How the Ukraine Ended Up at the Center of American Politics
How the Ukraine Ended Up at the Center of American Politics
It’s all about the energy.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
The average American working out in a gym while being forced to endure CNN talking heads yammering about Ukraine has to wonder why a country he knows so very little about is all over Washington D.C.
How did a minor country intersect with three presidential campaigns, those of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump, the Mueller investigation and the business dealings of the Biden clan?
Ukraine’s government is a dysfunctional oligarchy that exists in a state of permanent conflict between billionaires, energy interests, nationalists, Russian front groups, European front groups and street thugs. To make matters more confusing, some of those categories overlap and sometimes shift back and forth.
The Ukraine is one of the poorest countries in the region. Its per capita income is miserable. Its life expectancy is slightly higher than that of Syria. Its real prize is a complex energy sector interwoven with those of Russia and the European Union. Every reason why Ukraine has been in the news comes back to that energy sector and its role in the power balance between Russia, Europe and the United States.
Without that energy sector, the Ukraine would have wallowed quietly in a morass of corruption. Instead its scandals touch off explosions in Moscow, Brussels and Washington D.C. because they originate there.
That’s why the origin of the latest Ukraine scandal begins, unsurprisingly, with an energy company.
Burisma Holdings, the energy company, paid Hunter Biden, Joe’s son, $50,000 a month to sit on its board. That’s not a commonplace arrangement. But energy companies in that part of the world are never just private companies. They’re closely linked to political interests and political leaders.
The company that was paying Biden’s son a cool $50K a month was founded by a businessman who had been the Minister of Natural Resources in the Yanukovich government. The Yanukovich government, which was pro-Russian, was forced out by nationalist and pro-EU activist protests. Yanukovich fled to Russia and Putin responded to the fall of his government by invading the Ukraine and annexing Crimea.
And Crimea is all about the pipelines.
Yanukovich’s party employed American political consultants from across the spectrum including Tony Podesta, the brother of Hillary’s campaign chair, Tad Devine, Bernie Sanders’ chief political strategist, and Paul Manafort, briefly Trump’s campaign chair. While Podesta won’t be charged and Devine got off, Manafort had the book thrown at him because our political class and the Russian and Ukrainian political classes have more than a few things in common. And the similarities are only growing.
The Manafort case was collateral damage from the infighting between Ukraine’s old government and its new government. But Democrat operatives seized on the Ukrainian scandals because of their potential usefulness to their anti-Trump cause, ignoring Podesta and Devine, while focusing on Manafort.
Last year, three Senate Democrats, including Senator Bob Menendez, who had faced a corruption trial a year before, sent a letter demanding that the Ukrainian government aid in their investigations of Manafort, and by extension Trump, or lose foreign aid. Despite claims by Senator Leahy, Senator Menendez, and Senator Durbin, that the investigations weren’t yielding the desired results because of pressure by the Trump administration, the Ukrainians did not care about Trump or Manafort.
They were out to settle scores with Yanukovich, his Party of Regions, and their political allies.
The Biden family had similarly been entangled in a Ukrainian investigation of the economic and political networks of the Yanukovich government which led, among other places, to Burisma and Hunter Biden.
That may have led Vice President Joe Biden to aggressively pressure the Ukrainian government to fire Viktor Shokin, its top prosecutor. "I looked at them and said, 'I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money.' Well, son of a b --. He got fired,” he had boasted.
Biden wasn’t the only one who had wanted Shokin gone. Pro-EU elements had wanted the same thing.
And that’s the great challenge of Ukraine’s scandals, understanding the intersection between politics, ideology and financial interests. Ukraine is in the midst of a struggle between nationalists, the EU and Russia, and between corrupt financial interests on all sides trying to get their hands on its industries.
With corrupt political interests in Washington D.C. and Moscow intertwining national interests and private economic interests, the Ukraine is the ultimate swamp. And the money has kept moving both ways. Just ask Tony Podesta and Hunter Biden. Both of whom were entangled with the Russian boogeyman that the Democrats can’t seem to see when they’re the ones making the rubles.
Today’s Ukraine resembles The Third Man’s vision of Vienna. It’s a convoluted nest of spies, information brokers, and corrupt financial interests, that’s in the middle of a tug of war between two superpowers. And its chaos and corruption resemble Russia after the fall of Communism and before control of the country was consolidated by Vladimir Putin, former KGB personnel and their billionaire oligarch allies.
Ukraine embodies the worst of the region before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. And America and Russia have both been sucked into it by mixing politics and business, as the Clintons and the Bidens did.
Democrats and Republicans have held out hope that Ukrainian investigations would produce something useful, but the only thing they have produced and will go on producing is more corruption. A corrupt system can’t investigate itself. Ukraine’s prosecutorial system is at the heart of the corruption.
There’s nothing to be found in the Ukraine except a convoluted network of overlapping agendas, secret bank accounts, bribes, front men, paid agents and foreign operatives going all the way to the bottom.
A true swamp has no bottom. The Ukrainian swamp has no bottom. Let’s hope that ours does.
That ought to be a warning to anyone on either side expecting the FBI or independent prosecutors to fix this. Washington D.C. isn’t as bad as Kiev, but the FBI, the DOJ and assorted judicial and prosecutorial bodies have been hopelessly tangled in political corruption and serve their own political interests.
To most Americans, the Ukraine may be obscure and far away, but its political scandals not only intersect with our own, increasingly they have begun to predict them. Only on a much larger scale.
The Democrats have built much of their campaign against President Trump around Ukrainian political scandals. The irony is that they have adopted Ukraine as their political model. The political consultants who went to Ukraine brought its culture of corruption back here. And we’re all living with it now.
Ukraine is an energy industry battlefield. So is America.
Some of the biggest backers of impeaching President Trump are in the green energy business. Trump’s backing for oil and coal lit a fire under our economy, but it’s been bad news for the folks who make money from subsidized renewables and, even more shamefully, carbon credits. If Trump loses, they win.
Not just ideologically, but economically, to the tune of more billions of dollars than you can count.
The pipelines in question are legal and virtual, but, as proposals like the Green New Deal demonstrate, they are more inescapable systems of control than any conventional pipeline could ever be. Like the pipelines, they consolidate control, create dependency and build a corrupt energy monopoly.
After the fall of the old Ukrainian government, Burisma, the energy company that was paying Hunter Biden $50,000 a month, got into the green energy business. A year later, Burisma had started the Energy Security Forum to promote “green energy”. The speakers included former Senator Landrieu.
And, of course, Hunter Biden.
By then, Burisma, once aligned with Russia, had become thoroughly enmeshed in the European Union.
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
As Biden falters, Hillary attacks Trump and positions herself to enter presidential race
Hillary Clinton remains shackled to her lust for power and revenge, and now is signaling that she may enter the Democrats’ presidential contest when ex-Vice President Joe Biden withdraws and serves as the fall-guy for Ukraine's collusion with her 2016 presidential campaign. She realizes that her party’s frenzy to unseat President Trump will consume the ambition of the hapless halfwit to gain the Oval Office that rightfully belongs to her, as his familial dirty laundry is aired in an effort to find Trump impeachment fodder in Ukraine.
Hillary is not committing to the race, but keeping that option very open. It is evident from her latest video statement that a lot of work has gone into her appearance recently, with her face losing the bloat that had recently developed from her chardonnay guzzling, and her hair style and outfit looking business-like.
YouTube screen grab (croppped)
Almost 3 years after her defeat at the polls, she still complains and calls President Trump an “illegitimate president” and a “corrupt human tornado” in an interview taped for CBS Sunday Morning.
Her choice of the word “tornado” is a poker tell -- resonant for those old enough to remember how her former business partner Jim McDougal served as her fall-guy for the Whitewater scandal, a real estate development scheme that failed amid crime and scandal. McDougal died in prison at the age of 58, convicted of fraud by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr afrer the collapse of Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan in Arkansas, the lender he ran that financed the Whitewater real estate scam that the Clintons hoped would earn them their first fortune. Before his death, McDougal ruefully observed about his and his wife Susan’s imprisonment, as well as the other people whose futures were sacrificed while the Clintons remained above the law:
"I think the Clintons are really sort of like tornadoes moving through people's lives," he once said. "I'm just one of the people left in the wake of their passing by."
Biden probably doesn’t realize that he is being set up as a fall-guy just like McDougal. The prima facie corruption of his totally unqualified son receiving six hundred grand a year from a Ukrainian oligarch while Biden was the point man on Ukraine for Barack Obama will be the shiny object for the counter-attack on the current Democrat impeachment frenzy. Meanwhile, the larger picture of Ukrainian corruption’s role on the 2016 election will fall by the wayside:
…a July 2017 letter from the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee [Chuck Grassley] sent to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein raised concerns over reports that Ukraine’s political leadership “opposed the candidacy of Donald Trump for president of the United States and worked with a Democratic National Committee consultant to undermine his campaign.”“This consultant allegedly had various meetings with Ukrainian government officials, including embassy staff, to coordinate the dissemination of incriminating information about Trump campaign officials,” wrote Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) in a press release announcing the letter. “It appears that this consultant was operating to advance the interests of both the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton campaign, and a foreign government, which would have required registration under FARA.”Citing several reports from mainstream news outlets, the letter reads in part:According to news reports, during the 2016 presidential election, “Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump” and did so by “disseminat[ing] documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter…”[1] Ukrainian officials also reportedly “helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.”[2] At the center of this plan was Alexandra Chalupa, described by reports as a Ukrainian-American operative “who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee” and reportedly met with Ukrainian officials during the presidential election for the express purpose of exposing alleged ties between then-candidate Donald Trump, Paul Manafort, and Russia.[3] Politico also reported on a Financial Times story that quoted a Ukrainian legislator, Serhiy Leschenko, saying that Trump’s candidacy caused “Kiev’s wider political leadership to do something they would never have attempted before: intervene, however indirectly, in a U.S. election.”[4]Reporting indicates that the Democratic National Committee encouraged Chalupa to interface with Ukrainian embassy staff to “arrange an interview in which Poroshenko [the president of Ukraine] might discuss Manafort’s ties to Yanukovych.”[5] Chalupa also met with Valeriy Chaly, Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., and Oksana Shulyar, a top aid to the Ukrainian ambassador in March 2016 and shared her alleged concerns about Manafort. Reports state that the purpose of their initial meeting was to “organize a June reception at the embassy to promote Ukraine.” However, another Ukrainian embassy official, Andrii Telizhenko, told Politico that Shulyar instructed him to assist Chalupa with research to connect Trump, Manafort, and the Russians. He reportedly said, “[t]hey were coordinating an investigation with the Hillary team on Paul Manafort with Alexandra Chalupa” and that “Oksana [Shulyar] was keeping it all quiet…the embassy worked very closely with” Chalupa.[6]Chalupa’s actions appear to show that she was simultaneously working on behalf of a foreign government, Ukraine, and on behalf of the DNC and Clinton campaign, in an effort to influence not only the U.S voting population but U.S. government officials. Indeed, Telizhenko recalled that Chalupa told him and Shulyar, “[i]f we can get enough information on Paul [Manafort] or Trump’s involvement with Russia, she can get a hearing in Congress by September.”[7] Later, Chalupa did reportedly meet with staff in the office of Democratic representative Marcy Kaptur to discuss a congressional investigation. Such a public investigation would not only benefit the Hillary Clinton campaign, but it would benefit the Ukrainian government, which, at the time, was working against the Trump campaign. When Politico attempted to ask Rep. Kaptur’s office about the meeting, the office called it a “touchy subject.”
Hillary is betting that Biden’s scalp will suffice to wrap up the Ukraine narrative, and his withdrawal will open the door for her to enter the race as a “moderate” Democrat who can keep the money spigot from Wall Street and the American oligarchs flowing into Democrat coffers.
The judge found these releases, together with the publication of Clinton’s secret speeches to Wall Street banks, in which she pledged to be their representative, were “matters of the highest public concern.” They “allowed the American electorate to look behind the curtain of one of the two major political parties in the United States during a presidential election.”
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THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’S BILLIONAIRES’ GLOBALIST EMPIRE requires someone as ruthlessly dishonest as Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to be puppet dictators.
http://hillaryclinton-whitecollarcriminal.blogspot.com/2018/09/google-rigged-it-so-illegals-would-vote.html
GRIFTER AND PHONY CHARITY FOUNDATION FRAUDSTER HILLARY CLINTON’S LONG SERVICE TO AMERICA’S MOST EVIL BANKSTERS
The judge found these releases, together with the publication of Clinton’s secret speeches to Wall Street banks, in which she pledged to be their representative, were “matters of the highest public concern.” They “allowed the American electorate to look behind the curtain of one of the two major political parties in the United States during a presidential election.”
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“Clinton also failed to mention how he and Hillary cashed in after his presidential tenure to make themselves multimillionaires, in part by taking tens of millions in speaking fees from Wall Street bankers.”
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VIDEO:
THE FRAUDULENT CLINTON FOUNDATION EXPOSED.
PAY-TO-PLAY FROM THE FIRST DAY!
Is it a signal that she's back in the game because she's selling her president-ability to the world's global billionaire crowd and laying the groundwork for more funds? There are all kinds of ways for foreign billionaires to get money to the U.S. without consequences, after all. What's more, it's pretty much the biggest base of support she has, which is at least one reason why she lost the 2016 election.
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“The couple parlayed lives supposedly spent in “public service”
into admission into the upper stratosphere of American wealth, with incomes in the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of this vast wealth was a political
machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton, Inc.” This consists essentially of
a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure big business support for the
Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their personal fortunes.
into admission into the upper stratosphere of American wealth, with incomes in the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of this vast wealth was a political
machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton, Inc.” This consists essentially of
a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure big business support for the
Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their personal fortunes.
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The basic components of the operation are lavishly paid speeches to Wall Street and Fortune 500 audiences, corporate campaign contributions, and donations to the ostensibly philanthropic Clinton Foundation.”
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"But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every person on the planet by now." ---- Patricia McCarthy - AMERICANTHINKER.com
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THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’S BILLIONAIRES’ GLOBALIST EMPIRE requires someone as ruthlessly dishonest as Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to be puppet dictators.
http://hillaryclinton-whitecollarcriminal.blogspot.com/2018/09/google-rigged-it-so-illegals-would-vote.html
1. Globalism: Google VP Kent Walker insists that despite its repeated rejection by electorates around the world, “globalization” is an “incredible force for good.”
2. Hillary Clinton’s Democratic party: An executive nearly broke down crying because of the candidate’s loss. Not a single executive expressed anything but dismay at her defeat.
3. Immigration: Maintaining liberal immigration in the U.S is the policy that Google’s executives discussed the most.
HILLARY CLINTON’S GLOBALIST VISION:
SURRENDER OF OUR BORDERS WITH NARCOMEX AND SUCKING IN GLOBAL BRIBES FOR THE PHONY CLINTON FOUNDATION
Even though it has gone virtually unreported by Corporate media, Breitbart News has extensively documented the Clintons’
longstanding support for “open borders.” Interestingly, as the Los Angeles Times observed in 2007, the Clinton’s praise for
globalization and open borders frequently comes when they are
speaking before a wealthy foreign audiences and donors.
THE OBAMA – CLINTON RUSSIA CONNECTION
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WITH THESE TRAITORS, JUST FOLLOW THE MONEY!
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How President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton aided Russia’s quest for global nuclear dominance.
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THE SHADY POLITICS OF HILLARY CLINTON and her PAY-TO-PLAY MAFIA
The left cared nothing about that bit of collusion.
Hillary and her campaign aides have long been involved with Russia for reasons of personal gain. Clinton herself got $145 million in donations to the Clinton Foundation for allowing Russia to take over twenty percent of all uranium production in the U.S. Her campaign chairman, John Podesta, is reaping the financial benefits of being on the board of a Russian company, Joule, which he did not disclose. PATRICIA McCARTHY
Had Hillary been elected, the Clinton Foundation would be raking in even more millions than it did before. She would be happily selling access, favors and our remaining freedoms out from under us. PATRICIA McCARTHY
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