By Pie Guevara
Pie Guevara appears in Post Scripts courtesy of Jack Lee and Tina Grazier. Pie Guevara is an unregistered trademark of Engulf and Devour Investments LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Walton Industries which, in turn, is wholly owned by David Walton. So there!
Thanks to Joe and Peggy for this tip.
Award winning investigative reporter John Solomon writes —
Hunter Biden and his Ukrainian gas firm colleagues had multiple contacts with the Obama State Department during the 2016 election cycle, including one just a month before Vice President Joe Biden forced Ukraine to fire the prosecutor investigating his son’s company for corruption, newly released memos show.
During that February 2016 contact, a U.S. representative for Burisma Holdings sought a meeting with Undersecretary of State Catherine A. Novelli to discuss ending the corruption allegations against the Ukrainian firm where Hunter Biden worked as a board member, according to memos obtained under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. (I filed that suit this summer with the help of the public interest law firm the Southeastern Legal Foundation.)
Just three weeks before Burisma’s overture to State, Ukrainian authorities raided the home of the oligarch who owned the gas firm and employed Hunter Biden, a signal the long-running corruption probe was escalating in the middle of the U.S. presidential election.
Hunter Biden’s name, in fact, was specifically invoked by the Burisma representative as a reason the State Department should help, according to a series of email exchanges among U.S. officials trying to arrange the meeting.
The Obumble administration was For $ale. All that was missing was a sign on the white house lawn.
John Solomon and Sara A Carter have been on top of the Biden shenanigans from the start – unlike others who call themselves journalists but are nothing but PRESSTITUTES blindly repeating Demwit talking points delivered hourly.
The Obumble administration was For $ale.
Pure projection. Trump was just caught letting a foreign government know that the price of releasing congressionally approved aid is to publicly launch an investigation into a political rival, thus meddling then trying to cover it up by hiding the phone call with classified information. And this is not new–his pro-Russia policies have long been clearly a reward for their help in the 2016 election. A party that still can’t accept that Donald Trump, a man who once bragged about peaking on Miss Teen USA contestants, abuses any position of power he finds himself in is a party that deserves its destruction. You elevated this corrupt backstabber to the highest position of power in the world, and you didn’t think this would happen? Incredible.
Jim Jordan may be assigned to Intelligence committee.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/jim-jordan-adam-schiff-trump
Jordan would be a great choice as he’s smart, articulate, and doesn’t put up with Demwit BS.
And as long as BullSchifft is running that committee, “intelligence” has left the building.
The guy who failed to report sexual abuse at Ohio State? Come on.
To quote myself from a previous thread…
If you stepped outside your bubble you wouldn’t be citing John Solomon to me due to his extreme conflicts of interest. Much of his work relied on one Lev Parnas, one of the Giuliani-associated election fraudsters who was just arrested trying to flee to Vienna. Now tell me, is that a reliable source? Solomon didn’t seem to think so, as he didn’t reveal this source until ProPublica caught him. Are you aware of the complaints about Solomon from other Hill reporters that led to the Hill forbidding him from writing anything but opinion columns?
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-a-veteran-reporter-worked-with-giuliani-associates-to-launch-the-ukraine-conspiracy
More on Solomon:
Solomon depicted a second innocent victim of these conspiracies in addition to Trump: Ukrainian oligarch Dimitry Firtash, “a major target of the Soros group.” Firtash — close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian mafia kingpin Semion Mogilevich, and a chief financier of former Ukrainian president Yanukovych — is fighting extradition to avoid U.S. federal charges of bribery and racketeering. Solomon wrote that Robert Mueller’s investigation was attempting to frame Firtash to get “some dirt on Donald Trump,” but that the case against Firtash was “falling apart.” Solomon stated, “The oligarch’s defense team told me that Firtash rejected the deal because he didn’t have credible information or evidence.”
The State Department labeled the charges in Solomon’s initial article about Yovanovitch “an outright fabrication.” Later, the Ukrainian prosecutor Solomon quoted as his source, Yuri Lutsenko, was dismissed from his position and disavowed Solomon’s reporting, saying that Hunter Biden “did not violate anything” and now said that his statements to Solomon about a do-not-prosecute list were false. Lutsenko is now under criminal investigation for abuse of power. Meanwhile, the effort to extradite Firtash to face corruption charges continues.
When the scandal broke about Trump and Ukraine, uncomfortable facts emerged about Solomon that cast a new light on how he came to write his articles. Solomon admitted that he had used Lev Parnas to arrange his interviews and serve as his translator. Solomon also sent his work in draft form to Parnas apparently for vetting. Parnas, along with his associate Igor Fruman, worked closely with Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, on the Ukraine intrigues, and were reportedly trying to alter the management of Naftogaz, a Ukrainian gas and oil company, to obtain lucrative contracts. Parnas paid Giuliani $500,000 for consulting on his company called Fraud Guarantee while Firtash paid Parnas through DiGenova and Toensing as “a translator.” CNN reported on the scale of Firtash’s financial support for Parnas:
Parnas boasted that his newfound luxurious lifestyle was bankrolled by Firtash, two sources told CNN. Beginning in mid-August, this included around-the-clock bodyguards, two luxury SUVs for his entourage, and at least six private charter flights in the past several months… he talked about how he was cultivating Firtash for his own business interests. “I’m the best-paid interpreter in the world,” Parnas joked.
On October 10, Parnas and Fruman were indicted on federal charges of conspiracy for fraudulent campaign contributions. The Indictment states that a Russian national (who is not Firtash) “arranged for two $500,000 wires on or about September 18, 2018 and October 16, 2018 to be sent from overseas accounts to a U.S. corporate bank account controlled by Fruman and another individual.”
Joseph DiGenova and Victoria Toensing, associates of Giuliani, surfaced as Parnas and Fruman’s attorneys. They are also the lawyers for Dimitry Firtash, who was revealed to be the source of the original disinformation about Biden, which Firtash’s attorneys delivered to Giuliani. Then, Politico disclosed that DiGenova and Toensing are Solomon’s lawyers as well. Solomon gave them at least one of his stories fully in draft form before it appeared (he says for “fact-checking” purposes), unsurprising since they orchestrated his sources. Solomon claimed that he met Parnas through former Congressman Pete Sessions, a Republican from Texas, who had accepted campaign contributions from Parnas and Fruman, and did their bidding in writing a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo demanding the dismissal of U.S. ambassador Yovanovitch, who was an obstacle to the Giuliani scheme against Biden. Giuliani gave Pompeo a packet of Solomon’s articles in the effort to instigate Yovanovitch’s firing.
https://www.justsecurity.org/66962/a-dozen-questions-for-john-solomon/
He was literally working with corrupt Ukrainians, including Giuliani’s associates who were recently arrested, to exonerate them and change the story. He is a paid propagandist who is part of an active effort by many in Trump’s orbit to turn the US against Ukraine in favor of Russia. Funny how it all comes back to that.
This seems bad.
Sondland Updates Impeachment Testimony, Describing Ukraine Quid Pro Quo
…The additions Mr. Sondland made to his testimony were significant because they were the first admission by a senior figure who had direct contact with Mr. Trump that the military aid for Ukraine was being held hostage to the president’s demands for investigations into his political rivals. A wealthy Oregon hotelier who donated to the president’s campaign and was rewarded with the plum diplomatic post, Mr. Sondland can hardly be dismissed as a “Never Trumper,” a charge that Mr. Trump has leveled against many other officials who have offered damaging testimony about his conduct with regard to Ukraine.
As such, Mr. Sondland’s new, fuller account is likely to complicate Republicans’ task in defending the president against the impeachment push, effectively leaving them with no argument other than that demanding a political quid pro quo from a foreign leader may be concerning, but — in the words of Mr. Trump himself — is not “an impeachable event.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/us/politics/impeachment-trump.html
The problem with the argument that Trump was simply demanding Ukraine “investigate corruption” is that he asked for no anti-corruption measures that would not directly benefit himself. Both of his demands–that the Ukraine investigate Crowdstrike and the server (neither of which has anything to do with Ukraine in reality) and that they announce a public investigation of Biden were direct attempts were clearly politically motivated in order to help Trump spread further misinformation about the Russian interference campaign in 2016 and target Joe Biden. One could argue that Biden’s actions regarding the Ukraine also benefitted himself (they didn’t), but those actions were ordered by others and were part of a larger package of anti-corruption measures. Trump’s demands were not. Again, he did not ask Ukraine to do anything other than take actions that would materially benefit his campaign, and he wouldn’t, because that is all he cares about.
PS is blocking me from posting, so I give up.
It was blocking me from posting information about Solomon’s awards.
I blame the Deep State.
Hehehe!!!
https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/status/1191686697836105728?fbclid=IwAR28-V1hGwONGho7jnOmYyF_BUeJ5XfrVuhzCWpk-ab8XMZi7-3eOW-Qh8o
So now you think refusing to testify is bad and evidence of guilt?