the article, which was published shortly before Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
The authors reported that Ukrainian government officials “helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers” with the goal of “advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia.”
With the benefit of hindsight and the results of the Mueller investigation, it’s now clear that there was no evidence of Trump campaign collusion with Russia. What is not clear and what demands further investigation is how this baseless claim managed to consume the first two years of an American presidency.
Among the questions to resolve: the Politico story featured what appear to be contradictory statements about the level of help provided to Democrats by people who worked at the Ukrainian embassy in Washington in 2016. “Politico’s investigation found evidence of Ukrainian government involvement in the race that appears to strain diplomatic protocol dictating that governments refrain from engaging in one another’s elections,” according to the report.
The reporting certainly appears solid but one should not simply accept all the particulars of the Politico story as proven fact, just as—to take an extreme example—a reasonable person would not authorize the wiretap of an opposition political campaign based on a dispatch from Yahoo News. But the Politico piece may be helpful in figuring out exactly how the surveillance tools of America’s national security apparatus were turned against the party out of power in 2016.
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‘Trillion Has Become the New Billion’
Speaking of Politico stories, taxpayers may suspect that they are the targets of a horrifying political conspiracy when they read today’s report from Brian Faler on the Democratic presidential race:
Virtually every major candidate has a proposal that would cost a trillion dollars or more, and even those positioning themselves as moderates, like Pete Buttigieg, have multiple trillion-dollar plans.
It increasingly looks like an arms race in which case a proposal needs a 13-digit price tag to appear bold and plans costing mere billions risk being taken as not serious. Both Kamala Harris and Julián Castro have $10 trillion plans to address climate change…
Sanders has at least four mega-proposals dealing with Medicare, climate change, college-tuition costs and, most recently, affordable housing…
Even Amy Klobuchar, who has repeatedly criticized her opponents’ proposals as unrealistically large, has a $1 trillion infrastructure plan.
Ukraine Donated the Most Cash of Any Country to the Clinton Foundation – True Pundit
A shocking new report reveals that Ukraine donated more money to the Clinton Foundation than any other county on Earth.
Ukraine beat out both of those countries — and everyone else — by donating a whopping $10 million to the Clinton Foundation.
See this chart for yourself, published in The Wall Street Journal, about contributions made between 1999 and 2014:
“Ukraine became a vast pool of U.S. taxpayer-funded ‘aid’ that poured into that long-corrupt nation and then saw piles of kickbacks returned to powerful and politically connected recipients,” according to a report in DC Clothesline. – READ MORE
“The far-Left media is still trying to ignore how many times Joe Biden grabbed some of that Ukraine stash for his family but chances are it wasn’t anywhere near what the Clintons did — and all with the blessing of President [Barack] Obama,” the same outlet also claims.
It then quotes from an earlier report in The Wall Street Journal from 2015 about funding: “Between 2009 and 2013, including when Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state, the Clinton Foundation received at least $8.6 million from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, according to that foundation, which is based in Kiev, Ukraine. It was created by Mr. Pinchuk, whose fortune stems from a pipe-making company. He served two terms as an elected member of the Ukrainian Parliament and is a proponent of closer ties between Ukraine and the European Union.”
The outlet then went on to “connect the dots that bind Mr. Pinchuk and the Obama White House” by quoting from another piece, this one an opinion piece by Andrew McCarthy in Fox News from a little over a week ago: “It is in connection with Paul Manafort that we encounter some genuine collusion targeting the 2016 campaign: willful collaboration among foreign governments, the Obama administration, and the Clinton campaign.”
“Manafort had brought influential Democrats into his Ukrainian work, such as former Obama White House Counsel Greg Craig and the consulting firm started by Obama and Clinton adviser John Podesta — a firm that is still run by Podesta’s brother.”
“Leshchenko just happens to be a vassal of Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian billionaire who just happens to give millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation. Wonder of wonders, Leshchenko took a public, strident anti-Trump position during the U.S. campaign — highly unusual for a foreign parliamentarian,” the McCarthy piece also said.
McCarthy’s piece then also added, “Which brings us back to Serhiy Leshchenko, Ukraine’s unabashed Clinton backer. And [what do you] know: Besides serving the government in Kiev and providing scintillating geopolitical analysis, Leshchenko had a side job: He was a source for … wait for it … Fusion GPS — the Clinton campaign-opposition arm, led by Glenn Simpson, which later dreamed up the Steele dossier.”
The fact that Democrats think the American people are unable to “connect the dots” says a lot about how smug, elite and “out-of-touch” these people are.
Gone are the days when we would just take what they or their media flunkies said at face value. Thanks to Trump, those days are long gone.
Someone should alert the Democrats — because they’re still playing the same old game.
It’s more than obvious that people who are most connected to Ukraine, Russia and China are the politicians who have been in D.C. for three generations or more, in my view — not the guy who just arrived in the swamp three years ago.
— Read on truepundit.com/ukraine-donated-the-most-cash-of-any-country-to-the-clinton-foundation/