Story 1: Unfair Partisan Democrat Impeachment Inquiry Ends– No Evidence of Bribery or Quid Pro Que — American People Unconvinced That President Trump Did Anything Wrong — American People Do Not Support Impeachment of President Trump — House Speaker Pelosi Will Not Call For An Impeachment Vote Arguing The Republican Senate Will Not Convict President Trump of A Non-existent Crime or Impeachment Offense — American People Will Elect President Trump For A Second Term in Landslide of 70 Million Votes and Over 330 Electoral College Votes — Elections Have Consequences — Schiff Parody of Richard III Cries– A Horse A Horse My Kingdom for A Horse — The End — Videos
rab·bit hole
noun
1.
a rabbit’s burrow.
“a heather-covered hillside full of rabbit holes”
2.
used to refer to a bizarre, confusing, or nonsensical situation or environment, typically one from which it is difficult to extricate oneself.
“he’ll continue fearmongering to promote his agenda no matter how far down the rabbit hole it takes him”
Jefferson Airplane White Rabbit (Live At Woodstock 1969)
One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you, don’t do anything at all
Go ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall
And if you go chasing rabbits, and you know you’re going to fall
Tell ’em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call
And call Alice, when she was just small
When the men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go
And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom, and your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice, I think she’ll know
When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead
And the white knight is talking backwards
And the red queen’s off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head, feed your head
Fox News Live: Trump impeachment hearing Day 5 – Fiona Hill testifies
Rep. Devin Nunes Opening Statement
Fiona Hill Opening Statement
David Holmes Opening Statement
Day 5, Part 6: Devin Nunes and Steve Castor question Fiona Hill and David Holmes
WATCH: Republican counsel and Rep. Nunes’ full questioning of Hill and Holmes
Nunes presses Fiona Hill over the Steele dossier and its origins
WATCH: Rep. Jim Jordan speaks during testimony by Hill and Holmes | Trump impeachment hearings
WATCH: Rep. Nunes’ full closing statement in Hill and Holmes hearing | Trump impeachment hearings
WATCH: Democratic counsel’s full questioning of Hill and Holmes | Trump impeachment hearings
WATCH: Rep. Adam Schiff’s full questioning of David Holmes | Trump impeachment hearings
ADAM SCHIFF ERUPTS: Closing Statement On CONTENTIOUS Impeachment Hearing
EXCLUSIVE: Rudy Giuliani Responds to Dems’ ‘Quid Pro Quo’ Claims Amid Impeachment Hearings
Glenn Beck Lays Out the Case Against The Media
Glenn Beck Presents: The Democrats’ Hydra
Biden’s Ukraine Scandal Explained I Glenn Beck
House GOP speak following the fifth public impeachment hearing
Tucker’s big takeaways from the Trump impeachment saga
The Doors – The End – Live At Hollywood Bowl 1968
The Doors Lyrics
Play “The End”
on Amazon Music
“The End”
This is the end Beautiful friend This is the end My only friend
The end Of our elaborate plans The end Of everything that stands The end No safety or surprise The end I’ll never look into your eyes Again
Can you picture what will be So limitless and free Desperately in need of some stranger’s hand In a desperate land
Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain And all the children are insane All the children are insane Waiting for the summer rain, yeah
There’s danger on the edge of town Ride the king’s highway, baby Weird scenes inside the gold mine Ride the highway west, baby
Ride the snake, ride the snake To the lake The ancient lake Baby
The snake is long, seven miles Ride the snake He’s old And his skin is cold
The west is the best The west is the best Get here, and we’ll do the rest
The blue bus is callin’ us The blue bus is callin’ us Driver, where you taking us
The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on He took a face from the ancient gallery And he walked on down the hall He went into the room where his sister lived, and…then he Paid a visit to his brother, and then he He walked on down the hall, and And he came to a door…and he looked inside “Father?” “Yes, son.” “I want to kill you.” “Mother, I want to…”
C’mon babe
C’mon baby, take a chance with us C’mon baby, take a chance with us C’mon baby, take a chance with us And meet me at the back of the blue bus Doin’ a blue rock On a blue bus Doin’ a blue rock C’mon, yeah
This is the end Beautiful friend This is the end My only friend, the end
It hurts to set you free But you’ll never follow me The end of laughter and soft lies The end of nights we tried to die
This is the end
The Doors – Riders On The Storm (ORIGINAL!) – driving with Jim
The Doors Lyrics
Play “Riders On The Storm”
on Amazon Music (ad)
“Riders On The Storm”
Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Into this house we’re born
Into this world we’re thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out on loan
Riders on the stormThere’s a killer on the road
His brain is squirmin’ like a toad
Take a long holiday
Let your children play
If you give this man a ride
Sweet family will die
Killer on the road, yeahGirl, you gotta love your man
Girl, you gotta love your man
Take him by the hand
Make him understand
The world on you depends
Our life will never end
Gotta love your man, yeahRiders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Into this house we’re born
Into this world we’re thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out on loan.
Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Riders On The Storm – (The Doors) Extended Remastered Version
Hill was born in Bishop Auckland, County Durham in northern England, the daughter of a coal miner, Alfred Hill, and a midwife, June Murray. Her father died in 2012; her mother still resides in Bishop Auckland.[1] In the 1960s, after the last of the local coal mines had closed, her father wanted to emigrate to find work in the mines of Pennsylvania or West Virginia, but his mother’s poor health required him to stay in England.[2] Her family struggled financially; June sewed clothes for her daughters and at age 13, Fiona began working at odd jobs, including washing cars and working as a waitress at a local hotel.[1]
Hill served as an intelligence analyst under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama from 2006 to 2009. She was appointed, in the first quarter of 2017, by President Donald Trump as Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs on his National Security Council staff,[6][5][7] and resigned her position on July 19, 2019.[8]
Fiona Hill (center left) with John R. Bolton at a meeting with Vladimir Putin on June 27, 2018
She testified in public before the same body on November 21, 2019.[12] While being questioned by Steve Castor, the counsel for the House Intelligence Committee’s Republican minority, Hill commented on Gordon Sondland‘s involvement in the Ukraine matter: “It struck me when (Wednesday), when you put up on the screen Ambassador Sondland’s emails, and who was on these emails, and he said these are the people who need to know, that he was absolutely right,” she said. “Because he was being involved in a domestic political errand, and we were being involved in national security foreign policy. And those two things had just diverged.”[13] In response to a question from that committee’s chairman, Rep. Adam Schiff, Hill stated: “The Russians’ interests are frankly to delegitimize our entire presidency.… The goal of the Russians [in 2016] was really to put whoever became the president — by trying to tip their hands on one side of the scale — under a cloud.”[14]
Solomon: These once-secret memos cast doubt on Joe Biden’s Ukraine story
BY JOHN SOLOMON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 09/26/19 06:00 PM EDT 11,214
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
96,086
Former Vice President Joe Biden, now a 2020 Democratic presidential contender, has locked into a specific story about the controversy in Ukraine.
He insists that, in spring 2016, he strong-armed Ukraine to fire its chief prosecutor solely because Biden believed that official was corrupt and inept, not because the Ukrainian was investigating a natural gas company, Burisma Holdings, that hired Biden’s son, Hunter, into a lucrative job.
There’s just one problem.
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.
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,” 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.
John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill. Follow him on Twitter @jsolomonReports.
Story 1: Unfair Partisan Democrat Impeachment Inquiry Ends– No Evidence of Bribery or Quid Pro Que — American People Unconvinced That President Trump Did Anything Wrong — American People Do Not Support Impeachment of President Trump — House Speaker Pelosi Will Not Call For An Impeachment Vote Arguing The Republican Senate Will Not Convict President Trump of A Non-existent Crime or Impeachment Offense — American People Will Elect President Trump For A Second Term in Landslide of 70 Million Votes and Over 330 Electoral College Votes — Elections Have Consequences — Schiff Parody of Richard III Cries– A Horse A Horse My Kingdom for A Horse — The End — Videos
rab·bit hole
noun
1.
a rabbit’s burrow.
“a heather-covered hillside full of rabbit holes”
2.
used to refer to a bizarre, confusing, or nonsensical situation or environment, typically one from which it is difficult to extricate oneself.
“he’ll continue fearmongering to promote his agenda no matter how far down the rabbit hole it takes him”
Jefferson Airplane White Rabbit (Live At Woodstock 1969)
One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you, don’t do anything at all
Go ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall
And if you go chasing rabbits, and you know you’re going to fall
Tell ’em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call
And call Alice, when she was just small
When the men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go
And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom, and your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice, I think she’ll know
When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead
And the white knight is talking backwards
And the red queen’s off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head, feed your head
Fox News Live: Trump impeachment hearing Day 5 – Fiona Hill testifies
Rep. Devin Nunes Opening Statement
Fiona Hill Opening Statement
David Holmes Opening Statement
Day 5, Part 6: Devin Nunes and Steve Castor question Fiona Hill and David Holmes
WATCH: Republican counsel and Rep. Nunes’ full questioning of Hill and Holmes
Nunes presses Fiona Hill over the Steele dossier and its origins
WATCH: Rep. Jim Jordan speaks during testimony by Hill and Holmes | Trump impeachment hearings
WATCH: Rep. Nunes’ full closing statement in Hill and Holmes hearing | Trump impeachment hearings
WATCH: Democratic counsel’s full questioning of Hill and Holmes | Trump impeachment hearings
WATCH: Rep. Adam Schiff’s full questioning of David Holmes | Trump impeachment hearings
ADAM SCHIFF ERUPTS: Closing Statement On CONTENTIOUS Impeachment Hearing
EXCLUSIVE: Rudy Giuliani Responds to Dems’ ‘Quid Pro Quo’ Claims Amid Impeachment Hearings
Glenn Beck Lays Out the Case Against The Media
Glenn Beck Presents: The Democrats’ Hydra
Biden’s Ukraine Scandal Explained I Glenn Beck
House GOP speak following the fifth public impeachment hearing
Tucker’s big takeaways from the Trump impeachment saga
The Doors – The End – Live At Hollywood Bowl 1968
The Doors Lyrics
Play “The End”
on Amazon Music
“The End”
This is the end Beautiful friend This is the end My only friend
The end Of our elaborate plans The end Of everything that stands The end No safety or surprise The end I’ll never look into your eyes Again
Can you picture what will be So limitless and free Desperately in need of some stranger’s hand In a desperate land
Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain And all the children are insane All the children are insane Waiting for the summer rain, yeah
There’s danger on the edge of town Ride the king’s highway, baby Weird scenes inside the gold mine Ride the highway west, baby
Ride the snake, ride the snake To the lake The ancient lake Baby
The snake is long, seven miles Ride the snake He’s old And his skin is cold
The west is the best The west is the best Get here, and we’ll do the rest
The blue bus is callin’ us The blue bus is callin’ us Driver, where you taking us
The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on He took a face from the ancient gallery And he walked on down the hall He went into the room where his sister lived, and…then he Paid a visit to his brother, and then he He walked on down the hall, and And he came to a door…and he looked inside “Father?” “Yes, son.” “I want to kill you.” “Mother, I want to…”
C’mon babe
C’mon baby, take a chance with us C’mon baby, take a chance with us C’mon baby, take a chance with us And meet me at the back of the blue bus Doin’ a blue rock On a blue bus Doin’ a blue rock C’mon, yeah
Hill was born in Bishop Auckland, County Durham in northern England, the daughter of a coal miner, Alfred Hill, and a midwife, June Murray. Her father died in 2012; her mother still resides in Bishop Auckland.[1] In the 1960s, after the last of the local coal mines had closed, her father wanted to emigrate to find work in the mines of Pennsylvania or West Virginia, but his mother’s poor health required him to stay in England.[2] Her family struggled financially; June sewed clothes for her daughters and at age 13, Fiona began working at odd jobs, including washing cars and working as a waitress at a local hotel.[1]
Hill served as an intelligence analyst under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama from 2006 to 2009. She was appointed, in the first quarter of 2017, by President Donald Trump as Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs on his National Security Council staff,[6][5][7] and resigned her position on July 19, 2019.[8]
Fiona Hill (center left) with John R. Bolton at a meeting with Vladimir Putin on June 27, 2018
She testified in public before the same body on November 21, 2019.[12] While being questioned by Steve Castor, the counsel for the House Intelligence Committee’s Republican minority, Hill commented on Gordon Sondland‘s involvement in the Ukraine matter: “It struck me when (Wednesday), when you put up on the screen Ambassador Sondland’s emails, and who was on these emails, and he said these are the people who need to know, that he was absolutely right,” she said. “Because he was being involved in a domestic political errand, and we were being involved in national security foreign policy. And those two things had just diverged.”[13] In response to a question from that committee’s chairman, Rep. Adam Schiff, Hill stated: “The Russians’ interests are frankly to delegitimize our entire presidency.… The goal of the Russians [in 2016] was really to put whoever became the president — by trying to tip their hands on one side of the scale — under a cloud.”[14]
Solomon: These once-secret memos cast doubt on Joe Biden’s Ukraine story
BY JOHN SOLOMON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 09/26/19 06:00 PM EDT 11,214
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
96,086
Former Vice President Joe Biden, now a 2020 Democratic presidential contender, has locked into a specific story about the controversy in Ukraine.
He insists that, in spring 2016, he strong-armed Ukraine to fire its chief prosecutor solely because Biden believed that official was corrupt and inept, not because the Ukrainian was investigating a natural gas company, Burisma Holdings, that hired Biden’s son, Hunter, into a lucrative job.
There’s just one problem.
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.
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,” 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.
John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill. Follow him on Twitter @jsolomonReports.
The Pronk Pops blog is the broadcasting and mass communication of ideas about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, prosperity, truth, virtue and wisdom.
The Pronk Pops Show 1364, November 21, 2019, Part 1 of 2: Story 1: Unfair Partisan Democrat Impeachment Inquiry Ends– No Evidence of Bribery or Quid Pro Que — American People Unconvinced That President Trump Did Anything Wrong — American People Do Not Support Impeachment of President Trump — House Speaker Pelosi Will Not Call For An Impeachment Vote Arguing The Republican Senate Will Not Convict President Trump of A Non-existent Crime or Impeachment Offense — American People Will Elect President Trump For A Second Term in Landslide of 70 Million Votes and Over 330 Electoral College Votes — Elections Have Consequences — Schiff Parody of Richard III Cries– A Horse A Horse My Kingdom for A Horse — The End — Videos
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Richard III Act 5 Scene 4
Part 1 of 2
Story 1: Unfair Partisan Democrat Impeachment Inquiry Ends– No Evidence of Bribery or Quid Pro Que — American People Unconvinced That President Trump Did Anything Wrong — American People Do Not Support Impeachment of President Trump — House Speaker Pelosi Will Not Call For An Impeachment Vote Arguing The Republican Senate Will Not Convict President Trump of A Non-existent Crime or Impeachment Offense — American People Will Elect President Trump For A Second Term in Landslide of 70 Million Votes and Over 330 Electoral College Votes — Elections Have Consequences — Schiff Parody of Richard III Cries– A Horse A Horse My Kingdom for A Horse — The End — Videos
rab·bit hole
noun
Jefferson Airplane White Rabbit (Live At Woodstock 1969)
And the ones that mother gives you, don’t do anything at all
Tell ’em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call
And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom, and your mind is moving low
And the white knight is talking backwards
And the red queen’s off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head, feed your head
Fox News Live: Trump impeachment hearing Day 5 – Fiona Hill testifies
Rep. Devin Nunes Opening Statement
Fiona Hill Opening Statement
David Holmes Opening Statement
Day 5, Part 6: Devin Nunes and Steve Castor question Fiona Hill and David Holmes
WATCH: Republican counsel and Rep. Nunes’ full questioning of Hill and Holmes
Nunes presses Fiona Hill over the Steele dossier and its origins
WATCH: Rep. Jim Jordan speaks during testimony by Hill and Holmes | Trump impeachment hearings
WATCH: Rep. Nunes’ full closing statement in Hill and Holmes hearing | Trump impeachment hearings
WATCH: Democratic counsel’s full questioning of Hill and Holmes | Trump impeachment hearings
WATCH: Rep. Adam Schiff’s full questioning of David Holmes | Trump impeachment hearings
ADAM SCHIFF ERUPTS: Closing Statement On CONTENTIOUS Impeachment Hearing
EXCLUSIVE: Rudy Giuliani Responds to Dems’ ‘Quid Pro Quo’ Claims Amid Impeachment Hearings
Glenn Beck Lays Out the Case Against The Media
Glenn Beck Presents: The Democrats’ Hydra
Biden’s Ukraine Scandal Explained I Glenn Beck
House GOP speak following the fifth public impeachment hearing
Tucker’s big takeaways from the Trump impeachment saga
The Doors – The End – Live At Hollywood Bowl 1968
The Doors Lyrics
“The End”
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend
The end
Of our elaborate plans
The end
Of everything that stands
The end
No safety or surprise
The end
I’ll never look into your eyes
Again
Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Desperately in need of some stranger’s hand
In a desperate land
Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain, yeah
There’s danger on the edge of town
Ride the king’s highway, baby
Weird scenes inside the gold mine
Ride the highway west, baby
Ride the snake, ride the snake
To the lake
The ancient lake
Baby
The snake is long, seven miles
Ride the snake
He’s old
And his skin is cold
The west is the best
The west is the best
Get here, and we’ll do the rest
The blue bus is callin’ us
The blue bus is callin’ us
Driver, where you taking us
The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall
He went into the room where his sister lived, and…then he
Paid a visit to his brother, and then he
He walked on down the hall, and
And he came to a door…and he looked inside
“Father?” “Yes, son.” “I want to kill you.”
“Mother, I want to…”
C’mon babe
C’mon baby, take a chance with us
C’mon baby, take a chance with us
C’mon baby, take a chance with us
And meet me at the back of the blue bus
Doin’ a blue rock
On a blue bus
Doin’ a blue rock
C’mon, yeah
Fuck, fuck-ah, yeah
Fuck
Fuck
Fuck, fuck
Fuck, fuck, fuck, yeah
C’mon, yeah, c’mon, yeah
Fuck me, baby, fuck yeah
Fuck, fuck, fuck, yeah!
Fuck, yeah! C’mon, baby
Fuck me, baby, fuck, fuck, yeah
Whoa, whoa, yeah, fuck, baby
C’mon, yeah, huh, huh, huh, huh, yeah
All right
Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill
This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
It hurts to set you free
But you’ll never follow me
The end of laughter and soft lies
The end of nights we tried to die
This is the end
Fiona Hill (presidential advisor)
Jump to navigationJump to search
April 2017 – July 19, 2019
2006–2009
Barack Obama
Bishop Auckland, County Durham, England
Fiona Hill (born October 1965) is a British-born American foreign affairs specialist. She is a former official at the U.S. National Security Council specializing in Russian and European affairs. She was a witness in the November 2019 House hearings regarding the impeachment of President Trump.
Contents
Early life and education
Hill was born in Bishop Auckland, County Durham in northern England, the daughter of a coal miner, Alfred Hill, and a midwife, June Murray. Her father died in 2012; her mother still resides in Bishop Auckland.[1] In the 1960s, after the last of the local coal mines had closed, her father wanted to emigrate to find work in the mines of Pennsylvania or West Virginia, but his mother’s poor health required him to stay in England.[2] Her family struggled financially; June sewed clothes for her daughters and at age 13, Fiona began working at odd jobs, including washing cars and working as a waitress at a local hotel.[1]
She and her sister attended Bishop Barrington School, a local comprehensive school. In 2017, she recalled applying for the University of Oxford: “I applied to Oxford in the ’80s and was invited to an interview. It was like a scene from Billy Elliot: people were making fun of me for my accent and the way I was dressed. It was the most embarrassing, awful experience I had ever had in my life.” She then studied history and Russian at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.[1] In 1987, she was an exchange student in the Soviet Union, where while interning for NBC News, she witnessed the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty by Ronald Reaganand Mikhail Gorbachev.[1] An American professor encouraged Hill to apply for a graduate program in the U.S.[2]
She studied at Harvard University, where she gained her master’s degree in Russian and modern history in 1991, and her PhD in history in 1998 under Richard Pipes, Akira Iriye, and Roman Szporluk. While at Harvard, she was a Frank Knox Fellow, and met her future husband, Kenneth Keen, at Cabot House.[3]
Hill became a US citizen in 2002.[4]
Career
Hill worked in the research department at the John F. Kennedy School of Government from 1991 to 1999, and at the National Intelligence Council as a national intelligence analyst of Russia and Eurasia from 2006 to 2009. In 2017, she took a leave of absence from the Brookings Institution, where she was director for the Center on the United States and Europe, while serving on the National Security Council. Hill is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the board of trustees of the Eurasia Foundation.[5]
Hill served as an intelligence analyst under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama from 2006 to 2009. She was appointed, in the first quarter of 2017, by President Donald Trump as Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs on his National Security Council staff,[6][5][7] and resigned her position on July 19, 2019.[8]
Fiona Hill (center left) with John R. Bolton at a meeting with Vladimir Putin on June 27, 2018
Impeachment testimony
On October 14, 2019, responding to a subpoena, Hill testified in a closed-door deposition for ten hours before special committees of the United States Congress as part of the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump.[9][10][11]
She testified in public before the same body on November 21, 2019.[12] While being questioned by Steve Castor, the counsel for the House Intelligence Committee’s Republican minority, Hill commented on Gordon Sondland‘s involvement in the Ukraine matter: “It struck me when (Wednesday), when you put up on the screen Ambassador Sondland’s emails, and who was on these emails, and he said these are the people who need to know, that he was absolutely right,” she said. “Because he was being involved in a domestic political errand, and we were being involved in national security foreign policy. And those two things had just diverged.”[13] In response to a question from that committee’s chairman, Rep. Adam Schiff, Hill stated: “The Russians’ interests are frankly to delegitimize our entire presidency.… The goal of the Russians [in 2016] was really to put whoever became the president — by trying to tip their hands on one side of the scale — under a cloud.”[14]
Selected works
Hill’s books include:
See also
References …
External links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiona_Hill_(presidential_advisor)
Solomon: These once-secret memos cast doubt on Joe Biden’s Ukraine story
BY JOHN SOLOMON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 09/26/19 06:00 PM EDT 11,214
96,086
Former Vice President Joe Biden, now a 2020 Democratic presidential contender, has locked into a specific story about the controversy in Ukraine.
He insists that, in spring 2016, he strong-armed Ukraine to fire its chief prosecutor solely because Biden believed that official was corrupt and inept, not because the Ukrainian was investigating a natural gas company, Burisma Holdings, that hired Biden’s son, Hunter, into a lucrative job.
There’s just one problem.
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,” 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.
John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill. Follow him on Twitter @jsolomonReports.
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/463307-solomon-these-once-secret-memos-cast-doubt-on-joe-bidens-ukraine-story
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Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 1139-1144
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 1131-1138
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 1122-1130
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 1112-1121
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 1101-1111
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 1091-1100
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 1082-1090
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 1073-1081
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 1066-1073
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 1058-1065
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 1048-1057
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 1041-1047
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 1033-1040
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 1023-1032
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 1017-1022
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 1010-1016
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 1001-1009
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 993-1000
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 984-992
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 977-983
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 970-976
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 963-969
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 955-962
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 946-954
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 938-945
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 926-937
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 916-925
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 906-915
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 889-896
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 884-888
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 878-883
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 870-877
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 864-869
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 857-863
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 850-856
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 845-849
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 840-844
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 833-839
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 827-832
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 821-826
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 815-820
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 806-814
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 800-805
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 793-799
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 785-792
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 777-784
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 769-776
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 759-768
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 751-758
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 745-750
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 738-744
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 732-737
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 727-731
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 720-726
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 713-719
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 705-712
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 695-704
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 685-694
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 675-684
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 668-674
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 660-667
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 651-659
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 644-650
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 637-643
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 629-636
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 617-628
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 608-616
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 599-607
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 590-598
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 585- 589
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 575-584
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 565-574
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 556-564
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 546-555
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 538-545
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 532-537
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 526-531
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 519-525
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 510-518
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 500-509
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 490-499
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 480-489
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 473-479
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 464-472
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 455-463
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Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 439-446
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 431-438
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 422-430
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 414-421
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 408-413
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 400-407
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 391-399
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 383-390
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 376-382
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 369-375
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 360-368
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 354-359
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 346-353
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 338-345
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 328-337
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 319-327
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 307-318
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 296-306
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 287-295
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 277-286
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 264-276
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 250-263
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 236-249
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 222-235
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 211-221
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 202-210
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 194-201
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 184-193
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 174-183
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 165-173
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 158-164
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 151-157
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 143-150
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 135-142
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 131-134
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 124-130
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 121-123
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 118-120
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 113 -117
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Show 112
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 108-111
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 106-108
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 104-105
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 101-103
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 98-100
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 94-97
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Show 93
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Show 92
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Show 91
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 88-90
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 84-87
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 79-83
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 74-78
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 71-73
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 68-70
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 65-67
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 62-64
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 58-61
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 55-57
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 52-54
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 49-51
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 45-48
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 41-44
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 38-40
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 34-37
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 30-33
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 27-29
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 17-26
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 16-22
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 10-15
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 1-9