"The Hill" articles beginning March 20, 2019
Hill Staff
Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch presented her official credentials to President @Poroshenko. Congratulations!
Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko (click here) told Hill.TV's John Solomon in an interview that aired Wednesday that U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch gave him a do not prosecute list during their first meeting.
“Unfortunately, from the first meeting with the U.S. ambassador in Kiev, [Yovanovitch] gave me a list of people whom we should not prosecute,” Lutsenko, who took his post in 2016, told Hill.TV last week.
“My response of that is it is inadmissible. Nobody in this country, neither our president nor our parliament nor our ambassador, will stop me from prosecuting whether there is a crime,” he continued....
It would seem as though the relationship between the US Ambassador and the Prosecutor General Lutsenko had a poor relationship. There is a question from the Prosecutor General Lutsenko as to the distribution of $4.4 million dollars designated for his office.
There is nothing here about Joe or Hunter Biden. The next article is about a probe opened into US Election interference. I believe the Prosecutor General decided there had to be problems within Ukraine because of the involvement and prosecution in the USA of Paul Manafort.
Ukraine is a sovereign country and does not need the permission of the USA to conduct any probe into any subject they deem important to their country. It is completely understandable that Ukraine would feel a responsibility to understand the movements and activities of Paul Manafort considering the brevity of the situation with the Trump Campaign. Additionally, Ukraine is very conscience about the issue of corruption from the country's past and attempts to stem such problems in the future.
March 20, 2019
By Hill TV Staff
Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko (click here) told Hill.TV’s John Solomon in an interview aired on Wednesday that he has opened a probe into alleged attempts by Ukrainians to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
“Today we will launch a criminal investigation about this and we will give legal assessment of this information,” Lutsenko said last week.
Lutsenko is probing a claim from a member of the Ukrainian parliament that the director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), Artem Sytnyk, attempted to influence the 2016 vote to the benefit of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
A State Department spokesman told Hill.TV that officials are aware of news reports regarding Sytnyk.
"We have always emphasized the need for deep, comprehensive, and timely reforms that respond to the demands the Ukrainian people made during the Revolution of Dignity: an end to systemic corruption, faster economic growth, and a European future for all Ukrainians," a State spokesperson told Hill.TV....
...Solomon asked Lutsenko about reports that a member of Ukraine’s parliament obtained a tape of the current head of the NABU saying that he was attempting to help Clinton win the 2016 presidential election, as well as connections that helped release the black-ledger files that exposed Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s wrongdoing in Ukraine....
The article spells out the fact Paul Manafort took money from the former President Yanukovych's party for some time and recorded in record books called the black ledger. A member of the Ukraine Parliament stated the Director of the Anti-corruption agency made an illegal investigation into these "black ledger" entires and it would benefit the Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her presidential campaign. The Director of the Anti-Corruption agency in Ukraine was Artem Sytnyk.
Of course, anyone in Ukraine with any knowledge of an illegal investigation into potential corruption that would benefit one candidate or another would report such things. So, this article seems to report the beginning of an inquiry into an illegal investigation. If these allegations are true the benefit of the Clinton Campaign would come in the form of exposure of Paul Manafort and the monies paid to him. Since Paul Manafort was the Campaign Chairman of the Trump Campaign, it would bring disgrace to Mr. Trump.
The reason Paul Manafort resigned from the Trump Campaign was due to reports in the USA media that he was involved with Russia and Ukraine. The black ledger files are real and they were brought forward in the Special Counsel report. Of course, Paul Manafort is in prison now. The exposure of the black ledger files was important to the USA FBI. The worry by the member of parliament is after the fact of the discovery of the monies paid to Paul Manafort. It is understandable a member of the Ukraine parliament would seek to understand the corruption involved within their sovereign borders.
There is nothing here about Former Vice President Biden or his son.
This is interesting and just came from CNN. I think it closes the case on Joe and Hunter Biden. There was a bipartisan concern for the corruption in Ukraine and the end to it. The Prosecutor General's Office under Shokin was considered to be corrupt, hence, ending his career.
October 3, 2019
By Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck
A newly unearthed letter (click here) from 2016 shows that Republican senators pushed for reforms to Ukraine's prosecutor general's office and judiciary, echoing calls then-Vice President Joe Biden made at the time.
CNN's KFile found a February 2016 bipartisan letter signed by several Republican senators that urged then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to "press ahead with urgent reforms to the Prosecutor General's office and judiciary."
The letter shows that addressing corruption in Ukraine's Prosecutor General's office had bipartisan support in the US and further undercuts a baseless attack made by President Donald Trump and his allies that Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire then Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin to stop investigations into a Ukrainian natural gas company that his son, Hunter Biden, sat on the board of. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Joe or Hunter Biden, nor is it clear whether Hunter was under investigation at all.
Trump called the 2016 dismissal of the Ukrainian prosecutor "unfair" in his July 25 call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, saying, "A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved," according to the rough transcript of the phone call.
The 2016 letter, sent by members of the Senate Ukraine Caucus, was signed by Republican Sens. Rob Portman, Mark Kirk and Ron Johnson, as well as Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin, Jeanne Shaheen, Chris Murphy, Sherrod Brown, and Richard Blumenthal and focused on longstanding issues of corruption in Ukraine and urged reforms of the government....
Continued in the next entry.
