Guiliani, Trump, and Ukraine

[Anonymous]

We need the names of the State Department people who arranged meetings for Rudy and the Ukrainian government knowing it was for Trumps campaign.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hope for a response from someone with governmental expertise. Is it proper for the President's personal lawyer to be engaging with foreign governments on behalf of his client's interests? And if these are national interests, is it proper for the President's personal lawer to be handling them?

The coverage suggests Giuliani reached out to new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s team this summer solely because he wanted to get dirt on possible Trump 2020 challenger Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s business dealings in that country.

Politics or law could have been part of Giuliani’s motive, and neither would be illegal.

But there is a missing part of the story that the American public needs in order to assess what really happened: Giuliani’s contact with Zelensky adviser and attorney Andrei Yermak this summer was encouraged and facilitated by the U.S. State Department.

Giuliani didn’t initiate it. A senior U.S. diplomat contacted him in July and asked for permission to connect Yermak with him.

Then, Giuliani met in early August with Yermak on neutral ground — in Spain — before reporting back to State everything that occurred at the meeting.

That debriefing occurred Aug. 11 by phone with two senior U.S. diplomats, one with responsibility for Ukraine and the other with responsibility for the European Union, according to electronic communications records I reviewed and interviews I conducted.

When asked on Friday, Giuliani confirmed to me that the State Department asked him to take the Yermak meeting and that he did, in fact, apprise U.S. officials every step of the way.

“I didn’t even know who he (Yermak) really was, but they vouched for him. They actually urged me to talk to him because they said he seemed like an honest broker,” Giuliani told me. “I reported back to them (the two State officials) what my conversations with Yermak were about. All of this was done at the request of the State Department.”

So, rather than just a political opposition research operation, Giuliani’s contacts were part of a diplomatic effort by the State Department to grow trust with the new Ukrainian president, Zelensky, a former television comic making his first foray into politics and diplomacy.

Why would Ukraine want to talk to Giuliani, and why would the State Department be involved in facilitating it?

According to interviews with more than a dozen Ukrainian and U.S. officials, Ukraine’s government under recently departed President Petro Poroshenko and, now, Zelensky has been trying since summer 2018 to hand over evidence about the conduct of Americans they believe might be involved in violations of U.S. law during the Obama years.

The Ukrainians say their efforts to get their allegations to U.S. authorities were thwarted first by the U.S. embassy in Kiev, which failed to issue timely visas allowing them to visit America.

Then the Ukrainians hired a former U.S. attorney — not Giuliani — to hand-deliver the evidence of wrongdoing to the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York, but the federal prosecutors never responded.

The U.S. attorney, a respected American, confirmed the Ukrainians’ story to me. The allegations that Ukrainian officials wanted to pass on involved both efforts by the Democratic National Committee to pressure Ukraine to meddle in the 2016 U.S. election as well as Joe Biden’s son’s effort to make money in Ukraine while the former vice president managed U.S.-Ukraine relations, the retired U.S. attorney told me.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/462422-missing-piece-to-the-ukraine-puzzle-state-departments-overture-to-rudy

John Solomon, author of the above and opinion contributor to The Hill, is not a credible person.

There have never been substantiated claims that Joe Biden was involved in shady dealings or trying to help his son profit from his own powerful post as VP.

The New Yorker, a credible news source, did an exhaustive story on Hunter Biden and did not find evidence of Ukrainian wrongdoing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Trump withheld Congressionally allocated military funds from an ally in order to force them to start a bogus investigation of Biden's son. Ukraine is fighting a war against Russia - remember?

This is 100% indefensible, so don't even try.

Did Maddow tell you that?

I don't know where you grew up, but where I'm from, the American President doesn't shake down foreign leaders to force them to get him dirt on his political opponents.

Read the article linked above.
I give Trump credit for forcing the media to cover not-so-positive stories about Democrats.
Even the WaPo is starting to take note.

Joe Biden intended to spend Friday talking about climate change and his long-standing support for the gay and lesbian community.

Instead, he was thrust into the center of the latest White House scandal — that President Trump allegedly urged the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden’s son Hunter.

Suddenly, Biden faced two dueling realities: The president he is hoping to defeat next year — and who he describes as morally unfit for office — is under scrutiny for behavior some view as treasonous. But the story is inextricably linked to Biden’s son, pushing one of the topics that Biden is least comfortable discussing into the spotlight.

The challenge of taking advantage of this political moment without becoming ensnared was evident by how Biden responded to the news Friday afternoon. First, he reacted defensively in an exchange with reporters in Iowa. Then later, in a formal statement from his campaign, he forcefully denounced Trump’s actions.

“Not one single credible outlet has given any credibility to his assertions. Not one single one,” Biden told reporters in Iowa on Friday afternoon, referring to the allegations related to his son, after initially ignoring shouted questions.

“And so I have no comment,” he said. “Except the president should start to, uh, be president.”

But two hours later, Biden’s campaign released a written statement that was far more robust. While his initial response was to defend his family’s honor, his second statement focused on Trump’s behavior.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trumps-ukraine-scandal-may-also-hurt-bidens-campaign/2019/09/20/772aaba0-dbe6-11e9-ac63-3016711543fe_story.html

I get it. You're one of those hardcore Trumpers who'll believe anything except that your guy is a crook. Sorry, but I have zero interest in your lame conspiracy theories.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hope for a response from someone with governmental expertise. Is it proper for the President's personal lawyer to be engaging with foreign governments on behalf of his client's interests? And if these are national interests, is it proper for the President's personal lawer to be handling them?

The coverage suggests Giuliani reached out to new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s team this summer solely because he wanted to get dirt on possible Trump 2020 challenger Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s business dealings in that country.

Politics or law could have been part of Giuliani’s motive, and neither would be illegal.

But there is a missing part of the story that the American public needs in order to assess what really happened: Giuliani’s contact with Zelensky adviser and attorney Andrei Yermak this summer was encouraged and facilitated by the U.S. State Department.

Giuliani didn’t initiate it. A senior U.S. diplomat contacted him in July and asked for permission to connect Yermak with him.

Then, Giuliani met in early August with Yermak on neutral ground — in Spain — before reporting back to State everything that occurred at the meeting.

That debriefing occurred Aug. 11 by phone with two senior U.S. diplomats, one with responsibility for Ukraine and the other with responsibility for the European Union, according to electronic communications records I reviewed and interviews I conducted.

When asked on Friday, Giuliani confirmed to me that the State Department asked him to take the Yermak meeting and that he did, in fact, apprise U.S. officials every step of the way.

“I didn’t even know who he (Yermak) really was, but they vouched for him. They actually urged me to talk to him because they said he seemed like an honest broker,” Giuliani told me. “I reported back to them (the two State officials) what my conversations with Yermak were about. All of this was done at the request of the State Department.”

So, rather than just a political opposition research operation, Giuliani’s contacts were part of a diplomatic effort by the State Department to grow trust with the new Ukrainian president, Zelensky, a former television comic making his first foray into politics and diplomacy.

Why would Ukraine want to talk to Giuliani, and why would the State Department be involved in facilitating it?

According to interviews with more than a dozen Ukrainian and U.S. officials, Ukraine’s government under recently departed President Petro Poroshenko and, now, Zelensky has been trying since summer 2018 to hand over evidence about the conduct of Americans they believe might be involved in violations of U.S. law during the Obama years.

The Ukrainians say their efforts to get their allegations to U.S. authorities were thwarted first by the U.S. embassy in Kiev, which failed to issue timely visas allowing them to visit America.

Then the Ukrainians hired a former U.S. attorney — not Giuliani — to hand-deliver the evidence of wrongdoing to the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York, but the federal prosecutors never responded.

The U.S. attorney, a respected American, confirmed the Ukrainians’ story to me. The allegations that Ukrainian officials wanted to pass on involved both efforts by the Democratic National Committee to pressure Ukraine to meddle in the 2016 U.S. election as well as Joe Biden’s son’s effort to make money in Ukraine while the former vice president managed U.S.-Ukraine relations, the retired U.S. attorney told me.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/462422-missing-piece-to-the-ukraine-puzzle-state-departments-overture-to-rudy

John Solomon, author of the above and opinion contributor to The Hill, is not a credible person.

There have never been substantiated claims that Joe Biden was involved in shady dealings or trying to help his son profit from his own powerful post as VP.

The New Yorker, a credible news source, did an exhaustive story on Hunter Biden and did not find evidence of Ukrainian wrongdoing.

But the two women who wrote the Kav book are
We’ll see how credible Solomon is when heads start rolling.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hope for a response from someone with governmental expertise. Is it proper for the President's personal lawyer to be engaging with foreign governments on behalf of his client's interests? And if these are national interests, is it proper for the President's personal lawer to be handling them?

The coverage suggests Giuliani reached out to new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s team this summer solely because he wanted to get dirt on possible Trump 2020 challenger Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s business dealings in that country.

Politics or law could have been part of Giuliani’s motive, and neither would be illegal.

But there is a missing part of the story that the American public needs in order to assess what really happened: Giuliani’s contact with Zelensky adviser and attorney Andrei Yermak this summer was encouraged and facilitated by the U.S. State Department.

Giuliani didn’t initiate it. A senior U.S. diplomat contacted him in July and asked for permission to connect Yermak with him.

Then, Giuliani met in early August with Yermak on neutral ground — in Spain — before reporting back to State everything that occurred at the meeting.

That debriefing occurred Aug. 11 by phone with two senior U.S. diplomats, one with responsibility for Ukraine and the other with responsibility for the European Union, according to electronic communications records I reviewed and interviews I conducted.

When asked on Friday, Giuliani confirmed to me that the State Department asked him to take the Yermak meeting and that he did, in fact, apprise U.S. officials every step of the way.

“I didn’t even know who he (Yermak) really was, but they vouched for him. They actually urged me to talk to him because they said he seemed like an honest broker,” Giuliani told me. “I reported back to them (the two State officials) what my conversations with Yermak were about. All of this was done at the request of the State Department.”

So, rather than just a political opposition research operation, Giuliani’s contacts were part of a diplomatic effort by the State Department to grow trust with the new Ukrainian president, Zelensky, a former television comic making his first foray into politics and diplomacy.

Why would Ukraine want to talk to Giuliani, and why would the State Department be involved in facilitating it?

According to interviews with more than a dozen Ukrainian and U.S. officials, Ukraine’s government under recently departed President Petro Poroshenko and, now, Zelensky has been trying since summer 2018 to hand over evidence about the conduct of Americans they believe might be involved in violations of U.S. law during the Obama years.

The Ukrainians say their efforts to get their allegations to U.S. authorities were thwarted first by the U.S. embassy in Kiev, which failed to issue timely visas allowing them to visit America.

Then the Ukrainians hired a former U.S. attorney — not Giuliani — to hand-deliver the evidence of wrongdoing to the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York, but the federal prosecutors never responded.

The U.S. attorney, a respected American, confirmed the Ukrainians’ story to me. The allegations that Ukrainian officials wanted to pass on involved both efforts by the Democratic National Committee to pressure Ukraine to meddle in the 2016 U.S. election as well as Joe Biden’s son’s effort to make money in Ukraine while the former vice president managed U.S.-Ukraine relations, the retired U.S. attorney told me.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/462422-missing-piece-to-the-ukraine-puzzle-state-departments-overture-to-rudy

And liberals keep yapping despite this

Because it is totally inappropriate for State Department officials to do that. The information was passed on to the appropriate US officials and they did not see a case. The State Department is done after that. Rudy Giuliani is not a representative of the U.S. government. Bringing him in was an inappropriately political action.

[Anonymous]

The New York Times also investigated the Bidens and their connections to Ukraine, but did not find any credible assertions of wrongdoing.

No media outlet, including Fox News, has found anything at all in connection with this story.

However, Giuliani and Trump et al. have been trying to push this story for months in the hope it will get traction. Since there it apparently nothing there, they have accused the media of a cover-up.

Personally, I have never liked Biden and didn't want him as a Democratic candidate. But it's not only unfair to accuse him of things he hasn't done just to sink his Presidential chances, the way Trump went about it, it's also impeachable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Biden might be in jail before the primaries

There is no evidence.

Journalists have been on the case for months. Believe me, if there had been something to find, they'd have found it. Getting an exclusive on such a well-known politician would be career-boosting for a journalist.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The New York Times also investigated the Bidens and their connections to Ukraine, but did not find any credible assertions of wrongdoing.

No media outlet, including Fox News, has found anything at all in connection with this story.

However, Giuliani and Trump et al. have been trying to push this story for months in the hope it will get traction. Since there it apparently nothing there, they have accused the media of a cover-up.

Personally, I have never liked Biden and didn't want him as a Democratic candidate. But it's not only unfair to accuse him of things he hasn't done just to sink his Presidential chances, the way Trump went about it, it's also impeachable.

ITA.. with everything. I'm sure if there was sh1t to be found, Fox News would've done their due diligence to find it. But they didn't. Trump pressing a foreign leader to find dirt about a political rival is bordering on a strong arm dictator. He is the swamp.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think the more appropriate question is .... Is it appropriate for Joe Biden to make funds to Ukraine contingent on the firing of a prosecutor.
This is quid pro quo.

Why is the media not looking into this?

Because your stable genius would have ordered one by now if it was true.

[Anonymous]

Trump introduced the conspiracy about Biden. Now I bet the GRU troll farms will start a ton of memes and social media posts about the Biden conspiracy to push Trump for 2020 elections.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think the more appropriate question is .... Is it appropriate for Joe Biden to make funds to Ukraine contingent on the firing of a prosecutor.
This is quid pro quo.

Why is the media not looking into this?

Nope you’re wrong. That isn’t the more appropriate question.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Trump withheld Congressionally allocated military funds from an ally in order to force them to start a bogus investigation of Biden's son. Ukraine is fighting a war against Russia - remember?

This is 100% indefensible, so don't even try.

Did Maddow tell you that?

Maddow has been right about almost everything because she uses really journalists and experts as sources.

For 2 years she pushed the collusion theory. 'Nough said.

Yes and what part of it was false? Are you oblivious to the Mueller report or just reading any news in general?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hope for a response from someone with governmental expertise. Is it proper for the President's personal lawyer to be engaging with foreign governments on behalf of his client's interests? And if these are national interests, is it proper for the President's personal lawer to be handling them?

The coverage suggests Giuliani reached out to new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s team this summer solely because he wanted to get dirt on possible Trump 2020 challenger Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s business dealings in that country.

Politics or law could have been part of Giuliani’s motive, and neither would be illegal.

But there is a missing part of the story that the American public needs in order to assess what really happened: Giuliani’s contact with Zelensky adviser and attorney Andrei Yermak this summer was encouraged and facilitated by the U.S. State Department.

Giuliani didn’t initiate it. A senior U.S. diplomat contacted him in July and asked for permission to connect Yermak with him.

Then, Giuliani met in early August with Yermak on neutral ground — in Spain — before reporting back to State everything that occurred at the meeting.

That debriefing occurred Aug. 11 by phone with two senior U.S. diplomats, one with responsibility for Ukraine and the other with responsibility for the European Union, according to electronic communications records I reviewed and interviews I conducted.

When asked on Friday, Giuliani confirmed to me that the State Department asked him to take the Yermak meeting and that he did, in fact, apprise U.S. officials every step of the way.

“I didn’t even know who he (Yermak) really was, but they vouched for him. They actually urged me to talk to him because they said he seemed like an honest broker,” Giuliani told me. “I reported back to them (the two State officials) what my conversations with Yermak were about. All of this was done at the request of the State Department.”

So, rather than just a political opposition research operation, Giuliani’s contacts were part of a diplomatic effort by the State Department to grow trust with the new Ukrainian president, Zelensky, a former television comic making his first foray into politics and diplomacy.

Why would Ukraine want to talk to Giuliani, and why would the State Department be involved in facilitating it?

According to interviews with more than a dozen Ukrainian and U.S. officials, Ukraine’s government under recently departed President Petro Poroshenko and, now, Zelensky has been trying since summer 2018 to hand over evidence about the conduct of Americans they believe might be involved in violations of U.S. law during the Obama years.

The Ukrainians say their efforts to get their allegations to U.S. authorities were thwarted first by the U.S. embassy in Kiev, which failed to issue timely visas allowing them to visit America.

Then the Ukrainians hired a former U.S. attorney — not Giuliani — to hand-deliver the evidence of wrongdoing to the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York, but the federal prosecutors never responded.

The U.S. attorney, a respected American, confirmed the Ukrainians’ story to me. The allegations that Ukrainian officials wanted to pass on involved both efforts by the Democratic National Committee to pressure Ukraine to meddle in the 2016 U.S. election as well as Joe Biden’s son’s effort to make money in Ukraine while the former vice president managed U.S.-Ukraine relations, the retired U.S. attorney told me.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/462422-missing-piece-to-the-ukraine-puzzle-state-departments-overture-to-rudy

And liberals keep yapping despite this

Fyi: the Ambassador to Ukraine was relieved of duty before this. This was done by a "special envoy". In other words a purely politcal appointee.

[Anonymous]

Moreover, all that article does is prove the quid portion of the pro quo.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We need the names of the State Department people who arranged meetings for Rudy and the Ukrainian government knowing it was for Trumps campaign.

Why do we need their names? These people just doing their jobs. These are the same people who arranged Kerry's And Gore’s and Clinton’s trips overseas when they were no longer holding any government positions. These are the same people who made several arrangements for Michelle O amas overseas trips this year.