The Foreign Policy Blob Versus Trump: are the attacks on Trump's Ukraine conduct causing real damage?
by Hunter DeRensis
October 30, 2019
Ever since the whistleblower complaint from inside the CIA first surfaced against President Donald Trump, a steady stream of
national security and State Department officials have testified about their consternation at his dealings with Ukraine. The dominant
impression that they have left, however, is that they are blurring the line between what constitutes unsavory behavior when it comes
to pressuring Ukraine for information on domestic political opponents, on the one hand, and what are legitimate policy
disagreements. Indeed, it appears that they are, more often than not, substituting their own political judgments for the president’s
when it comes to the conduct of American foreign policy—something that should concern Democrats as much as Republicans. A whole
caste of government officials seems to believe that for an American president to aim to improve relations with Russia is an
illegitimate, even treasonous, aspiration.
Today was no exception. Consider the testimony of State Department official Catherine Croft. In her brief opening statement, she
declared, “As the Director covering Ukraine, I staffed the President's December 2017 decision to provide Ukraine with Javelin
anti-tank missile systems. I also staffed his September 2017 meeting with then-President Petro Poroshenko on the margins of the UN
General Assembly. Throughout both, I heard—directly and indirectly—President Trump describe Ukraine as a corrupt country.” The
implication was that Trump had no business complaining about corruption in Ukraine. But why not? The persistence of corruption,
which President Volodymyr Zelensky was elected by an overwhelming majority to combat, is hardly a secret.
Perhaps even more revealing was Croft’s declaration to the House Intelligence Committee that in November 2018 the White House
refused to approve the release of a statement condemning Russia for seizing three Ukrainian ships located close to Crimea. It sounds
damning at first glance. But once again, why shouldn’t Trump have practiced restraint in this instance if he was intent on improving
relations with Russia, a platform that he was elected on? As it happens, the Zelensky campaign depicted the ship incident as a
political provocation on the part of the Poroshenko government.
The implicit assumptions that appear to guide these veteran members of the bureaucracy were even more obvious in the case of Lt.
Col. Alexander S. Vindman. As the media has underscored, he is the first person to testify in the impeachment inquiry who
participated in the July 25 phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Initially, Trump’s
defenders sought to portray him as guilty of “espionage” or dual loyalty because he emigrated to America as a toddler. But this was
always preposterous. More telling is that Vindman, no less than Croft, epitomizes a mindset that seems to regard a deviation from
the strictures of the foreign policy establishment as by definition unacceptable.
In his opening statement, Vindman declared, that Ukraine is a “frontline state and a bulwark against Russian aggression.” He added,
“the U.S. government policy community’s view is that the election of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the promise of reforms will
lock in Ukraine’s Western-leaning trajectory, and allow Ukraine to realize its dream of a vibrant democracy and economic
prosperity.” But what if Trump has a different view of matters than the “U.S. government policy community’s view”? After all, Trump
was elected in part on his explicit declarations that he would not rely on the experts who had plunged America into Iraq and Libya.
Consider as well the attention that Vindman has lavished upon Trump’s phone call with Zelensky. According to Vindman, portions of
the call he considered important were not included in the document kept by the government that was released to the last month. This
includes President Trump claiming there are recordings of former Vice President Joe Biden discussing Ukrainian corruption, and
President Zelensky specifically referring to Biden’s son’s company, Burisma Holdings. The document released by the administration
includes Zelensky talking about “the company” and Trump saying, “Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution,” which
is an interpretation of a video of Joe Biden describing how the Obama administration made firing Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor
Shokin a prerequisite for receiving foreign aid. Vindman’s recollection of the call does not change the substance of what was
already understood. However, the changes in language are being portrayed as more analogous to Richard Nixon editing the White House
tapes than the routine process that produced a routine document. “Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, who heard President Trump’s July
phone call with Ukraine’s president and was alarmed, testified that he tried and failed to add key details to the rough transcript,”
blared the New York Times headline.
For two months, major media outlets have described the document as a “transcript,” as a shorthand term. But as the document, and
TNI’s previous reporting makes clear, it is not a transcript in the strict sense of the term. “This is what’s known as a memorandum
of conversation: MEMCON. It is a standard tool that is used throughout the government and the procedures can vary from agency to
agency, or who your boss is. But generally, they’re all done about the same way,” explains Peter Van Buren, a former Foreign Service
Officer in the State Department.
“In my own experience in government for 24 years it’s a pretty standardized practice. The idea is, for all sorts of reasons, most
interactions are not recorded. Instead, they’re memorialized through this process of MEMCON. Typically, while there are many people
who may be listening in or present at a meeting, someone (or sometimes two people) are designated as official notetakers and they
take down the conversation. And they’re not trying necessarily to get an exact word-for-word account, but they’re certainly trying
to get an idea for idea. And in many cases when you’re dealing at the White House level, they are getting it pretty much word for
word,” Van Buren tells TNI.
As a participant on the phone call, Vindman would have been one of the early editors. As the process continued, officials higher
than him made changes, just like the editor of a magazine would for a writer. The precise reasons for the changes are open-ended and
probably unknowable. There exists no evidence that the changes were nefarious or anything other than mundane word choice. The
document released to the public is the official U.S. government record of what happened.
John Marshall Evans, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer and Ambassador to Armenia, narrows down what should be the focus of this
inquiry—and what it’s actually becoming. “The issue is indeed not one of policy, which the President can change, but of the purpose
that was pursued in the July 25th call: whether it was in the national interest or a private gain,” he says. So far, no one has
shown that Trump demanded that the Ukrainian government produce a specific result or fabricate evidence about the Bidens.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi is supposed to hold a House vote on the impeachment inquiry tomorrow, after a barrage of criticism from
Republicans for moving forward without one. Whether the open hearings and public testimony will provide any more substance than a
parade of national security bureaucrats ventilating their grievances about a president who sought to take a different course in
foreign policy is questionable.
Hunter DeRensis is a reporter at the National Interest.
"... Ms. Rion spoke with Ukrainian former Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko who outlines how former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch perjured herself before Congress . ..."
"... What is outlined in this interview is a problem for all DC politicians across both parties. The obviously corrupt influence efforts by U.S. Ambassador Yovanovitch as outlined by Lutsenko were not done independently. ..."
"... Senators from both parties participated in the influence process and part of those influence priorities was exploiting the financial opportunities within Ukraine while simultaneously protecting Joe Biden and his family. This is where Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham were working with Marie Yovanovitch. ..."
In a fantastic display of true investigative journalism, One America News journalist Chanel
Rion tracked down Ukrainian witnesses as part of an exclusive OAN investigative series. The
evidence being discovered dismantles the baseless Adam Schiff impeachment hoax and highlights
many corrupt motives for U.S. politicians.
Ms. Rion spoke with Ukrainian former Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko who outlines how
former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch perjured herself before Congress .
What is outlined in this interview is a problem for all DC politicians across both parties.
The obviously corrupt influence efforts by U.S. Ambassador Yovanovitch as outlined by Lutsenko
were not done independently.
Senators from both parties participated in the influence process and part of those influence
priorities was exploiting the financial opportunities within Ukraine while simultaneously
protecting Joe Biden and his family. This is where Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey
Graham were working with Marie Yovanovitch.
Imagine what would happen if all of the background information was to reach the general
public? Thus the motive for Lindsey Graham currently working to bury it.
You might remember George Kent and Bill Taylor testified together.
It was evident months ago that U.S. chargé d'affaires to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, was
one of the current participants in the coup effort against President Trump. It was Taylor who
engaged in carefully planned
text messages with EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland to set-up a narrative helpful to Adam
Schiff's political coup effort.
Bill Taylor was formerly U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine ('06-'09) and later helped the Obama
administration to design the laundry operation providing taxpayer financing to Ukraine in
exchange for back-channel payments to U.S. politicians and their families.
In November Rudy Giuliani released a letter he sent to Senator
Lindsey Graham outlining how Bill Taylor blocked VISA's for Ukrainian 'whistle-blowers' who are
willing to testify to the corrupt financial scheme.
Unfortunately, as we are now witnessing, Senator Lindsey Graham, along with dozens of U.S.
Senators currently serving, may very well have been recipients for money through the
aforementioned laundry process. The VISA's are unlikely to get approval for congressional
testimony, or Senate impeachment trial witness testimony.
U.S. senators write foreign aid policy, rules and regulations thereby creating the financing
mechanisms to transmit U.S. funds. Those same senators then received a portion of the laundered
funds back through their various "institutes" and business connections to the foreign
government offices; in this example Ukraine. [ex. Burisma to Biden]
The U.S. State Dept. serves as a distribution network for the authorization of the money
laundering by granting conflict waivers , approvals for financing (think Clinton Global
Initiative), and permission slips for the payment of foreign money. The officials within the
State Dept. take a cut of the overall payments through a system of "indulgence fees", junkets,
gifts and expense payments to those with political oversight.
If anyone gets too close to revealing the process, writ large, they become a target of the
entire apparatus. President Trump was considered an existential threat to this entire process.
Hence our current political status with the ongoing coup.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out , because, well, in reality all of the U.S.
Senators (both parties) are participating in the process for receiving taxpayer money and
contributions from foreign governments.
A "Codel" is a congressional delegation that takes trips to work out the payments
terms/conditions of any changes in graft financing. This is why Senators spend $20 million on a
campaign to earn a job paying $350k/year. The "institutes" is where the real foreign money
comes in; billions paid by governments like China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Ukraine, etc.
etc. There are trillions at stake.
[SIDEBAR: Majority Leader Mitch McConnell holds the power over these members (and the
members of the Senate Intel Committee), because McConnell decides who sits on what committee.
As soon as a Senator starts taking the bribes lobbying funds, McConnell then has
full control over that Senator. This is how the system works.]
The McCain Institute is one of the obvious examples of the financing network. And that is
the primary reason why Cindy McCain is such an outspoken critic of President Trump. In essence
President Trump is standing between her and her next diamond necklace; a dangerous place to
be.
So when we think about a Senate Impeachment Trial; and we consider which senators will vote
to impeach President Trump, it's not just a matter of Democrats -vs- Republican. We need to
look at the game of leverage, and the stand-off between those bribed Senators who would prefer
President Trump did not interfere in their process.
McConnell has been advising President Trump which Senators are most likely to need their
sensibilities eased. As an example President Trump met with Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski in
November. Senator Murkowski rakes in millions from the multinational Oil and Gas industry; and
she ain't about to allow horrible Trump to lessen her bank account any more than Cindy McCain
will give up her frequent shopper discounts at Tiffanys.
Senator Lindsey Graham
announcing today that he will not request or facilitate any impeachment testimony that
touches on the DC laundry system for personal financial benefit (ie. Ukraine example), is
specifically motivated by the need for all DC politicians to keep prying eyes away from the
swamps' financial endeavors. WATCH:
This open-secret system of "Affluence and Influence" is how the intelligence apparatus gains
such power. All of the DC participants are essentially beholden to the various U.S.
intelligence services who are well aware of their endeavors.
There's a ton of exposure here (blackmail/leverage) which allows the unelected officials
within the CIA, FBI and DOJ to hold power over the DC politicians. Hold this type of leverage
long enough and the Intelligence Community then absorbs that power to enhance their self-belief
of being more important than the system.
Perhaps this corrupt sense of grandiosity is what we are seeing play out in how the
intelligence apparatus views President Donald J Trump as a risk to their importance.
Everyone loves money. I like money. The only question is how to earn them. Neither I, nor
you, nor many of us will cross a certain moral and ethical line (border), but there are
people without morality, without ethical standards, without conscience. We all look the same
outwardly, but we are all completely different inside.
Ukraine is Obama's **** , this is not Trump's ****. Trump's stupidity was only one - he
got into this ****. I wrote, but I repeat - USA acted as the best friend in relation to
Russia, having taken off a leech from Russia and hanging it on itself. Do you know such an
estate of Rothschilds - called Israel and its role in the life of USA?
So, Ukraine was for the Russians the same Israel in terms of meaningless spending. Look at
Vlad, in 2014 he looked like a fox who was eating a chicken, and on January 1, 2020 he will
look like a fox who eating a whole brood of chickens. I think he has portraits of Obama and
Trump in his bedroom.
Yes, indeed. Lindsey will bury the story, he is on the take. Your tax dollars at work. By
the way, the Fed picked up all of the Ukies gold for safekeeping at 33 Liberty St. NY, with
Yats permission, of course.... https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-11-18/ukraine-admits-its-gold-gone
A glimpse into how elected officials accumulate millions, retire wealthy, pampered and
privileged....and I'm not talking pensions I'm talking corruption. Obama, Biden, Hillary,
Kerry, Holder, Rice and ALL the senior Obama Administration officials knew of each other's
corrupt sinecures.
Well, it is based on a OAN story. Believe it or not, they actually sent a reporter to
Ukraine to talk to people with knowledge of the matter and look what they came up with. Kind
of makes you wonder why other well funded news organizations never thought to do something
like that.
I don't know that we deserve this. We are all working people, with families to raise,
taxes to pay and the Dems and Commies have been working against us 24/7. And most of them get
paid to do so from government jobs that pay them 8 hours a day when many work 1 hour a day,
all the while scheming against us.
If Trump wins a second term, he is gonna **** these people up good.
Now that I've read the article, I'm both shocked and appalled at learning that Ukraine is
a money laundering operation for the politically connected. (They provide many other 'perks'
as well.)
I've warned about light in the loafers Lindsey as well as McConnell before and more than
once. Sessions should also be denied a re-admission into the swamp. There are others.
"... I first heard of the interagency in Baghdad in 2009. I was there as part of a Council on Foreign Relations delegation to Iraq. As a U.S. Army general briefed us on how the war was being fought, he spoke of the interagency as the source of the strategy he was executing. Naively, I asked why he wasn't operating according to orders from his military superiors or the secretary of defense. ..."
"... He explained that American war-fighting was being guided by a "whole of government" philosophy. Incredibly, he explained that the war couldn't be won without, among other agencies, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Health and Human Services, Justice and Labor. Iraq needed economic expansion, modern farming, business statistics, new hospitals, a working court system and workplace regulations. The strategy framed by the interagency was nothing less than a yearslong engagement in nation building -- precisely what President George W. Bush had rejected in his 2000 campaign. ..."
"... When the war on terror opened, with all the secret activity it required, professional cadres in the diplomatic corps, the military and the nation's many intelligence agencies were able to transform interagency cooperative agreements that had existed since the Cold War into a de facto agency -- a largely informal and virtual bureaucracy -- with the assumed power, if need be, to determine and execute a foreign policy at odds with the intent of the president and Congress. ..."
"... Last month's testimony before the Intelligence Committee shed light on this club whose members are a permanent shadow government credentialed by family histories, elite schools and unique career experiences. This common pedigree informs their perspective of how America should relate to the world. The dogmatists of the interagency seem to share a common discomfort with a president who probably couldn't describe the doctrine of soft power, doesn't desire to be the center of attention at Davos, and wouldn't know that Francis Fukuyama once decided that history was over. ..."
Enthusiasm over entrepreneurship is now found in every corner of society -- even, apparently, within the federal bureaucracy.
Witness after witness in last month's House impeachment inquiry hearings referred to "the interagency," an off-the-books informal
government organization that we now know has enormous power to set and execute American foreign policy.
The first to testify before the House Intelligence Committee, State Department official George Kent, seemed to conceive of the
interagency as the definitive source of foreign-policy consensus. That Mr. Trump's alleged decision to withhold military aid to Ukraine
deviated from that consensus was, for Mr. Kent, prima facie evidence that it was misguided.
Next up, Ambassador William Taylor told the committee that it was the "unanimous opinion of every level of interagency discussion"
that the aid should be resumed without delay. Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council official, gave the game away by admitting
how upset she was that Gordon Sondland, President Trump's ambassador to the European Union, had established an "alternative" approach
to helping Kyiv. "We have a robust interagency process that deals with Ukraine," she said.
What is the interagency, and why should its views guide the conduct of American diplomatic and national-security professionals?
The Constitution grants the president the power to set defense and diplomatic policy. Where did this interagency come from?
I first heard of the interagency in Baghdad in 2009. I was there as part of a Council on Foreign Relations delegation to Iraq.
As a U.S. Army general briefed us on how the war was being fought, he spoke of the interagency as the source of the strategy he was
executing. Naively, I asked why he wasn't operating according to orders from his military superiors or the secretary of defense.
He explained that American war-fighting was being guided by a "whole of government" philosophy. Incredibly, he explained that
the war couldn't be won without, among other agencies, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the departments of Agriculture,
Commerce, Health and Human Services, Justice and Labor. Iraq needed economic expansion, modern farming, business statistics, new
hospitals, a working court system and workplace regulations. The strategy framed by the interagency was nothing less than a yearslong
engagement in nation building -- precisely what President George W. Bush had rejected in his 2000 campaign.
Interagency cooperative agreements have been around for decades. The Justice Department, for example, has opioid-interdiction
programs that require it to work with the Department of Homeland Security. Today a dictionary of more than 12,500 official terms
exists to guide bureaucrats in writing interagency contracts that repurpose federal funds appropriated to various executive departments.
Often these interdepartmental initiatives devised by bureaucrats are unknown to Congress. It's hard to imagine that the legislative
branch wouldn't object to these arrangements, if only it were aware of them.
When the war on terror opened, with all the secret activity it required, professional cadres in the diplomatic corps, the military
and the nation's many intelligence agencies were able to transform interagency cooperative agreements that had existed since the
Cold War into a de facto agency -- a largely informal and virtual bureaucracy -- with the assumed power, if need be, to determine
and execute a foreign policy at odds with the intent of the president and Congress.
Last month's testimony before the Intelligence Committee shed light on this club whose members are a permanent shadow government
credentialed by family histories, elite schools and unique career experiences. This common pedigree informs their perspective of
how America should relate to the world. The dogmatists of the interagency seem to share a common discomfort with a president who
probably couldn't describe the doctrine of soft power, doesn't desire to be the center of attention at Davos, and wouldn't know that
Francis Fukuyama once decided that history was over.
The impeachment hearings will have served a useful purpose if all they do is demonstrate that a cabal of unelected officials are
fashioning profound aspects of U.S. foreign policy on their own motion. No statutes anticipate that the president or Congress will
delegate such authority to a secret working group formed largely at the initiation of entrepreneurial bureaucrats, notwithstanding
that they may be area experts, experienced in diplomatic and military affairs, and motivated by what they see as the best interests
of the country.
However the impeachment drama plays out, Congress has cause to enact comprehensive legislation akin to the Goldwater-Nichols Act
of 1986, which created more-efficient structures and transparent processes in the Defense Department. Americans deserve to know who
really is responsible for making the nation's foreign policy. The interagency, if it is to exist, should have a chairman appointed
by the president, and its decisions, much like the once-secret minutes of the Federal Reserve, should be published, with limited
and necessary exceptions, for all to see.
Mr. Schramm is a university professor at Syracuse. His most recent book is "Burn the Business Plan."
So a republican staffer, a neocon without any diplomatic experience was the NSC senior director of European and Russian
affairs, the successor of Fiona Hill.
Washington
-- A top National Security Council official who listened to President Trump's July call with the
president of Ukraine told lawmakers he "promptly" told White House lawyers he was concerned details of the call would
become public, but did not think "anything illegal was discussed" during the conversation.
Tim Morrison, the outgoing senior director of European and Russian affairs at the National Security Council and a
deputy assistant to the president, is testifying before committees leading the
impeachment inquiry
on Capitol Hill on Thursday. He has emerged as a central witness to the events at the center
of the inquiry, particularly the administration's policy toward Ukraine.
CBS News learned the substance of his opening statement to the committees, which ran six pages and appears below.
Morrison said the summary released by the White House of the call between Mr. Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky accurately reflects his memory and understanding of the call, but he said he had three concerns in the event
the summary became public.
"[F]irst, how it would play out in Washington's polarized environment; second, how a leak would affect the
bipartisan support our Ukrainian partners currently experience in Congress; and third, how it would affect the
Ukrainian perceptions of the U.S.-Ukraine relationship," Morrison, who was in the Situation Room for the call, told
lawmakers. "I want to be clear, I was not concerned that anything illegal was discussed."
However, he also corroborated a central allegation in the Democratic case against the president: that a U.S.
ambassador told a high-ranking Ukrainian official that the release of military aid was contingent on an investigation
into the Bidens.
Tim Morrison arrives for a deposition at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on October 31,
2019.
SAUL LOEB / AF
Morrison said his predecessor, Fiona Hill, told him about "concerns about two Ukraine processes that were
occurring": one led by traditional U.S. diplomatic entities, and one led by the U.S. Ambassador the E.U. Gordon
Sondland and Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer. He said Hill told him about their efforts to get Ukraine
to investigate Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company that had employed Hunter Biden, former Vice President Joe
Biden's son.
"At the time, I did not know what Burisma was or what the investigation entailed," Morrison said. "After the
meeting with Dr. Hill, I googled Burisma and learned that it was a Ukrainian energy company and that Hunter Biden was
on its board."
Morrison said he spoke frequently with Bill Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in the embassy in Kiev. Taylor
testified before the committees
last week and described his misgivings about efforts to pressure Ukraine
to open investigations into the president's rivals. Morrison, in his statement, confirmed the substance of Taylor's
account, but said he remembered two details differently.
Taylor testified that Morrison told him Sondland had demanded the Ukrainian president announce an investigation
into Burisma, while Morrison said he remembered Sondland saying an announcement by the country's top prosecutor would
suffice. Taylor also indicated Morrison met with the Ukrainian national security adviser in his hotel room, while
Morrison said it was in the hotel's business center.
Morrison said he learned about a delay in military aid to Ukraine shortly after assuming his post, and was tasked
with coordinating with various agencies to demonstrate why the aid was needed.
"I was confident that our national security principals -- the Secretaries of State and Defense, the Director of the
Central Intelligence Agency, and the head of the National Security Council -- could convince President Trump to
release the aid," he said.
Morrison testified he had "no reason to believe" the Ukrainians knew of a delay in military aid until August 28,
and said he was unaware the aid may have been tied to the demand for an investigation into Burisma until he spoke to
Sondland on September 1.
Morrison arrived on Capitol Hill before 8 a.m. Thursday for his deposition after Democrats issued a subpoena for
his testimony. A spokesman for House Intelligence Committee chairman declined to comment on his opening statement.
Morrison appeared on the same day the House
approved a resolution
greenlighting the rules for impeachment proceedings moving forward.
On Wednesday, officials said Morrison would be leaving his White House post. He said in his statement he has yet
to submit his resignation "because I do not want anyone to think there is a connection between my testimony today and
my impending departure."
"I am proud of what I have been able, in some small way, to help the Trump Administration to accomplish," he said.
Read Morrison's full statement
Opening Statement of Timothy Morrison
Before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and
the House Committee on Oversight and Reform
October 31, 2019
Chairman Schiff and Members of the Committees, I appear today under subpoena to answer your questions about my
time as Senior Director for European Affairs at the White House and the National Security Council ("NSC"). I will
give you the most complete information I can, consistent with my obligations to the President and the protection of
classified information. I do not know who the whistleblower is, nor do I intend to speculate as to who it may be.
Before joining the NSC in 2018, I spent 17 years as a Republican staffer, serving in a variety of roles in both
houses of Congress. My last position was Policy Director for the then-Majority Staff of the House Armed Services
Committee.
I. The Role of the National Security Council
From July 9, 2018 to July 15, 2019, I served as a Special Assistant to the President for National Security and as
the NSC Senior Director for Weapons of Mass Destruction and Biodefense. In that role, I had limited exposure to
Ukraine, focusing primarily on foreign military sales and arms control. On July 15, 2019, I became Deputy Assistant
to the President for National Security. In this role, I serve as the lead interagency coordinator for national
security issues involving Europe and Russia.
It is important to start with the role of the NSC. Since its creation by Congress in 1947, the NSC has
appropriately evolved in shape and size to suit the needs of the President and the National Security Advisor it
serves at the time. But its mission and core function has fundamentally remained the same: to coordinate across
departments and agencies of the Executive Branch to ensure the President has the policy options he needs to
accomplish his objectives and to see that his decisions are implemented. The NSC staff does not make policy. NSC
staff are most effective when we are neutral arbiters, helping the relevant Executive Branch agencies develop options
for the President and implement his direction.
In my current position, I understood our primary U.S. policy objective in Ukraine was to take advantage of the
once-in-a-generation opportunity that resulted from the election of President Zelensky and the clear majority he had
gained in the Ukrainian Rada to see real anti-corruption reform take root.
The Administration's policy was that
the best way for the United States to show its support for President Zelensky's reform efforts was to make sure the
United States' longstanding bipartisan commitment to strengthen Ukraine's security remained unaltered, it is easy to
forget here in Washington, but impossible in Kyiv, that Ukraine is still under armed assault by Russia, a
nuclear-armed state.
We also tend to forget that the United States had helped convince Ukraine to give up Soviet
nuclear weapons in 1994. United States security sector assistance (from the Departments of Defense and State) is,
therefore, essential to Ukraine. Also essential is a strong and positive relationship with Ukraine at the highest
levels of our respective governments.
In my role as Senior Director for European Affairs, I reported directly to former Deputy National Security
Advisor, Dr. Charles Kupperman, and former National Security Advisor, Ambassador John Bolton. I kept them fully
informed on matters that I believed merited their awareness or when I felt I needed some direction. During the time
relevant to this inquiry, I never briefed the President or Vice President on matters related to Ukrainian security.
It was my job to coordinate with the U.S. Embassy Chief of Mission to Ukraine William Taylor, Special Representative
for Ukraine Negotiations Kurt Volker, and other interagency stakeholders in the Departments of Defense and State of
Ukrainian matters.
My primary responsibility has been to ensure federal agencies had consistent messaging and policy guidance on
national security issues involving European and Russian affairs. As Dr. Fiona Hill and I prepared for me to succeed
her, one of the areas we discussed was Ukraine. In that discussion, she informed me of her concerns about two Ukraine
processes that were occurring: the normal interagency process led by the NSC with the typical department and agency
participation and a separate process that involved chiefly the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union. Dr. Hill told
me that Ambassador Sondland and President Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, were trying to get President
Zelensky to reopen Ukrainian investigations into Burisma. At the time, I did not know what Burisma was or what the
investigation entailed. After the meeting with Dr. Hill, I googled Burisma and learned that it was a Ukrainian energy
company and that Hunter Biden was on its board. I also did not understand why Ambassador Sondland would be involved
in Ukraine policy, often without the involvement of our duly-appointed Chief of Mission, Ambassador Bill Taylor.
My most frequent conversations were with Ambassador Taylor because he was the U.S. Chief of Mission in Ukraine and
I was his chief conduit for information related to White House deliberations, including security sector assistance
and potential head-of-state meetings. This is a normal part of the coordination process.
II. Review of Open Source Documents in Preparation for Testimony
In preparation for my appearance today, I reviewed the statement Ambassador Taylor provided this inquiry on
October 22, 2019. I can confirm that the substance of his statement, as it relates to conversations he and I had, is
accurate. My recollections differ on two of the details, however. I have a slightly different recollection of my
September 1, 2019 conversation with Ambassador Sondland. On page 10 of Ambassador Taylor's statement, he recounts a
conversation I relayed to him regarding Ambassador Sondland's conversation with Ukrainian Presidential Advisor Yermak.
Ambassador Taylor wrote: "Ambassador Sondland told Mr. Yermak that security assistance money would not come until
President Zelensky committed to pursue the Burisma investigation." My recollection is that Ambassador Sondland's
proposal to Mr. Yermak was that it could be sufficient if the new Ukrainian prosecutor general -- not President Zelensky -- would
commit to pursue the Burisma investigation. I also would like to clarify that I did not meet with the Ukrainian
National Security Advisor in his hotel room, as Ambassador Taylor indicated on page 11 of his statement. Instead, an
NSC aide and I met with Mr. Danyliuk in the hotel's business center.
I also reviewed the Memorandum of Conversation ("MemCont') of the July 25 phone call that was released by the
White House. I listened to the call as it occurred from the Situation Room. To the best of my recollection, the
MemCon accurately and completely reflects the substance of the call. I also recall that I did not see anyone from the
NSC Legal Advisor's Office in the room during the call. After the call, I promptly asked the NSC Legal Advisor and
his Deputy to review it. I had three concerns about a potential leak of the MemCon: first, how it would play out in
Washington's polarized environment; second, how a leak would affect the bipartisan support our Ukrainian partners
currently experience in Congress; and third, how it would affect the Ukrainian perceptions of the U.S.-Ukraine
relationship. I want to be clear, I was not concerned that anything illegal was discussed.
III. White House Hold on Security Sector Assistance
I was not aware that the White House was holding up the security sector assistance passed by Congress until my
superior, Dr. Charles Kupperman, told me soon after I succeeded Dr. Hill. I was aware that the President thought
Ukraine had a corruption problem, as did many others familiar with Ukraine. I was also aware that the President
believed that Europe did not contribute enough assistance to Ukraine. I was directed by Dr. Kupperman to coordinate
with the interagency stakeholders to put together a policy process to demonstrate that the interagency supported
security sector assistance to Ukraine. I was confident that our national security principals -- the Secretaries of State
and Defense, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the head of the National Security Council -- could
convince President Trump to release the aid because President Zelensky and the reform-oriented Rada were genuinely
invested in their anti-corruption agenda.
Ambassador Taylor and I were concerned that the longer the money was withheld, the more questions the Zelensky
administration would ask about the U.S. commitment to Ukraine. Our initial hope was that the money would be released
before the hold became public because we did not want the newly constituted Ukrainian government to question U.S.
support.
I have no reason to believe the Ukrainians had any knowledge of the review until August 28, 2019. Ambassador
Taylor and I had no reason to believe that the release of the security sector assistance might be conditioned on a
public statement reopening the Burisma investigation until my September 1, 2019 conversation with Ambassador Sondland.
Even then I hoped that Ambassador Sondland's strategy was exclusively his own and would not be considered by leaders
in the Administration and Congress, who understood the strategic importance of Ukraine to our national security.
I am pleased our process gave the President the confidence he needed to approve the release of the security sector
assistance. My regret is that Ukraine ever learned of the review and that, with this impeachment inquiry, Ukraine has
become subsumed in the U.S. political process.
IV. Conclusion
After 19 years of government service, I have decided to leave the NSC. I have not submitted a formal resignation
at this time because I do not want anyone to think there is a connection between my testimony today and my impending
departure. I plan to finalize my transition from the NSC after my testimony is complete.
During my time in public service, I have worked with some of the smartest and most self-sacrificing people in this
country. Serving at the White House in this time of unprecedented global change has been the opportunity of a
lifetime. I am proud of what I have been able, in some small way, to help the Trump Administration to accomplish.
"... It may be as simple as Trump does not really know what he's doing. He doesn't seem to understand the complexity and dynamics of foreign policy. The way he handled Israel is an example as well as some of the bombs he ordered dropped on Afghanistan and Syria. Was he behind that or was someone else? ..."
"... After Bolton came onboard, and then Eliot Abrams, the 24/7 Russia-gate suddenly stopped. That was also around the time USA was fomenting a Venezuelan coup. Was obvious that Russia-Gate was designed to control Trump. ..."
"... The US had power, and no-one else had any. That's all they needed to know, and set about creating new, wonderfully intoxicating realities. As Rove famously inverted the MO they'll act first, creating realities and the analysis and calculation can come later. In awe of their creations, they failed to notice that while history may have ended in Washington, elsewhere it moved on to surround them with a reality where they found themselves in zugzwang, with no understanding how they got there. Flailing (and wailing) like a Mastodon in a tar pit, they've managed only to attract an unhelpful crowd of onlookers, fascinated by the abomination. ..."
"... If that's so, his is the most extraordinary political performance I thought I'd ever see. Even though I can't imagine a more effective single handed way to accomplish what he promised to do, that he's lasted this long and has been so effective is astonishing. I guess we'll see if he abandons buffoonery when his opponents finally sink into the tar. ..."
@Z-man I
wasn't sure how to characterize McMaster and Kelly. My sense was that they represented the
foreign policy establishment consensus, ergo neocon by default.
I share your optimism about Trump -- because it's the only strand of hope out there, and
his enemies are so impeccably loathsome -- but am fully prepared to be proved wrong.
"How did this unusual and dysfunctional situation come about? One possibility is that it
was the doing and legacy of the neocon John Bolton, briefly Trump's national security
adviser. But this doesn't explain why the president would accept or long tolerate such
appointees."
It started before Bolton came on board.
Believe Trump when he says "Loyalty to me first". And that begins with his son in law
Jared .his former personal attorney Jason Greenblatt .his former bankruptcy attorney David
Friedman and his largest donor Sheldon Adelson .
Trump is too stupid to see that his Zios have no loyalty to him. Trump doesn't appoint anyone, doesn't even know anyone to appoint to national security or
foreign policy. He never had any associations or confidents in his business life in NY except
the above Jews .
Ask yourself how a 29 year old Jewish boy (now gone) with zero experience got brought onto
the WH NSC. He was recommended by Gen. Flynn who did it as a favor to Zio Frank Gaffney of
Iraq fame, and Jared because he was a friend of Jared and Gaffney was a friend Ezra's family.
..getting the picture?
All Trumps appointments look like a chain letter started by Kushner and his Zio
connections.
It may be as simple as Trump does not really know what he's doing. He doesn't seem to
understand the complexity and dynamics of foreign policy. The way he handled Israel is an
example as well as some of the bombs he ordered dropped on Afghanistan and Syria. Was he
behind that or was someone else?
He's a walking contradiction.
After Bolton came onboard, and then Eliot Abrams, the 24/7 Russia-gate suddenly stopped.
That was also around the time USA was fomenting a Venezuelan coup. Was obvious that
Russia-Gate was designed to control Trump.
There was a lull in the attacks on Trump between the time they stopped the 24/7
Russia-gate garbage and start of Impeachment inquiry.
He did something else to tick them all off, so now impeachment is on front burner.
In the days of Kissinger, Baker, et al the Imperial Staff were well coached in the
Calculus of Power, knew the limits to Empire and thrived within them. Since the end of
history, and the apparent end of limits, policy makers had no more need of realists and their
confusing calculations and analyses.
The US had power, and no-one else had any. That's all they needed to know, and set about
creating new, wonderfully intoxicating realities. As Rove famously inverted the MO they'll
act first, creating realities and the analysis and calculation can come later. In awe of
their creations, they failed to notice that while history may have ended in Washington,
elsewhere it moved on to surround them with a reality where they found themselves in
zugzwang, with no understanding how they got there. Flailing (and wailing) like a Mastodon in
a tar pit, they've managed only to attract an unhelpful crowd of onlookers, fascinated by the
abomination.
In the second term watch out Trump is not as dumb as they think
I too believe he isn't dumb, but the real question is whether he's playing the fool in
furtherance of a plan, or whether it's just who he is and his successes are accidental.
The Deep State's (aka: PFPE's) ongoing behaviour indicates that Trump's using buffoonery
to work a plan that's anathema to their created realities, and their increasing shrillness
indicates it's working. At every turn, he's managed to make unavailable the resources their
reality called for. From the M.E., to the Ukraine to N. Korea to Venezuela, things just
aren't working the way they're supposed to. In fact, they're invariably working out in a way
that exposes the Deep State's ineptitude and malevolence, and maximizes its
embarrassment.
If that's so, his is the most extraordinary political performance I thought I'd ever see.
Even though I can't imagine a more effective single handed way to accomplish what he promised
to do, that he's lasted this long and has been so effective is astonishing. I guess we'll see
if he abandons buffoonery when his opponents finally sink into the tar.
Decades old rhetorical question and answer-the indolent, indoctrinated and illiterate masses
who only care about the Super Bowl and other sports,Disneyland and burgers. Twelve per cent of
Americans have never heard of the Vice President Mike Pence - that is 30,870,000 American
adults.
It is the same people who have been making it since the creation of central banks in
America (all three of them).
Never in the history of America, probably never in the history of any country, had there
been such open and direct control of governmental activities by the very rich. So long as a
handful of men in Wall Street control the credit and industrial processes of the country,
they will continue to control the press, the government, and, by deception, the people. They
will not only compel the public to work for them in peace, but to fight for them in war.
– John Turner, 1922
"... A more plausible explanation is that Trump thought that by appointing such anti-Russian hard-liners he could lay to rest the Russiagate allegations that had hung over him for three years and still did: that for some secret nefarious reason he was and remained a "Kremlin puppet." Despite the largely exculpatory Mueller report, Trump's political enemies, mostly Democrats but not only, have kept the allegations alive. ..."
"... The larger question is who should make American foreign policy: an elected president or Washington's permanent foreign policy establishment? (It is scarcely a "deep" or "secret" state, since its representatives appear on CNN and MSNBC almost daily.) Today, Democrats seem to think that it should be the foreign policy establishment, not President Trump. But having heard the cold-war views of much of that establishment, how will they feel when a Democrat occupies the White House? After all, eventually Trump will leave power, but Washington's foreign-policy "blob," as even an Obama aide termed it , will remain. ..."
"... Listen to the podcast here ..."
"... War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate ..."
"... The John Batchelor Show ..."
"... Trump's anti-Iranian fever is every bit as ludicrous as the DNC's anti-Russian fever. There is absolutely nothing to support the anti-Iranian policy argument or the anti JCPOA argument. The only thing that is missing from all of this is Iranian hookers, and that would certainly be an explosive headline! ..."
"... You know why Rhodes called it the blob, right? Why he made it sound so formless and squishy? Ask yourself, how does a failed novelist with zilch for foreign-affairs credentials get the big job of Obama's ventriloquist? That's a CIA billet. It so happens that Rhodes' brother has a big job of his own with CBS News, the most servile of the Mockingbird media propaganda mills. ..."
"... It's not a blob, it's a precisely-articulated hierarchy. And the top of it is CIA. So please for once somebody answer this blindingly obvious question, Who is making US foreign policy? CIA, that's who. For the CIA show trial run by Iran/Contra nomenklatura Bill Barr and his blackmailed flunky Durham, Trump's high crime and misdemeanor is conducting diplomacy without CIA supervision. They come out and say so, pointing to the National Security Act's mousetrap bureaucracy. ..."
"... CIA runs your country. They've got impunity, they do what they want. We've got 400,000 academics paid to overthink it. ..."
"... We cannot trust that the people that destroyed the country will repair it. It is run by a Cult of Hedonistic Satanic Psychopaths. If they were limited to just the CIA, America would be in far better shape than its in. The CIA is not capable of thinking or intelligence, so we should stop paying them. ..."
"... Drumpf has been a tool of the Wall Street/Las Vegas Zionist billionaires for many, many years. so his selection of warmongering Zio neo-con advisors should be no surprise. ..."
"... Perhaps part of the reason that Trump often seems to be surrounded by people who don't support his policies or values is, as Paul Craig Roberts suggested in 2016, that Trump would have real problems simply because he was an outsider. An outsider to the Washington swamp, a swamp that Clinton had been swimming in for decades. In short he didn't know who to trust, who to keep "in the tent" & who to shut out. Thus, we have had this huge churn in Secretaries & on so on downwards. ..."
"... Sociopaths are the ones that do the worst because they lack any concern or "Empathy", like robots. So I read that the socio's are some of the brightest people who often are very successful in business etc. and can hide the fact that they would soon as kill as look at ya, but cool as ice, all they want is to get what the hell they want! They don't give a rats petoot who likes likes it or not, except as . ..."
"... Trump hasn't fired any of the neocons, but he proved that he CAN fire defense executives. He fired the Sec of Navy for disagreeing with some ridiculous personal thing that Trump wanted to do. Since Trump hasn't fired any neocons, we have to conclude that he's fully on board. ..."
"... There are so many security holes in the constitution of the USA including that it was ratified by those who invented it, not by a vote put to the people that would be made to suffer being governed by it. Basically the USA is useless as a defender of human rights (one of which is the right to self determination). The so called bill of rights (1st 10 amendments) are contractual promises, but like all clauses in contracts if there is no way to enforce them, then there is no use for the clause except maybe propaganda value. ..."
"... In a normally functioning world you simply can't simultaneously argue that in one case West can bomb a country to force self-determination as in Kosovo, and also denounce exactly the same thing in Crimea. On to Catalonia and more self-determination ..."
"... Trump, among his other occupations, used to engage with the professional wrestling circuit. In that well-staged entertainment there is always a bad guy – or a ' heel ' – who is used to stir up the crowds, the Evil Sheik or Rocky's hapless movie enemies. It makes it ' real '. The ' heel ' is sometimes allowed to win to better manage the audience. But the narrative never changes. Our rational judgments should focus on what happens, and on outcomes – not on talk, slogans, speeches, etc Based on that, Trump is a classical ' heel ' character. He might even be playing it consciously, or he has no choice. ..."
"... To answer the question who runs ' foreign policy ', let's ignore the stadium speeches, and simply look at what happens. In a world bereft of enough profitable consumer things to do, and enough justifiable careers for unemployable geo-political security 'experts' of all kinds, having enemies and maybe even a small war occasionally is not such an irrational thing to want. Plus there are the deep ethnic hatreds and traumas going back generations that were naively imported into the heart of the Western world. (Washington warned against that 200+ years ago.) ..."
"... or maybe trump was a lying neocon, war-loving, immigration-loving neoliberal all along, and you and the trumptards somehow continue to believe his campaign rhetoric? ..."
"... The fact is Trump is not an anti-neocon (Deep State) president he only talks that way. The fact that he surrounded himself with Deep State denizens gives lie to the thought that he is anti-Deep State no one can be that god damn stupid. ..."
"... "TRUMP SUPPORTERS WERE DUPED – Trump supporters are going to find out soon enough that they were duped by Donald Trump. Trump was given the script to run as the "Chaos Candidate" .He is just a pawn of the ruling elite .It is a tactic known as 'CONTROLLED OPPOSITION' ". Wasn't it FDR who said "Presidents are selected , they are not elected " ? ..."
"... Trump selected the Neocons he is surrounded with. And he's given away all kinds of property that he has absolutely no legal authority to give. He was seeking to please American Oligarchs the likes of Adelson. That's American politics. "Money is free speech." Of course, there is another connection with foreign policy beyond the truly total corruption of American domestic politics, and that's through America's brutal empire abroad. ..."
"... Obama or Trump, on the main matters of importance abroad – NATO, Russia, Israel/Palestine, China – there has been no difference, except Trump is more openly bellicose and given to saying really stupid things. ..."
President Trump campaigned and was elected on an anti-neocon platform: he promised to reduce direct US involvement in areas where,
he believed, America had no vital strategic interest, including in Ukraine. He also promised a new détente ("cooperation") with Moscow.
And yet, as we have learned from their recent congressional testimony, key members of his own National Security Council did not
share his views and indeed were opposed to them. Certainly, this was true of Fiona Hill and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. Both of them
seemed prepared for a highly risky confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, though whether retroactively because of Moscow's 2014
annexation of Crimea or for more general reasons was not entirely clear.
Similarly, Trump was slow in withdrawing Marie Yovanovitch, a career foreign service officer appointed by President Obama as ambassador
to Kiev, who had made clear, despite her official position in Kiev, that she did not share the new American president's thinking
about Ukraine or Russia. In short, the president was surrounded in his own administration, even in the White House, by opponents
of his foreign policy and presumably not only in regard to Ukraine.
How did this unusual and dysfunctional situation come about? One possibility is that it was the doing and legacy of the neocon
John Bolton, briefly Trump's national security adviser. But this doesn't explain why the president would accept or long tolerate
such appointees.
A more plausible explanation is that Trump thought that by appointing such anti-Russian hard-liners he could lay to rest the
Russiagate allegations that had hung over him for three years and still did: that for some secret nefarious reason he was and remained
a "Kremlin puppet." Despite the largely exculpatory Mueller report, Trump's political enemies, mostly Democrats but not only, have
kept the allegations alive.
The larger question is who should make American foreign policy: an elected president or Washington's permanent foreign policy
establishment? (It is scarcely a "deep" or "secret" state, since its representatives appear on CNN and MSNBC almost daily.) Today,
Democrats seem to think that it should be the foreign policy establishment, not President Trump. But having heard the cold-war views
of much of that establishment, how will they feel when a Democrat occupies the White House? After all, eventually Trump will leave
power, but Washington's foreign-policy "blob," as even
an Obama aide termed it , will remain.
Listen to the podcast
here . Stephen F. Cohen Stephen F.
Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University. ANationcontributing editor, his most recent book,War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate, is available
in paperback and in an ebook edition. His weekly conversations with the host ofThe John Batchelor Show, now in their sixth
year, are available at www.thenation.com .
because of Moscow's 2014 annexation of Crimea or for more general reasons was not entirely clear.
In an otherwise decent overview, this sticks out like a sore thumb. It would be helpful to stop using the word annexation.
While correct in a technical sense – that Crimea was added to the Russian Federation – the word comes with all kinds of connotations,
that imply illegality and or force. Given Crimea was given special status when gifted to Ukraine for administration by the USSR,
one could just as easily apply "annexation" of Crimea to Ukraine. After Ukraine voted to "leave" the USSR, Crimea voted to join
Ukraine. Obviously the "Ukrainian" vote did not include Crimea. Even after voting to join Ukraine, Crimea had special status within
Ukraine, and was semi autonomous. If you can vote to join, you can vote to leave. Either you have the right to self determination,
or you don't.
This is what is so infuriating, Stephen! These silent coups of the executive branch have been taking place for my entire life!
Both parties are guilty of refusing to appoint cabinet members that the elected presidents would have chosen for themselves, because
both parties are more interested in making the president of the opposing party look bad, make him ineffective, and incapable of
carrying out policies that he was elected to carry out. That is the very definition of treason!
Things are a disaster. The JCPOA is at the heart of the issue and Trump and his advisors stubborn refusal to capitulate on
this issue very well may cause Trump to lose the 2020 election. Trump's anti-Iranian fever is every bit as ludicrous as the
DNC's anti-Russian fever. There is absolutely nothing to support the anti-Iranian policy argument or the anti JCPOA argument.
The only thing that is missing from all of this is Iranian hookers, and that would certainly be an explosive headline!
The anti-Iranian fever has created so much havoc not only with Iran, but with every country on earth other than Israel, Saudi
Arabia, and the UAE. Germany announced that it is seeking to unite with Russia, not only for Gazprom, but is now considering purchasing
defense systems from Russia, and Germany is dictating EU policy, by and large. Germany has said that Europe must be able to defend
itself independent of America and is requesting an EU military and Italy is on board with this idea, seeking to create jobs and
weapons for its economy and defense.
The EU is fed up with the economic sanctions placed on countries that the U.S. has black-listed, particularly Russia and Iran,
and China as well for Huwaei 5G.
Nobody in their right mind could ever claim this to be the free market capitalism that Larry Kudlow espouses!
You know why Rhodes called it the blob, right? Why he made it sound so formless and squishy? Ask yourself, how does a failed
novelist with zilch for foreign-affairs credentials get the big job of Obama's ventriloquist? That's a CIA billet. It so happens
that Rhodes' brother has a big job of his own with CBS News, the most servile of the Mockingbird media propaganda mills.
It's not a blob, it's a precisely-articulated hierarchy. And the top of it is CIA. So please for once somebody answer this
blindingly obvious question, Who is making US foreign policy? CIA, that's who. For the CIA show trial run by Iran/Contra nomenklatura
Bill Barr and his blackmailed flunky Durham, Trump's high crime and misdemeanor is conducting diplomacy without CIA supervision.
They come out and say so, pointing to the National Security Act's mousetrap bureaucracy.
CIA runs your country. They've got impunity, they do what they want. We've got 400,000 academics paid to overthink it.
The CIA has no authority what so ever as defined by the supreme law of the land, the constitution. That would make them guilty
of a coup which would be an act of treason, so if what you claim is true, why have they not been prosecuted.
It is a political game between to competing kleptocratic cults. The DNC and RNC are whores and will do what ever their donors
tell them to do. That is also treason. This country is just a total wasteland.
Everyone has pledged allegiance to fraud.
Too big to fail, like the Titanic and the Hindenberg.
We cannot trust that the people that destroyed the country will repair it. It is run by a Cult of Hedonistic Satanic Psychopaths.
If they were limited to just the CIA, America would be in far better shape than its in. The CIA is not capable of thinking or
intelligence, so we should stop paying them.
Drumpf has been a tool of the Wall Street/Las Vegas Zionist billionaires for many, many years. so his selection of warmongering
Zio neo-con advisors should be no surprise.
What kind of stupid question is this? You mean you don't know or asking us for confirmation? If you really don't know then why
are you writing an article about it? If you do know then why are you asking the UNZ readers?
Perhaps part of the reason that Trump often seems to be surrounded by people who don't support his policies or values is,
as Paul Craig Roberts suggested in 2016, that Trump would have real problems simply because he was an outsider. An outsider to
the Washington swamp, a swamp that Clinton had been swimming in for decades. In short he didn't know who to trust, who to keep
"in the tent" & who to shut out. Thus, we have had this huge churn in Secretaries & on so on downwards.
It is run by a Cult of Hedonistic Satanic Psychopaths.
That's ok but it's a bit unfair to Hedonistic Satanic Psychopaths After all most of the country is Hedonistic as hell,
it sells commercials or wtf. Satanic is philosophical and way over the heads of these clowns, though if the be a Satan, then they
are in the plan for sure, and right on the mark. As for psychopaths, those are criminals who are insane, but they can have remorse
and be their own worst enemies, often they just go off and go psycho and bad things happen, but can be unplanned off the wall
stuff, not diabolic.
Sociopaths are the ones that do the worst because they lack any concern or "Empathy", like robots. So I read that the socio's
are some of the brightest people who often are very successful in business etc. and can hide the fact that they would soon as
kill as look at ya, but cool as ice, all they want is to get what the hell they want! They don't give a rats petoot who likes
likes it or not, except as .
So, once upon a time, a people got so hedonistic and they didn't watch the game and theier leaders were low quality
(especially religeous/morals ) and long story short Satan unleashed the Socio's , Things seem to be heading disastrously,
so will bit coin save the day? Green nudeal?
While massive attention is directed towards Russia and the Ukraine, the majority of the public are shown the slight of hand
and their attention is never brought near to the real perpetrators of subverting American and British foreign policy.
Doesn't matter if he's surrounded. A president CAN make foreign policy, and a president CAN fire people who disagree with his
policy. Trump hasn't fired any of the neocons, but he proved that he CAN fire defense executives. He fired the Sec of Navy
for disagreeing with some ridiculous personal thing that Trump wanted to do. Since Trump hasn't fired any neocons, we have to
conclude that he's fully on board.
The CIA has no authority what so ever as defined by the supreme law of the land, the constitution. That would make them
guilty of a coup which would be an act of treason, so if what you claim is true, why have they not been prosecuted.
--
first off the supreme law of the land maybe the Constitution and to oppose it may be Treason, but the Law that is supreme to the
Law of the land is Human rights law.. it is far superior to, and it is the TLD of all laws of the land of all of the Nation States
that mankind has allowed the greedy among its masses, to impose.
There are so many security holes in the constitution of the USA including that it was ratified by those who invented it,
not by a vote put to the people that would be made to suffer being governed by it. Basically the USA is useless as a defender
of human rights (one of which is the right to self determination). The so called bill of rights (1st 10 amendments) are contractual
promises, but like all clauses in contracts if there is no way to enforce them, then there is no use for the clause except maybe
propaganda value.
If you note the USA constitution has seven articles..
Article 1 is about 525 elected members of congress and their very limited powers to control
foreign activities. Each qualified to vote member of the governed (a citizen so to speak) is allowed to
vote for only 3 of the 525 persons. so basically there is no real national election anywhere .
Article II grants the electoral college the power to appoint two persons full control of the assets,
resources and manpower of America to conquer the entire world or to make peace in the entire world.
Either way: the governed are not allowed to vote for either; the EC vote determines the P or VP.
Article III allows the Article II person to appoint yes men to the judiciary
Where exist the power of the governed to deny USA governors the ability to the use the powers the constitution claims
the governors are to have, against the governed? <==No where I can find? Theoretically, the governed are protected from abuse
for as long as it takes to conduct due process?
One person, the Article II person, is basically the king when in comes to constitutional authority to establish, conduct,
prosecute or defend USA involvement in foreign affairs.
No where does the constitution of the USA deny its President the use of American resources or USA military power, to
make and use diplomat appointments, or to use the USA to use the wealth of America and the hegemonic powers of the USA to make
a private or public profit in a foreign land. <= d/n matter if the profit is personal to the President or if it assigned by appointment
(like the feudal powers granted by the feudal kings to the feudal lords) to corporate feudal lords or oligarch personal interest.
AFAICT, the president can USE the USA to conduct war, invade or otherwise infringe on, even destroy, the territory, or a
private or public interest, within a foreign sovereign more or less at will. So if the President wants to command a private
or secret Army like the CIA, he can as far as I can tell, obviously this president does, because he could with his pen alone shut
it down.
Seems to me the "NO" from Wilson's four points
no more secret diplomacy peace settlement must not lead the way to new wars
no retribution, unjust claims, and huge fines <basically indemnities paid by the losers to the winners.
no more war; includes controls on armaments and arming of nations.
no more Trade Barriers so the nations of the world would become more interdependent.
have been made the essence of nation state operations world wide.
IMO, The CIA exists at the pleasure of the President.
@Curmudgeon all of that,
plus the Kosovo precedent.
In a normally functioning world you simply can't simultaneously argue that in one case West can bomb a country to force
self-determination as in Kosovo, and also denounce exactly the same thing in Crimea. On to Catalonia and more self-determination
Trump, among his other occupations, used to engage with the professional wrestling circuit. In that well-staged entertainment
there is always a bad guy – or a ' heel ' – who is used to stir up the crowds, the Evil Sheik or Rocky's hapless movie
enemies. It makes it ' real '. The 'heel ' is sometimes allowed to win to better manage the audience. But
the narrative never changes. Our rational judgments should focus on what happens, and on outcomes – not on talk, slogans, speeches,
etc Based on that, Trump is a classical ' heel ' character. He might even be playing it consciously, or he has no choice.
To answer the question who runs ' foreign policy ', let's ignore the stadium speeches, and simply look at what happens.
In a world bereft of enough profitable consumer things to do, and enough justifiable careers for unemployable geo-political security
'experts' of all kinds, having enemies and maybe even a small war occasionally is not such an irrational thing to want. Plus there
are the deep ethnic hatreds and traumas going back generations that were naively imported into the heart of the Western world.
(Washington warned against that 200+ years ago.)
Trump should have kept Steve Bannon as his advisor and should have fired instead his son-in-law. Perhaps "they" are blackmailing
Trump with photos like here: https://www.pinterest.com/richarddesjarla/creepy/
That would explain why Trump is so ineffective at making a reality anything he campaigned for.
or maybe trump was a lying neocon, war-loving, immigration-loving neoliberal all along, and you and the trumptards somehow
continue to believe his campaign rhetoric?
An anti-neocon president appears to have been surrounded by neocons in his own administration.
The fact is Trump is not an anti-neocon (Deep State) president he only talks that way. The fact that he surrounded himself
with Deep State denizens gives lie to the thought that he is anti-Deep State no one can be that god damn stupid.
or maybe trump was a lying neocon, war-loving, immigration-loving neoliberal all along, and you and the trumptards somehow
continue to believe his campaign rhetoric?
Halfway around the world from Washington's halls of power, Ukraine sits along a civilizational and geopolitical fault line.
To Ukraine's west are the liberal democracies of Europe, governed by rule of law and democratic principles. To its east are
Russia and its client states in Eurasia, almost all of which are corrupt oligarchies. [ ] In this war on democratic movements
and democratic principles, Russia's biggest prize and chief adversary has always been the United States. Until now, however,
Russia has always had to contend with bipartisan resolve to counter
No mention of China, and this is the problem with the whole foreign policy establishment not just the neocons. Russia is more
of an annoyance than anything, but they are still operating assumptions on what is the
Geographical Pivot of History , so they want to talk about Russia. Like an Edwardian sea cadet we are supposed to care about
Russia getting (back) a water port in Crimea. Mahan's definition of sea power included a strong commercial fleet. After tearing
their own environment apart like a car in a wrecking yard and heating up the planet China has taken time out from deforestation
and colonising Tibet, to send huge container vessels full of cheap goods through the melting Arctic round the top of Russia all
the better to get to Europe and deindustrialise it.
Western elites have sold out to China, seen as the future, so we hear about Russia rather than the three million Uyghurs in
concentration camps complete with constantly smoking crematoria, and harvesting of organs for rich foreigners.
Who
poses a greater threat to the West: China or Russia?
By the time the West finds itself in open conflict with Beijing, we will have lost our relative advantage. Brendan Simms and
K.C. Lin [ ] The concept of China being a threat is harder to comprehend. In what way? Yes, its hacking and intellectual property
theft is a headache. But is it worse than what Russia is up to? And don't we need Chinese investment, so does it really matter
if China builds our 5G mobile networks? In London, ministers agonise over these issues -- not knowing whether to pity China
(we still send foreign aid there), beg for its money and contracts (with prime ministerial trade trips), or treat it as a potential
antagonist.
Aid ! They sent robots to the far side of the Moon
Beijing has been the beneficiary of liberal revulsion at the Trump presidency: if the Donald is against the Chinese,
who cannot be for them? As a result, Trump's efforts to address China's unfair trade practices have so far missed the mark
with the domestic and international audience. As Trump declares war on free trade, China -- one of the most protectionist economies
in the world -- is now celebrated at Davos as the avatar of free trade. Later this month, China's Vice-President is likely
to be in attendance at Davos -- and there is even talk of him meeting with Trump. Similarly, the messiness of American politics
has made China's one-party state an apparent poster boy of political stability and governability.
"TRUMP SUPPORTERS WERE DUPED – Trump supporters are going to find out soon enough that they were duped by
Donald Trump. Trump was given the script to run as the "Chaos Candidate" .He is just a pawn of the ruling elite .It is a tactic
known as 'CONTROLLED OPPOSITION' ".
Wasn't it FDR who said "Presidents are selected , they are not elected " ?
Trump selected the Neocons he is surrounded with. And he's given away all kinds of property that he has absolutely no legal
authority to give. He was seeking to please American Oligarchs the likes of Adelson. That's American politics. "Money is free
speech." Of course, there is another connection with foreign policy beyond the truly total corruption of American domestic politics,
and that's through America's brutal empire abroad.
The military/intelligence imperial establishment definitely see Israel as a kind of American colony in the Mideast, and they
make sure that it's well provided for. That's what the Neocon Wars have been about. Paving over large parts of Israel's noisy
neighborhood. And that includes matters like keeping Syria off-balance with occupation in its northeast. And constantly threatening
Iran.
Obama or Trump, on the main matters of importance abroad – NATO, Russia, Israel/Palestine, China – there has been no difference,
except Trump is more openly bellicose and given to saying really stupid things.
By the way, the last President who tried seriously to make foreign policy as the elected head of government left half of his
head splattered on thec streets of Dallas.
@Jon Baptist We have
all been brainwashed by the propaganda screened by the massmedia ,whether it be FOX , MSNBC , CBS ,etc.. SeptemberClues.info has
a good article entitled "The central role of the news media on 9/11 " :
"The 9/11 psyop relied foremostly on that weakspot of ours .We all fell for the images we saw on TV at the time we can only
wonder why so many never questioned the absurd TV coverage proposed by all the major networks The 9/11 TV imagery of the crucial
morning events was just a computer-animated, pre-fabricated movie."
@follyofwar Pat inhabits
a strange Hollywood type world, where the US is always the good guy. He believes that, although the US may make foreign policy
mistakes, its aims and ambitions are nevertheless noble and well intentioned.
In Pat's world it's still circa 1955, but even then, his take on US foreign policy would have been hopelessly unrealistic.
"This was a debate over policy. Trump's critics may not have liked the policy he was
pushing. But as former Defense Intelligence Agency official Pat Lang noted on his blog last
week,
the statute in question applies only to "intelligence activities" but "does not include
differences of opinions concerning public policy matters."
That's what this fight is about, said Lang . Speaker after speaker at the hearings asserted
that Trump's views did not comport with official national policy. But the president sets that
policy, Lang said, not the diplomats.
"They think they are the people who set national policy and the president is this figurehead
who is guided by all these people around him who agree on everything," he said. "The president
doesn't need to use the State Department at all to conduct foreign policy." ' Paul Mulshine
-------------
Actually, I was too minimal in speaking of "diplomats." Vindman is not a diplomat and there
are many other actors in this drama of Borgist angst (foreign policy establishment ) who are
not diplomats.
For one thing a large percentage of the Drones at the State Department are civil service
employees rather than Foreign Service Officers, and although they do not play well together
they agree on the ultimate authority of the Supremacy Clause (non-existent) in the US
Constitution that gives the State Department dominion over all the Lord created. A career
ambassador's wife once lectured me that the US Army should change the cap badge that officers
wear because it looks too much like the Great Seal of the United States which in the State
Department can only be displayed by Ambassadors. I told her that she should petition the
Secretary of the Army in this matter.
Various departments of government, media, academia, thinktankeries, etc., all have heavy
infestations of folks who went to graduate school together in poly sci in all its branches, or
who wish to be thought worthy of such attendance. They specialize in group think, conformity,
and conformism, even to the solemn dress they affect. The four in hand tie knot is pretty much
mandatory for serious consideration for inclusion in the Borg. It indicates a certain preppy
insouciance and faux disregard for details of dress.
Trump's casual disregard for all that enrages the Borg who thought they had "won it all"
long ago and that they would have a Borgist neocon to deal with in Hillary.
Hillary's Foundation has lost millions recently, which has Hillary pursing her lips like
she's been using a lemon for her lipstick. I mean, worse than fish-lips, Hillary's pursing
expression.
Too bad that we can't form some cement shoes for the Borg and toss them into the east
river AKA the Atlantic, or send them back to hell from where they originated!
OT:
This afternoon my wife and I turned on the TV to watch football. We were flipping through
channels and came upon some local ABC affiliate (WMUR) which had on a documentary which
mentioned the Medal of Honor and a Catholic chaplain in Vietnam. Needless to say we stayed on
that channel. Long story short, it was one of the most powerful things we've ever watched. We
were both in tears by the end (nb: I don't cry easily) and we were changed from having
watched it. We immediately went online to purchase copies for family members. It was recently
released.
As the Borg like to say "We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our
own." They have done this with the four in hand tie knot which was previously worn by giants
like George Kennon and Chip Bohlen. Yet now, the midgetry prevails.
Colonel...This is another Reason why I appreciate your levels of Experience and knowledge
with SST..Thank you for doing that...I always come away with New Insight..and Understanding
of Real Dynamics..what has Progressively Developed inside the State.Department.with its
Influence On so Much POLICY...and .is as You say...The BORG..and Their Own Culture.your
Article put that all into a Big Picture for Me..(Connecting the Data..) .It.as you aptly
Described. is a Universal.Sect..and...At The National Level...They are Cyber Borgs..Shciff
Shapers..and that Whole Colony has Been Exposed.,,, Bad Products and All....
Fiona Hill appears to be part of the Borg, not really sure which part she's affiliated.
Some have called her a 'sleeper agent', but a sleeper for whom? British Intelligence agent of
influence? Or an Israeli agent of influence, or maybe a Daniel Pipes trained NEOCON agent of
influence? Any way one spins it, Fiona Hill has been undermining POTUS Trump while she was
part of his NSC and his advisory team. Why her intense hatred of Putin? Does he happen to
know through his nation's intelligence exactly who she is and whom she may be working on
behalf of? The Skripal incident showed just how much that the British Government and Crown
hate Russia. But why the intense British hatred of Russia, why?
Questions, so many questions regarding Ms. Hill and who she really works for.
The fraction of RussiaGate/UkraineGate that can be taken seriously is quite small. An
enormous amount of it is "it's ok when we do it"-level material. Difficult to sort without
presenting a range encompassing all factions.
It's possible I'm too jaded, but "reporters presents material derived from his political
faction" isn't all that exciting, since I don't belong to either of the factions engaged in
this battle. I remember the Lewinsky Matter, WMDs, and (see today's Links), being smeared by
Prop0rNot, and UkraineGate just a little too well.
"... Ciaramella invited Chalupa to meetings and events at the Obama White House. She also visits the Obama White House with Ukrainian lobbyists seeking aid from Obama. Senator Charles Grassley, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in 2017, " ..."
"... According to Fox News, the complaint alleges that the DNC specifically "tasked Chalupa with obtaining incriminating or derogatory information about Donald Trump [and] Paul Manfort," ..."
"... Remarkably, despite his clear connections to Rice and Brennan, he was brought back into the inner circle of the Trump NSC by HR McMaster. McMaster appointed him to be his personal aide. ..."
"... He was fired in June of 2017 after being directly implicated in a series of serious national security leaks from the White House calculated to be damaging to President Trump. ..."
"... Vindman also leaked the classified information about the President's call with a foreign head of state to a number of other people. These unauthorized leaks are criminal. Both illegal, unethical and unconscionable. ..."
"... Ciaramella worked with both Grace and Misko in the NSC at the Obama White House. Misko and Grace joined Schiff's committee in early August of 2019, just in time to coordinate the "whistleblower" complaint. ..."
"... Both Vindman and Ciaramella do not qualify for "whistleblower" status. They were reporting on a diplomatic conversation, not an intelligence matter. They were not reporting on a member of the Intelligence committee. ..."
"... IC IG Michael Atkinson surreptitiously changed the rules for whistleblower complaints to allow second-hand testimony in September of 2019. He then backdated the changes to allow the Ciaramella complaint, initially filed in early August, to be included under the new "interpretive" guidelines. ..."
"... The playbook is the same as the Mueller Inquisition and the Russia Hoax, the same as the Kavanaugh smear campaign. With the same co-conspirators of the left-wing mainstream media. Not only carrying water for the coup plotters but being actual participants in the scheme. Paid mouthpieces for the Deep State. ..."
"... Sperry's devastating expose makes clear that Ciaramella is another cog in the Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Rice, Obama conspiracy to overthrow the duly elected President of the United States. As Chuck Schumer said in January of 2017, ..."
"... Ciaramella helped generate the "Putin fired Comey" narrative. Sperry reports, "In the days after Comey's firing, this presidential action was used to further political and media calls for the standup of the special counsel to investigate 'Russia collusion.'" ..."
WASHINGTON, DC : Adam Schiff "whistleblower" Eric Ciaramella has
been exposed as a John Brennan ally. An ally who actively worked to defame, target, and destroy
President Donald Trump during both the Obama and Trump administrations. He was fired from the
Trump White House for leaking confidential if not classified information detrimental to the
President. ( The Pajama Boy
Whistleblower Revealed – Rush Limbaugh )
The 33-year-old Ciaramella, a former Susan Rice protege, currently works for the CIA as an
analyst.
Eric Ciaramella: The Deep State non-whistleblower
During his time in the Obama White House, NSC Ciaramella worked under both Vice President
Joe Biden and CIA director John Brennan. He reported directly to NSC advisor Susan Rice through
his immediate boss, Charles Kupchan. Kupchan had extensive ties with Clinton crony Sydney
Blumenthal. Large portions of Blumenthal's disinformation from Ukrainian sources in 2016 was
used in the nefarious Steele Dossier.
Ciaramella also worked extensively with DNC operative Alexandra Chalupa. Chalupa led the
effort at the DNC to fabricate a link between the Trump Campaign to Vladimir Putin and Russia.
According to Politico, Chalupa "met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington
in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia."
The DNC paid Chalupa $412,000 between 2004 and 2016.
DNC operative Alexandra Chalupa: Ciaramella co-conspirator
"Chalupa told a senior DNC official that, when it came to Trump's campaign, 'I felt there
was a Russia connection.'"
Apparently without any evidence. So she set out to concoct it.
Chalupa (left) also says that the Ukrainian embassy was working directly with reporters
digging for Trump-Russia ties. How convenient, and unethical.
Ciaramella invited Chalupa to meetings and events at the Obama White House. She also visits
the Obama White House with Ukrainian lobbyists seeking aid from Obama. Senator Charles
Grassley, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a letter to Deputy Attorney
General Rod Rosenstein in 2017, "
"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."
The FEC complaint against the DNC and Chalupa
In September 2019 a complaint was filed with the Federal Elections Commission against the
DNC naming Alexandra Chalupa. The complaint alleges that Chalupa acted "improperly to gather
information on Paul Manafort and Donald Trump in the 2016 election".
According to Fox News, the complaint alleges that the DNC specifically "tasked Chalupa
with obtaining incriminating or derogatory information about Donald Trump [and] Paul
Manfort,"
Fox News reporting, that Chalupa allegedly
"Pushed for Ukrainian officials to publicly mention Manafort's financial and political ties
to" Ukraine and "sought to have the Ukrainian government provide her information about
Manafort's work in the country."
John Solomon and Wikileaks both expose Chalupa as DNC operative
"Ambassador Valeriy Chaly's office says DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa sought information
from the Ukrainian government on Paul Manafort's dealings inside the country. Chalupa later
tried to arrange for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to comment on Manafort's Russian ties
on a U.S. visit during the 2016 campaign."
Ciaramella's connection with John Brennan and Susan Rice
Eric Ciaramella had been working with John Brennan, Susan Rice, the Obama White House, and
Alexandra Chalupa to target and destroy Donald Trump well before he was elected. He was
initially brought into the NSC and the White House inner circle by John Brennan himself.
Remarkably, despite his clear connections to Rice and Brennan, he was brought back into the
inner circle of the Trump NSC by HR McMaster. McMaster appointed him to be his personal
aide.
He was fired in June of 2017 after being directly implicated in a series of serious national
security leaks from the White House calculated to be damaging to President Trump.
Ciaramella and Alexander Vindman: the second "whistleblower"
Ciaramella's title at the White House was NSC Director for Ukraine. That position is now
held by the newest Schiff star witness and Trump hater Lt. Col Alexander Vindman. Vindman is
apparently the "2nd whistleblower" to leak his concerns about the call between Trump and
President Zelensky to Ciaramella.
Vindman also leaked the classified information about the President's call with a foreign
head of state to a number of other people. These unauthorized leaks are criminal. Both illegal,
unethical and unconscionable.
Violating clear national security guidelines for classified information.
Republicans, on cross-examination of Vindman was asked by Republicans cross-examining him
during the closed-door secret police hearings conducted by Adam Schiff, asking who Vindman had
contact with. Schiff cut off the questioning, coaching the witness while refusing to let him
answer the questions.
Schiff coordinated with Ciaramella and Vindman
It is now clear that Ciaramella and Vindman coordinated the entire whistleblower affair with
Schiff and his staff in violation of the "whistleblower" statute. That Ciaramella has been
coordinating his complaint with Schiff committee staffers Abigail Grace and Sean Misko.
Ciaramella worked with both Grace and Misko in the NSC at the Obama White House. Misko and
Grace joined Schiff's committee in early August of 2019, just in time to coordinate the
"whistleblower" complaint.
Both Vindman and Ciaramella do not qualify for "whistleblower" status. They were reporting
on a diplomatic conversation, not an intelligence matter. They were not reporting on a member
of the Intelligence committee.
The suspicious case of IC IG Michael Atkinson
IC IG Michael Atkinson surreptitiously changed the rules for whistleblower complaints to
allow second-hand testimony in September of 2019. He then backdated the changes to allow the
Ciaramella complaint, initially filed in early August, to be included under the new
"interpretive" guidelines.
The level of subterfuge and coordination between Schiff, Ciaramella, Vindman, Abigail Grace,
Sean Misko, and IG Atkinson is more than suspicious. It reeks of yet another episode of a Deep
State coordinated coup attempt.
The whole impeachment affair is a brazen sequel to the Russia Hoax involving many of the
same key players. Susan Rice, John Brennan, Adam Schiff. Designed to target, destroy, and in
this case, fabricate grounds for the impeachment of the President.
The playbook is the same as the Mueller Inquisition and the Russia Hoax, the same as the
Kavanaugh smear campaign. With the same co-conspirators of the left-wing mainstream media. Not
only carrying water for the coup plotters but being actual participants in the scheme. Paid
mouthpieces for the Deep State.
Paul Sperry and Real Clear Investigations
The most comprehensive expose on Ciaramella, that has forced even the mainstream media to
take notice, was the Real Clear Investigations reporting of Paul Sperry. Only Sperry, the
Federalist, and CDN have exposed the whistleblowers' identity. But his name and transparent
partisan actions are the worst kept secret in Washington.
As CIA analyst Fred Fleitz has said:
"Everyone knows who he is. CNN knows. The Washington Post knows. The New York Times knows.
Congress knows. The White House knows. Even the president knows who he is."
Sperry's devastating expose makes clear that Ciaramella is another cog in the Brennan,
Clapper, Comey, Rice, Obama conspiracy to overthrow the duly elected President of the United
States. As Chuck Schumer said in January of 2017,
"If you take on the intelligence community, they have nines ways to Sunday of getting back
at you."
The never-ending coup attempt against Trump
The reality is that Trump was targeted by the Obama White House well before he was
President. The ongoing coup against him started as soon as he was elected. It morphed into the
Mueller Weissman inquisition and the Peter Strzok insurance policy.
When that fizzled into oblivion it was time for plan B, or in this case plan C or D. The
Deep State and their paid minions in the left-wing press have been unrelenting in their ongoing
anti-constitutional putsch against the President.
The impeachment farce, with its calculated rollout reminiscent of the Kavanaugh smear
campaign, is yet another extension of a never-ending East German Stassi coup (sic) attempt
against the constitution, the Republic, and the people of the United States.
Sperry lays out the trail of evidence against Ciaramella
Paul Sperry's excellent investigative reporting makes clear that Ciaramella "previously
worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and former CIA Director John Brennan. (He) left his
National Security Council posting in the White House's West Wing in mid-2017 amid concerns
about negative leaks to the media." As Sperry reports, "He was accused of working against Trump
and leaking against Trump," said a former NSC official.
Sperry reports that "a handful of former colleagues have compiled a roughly 40-page research
dossier on him. A classified version of the document is circulating on Capitol Hill". The
dossier documents Ciaramella's bias against Trump. His relationships with Brennan, Rice, the
Obama White House, and DNC operative Chalupa. As well as his coordination with Vindman, Schiff
and his committee staff.
Chuck Schumer: "Eight ways to Sunday of getting back at you"
It questions both Ciaramella's and Vindman's veracity as a legitimate whistleblower. It
makes clear that Ciaramella and his co-conspirators are part of a Deep State coup attempt. A
calculated, coordinated, illegal, seditious, and illegitimate putsch.
As CIA analyst Fred Fleitz makes clear, " They're hiding him ." Fleitz was emphatic,
" They're hiding him because of his political bias."
Ciaramella helped generate the "Putin fired Comey" narrative. Sperry reports, "In the days
after Comey's firing, this presidential action was used to further political and media calls
for the standup of the special counsel to investigate 'Russia collusion.'"
How IC Inspector General Atkinson found the whistleblower complaint "credible" and "urgent"
at the same time he was backdating the change in regulations to allow the complaint to be filed
is more than highly suspicious. How the 'whistleblower" coordinated with Schiff, Grace, Misko,
and Atkinson to stager the start of impeachment farce is criminal.
Adam Schiff: Constantly lying while moving the goalposts
... ... ...
Schiff: Outstanding scoundrel in a cesspit filled to the brim with similar criminals.
Now Eric Ciaramella is apparently backing away from testifying. Schiff says he no longer
needs his testimony. But Ciaramella should be subpoenaed and called to testify before the
Senate Judiciary Committee. He should not be allowed to escape accountability for his role in
this calculated charade of a conspiracy.
He would then have to testify to his coordination with Schiff and the committee staff. He
would have to expose how Vindmann leaked national security information illegally. How the
entire 'whistleblower" farce was a calculated effort to again derail the Trump Presidency.
A lot has come out about Eric Ciaramella, the Adam Schiff 'Whistleblower", in recent days.
It is the tip of the iceberg. Any legitimate investigation of the circumstances surrounding the
entire Ukraine affair will reveal the extensive criminality of the Obama White House and the
coup plotters.
Exposing the dark underbelly of the Obama White House
It stretches back to the Steele Dossier and the clear efforts of the DNC and the Deep State
to use to a foreign power to interfere in the 2016 election. He exposes the corruption of Vice
President Biden to enrich his family at the expense of the American taxpayer. Details the $6
million dollar bribery scheme of Hunter and Joe Biden by Burisma Holdings.
Lays out the corrupt dealings of Ambassador Yovanovich.
It will lay open the devious underbelly of all the so-called hero witnesses of the Schiff
impeachment Star Chamber inquisition. Of the criminal actions of the coup plotters. Of
Ambassador Yovanovich, Ambassador Taylor, Alexandra Chalupa, and Alexander Vindman.
As well as the so-called whistleblower, Eric Ciaramella.
Calling the Fourth Estate back
It is the tip of the iceberg that only a truly free and independent press will have to
take the reins to fearlessly expose. Like brilliant investigative reporter Paul Sperry at
Real Clear Investigations. Like the Federalist, NOQ Report, and here at CommDigiNews, who
broke the Ciaramella story a full two days before Real Clear Investigations.
No one else in the corrupt media establishment seems willing to rise to the challenge.
Looks like both Yovanovich and Hill are connected to Soros and did his bidding instead of pursuing Trump policies as for
Ukraine. Yovanovich was clearly dismiied due to her role in channeling damaging to Trump information during 2016 elections,
the fact that she denies (as she denied the exostance of "do not procecute list"). And nothing can be taken serious from a
government official until she denied it.
Notable quotes:
"... Fiona Hill, who was the senior director for Europe and Russia in the National Security Council (NSC) said other NSC staff had been "hounded out" by threats against them, including antisemitic smears linking them to the liberal financier and philanthropist, George Soros, a hate figure on the far right. ..."
"... This was a mishmash of conspiracy theories that I believe firmly to be baseless, an idea of an association between her and George Soros." ..."
"... "My entire first year of my tenure at the National Security Council was filled with hateful calls, conspiracy theories, which has started again, frankly, as it's been announced that I've been giving this deposition, accusing me of being a Soros mole in the White House, of colluding with all kinds of enemies of the president, and of various improprieties." ..."
"... "When I saw this happening to Ambassador Yovanovitch, I was furious," she said, pointing to "this whipping up of what is frankly an antisemitic conspiracy theory about George Soros to basically target nonpartisan career officials, and also some political appointees as well." ..."
"... Hill dismissed the suggestion that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election was a "conspiracy theory" intended to distract attention from Russia's well-documented role. ..."
Fiona Hill, who was the senior director for Europe and Russia in the National Security
Council (NSC) said other NSC staff had been "hounded out" by threats against them, including
antisemitic smears linking them to the liberal financier and philanthropist, George Soros, a
hate figure on the far right.
In her testimony to Congress, Hill described a climate of fear among administration
staff.
The UK-born academic and biographer of Vladimir Putin said that the former ambassador to
Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, was the target of a hate campaign, with the aim of driving her from
her post in Kyiv, where she was seen as an obstacle to some corrupt business interests.
Yovanovitch was recalled from Ukraine in May on Trump's orders. In a 25 July conversation
with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Trump described Yovanovitch as "bad news"
and predicted she was "going to go through some things". The former ambassador has testified
she felt threatened by the remarks.
Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, led calls for Yovanovitch's dismissal, as did two of Giuliani
business associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. All three are under scrutiny in hearings being
held by House committees looking at Trump's use of his office to put pressure on the Ukrainian
government to investigate his political opponents.
"There was no basis for her removal," Hill testified. "The accusations against her had no
merit whatsoever. This was a mishmash of conspiracy theories that I believe firmly to be
baseless, an idea of an association between her and George Soros."
"I had had accusations similar to this being made against me as well," Hill testified. "My
entire first year of my tenure at the National Security Council was filled with hateful calls,
conspiracy theories, which has started again, frankly, as it's been announced that I've been
giving this deposition, accusing me of being a Soros mole in the White House, of colluding with
all kinds of enemies of the president, and of various improprieties."
She added that the former national security adviser, HR McMaster "and many other members of
staff were targeted as well, and many people were hounded out of the National Security Council
because they became frightened about their own security."
"I received, I just have to tell you, death threats, calls at my home. My neighbours
reported somebody coming and hammering on my door," Hill said, adding that she had also been
targeted by obscene phone calls. "Now, I'm not easily intimidated, but that made me mad."
"When I saw this happening to Ambassador Yovanovitch, I was furious," she said, pointing to
"this whipping up of what is frankly an antisemitic conspiracy theory about George Soros to
basically target nonpartisan career officials, and also some political appointees as well."
In Yovanovitch's case, Hill said: "the most obvious explanation [for the smear campaign]
seemed to be business dealings of individuals who wanted to improve their investment positions
inside of Ukraine
itself, and also to deflect away from the findings of not just the Mueller report on Russian
interference but what's also been confirmed by your own Senate report, and what I know myself
to be true as a former intelligence analyst and somebody who has been working on Russia for
more than 30 years."
Hill dismissed the suggestion that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election was a "conspiracy
theory" intended to distract attention from Russia's well-documented role.
The list contains some (but not all) of the key participants of the 2014 coup d'état
against President Yanukovich. There are 13 names in the list: MPs Serhiy Leshchenko, Mustafa
Nayem, Svitlana Zalishchuk, Serhiy Berezenko, Serhiy Pashynsky; ex-Prime Minister Arseniy
Yatsenyuk; ex-Head of the National Bank of Ukraine Valeriya Hontareva; ex-First Deputy of the
National Security and Defense Council Oleg Hladkovsky; judge of the Constitutional Court of
Ukraine Makar Pasenyuk; candidate for presidency Anatoly Hrytsenko; singer Svyatoslav Vakarchuk;
journalist Dmytro Hordon and ex-Head of the Presidential Administration Borys Lozhkin.
Pashynsky was involved in Snipergate. Yatsenyuk was the marionette chosen by Nuland to head
the Provisional government after Yanukovich will be overthrown.
Almost all of these people from the list were involved in various sort of scandals during
the last five years. Particularly, Oleg Hladkovsky was recently dismissed from his post due to
the corruption scandal in the defense sphere. Serhiy Leshchenko became known for the purchase
of the flat for $275,253 and the number of information attacks at well-known politicians and
businessmen. Serhy Pashynsky was tied to the hostile takeover of a confectionary factory in
Zhytomyr.
In its turn, the U.S. Department of State stated that the
words of Lutsenko are not true and aims to tarnish the reputation of Ambassador
Yovanovitch. Thus, there are certain concerns that the actual list might be fake.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - The House is holding its second public hearing with former US envoy
to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch centring around her ouster which, according to her, is pertinent
to the impeachment probe against Trump. Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch
flatly denied allegations that she circulated a list of potential corruption targets in Ukraine
that the United States did not want prosecuted, according to testimony at the opening of
hearings in the House impeachment probe of President Donald Trump on Friday.
"I want to reiterate first that the allegation that I disseminated a do not prosecute list
was a fabrication", Yovanovitch said. "Mr Lutsenko, the former Ukrainian prosecutor general
who made that allegation, has acknowledged that the list never existed. I did not tell Mr
Lutsenko or other Ukrainian officials who they should or should not prosecute. Instead I
advocated the US position that rule of law should prevail."
US President Donald Trump in a series of tweets on Friday
criticised former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch's performance while she was
testifying in the impeachment hearing against him. He defended his decision to replace
Yovanovitch - appointed by his predecessor Barak Obama - as the US ambassador to Ukraine, where
she served from August 2016 until May 2019.
....They call it "serving at the pleasure of the President." The U.S. now has a very
strong and powerful foreign policy, much different than proceeding administrations. It is
called, quite simply, America First! With all of that, however, I have done FAR more for
Ukraine than O.
During Friday's Democrat-led impeachment inquiry hearing, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine
Marie Yovanovitch testified under oath that she did not give former Ukrainian Prosecutor
General Yuriy Lutsenko a "do not prosecute list" in 2017. Yovanovitch also doubled-down on
left-wing disinformation saying that Lutsenko "acknowledged that the list never existed" in
April.
"I want to reiterate first that the allegation that I disseminated a "Do Not Prosecute" list
was a fabrication,"
Yovanovitch told the House Intelligence Committee . "Mr. Lutsenko, the former Ukrainian
prosecutor general who made that allegation, has acknowledged that the list never existed. I
did not tell Mr. Lutsenko or other Ukrainian officials who they should or should not
prosecute."
"That is such a lie," Glenn Beck said on Friday's show. "She should be held for
perjury."
During a three-part BlazeTV exposé on the Democrats' corruption in Ukraine, Glenn
debunked what he called "the most misleading fabrication I've ever seen by the mainstream
media."
Earlier this year, award-winning investigative journalist John
Solomon reported Lutsenko's claim that then-Ambassador Yovanovitch gave him a list of
"people whom we should not prosecute" during a meeting in 2016. Shortly after Solomon's article
was released, several news sources, including the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal,
reported that Lutsenko retracted his statement.
When Lutsenko said Yovanovitch "gave" him a list, he did not mean she actually handed him
anything in writing, but verbally conveyed the names of people he shouldn't prosecute.
"They never mentioned the fact that it was verbally dictated and he wrote the list down
himself -- are you kidding me?" Glenn exclaimed. "This is how the media is fact-checking and
debunking. They are playing with our republic and Ukraine's republic. They are planting
dynamite all around everything that we hold dear. How do they sleep at night? Everyone that
reads their stories actually thinks that there was a retraction of one of the most damning
parts of this entire case."
If you like what you see, use promo code GB20OFF to get $20 off a full year of BlazeTV . With a BlazeTV subscription, you're not just paying to watch
great pro-free speech, pro-America TV. Your subscription funds the intensive investigations
that let BlazeTV tell the stories
the liberal media wants to keep in the dark, giving you the unvarnished truth, showing you what
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Read More
Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko 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.
The State Department called Lutsenko's claim of receiving a do not prosecute list, "an
outright fabrication."
"We have seen reports of the allegations," a department spokesperson told Hill.TV. "The
United States is not currently providing any assistance to the Prosecutor General's Office
(PGO), but did previously attempt to support fundamental justice sector reform, including in
the PGO, in the aftermath of the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. When the political will for
genuine reform by successive Prosecutors General proved lacking, we exercised our fiduciary
responsibility to the American taxpayer and redirected assistance to more productive
projects."
Hill.TV has reached out to the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine for comment.
Lutsenko also said that he has not received funds amounting to nearly $4 million that the
U.S. Embassy in Ukraine was supposed to allocate to his office, saying that "the situation was
actually rather strange" and pointing to the fact that the funds were designated, but "never
received."
"At that time we had a case for the embezzlement of the U.S. government technical assistance
worth 4 million U.S. dollars, and in that regard, we had this dialogue," he said. " At that
time, [Yovanovitch] thought that our interviews of Ukrainian citizens, of Ukrainian civil
servants, who were frequent visitors of the U.S. Embassy put a shadow on that anti-corruption
policy."
"Actually, we got the letter from the U.S. Embassy, from the ambassador, that the money that
we are speaking about [was] under full control of the U.S. Embassy, and that the U.S. Embassy
did not require our legal assessment of these facts," he said. "The situation was actually
rather strange because the funds we are talking about were designated for the prosecutor
general's office also and we told [them] we have never seen those, and the U.S. Embassy replied
there was no problem."
"The portion of the funds namely 4.4 million U.S. dollars were designated and were foreseen
for the recipient Prosecutor General's office. But we have never received it," he said.
Yovanovitch previously served as the U.S. ambassador to Armenia under former presidents
Obama and George W. Bush, as well as ambassador to Kyrgyzstan under Bush. She also served as
ambassador to Ukraine under Obama.
"... Authored by John Solomon via JohnSolomonReports.com, ..."
"... Daily intelligence reports from March through August 2019 on Ukraine's new president Volodymyr Zelensky and his relationship
with oligarchs and other key figures. ..."
"... State Department memos on U.S. funding given to the George Soros-backed group the Anti-Corruption Action Centre. ..."
"... The transcripts of Joe Biden's phone calls and meetings with Ukraine's president and prime minister from April 2014 to January
2017 when Hunter Biden served on the board of the natural gas company Burisma Holdings. ..."
"... All documents from an Office of Special Counsel whistleblower investigation into unusual energy transactions in Ukraine. ..."
"... All FBI, CIA, Treasury Department and State Department documents concerning possible wrongdoing at Burisma Holdings. ..."
"... All documents from 2015-16 concerning the decision by the State Department's foreign aid funding arm, USAID, to pursue a joint
project with Burisma Holdings. ..."
"... All cables, memos and documents showing State Department's dealings with Burisma Holding representatives in 2015 and 2016.
..."
"... All contacts that the Energy Department, Justice Department or State Department had with Vice President Joe Biden's office
concerning Burisma Holdings, Hunter Biden or business associate Devon Archer. ..."
"... All memos, emails and other documents concerning a possible U.S. embassy's request in spring 2019 to monitor the social media
activities and analytics of certain U.S. media personalities considered favorable to President Trump. ..."
"... All State, CIA, FBI and DOJ documents concerning efforts by individual Ukrainian government officials to exert influence on
the 2016 U.S. election, including an anti-Trump Op-Ed written in August 2016 by Ukraine's ambassador to Washington or efforts to publicize
allegations against Paul Manafort. ..."
"... All State, CIA, FBI and DOJ documents concerning contacts with a Democratic National Committee contractor named Alexandra Chalupa
and her dealings with the Ukrainian embassy in Washington or other Ukrainian figures. ..."
There are still wide swaths of documentation kept under wraps inside government agencies like the State Department that could
substantially alter the public's understanding of what has happened in the U.S.-Ukraine relationships now at the heart of the impeachment
probe.
As House Democrats mull whether to pursue impeachment articles and the GOP-led Senate braces for a possible trial, here are 12
tranches of government documents that could benefit the public if President Trump ordered them released, and the questions these
memos might answer.
Daily intelligence reports from March through August 2019 on Ukraine's new president Volodymyr Zelensky and his relationship
with oligarchs and other key figures. What was the CIA, FBI and U.S. Treasury Department telling Trump and other agencies
about Zelensky's ties to oligarchs like Igor Kolomoisky, the former head of Privatbank, and any concerns the International Monetary
Fund might have? Did any of these concerns reach the president's daily brief (PDB) or come up in the debate around resolving Ukraine
corruption and U.S. foreign aid?
CNBC ,
Reuters and
The Wall Street
Journal all have done recent reporting suggesting there might have been intelligence and IMF concerns that have not been fully
considered during the impeachment proceedings.
State Department memos detailing conversations between former U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and former Ukrainian Prosecutor
General Yuriy Lutsenko . He says Yovanovitch raised the names of Ukrainians she did not want to see prosecuted during their first
meeting in 2016. She calls Lutsenko's account fiction. But State Department officials admit the U.S. embassy in Kiev did pressure
Ukrainian prosecutors not to target certain activists. Are there contemporaneous State Department memos detailing these conversations
and might they illuminate the dispute between Lutsenko and Yovanovitch that has become key to the impeachment hearings?
State Department memos on U.S. funding given to the George Soros-backed group the Anti-Corruption Action Centre.
There is documentary evidence that State provided funding to this group, that Ukrainian prosecutor sought to investigate whether
that aid was spent properly and that the U.S. embassy pressured Ukraine to stand down on that investigation. How much total did
State give to this group? Why was a federal agency giving money to a Soros-backed group? What did taxpayers get for their money
and were they any audits to ensure the money was spent properly? Were any of Ukrainian prosecutors' concerns legitimate?
The transcripts of Joe Biden's phone calls and meetings with Ukraine's president and prime minister from April 2014 to
January 2017 when Hunter Biden served on the board of the natural gas company Burisma Holdings. Did Burisma or Hunter Biden
ever come up in the calls? What did Biden say when he urged Ukraine to fire the prosecutor overseeing an investigation of Burisma?
Did any Ukrainian officials ever comment on Hunter Biden's role at the company? Was any official assessment done by U.S. agencies
to justify Biden's threat of withholding $1 billion in U.S. aid if Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin wasn't fired?
All documents from an Office of Special Counsel whistleblower investigation into unusual energy transactions in Ukraine.
The U.S. government's main whistleblower office
is investigating allegations from a U.S Energy Department worker of possible wrongdoing in U.S.-supported Ukrainian energy
business. Who benefited in the United States and Ukraine from this alleged activity? Did Burisma gain any benefits from the conduct
described by the whistleblower?
OSC has concluded there is a "substantial likelihood of wrongdoing" involved in these activities.
All FBI, CIA, Treasury Department and State Department documents concerning possible wrongdoing at Burisma Holdings.
What did the U.S. know about allegations of corruption at the Ukrainian gas company and the efforts by the Ukrainian prosecutors
to investigate? Did U.S., Latvian, Cypriot or European financial authorities flag any suspicious transactions involving Burisma
or Americans during the time that Hunter Biden served on its board? Were any U.S. agencies monitoring, assisting or blocking the
various investigations? When Ukraine reopened the Burisma investigations in March 2019, what did U.S. officials do?
All documents from 2015-16 concerning the decision by the State Department's foreign aid funding arm, USAID, to pursue
a joint project with Burisma Holdings. State official
George Kent has testified he stopped this joint project because of concerns about Burisma's corruption reputation. Did Hunter
Biden or his American business partner Devon Archer have anything to do with seeking the project? What caused its abrupt end?
What issues did Kent identify as concerns and who did he alert in the White House, State or other agencies?
All cables, memos and documents showing State Department's dealings with Burisma Holding representatives in 2015 and 2016.
We now know that Ukrainian authorities escalated their investigation of Burisma Holdings in February 2016 by raiding the home
of the company's owner, Mykola Zlochevsky. Soon after, Burisma's American representatives
were pressing the State Department to help end the corruption allegations against the gas firm, specifically invoking Hunter
Biden's name. What did State officials do after being pressured by Burisma? Did the U.S. embassy in Kiev assist Burisma's efforts
to settle the corruption case against it? Who else in the U.S. government was being kept apprised?
All contacts that the Energy Department, Justice Department or State Department had with Vice President Joe Biden's office
concerning Burisma Holdings, Hunter Biden or business associate Devon Archer. We now know that multiple State Department
officials believed Hunter Biden's association with Burisma created the appearance of a conflict of interest for the vice president,
and at least one official tried to contact Joe Biden's office to raise those concerns. What, if anything, did these Cabinet agencies
tell Joe Biden's office about the appearance concerns or the state of the various Ukrainian investigations into Burisma?
All memos, emails and other documents concerning a possible U.S. embassy's request in spring 2019 to monitor the social
media activities and analytics of certain U.S. media personalities considered favorable to President Trump. Did any such
monitoring occur? Was it requested by the American embassy in Kiev? Who ordered it? Why did it stop? Were any legal concerns raised?
All State, CIA, FBI and DOJ documents concerning efforts by individual Ukrainian government officials to exert influence
on the 2016 U.S. election, including an anti-Trump Op-Ed written in August 2016 by Ukraine's ambassador to Washington or efforts
to publicize allegations against Paul Manafort. What did U.S. officials know about these efforts in 2016, and how did they
react? What were these federal agencies' reactions to a Ukrainian court decision in December 2018 suggesting some Ukrainian officials
had improperly meddled in the 2016 election?
All State, CIA, FBI and DOJ documents concerning contacts with a Democratic National Committee contractor named Alexandra
Chalupa and her dealings with the Ukrainian embassy in Washington or other Ukrainian figures. Did anyone in these U.S. government
agencies interview or have contact with Chalupa during the time the Ukraine embassy in Washington says she was seeking dirt in
2016 on Trump and Manafort?
"... Despite massive amounts of evidence to the contrary, such people now enthusiastically whitewash the decades preceding Trump to turn it into a paragon of human liberty, justice and economic wonder. You don't have to look deep to understand that resistance liberals are now actually conservatives, brimming with nostalgia for the days before significant numbers of people became wise to what's been happening all along. ..."
"... Lying to yourself about history is one of the most dangerous things you can do. If you can't accept where we've been, and that Trump's election is a symptom of decades of rot as opposed to year zero of a dangerous new world, you'll never come to any useful conclusions ..."
"... Irrespective of what you think of Bernie Sanders and his policies, you can at least appreciate the fact his supporters focus on policy and real issues ..."
"... An illiberal democracy, also called a partial democracy, low intensity democracy, empty democracy, hybrid regime or guided democracy, is a governing system in which although elections take place, citizens are cut off from knowledge about the activities of those who exercise real power because of the lack of civil liberties; thus it is not an "open society". There are many countries "that are categorized as neither 'free' nor 'not free', but as 'probably free', falling somewhere between democratic and nondemocratic regimes". This may be because a constitution limiting government powers exists, but those in power ignore its liberties, or because an adequate legal constitutional framework of liberties does not exist. ..."
From a big picture perspective, the largest rift in American politics is between those
willing to admit reality and those clinging to a dishonest perception of a past that never
actually existed. Ironically, those who most frequently use "post-truth" to describe our
current era tend to be those with the most distorted view of what was really happening during
the Clinton/Bush/Obama reign.
Despite massive amounts of evidence to the contrary, such people now enthusiastically
whitewash the decades preceding Trump to turn it into a paragon of human liberty, justice and
economic wonder. You don't have to look deep to understand that resistance liberals are now
actually conservatives, brimming with nostalgia for the days before significant numbers of
people became wise to what's been happening all along.
They want to forget about the bipartisan coverup of Saudi Arabia's involvement in 9/11, all
the wars based on lies, and the indisputable imperial crimes disclosed by Wikileaks, Snowden
and others. They want to pretend Wall Street crooks weren't bailed out and made even more
powerful by the Bush/Obama tag team, despite ostensible ideological differences between the
two. They want to forget Epstein Didn't Kill Himself.
Lying to yourself about history is one of the most dangerous things you can do. If you can't
accept where we've been, and that Trump's election is a symptom of decades of rot as opposed to
year zero of a dangerous new world, you'll never come to any useful conclusions. As such, the
most meaningful fracture in American society today is between those who've accepted that we've
been lied to for a very long time, and those who think everything was perfectly fine before
Trump. There's no real room for a productive discussion between such groups because one of them
just wants to get rid of orange man, while the other is focused on what's to come. One side
actually believes a liberal world order existed in the recent past, while the other
fundamentally recognizes this was mostly propaganda based on myth.
Irrespective of what you think of Bernie Sanders and his policies, you can at least
appreciate the fact his supporters focus on policy and real issues. In contrast, resistance
liberals just desperately scramble to put up whoever they think can take us back to a
make-believe world of the recent past. This distinction is actually everything. It's the
difference between people who've at least rejected the status quo and those who want to rewind
history and perform a do-over of the past forty years.
A meaningful understanding that unites populists across the ideological spectrum is the
basic acceptance that the status quo is pernicious and unsalvageable, while the status
quo-promoting opposition focuses on Trump the man while conveniently ignoring the worst of his
policies because they're essentially just a continuation of Bush/Clinton/Obama. It's the most
shortsighted and destructive response to Trump imaginable. It's also why the Trump-era alliance
of corporate, imperialist Democrats and rightwing Bush-era neoconservatives makes perfect
sense, as twisted and deranged as it might seem at first. With some minor distinctions, these
people share nostalgia for the same thing.
This sort of political environment is extremely unhealthy because it places an intentional
and enormous pressure on everyone to choose between dedicating every fiber of your being to
removing Trump at all costs or supporting him. This anti-intellectualism promotes an ends
justifies the means attitude on all sides. In other words, it turns more and more people into
rhinoceroses.
Eugène Ionesco's masterpiece, Rhinoceros, is about a central European town where
the citizens turn, one by one, into rhinoceroses. Once changed, they do what rhinoceroses do,
which is rampage through the town, destroying everything in their path. People are a little
puzzled at first, what with their fellow citizens just turning into rampaging rhinos out of
the blue, but even that slight puzzlement fades quickly enough. Soon it's just the New
Normal. Soon it's just the way things are a good thing, even. Only one man resists the siren
call of rhinocerosness, and that choice brings nothing but pain and existential doubt, as he
is utterly profoundly alone.
A political environment where you're pressured to choose between some ridiculous binary of
"we must remove Trump at all costs" or go gung-ho MAGA, is a rhinoceros generating machine. The
only thing that happens when you channel your inner rhinoceros to defeat rhinoceroses, is you
get more rhinoceroses. And that's exactly what's happening.
The truth of the matter is the U.S. is an illiberal democracy in practice,
despite various myths to the contrary.
An illiberal democracy, also called a partial democracy, low intensity democracy, empty
democracy, hybrid regime or guided democracy, is a governing system in which although
elections take place, citizens are cut off from knowledge about the activities of those who
exercise real power because of the lack of civil liberties; thus it is not an "open society".
There are many countries "that are categorized as neither 'free' nor 'not free', but as
'probably free', falling somewhere between democratic and nondemocratic regimes". This may be
because a constitution limiting government powers exists, but those in power ignore its
liberties, or because an adequate legal constitutional framework of liberties does not
exist.
It's not a new thing by any means, but it's getting worse by the day. Though many of us
remain in denial, the American response to various crises throughout the 21st century was
completely illiberal. As devastating as they were, the attacks of September 11, 2001 did
limited damage compared to the destruction caused by our insane response to them. Similarly,
any direct damage caused by the election and policies of Donald Trump pales in comparison to
the damage being done by the intelligence agency-led "resistance" to him.
So are we all rhinoceroses now?
We don't have to be. Turning into a rhinoceros happens easily if you're unaware of what's
happening and not grounded in principles, but ultimately it is a choice. The decision to
discard ethics and embrace dishonesty in order to achieve political ends is always a choice. As
such, the most daunting challenge we face now and in the chaotic years ahead is to become
better as others become worse. A new world is undoubtably on the horizon, but we don't yet know
what sort of world it'll be. It's either going to be a major improvement, or it'll go the other
way, but one thing's for certain -- it can't stay the way it is much longer.
If we embrace an ends justifies the means philosophy, it's going to be game over for a
generation. The moment you accept this tactic is the moment you stoop down to the level of your
adversaries and become just like them. It then becomes a free-for-all for tyrants where
everything is suddenly on the table and no deed is beyond the pale. It's happened many times
before and it can happen again. It's what happens when everyone turns into rhinoceroses.
* * *
If you enjoyed this, I suggest you check out the following 2017 posts. It's never been more
important to stay conscious and maintain a strong ethical framework.
Sometimes you need to call a spade a spade, and Tuesday's testimony before Adam's Schiff
Show by former NSC official Tim Morrison is just such an occasion. In spades!
In his opening statement, this paranoid moron uttered the following lunacy, and it's all
you need to know about what is really going on down in the Imperial City.
"I continue to believe Ukraine is on the front lines of a strategic competition
between the West and Vladimir Putin's revanchist Russia. Russia is a failing power, but it
is still a dangerous one. The United States aids Ukraine and her people so they can fight
Russia over there and we don't have to fight Russia here.
Folks, that just plain whacko. The Trump-hating Dems are so feverishly set on a POTUS
kill that they have enlisted a veritable posse of Russophobic, right-wing neocon cretins
– Morrison, Taylor, Kent, Vindman, among others – to finish off the
Donald.
But in so doing they have made official Washington's real beef against Trump crystal
clear; and it's not about the rule of law or abuse of presidential power or an impeachable
dereliction of duty.
To be sure, foolish politicians like Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler and the Clintonista
apparatus at the center of the Dem party are so overcome with inconsolable grief and anger
about losing the 2016 election to Trump that their sole purpose in life is to drive the
Donald from office. But that just makes them "useful idiots" or compliant handmaids of the
Deep State, which has a far more encompassing and consequential motivation.
To wit, whether out of naiveté, contrariness or just plain common sense, the Donald
has declined to embrace the War Party's Russian bogeyman and demonization of Putin. He
thereby threatens the Empire's raison d'être to the very core.
Indeed, that's the real reason for the whole concerted attack on Trump from the Russian
Collusion hoax, through the Mueller Investigation farce to the present UkraineGate and
impeachment inquisition. The Deep State deeply and profoundly fears that if Trump remains in
office – and especially if he is elected with a new mandate in 2020 – he might
actually make peace with Russia and Putin.
So in Part 1 we advert to the basics. Without the demonization of Russia, Ukraine would
be the no count failed state and cesspool of corruption it actually is, and not a purported
"front line" buffer against Russian aggression.
Likewise, it would not have been a recipient of vast US and western military and economic
aid – a condition that turned it into a honeypot for the kind of Washington influence
peddling which ensnared the Bidens, induced its officials to meddle in the 2016 US election,
and, in return, incited Trump's justifiable quest to get to the bottom of the malignancy that
has ensued.
So the starting point is to identify Russia for what it actually is: Namely, a
kleptocratic state sitting atop an aging, Vodka-chugging population and third-rate economy
with virtually zero capacity to project 21st century offensive military power beyond its own
borders.
That truth, of course, shatters the whole foundation of the Warfare State. It renders NATO
an obsolete relic and eviscerates the case for America's absurd $900 billion defense and
national security budget. And with the latter's demise, the fairest part of Washington's
imperial self-importance and unseemly national security spending-based prosperity would also
crumble.
But in their frenzied pursuit of the Donald's political scalp, the Dems may be
inadvertently sabotaging their Deep State masters. That's because the neocon knuckleheads
they are dragging out of the NSC and State Department woodwork are such bellicose simpletons
– just maybe their utterly preposterous testimony about the Russkie threat and
Ukrainian "front line" will wake up the somnolent American public to the absurdity of the
entire Cold War 2.0 campaign.
Indeed, you almost have to ask whether the bit about fighting the Russkies in the
Donbas rather than on the shores of New Jersey from Morrison's opening statement quoted above
was reprinted in the New York Times or The Onion ?
The fact is, the fearsome Russian bogeyman cited by Morrison yesterday – and
Ambassador Taylor, George Kent and Lt. Colonel Vindman previously – is a complete
chimera; and the notion that the cesspool of corruption in Ukraine is a strategic buffer
against Russian aggression is just plain idiocy.
Russia is actually an economic and industrial midget transformed beyond recognition by
relentless Warfare State propaganda. It is actually no more threatening to America's homeland
security than the Siberian land mass that Sarah Palin once espied from her front porch in
Alaska a decade ago.
After all, how could it be? The GDP of the New York City metro area alone is about $1.8
trillion, which is well more than Russia's 2018 GDP of $1.66 trillion. And that, in turn, is
just 8% of America's total GDP of $21.5 trillion.
Moreover, Russia' dwarf economy is composed largely of a vast oil and gas patch; a
multitude of nickel, copper, bauxite and vanadium mines; and some very large swatches of
wheat fields. That's not exactly the kind of high tech industrial platform on which a war
machine capable of threatening the good folks in Lincoln NE or Worchester MA is likely to be
erected.
And especially not when the Russian economy has been heading sharply south in dollar
purchasing terms for several years running.
GDP of Russia In Millions of USD
Indeed, in terms of manufacturing output, the comparison is just as stark. Russia's annual
manufacturing value added is currently about $200 billion compared to
$2.2 trillion for the US economy.
And that's not the half of it. Not only are Russia's vast hydrocarbon deposits and mines
likely to give out in the years ahead, but so are the livers of its Vodka-chugging work
force. That's a problem because according to a recent Brookings study, Russia's working age
population – even supplemented by substantial in-migration and guest worker programs
– is heading south as far into the future as the eye can see.
Even in the Brookings medium case projection shown below, Russia's working age population
will be nearly 20% smaller than today by 2050. Yet today's figure of about 85 million is
already just a fraction of the US working age population of 255 million.
Russia's Shrinking Work Force
Not surprisingly, Russia's pint-sized economy can not support a military establishment
anywhere near to that of Imperial Washington. To wit, its $61 billion of
military outlays in 2018 amounted to less than 32 days of Washington's current
$750 billion of expenditures for defense.
Indeed, it might well be asked how Russia could remotely threaten homeland security in
America short of what would be a suicidal nuclear first strike.
That's because the 1,600 deployed nuclear weapons on each side represent a continuation
of mutual deterrence (MAD) – the arrangement by which we we got through 45-years of
cold war when the Kremlin was run by a totalitarian oligarchy committed to a hostile
ideology; and during which time it had been armed to the teeth via a forced-draft allocation
of upwards of 40% of the GDP of the Soviet empire to the military.
By comparison, the Russian defense budget currently amounts to less than 4% of the
country's anemic present day economy – one shorn of the vast territories and
populations of Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and all the Asian "stans"
among others. Yet given those realities we are supposed to believe that the self-evidently
calculating and cautious kleptomaniac who runs the Kremlin is going to go mad, defy MAD and
trigger a nuclear Armageddon?
Indeed, the idea that Russia presents a national security threat to America is laughable.
Not only would Putin never risk nuclear suicide, but even that fantasy is the extent of what
he's got. That is, Russia's conventional capacity to project force to the North American
continent is nonexistent – or at best, lies somewhere between nichts and nothing.
For example, in today's world you do not invade any foreign continent without massive sea
power projection capacity in the form of aircraft carrier strike groups. These units consist
of an armada of lethal escort ships, a fleet of aircraft, massive suites of electronics
warfare capability and the ability to launch hundreds of cruise missiles and other smart
weapons.
Each US aircraft carrier based strike group, in fact, is composed of roughly 7,500
personnel, at least one cruiser, a squadron of destroyers and/or frigates, and a carrier air
wing of 65 to 70 aircraft. A carrier strike group also sometimes includes submarines and
attached logistics ships.
The US has eleven such carrier strike groups. Russia has zero
modern carrier strike groups and one beat-up, smoky old (diesel) aircraft carrier that the
Israeli paper, Haaretz, described as follows when it recently entered the
Mediterranean:
Russia's only aircraft carrier, a leftover from the days of Soviet power, carries a
long history of mishaps, at sea and in port, and diesel engines which were built for Russia's
cold waters – as shown by the column of black smoke raising above it. It needs frequent
refueling and resupplies and has never been operationally tested.
Indeed, from our 19th floor apartment on the East River in NYC, even we could see this
smoke belcher coming up Long Island Sound with an unaided eye – with no help needed at
all from the high tech spyware of the nation's $80 billion intelligence apparatus.
Yet Morrison had the audacity to say before a committee of the U.S. House that we are
aiding Ukraine so we don't have to fight Russians on the banks of the East River or the
Potomac!
For want of doubt, just compare the above image of the Admiral Kuznetsov belching smoke in
the Mediterranean with that of the Gerald R. Ford CVN 48 next below.
The latter is the US Navy's new $13 billion aircraft carrier and is the most
technologically advanced warship ever built.
The contrast shown below serves as a proxy for the vastly inferior capability of the
limited number of ships and planes in Russia's conventional force. What it does have
numerical superiority in is tanks – but alas they are not amphibious nor
ocean-capable!
Likewise, nobody invades anybody without massive airpower and the ability to project it
across thousands of miles of oceans via vast logistics and air-refueling capabilities.
On that score, the US has 6,100 helicopters to Russia's 1,200 and 6,000 fixed wing
fighter and attack aircraft versus Russia's 2,100. More importantly, the US has 5,700
transport and airlift aircraft compared to just 1,100 for Russia.
In short, the idea that Russia is a military threat to the US homeland is ludicrous.
Russia is essentially a landlocked military shadow of the former Soviet war machine. Indeed,
for the world's only globe-spanning imperial power to remonstrate about an aggressive threat
from Moscow is a prime facie case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Moreover, the canard that Washington's massive conventional armada is needed to defend
Europe is risible nonsense. Europe can and should take care of its own security and
relationship with its neighbor on the Eurasian continent.
After all, the GDP of NATO Europe is $18 trillion or 12X greater than that of Russia, and
the current military budgets of European NATO members total about $280 billion or 4X more
than that of Russia.
More importantly, the European nations and people really do not have any quarrel with
Putin's Russia, nor is their security and safety threatened by the latter. All of the
tensions that do exist and have come to a head since the illegal coup in Kiev in February
2014 were fomented by Imperial Washington and its European subalterns in the NATO
machinery.
Then again, the latter is absolutely the most useless, obsolete, wasteful and dangerous
multilateral institution in the present world. But like the proverbial clothes-less emperor,
NATO doesn't dare risk having the purportedly "uninformed" amateur in the Oval Office
pointing out its buck naked behind.
So the NATO subservient think tanks and establishment policy apparatchiks are harrumphing
up a storm, but for crying out loud most of Europe's elected politicians are in on the joke.
They are fiscally swamped paying for their Welfare States and are not about to squeeze their
budgets or taxpayers to fund military muscle against a nonexistent threat.
Finally an American president has woken up to the fact that World War II, not to mention
the cold war, is over: there's no need for US troops to occupy Germany. Vladimir Putin
isn't going to march into Berlin in a reenactment of the Red Army taking the Fuehrer-bunker
– but even if he were so inclined, why won't Germany defend itself?
Exactly. If their history proves anything, Germans are not a nation of pacifists, meekly
willing to bend-over in the face of real aggressors. Yet they spent the paltry sum of
$43 billion on defense during 2018, or barely 1.1% of Germany's $4.0 trillion
GDP, which happens to be roughly three times bigger than Russia's.
In short, the policy action of the German government tells you they don't think Putin is
about to invade the Rhineland or retake the Brandenburg Gate.
And this live action testimonial also trumps, as it were, all of the risible alarms that
have emanated from the beltway think tanks and the 4,000 NATO bureaucrats talking their own
book in behalf of their plush Brussels sinecures.
And as we will outline in Part 2, that's what Washington's Ukraine intervention is all
about, and why the Donald's efforts to get to the bottom of that cesspool has brought on the
final Deep State assault against his presidency.
Part 2
In Part 1 we dispatched UkraineGater Tim Morrison's preposterous suggestion that
Washington is helping Kiev subdue the Donbas so we won't have Russkies coming up the East
River.
Yet his related claim that Ukraine is a victim of Russian aggression is even more
ludicrous. The actual aggression in that godforsaken corner of the planet came from
Washington when it instigated, funded, engineered and recognized the putsch on the streets of
Kiev during February 2014, which illegally overthrew the duly elected President of Ukraine on
the grounds that he was too friendly with Moscow.
Thus, Morrison risibly asserted that,
Support for Ukraine's territorial integrity and sovereignty has been a bipartisan
objective since Russia's military invasion in 2014. It must continue to be.
The fact is, when the Maidan uprising occurred in February that year there were no
uninvited Russian troops anywhere in Ukraine. Putin was actually sitting in his box on the
viewing stand, presiding over the Winter Olympics in Sochi and basking in the limelight of
global attention that they commanded .
It was only weeks later – when the Washington-installed ultra-nationalist
government with its neo-Nazi vanguard threatened the Russian-speaking populations of Crimea
and the Donbas – that Putin moved to defend Russian interests on his own doorstep. And
those interests included Russia's primary national security asset – the naval base at
Sevastopol in Crimea which had been the homeport of the Russian Black Sea Fleet for centuries
under czars and commissars alike, and on which Russia had a long-term lease.
We untangle the truth of the crucial events which surrounded the Kiev putsch in greater
detail below, but suffice it here to note the whole gang of neocon apparatchiks which have
been paraded before the Schiff Show have proffered the same Big Lie as did Morrison in the
"invasion" quote cited above.
As the ever perspicacious Robert Merry observed regarding the previous testimony of
Ambassador Bill Taylor and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent, the Washington
rendition of the Maidan coup and its aftermath amounts to a blatant falsehood:
The Taylor/Kent outlook stems from the widespread demonization of Russia that
dominates thinking within elite circles. Taylor's rendition of recent events in Ukraine was
so one-sided and selective as to amount to a falsehood.
As he had it, Ukraine's turn to the West after 2009 (when he left the country after his
first diplomatic tour there) threatened Russia's Vladimir Putin to such an extent that he
tried to "bribe" Ukraine's president with inducements to resist Western influence,
whereupon protests emerged in Kyiv that drove the Ukrainian president to flee the country
in 2014. Then Putin invaded Crimea, holding a "sham referendum at the point of Russian army
rifles." Putin sent military forces into eastern Ukraine "to generate illegal armed
formations and puppet governments." And so the West extended military assistance to
Ukraine.
"It is this security assistance," he said, "that is at the heart of the [impeachment]
controversy that we are discussing today."
Taylor's right that this narrative is at the center of UkraineGate, but there is not a
shred of truth to it. Nevertheless, defense of this false narrative, and the inappropriate
military and economic aid to Ukraine which flowed from it, is the real reason this posse of
neocon stooges took exception to the Donald's legitimate interest in investigating the Bidens
and the events of 2016.
As Morrison put it Tuesday and Vindman said last week, their interest was in protecting
not the constitution and the rule of law, but the bipartisan political consensus on Capitol
Hill in favor of their proxy war on Putin and the Ukraine aid package through which it was
being prosecuted.
As I stated during my deposition, I feared at the time of the call on July 25 how its
disclosure would play in Washington's political climate. My fears have been realized.
Not surprisingly, the entire Washington establishment has been sucked into this scam. For
instance, the insufferably sanctimonious Peggy Noonan used her Wall Street Journal
platform to idolize these liars.
As she portrayed it, bow-tie bedecked George P. Kent appeared to be the very picture of
the old-school American foreign service official. And West Pointer Bill Taylor – with a
military career going back to (dubious) Vietnam heroism – was redolent of the
blunt-spoken American military men who won WW II and the cold war which followed.
As Robert Merry further noted,
She saw them as "the old America reasserting itself." They demonstrated "stature and
command of their subject matter." They evinced "capability and integrity."
Oh, puleeze!
What they evinced was nothing more than the self-serving groupthink that has turned
Ukraine into a beltway goldmine. That is, a cornucopia of funding for all the think tanks,
NGOs, foreign policy experts, national security contractors and Warfare State agencies
– from DOD through the State Department, AID, the National Endowment for Democracy, the
Board for International Broadcasting and countless more – which ply their trade in the
Imperial City.
But Robert Merry got it right. These cats are not noble public servants and heroes;
they're apparatchiks and payrollers aggrandizing their own power and pelf – even as
they lead the nation to the brink of disaster:
But these men embrace a geopolitical outlook that is simplistic, foolhardy, and
dangerous. Perhaps no serious blame should accrue to them, since it is the same
geopolitical outlook embraced and enforced by pretty much the entire foreign policy
establishment, of which these men are mere loyal apparatchiks. And yet they are playing
their part in pushing a foreign policy that is directing America towards a very possible
disaster.
Neither man manifested even an inkling of an understanding of what kind of game the
United States in playing with Ukraine. Neither gave even a nod to the long, complex
relationship between Ukraine and Russia. Neither seemed to understand either the substance
or the intensity of Russia's geopolitical interests along its own borders or the likely
consequences of increasing U.S. meddling in what for centuries has been part of Russia's
sphere of influence.
They obviously didn't get it, but we must. So let us summarize the true Ukraine story,
starting with the utterly stupid and historically ignorant reason for Washington's February
2014 coup.
Namely, it objected to the decision of Ukraine's prior government in late 2013 to align
itself economically and politically with its historic hegemon in Moscow rather than the
European Union and NATO. Yet the fairly elected and constitutionally legitimate government of
Ukraine then led by Viktor Yanukovych had gone that route mainly because it got a better deal
from Moscow than was being demanded by the fiscal torture artists of the IMF.
Needless to say, the ensuing US sponsored putsch arising from the mobs on the street of
Kiev reopened deep national wounds. Ukraine's bitter divide between Russian-speakers in the
east and Ukrainian nationalists elsewhere dates back to Stalin's brutal rein in Ukraine
during the 1930s and Ukrainian collusion with Hitler's Wehrmacht on its way to Stalingrad and
back during the 1940s.
It was the memory of the latter nightmare, in fact, which triggered the fear-driven
outbreak of Russian separatism in the Donbas and the 96% referendum vote in Crimea in March
2014 to formally re-affiliate with Mother Russia.
In this context, even a passing familiarity with Russian history and geography would
remind that Ukraine and Crimea are Moscow's business, not Washington's.
In the first place, there is nothing at stake in the Ukraine that matters. During the last
800 years it has been a meandering set of borders in search of a country.
In fact, the intervals in which the Ukraine existed as an independent nation have been few
and far between. Invariably, its rulers, petty potentates and corrupt politicians made deals
with or surrendered to every outside power that came along.
These included the Lithuanians, Poles, Ruthenians (eastern Slavs), Tartars, Turks,
Muscovites, Austrians and Czars, among manifold others.
At the beginning of the 16th century, for instance, the territory of today's Ukraine was
scattered largely among the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Ruthenia (light brown area), the
Kingdom of Poland (dark brown area), Muscovy (bright yellow area) the Crimean Khanate (light
yellow area).
The latter was the entity which emerged when some clans of the Golden Horde (Tartars)
ceased their nomadic life on the Asian steppes and occupied the light yellow stripped areas
of the map north of the Black Sea as their Yurt (homeland).
From that cold start, the tiny Cossack principality of Ukraine (blue area below), which
had emerged by 1654, grew significantly over the subsequent three centuries. But as the map
also makes clear, this did not reflect the organic congealment of a nation of kindred volk
sharing common linguistic and ethnic roots, but the machinations of Czars and Commissars for
the administrative convenience of efficiently ruling their conquests and vassals.
Thus, much of modern Ukraine was incorporated by the Russian Czars between 1654 and 1917
per the yellow area of the map and functioned as vassal states. These territories were
amalgamated by absolute monarchs who ruled by the mandate of God and the often brutal sword
of their own armies.
In particular, much of the purple area was known as "Novo Russia" (Novorossiya) during the
18th and 19th century owing to the Czarist policy of relocating Russian populations to
the north of the Black Sea as a bulwark against the Ottomans. But after Lenin seized power in
St. Petersburg in November 1917 amidst the wreckage of Czarist Russia, an ensuing civil war
between the so-called White Russians and the Red Bolsheviks raged for several years in these
territories and elsewhere in the chaotic regions of the former western Russian Empire.
At length, Lenin won the civil war as the French, British, Polish and American contingents
vacated the postwar struggle for power in Russia. Accordingly, in 1922 the new Communist
rulers proclaimed the Union of Soviet Social Republics (USSR) and incorporated Novo Russia
into one of its four constituent units as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR)
– along with the Russian, Belarus and Transcaucasian SSRs.
Thereafter the border and political status of Ukraine remained unchanged until the
infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 between the USSR and Nazi Germany. Pursuant thereto
the Red Army and Nazi Germany invaded and dismembered Poland, with Stalin getting the blue
areas (Volhynia and parts of Galicia) as consolation prizes, which where then incorporated
into the Ukrainian SSR.
Finally, when Uncle Joe Stalin died and Nikita Khrushchev won the bloody succession
struggle in 1954, he transferred Crimea (red area) to the Ukraine SSR as a reward to his
supporters in Kiev. That, of course, was the arbitrary writ of the Soviet Presidium, given
that precious few Ukrainians actually lived in what had been a integral part of Czarist
Russia after it was purchased by Catherine the Great from the Turks in 1783.
In a word, the borders of modern Ukraine are the handiwork of Czarist emperors and
Communist butchers. The so-called international rule of law had absolutely nothing to
do with its gestation and upbringing.
It's a pity, therefore, that none of the so-called conservative Republicans attending
Adam's Schiff Show saw fit to ask young Tim Morrison the obvious question.
To wit, exactly why is he (and most of the Washington foreign policy establishment) so
keen on expending American treasure, weapons and even blood in behalf of the "territorial
integrity and sovereignty" of this happenstance amalgamation of people subdued by some of
history's most despicable tyrants?
Needless to say, owing to this very history, the linguistic/ethnic composition of today's
Ukraine does not reflect the congealment of a "nation" in the historic sense.
To the contrary, central and western Ukraine is populated by ethnic Ukrainians who speak
Ukrainian (dark red area), whereas the two parts of the country allegedly the victim of
Russian aggression and occupation – Crimea (brown area) and the eastern Donbas region
(yellow area with brown strips) – are comprised of ethnic Russians who speak Russian
and ethnic Ukrainians who predominately speak-Russian, respectively.
And much of the rest of the territory consists of admixtures and various Romanian,
Moldovan, Hungarian and Bulgarian minorities.
Did the Washington neocons – led by Senator McCain and Assistant Secretary Victoria
Nuland – who triggered the Ukrainian civil war with their coup on the streets of Kiev
in February 2014 consider the implications of the map below and its embedded, and often
bloody, history?
Quite surely, they did not.
Nor did they consider the rest of the map. That is, the enveloping Russian state all
around to which the parts and pieces of Ukraine – especially the Donbas and Crimea
– have been intimately connected for centuries. Robert Merry thus further noted,
As Nikolas K. Gvosdev of the US Naval War College has written, Russia and Ukraine
share a 1,500-mile border where Ukraine "nestles up against the soft underbelly of the
Russian Federation." Gvosdev elaborates: "The worst nightmare of the Russian General Staff
would be NATO forces deployed all along this frontier, which would put the core of Russia's
population and industrial capacity at risk of being quickly and suddenly overrun in the
event of any conflict." Beyond that crucial strategic concern, the two countries share
strong economic, trade, cultural, ethnic, and language ties going back centuries. No
Russian leader of any stripe would survive as leader if he or she were to allow Ukraine to
be wrested fully from Russia's sphere of influence.
And yet America, in furtherance of the ultimate aim of pulling Ukraine away from
Russia, spent some $5 billion in a campaign to gin up pro-Western sentiment there,
according to former assistant secretary of state for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who
spearheaded much of this effort during the Obama administration. It was clearly a blatant
effort to interfere in the domestic politics of a foreign nation – and a nation
residing in a delicate and easily inflamed part of the world.
Indeed, Ukraine is a tragically divided country and fissured simulacrum of a nation.
Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard called Ukraine "a cleft country, with two distinct
cultures" causing Robert Merry to rightly observe that,
Contrary to Taylor's false portrayal of an aggressive Russia trampling on eastern
Ukrainians by setting up puppet governments and manufacturing a bogus referendum in Crimea,
the reality is that large numbers of Ukrainians there favor Russia and feel loyalty to what
they consider their Russian heritage. The Crimean public is 70 percent Russian, and its
Parliament in 1992 actually voted to declare independence from Ukraine for fear that the
national leadership would nudge the country toward the West. (The vote was later rescinded
to avoid a violent national confrontation.) In 1994, Crimea elected a president who had
campaigned on a platform of "unity with Russia."
In short, in modern times Ukraine largely functioned as an integral part of Mother Russia,
serving as its breadbasket and iron and steel crucible under czars and commissars alike.
Given this history, the idea that Ukraine should be actively and aggressively induced to join
NATO was just plain nuts, as we will amplify further in Part 3 (to come).
"... "US Officials" say the Bidens are pure in heart and deed? Hah! Is it not clear that The Borg (foreign policy establishment) hate Donald Trump and will say anything possible to injure him? ..."
"... "Debunked," "Discredited," "Conspiracy theories?" Trickery in the press is the real truth , trickery intended to protect the only viable candidate in the Democratic Party field. ..."
"... Lutsenko has had a pretty sketchy career, including charges of abuse of power, forgery and embezzlement among other things. https://heavy.com/news/2019/11/yuriy-lutsenko/ It's telling that Democrats and the mainstream media choose to cite such a character as their primary source for evidence that the Bidens did nothing wrong. Reminds me of Mark Twains old adage: "An honest politician is one who, once he's been bought, stays bought." More recently it seems that his loyalties have shifted, accusing Yovanovitch of giving him a list of people who should be protected. ..."
"... It's not really that complicated an inquiry to decide whether there is a need to go further; two questions: what did Hunter Biden do for the money; and Joe, did you get the Ukrainian prosecutor fired as you bragged you did, and why? Maybe throw in a third if the answer is "I did", what or who made you think that you could do that? ..."
"Graham's conspiracy theory-based investigation is rooted in the
baseless allegation that Biden pressured Ukraine to remove a corrupt prosecutor in 2016
as a way to protect Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, against a corruption probe. Biden's
son Hunter was previously a board member with Burisma until April this year.
There is no evidence to support allegations that Biden acted improperly in calling for the
prosecutor general in charge of the Burisma probe to be ousted, and both Ukrainian and U.S.
officials have said there is no merit to the claim. As many have since noted, the Burisma
investigation was in fact dormant when the prosecutor general was forced out on accusations
he was slow-walking corruption probes, among other things.
Trump brought up that debunked conspiracy during a July 25 call with Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelenskiy, asking the Ukrainian government to investigate Biden as well as a
baseless conspiracy involving the Democratic National Committee servers."
"Epistemology is the study of the nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality
of belief. Much debate in epistemology centers on four areas:
(3) the sources and scope of knowledge and justified belief, and
(4) the criteria for knowledge and justification.
Epistemology addresses such questions as: "What makes justified beliefs justified?" " What
does it mean to say that we know something? ", and fundamentally "How do we know that we
know?"
~ wiki on epistemology
-------------
As in the example above from the "American Independent," the MSM and online projects like
the American Independent incessantly insist that the simple fact that Hunter Biden and his dear
old dad, a "Union Man," solicited money in Ukraine and in China for services not rendered
proves nothing, that nothing has been proven against them and that any mention of these
occurrences is evidence of harsh partisan rhetoric based on fantasy and equivalent to belief in
the Loch Ness Monster.
Well, pilgrims I want to know who and what investigation or investigations cleared the
Bidens of anything.
It is obvious that Hunter is qualified for employment as a bag man and not much else. He has
a law degree? So what? As in the matter of the qualifications of doctors, not all learn much in
medical or law school.
"US Officials" say the Bidens are pure in heart and deed? Hah! Is it not clear that The Borg
(foreign policy establishment) hate Donald Trump and will say anything possible to injure
him?
"Debunked," "Discredited," "Conspiracy theories?" Trickery in the press is the real truth , trickery intended to protect the only viable
candidate in the Democratic Party field.
The article highlighted here, typically, is a lie. As documented in Moon of Alabama's
timeline (
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/11/a-timeline-of-joe-bidens-intervention-against-the-prosecutor-general-of-ukraine.html),
Shokin was actively investigating Zlochevsky in February 2016, when Shokin seized his luxury
car. Barely two weeks later, Biden was on the phone to Poroshenko demanding Shokin's firing.
While this doesn't prove that Biden was motivated primarily by a desire to protect his son's
employer, it is certainly consistent with that possibility.
John Solomon has been very much in the lead on reporting from Ukraine which furthers what the
MSM calls "conspiracy theories".
While he earlier reported, or opined, from The Hill,
now he evidently has been bumped (my opinion) from that perch,
and now has own blog John Solomon Report : https://johnsolomonreports.com/
It is tragic, IMO, how the MSM ignores the facts that Solomon documents in his
columns.
It is possible that JS is a mouthpiece for corrupt elements in Ukraine,
but I think his points deserve more attention than they have been getting.
There are two sides to this story, not only one as Col. Lang pointed out in his root
piece.
I recall that the Russiagate conspiracy theory was "proven" factual as well, and by many of
the same people who claim that Biden's corruption has been "debunked". Even though it was
absurd on its face and had been debunked numerous times, many people in fact continue to
insist otherwise.
Seriously....who would think Biden's son taking a highly paid position with a company in a
foreign country that Biden was representing the US in wasn't a conflict of interest? Even the
'appearance' of a conflict of interest should be avoided in such situations.
I find Biden and his political 'career', greased by his 'good old Joe act' disgusting in so
many ways it would take too long to describe them here.
The media really seems to be testing the limits of disinformation. More and more, the media
wants to convince people that black is white and up is down. Fortunately, I don't think their
plan is working all that well.
In the case of Hunter Biden, we are told that "There is no evidence to support allegations
that Biden acted improperly".
Okay, that's one way to look at things, but I have found that even among my liberal
friends, the fetid smell of corruption emitting from this case, is overpowering. And while
most people might have a hard time sinking their teeth into a "quid pro quo", they do have a
pretty good grasp of old fashioned influence peddling, which is what we are talking
about.
So why has the media chosen to defend the crooked goings-on of public officials who were
obviously up to no good? Don't they care about their credibility at all?
Was the American Independent quote lifted from The NY Times? It sure sounds like it!
For some time I've been wondering how exactly Biden got cleared. Was there any formal
investigation? Who conducted it? And how reliable are the facts when they come from a place
like Ukraine, where anything, including the 'truth,' can be laundered?
What's become painfully obvious is how eagerly America's major news outlets, including the
journals of record, participate in the laundering of truth.
Of course, that should have been obvious from the yellow journalism preceding the war in
Iraq.
What's really scary are reports that "intelligence" services get most of their 'facts'
from the very same truth laundering sources.
I always got the impression the "wild, debunked conspiracy theory pushed by right wing nuts"
was always referring to the Crowdstrike DNC computer investigation hoax that Trump tried to
re-open.
They would never specifically refer to the Crowdstrike favor Trump specifically asked for
in the phone call, instead they would substitute Trump asked about some "debunked, wild right
wing conspiracy".
So they never explained how the Crowdstrike investigation hoax was debunked either.
To me this is far more interesting missing debunked conspiracy link - since it shows
incredible coordination between the DNC, the "leak" of their DNC computer data, Ukrainian
Crowdstrike, and finally the Mueller Report who used the DNC Crowdstrike investigation
conclusoin hook line and sinker to reach their own official conclusions which is now "proven"
operating dogma. Without ever doing an independent investigation themselves. How often does
that happen?
To me the Crowdstrike connection begs further investigation - why would a Russian hating
Ukrainian who was running Crowdstrike point the finger at the Russians and claim they
"hacked" the DNC computers, but not let anyone else touch those same computers to corroborate
that conclusion?
And then parlay this into Trump supporting Russian interference in the 2016 election. All
too tidy for me. Feels like dark forces are still at work, and subverting language to achieve
their ends.
Whatever happened to Joe Biden's taped boast, at the Council on Foreign Relations, that he
gave President Poroshenko 6 hours to fire Prosecutor Shokin -- or else lose $1 Billion of US
aid ?
How was this taped confession of QUID-PRO-QUO debunked ?
The media (approx. 99% of them) have been in the tank for Democrats since at least the
Vietnam war.
Roger Ailes said why he didn't read the NY Times:
"You cover the bad news about America. You do. But you don't get up in the morning hating
your country."
Eight days later Joe Biden launched an intense pressure campaign to get rid of Shokin. He
personally calls Poroshenko on Feb 12, 18 and 19 to press for firing Shokin.
To think that this is unrelated is not reasonable.
The rest of the
timeline shows further Biden influence in the case.
(I should update that timeline as a lot of additional evidence of Burisma lobbying State
at that time has since come in.)
There are tons of additional dirt. The U.S. has control over the National Anti-Corruption
Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and uses it to push all such investigations to its favor. NABU has
itself been involved in serious corruption.
There is also a USAID/Soros paid NGO that has a similar function and is equally corrupt.
These organizations are used as weapons to put all Ukrainian assets into the hands of
those that the U.S. embassy likes.
Lutsenko was the guy who was appointed as Prosecutor General after Biden got the previous
one fired. IOW Lutsenko owed his job to Biden.
Lutsenko has had a pretty sketchy career, including charges of abuse of power, forgery and
embezzlement among other things. https://heavy.com/news/2019/11/yuriy-lutsenko/ It's telling that Democrats and the mainstream media choose to cite such a character as
their primary source for evidence that the Bidens did nothing wrong. Reminds me of Mark Twains old adage: "An honest politician is one who, once he's been
bought, stays bought." More recently it seems that his loyalties have shifted, accusing
Yovanovitch of giving him a list of people who should be protected.
The only thing I can conclude is that Lutsenko is probably just trying to survive the
shifting tides in the Ukrainian swamp and will say or do whatever it takes.
"American Independent" is David Brock's Clinton / Soros linked Shareblue disinfo and troll
brigade rebranded. It will obviously tell every lie going to protect the corrupt Corporate Dem Establishment,
the Globalists and the Deep State. https://twitter.com/Ian56789/status/1198338991814250497
It's not really that complicated an inquiry to decide whether there is a need to go further;
two questions: what did Hunter Biden do for the money; and Joe, did you get the Ukrainian
prosecutor fired as you bragged you did, and why? Maybe throw in a third if the answer is "I
did", what or who made you think that you could do that?
"... It could be argued, perhaps, that an expansion of Russian influence in Ukraine could affect the vital interests of the rest of Europe, though that would hardly be inevitable. But cannot Europe handle any such threat vis-a-vis Russia, given that the EU has a population of 512 million and a GDP of $18 trillion -- compared to Russia's population of 145 million and GDP of $1.6 trillion? ..."
"... The Taylor/Kent outlook stems from the widespread demonization of Russia that dominates thinking within elite circles. Taylor's rendition of recent events in Ukraine was so one-sided and selective as to amount to a falsehood. As he had it, Ukraine's turn to the West after 2009 (when he left the country after his first diplomatic tour there) threatened Russia's Vladimir Putin to such an extent that he tried to "bribe" Ukraine's president with inducements to resist Western influence, whereupon protests emerged in Kyiv that drove the Ukrainian president to flee the country in 2014. Then Putin invaded Crimea, holding a "sham referendum at the point of Russian army rifles." Putin sent military forces into eastern Ukraine "to generate illegal armed formations and puppet governments." And so the West extended military assistance to Ukraine. ..."
"... Thumbs up on the article - the valiant Ukraine facing perfidious Russia is a gross oversimplification. And as noted, the US is involved in this mess up to its eyeballs. ..."
"... Russia is associated with the image of the USSR which developed an alternative model to financial capitalism. Financial capitalism is collapsing for objective and totally unavoidable reasons. The search for an alternative will continue drawing more attention to Russia as a country that is, in principle, capable of offering an alternative development model. ..."
"... The disagreement IS over Ukraine policy, not this argument about what Trump may or may not have done. DC is full of corruption of all kinds, including in foreign policy, but no one is ever punished. So we know that is not the issue. ..."
"... I believe Stratfor, no friend of Russia and close to the neocon faction in American politics, described the 2014 coup as "the most blatant coup in history". ..."
"... This article is very good in detail, but they could also add that the first Minister of Finance in Ukraine's post-Maidan government was a literal US State Department official who was only then granted Ukrainian citizenship. Not surprisingly she also made Ukraine accept IMF loans, getting Ukraine into the IMF predatory lending/austerity scam. ..."
"... This is the legacy of careerism within the Foreign Service. People get positions in which they live comfortably, attending all the right parties and getting a sophisticated world view and seldom have any loyalty or accountability to the Commander in Chief. ..."
"... When Vindman claimed he was disturbed by what he heard, instead of following the chain of command, which he invokes almost as often as his rank, he lawyers up. ..."
he Wall Street Journal 's Peggy Noonan liked what she saw when U.S. diplomats George Kent and William B. Taylor Jr. went
before the House Intelligence Committee to give testimony as part of the ongoing impeachment drama. She saw them as "the old America
reasserting itself." They demonstrated "stature and command of their subject matter." They evinced "capability and integrity."
All true. Kent, with his bow tie and his family tradition of public service, appeared to be the very picture of the old-school
American foreign service official. And Taylor, with his exemplary West Point career, his Vietnam heroism, and his longtime national
service, seemed a throwback to the blunt-spoken American military men who gave us our World War II triumph and our rise to global
dominance.
But these men embrace a geopolitical outlook that is simplistic, foolhardy, and dangerous. Perhaps no serious blame should accrue
to them, since it is the same geopolitical outlook embraced and enforced by pretty much the entire foreign policy establishment,
of which these men are mere loyal apparatchiks. And yet they are playing their part in pushing a foreign policy that is directing
America towards a very possible disaster.
Neither man manifested even an inkling of an understanding of what kind of game the United States in playing with Ukraine. Neither
gave even a nod to the long, complex relationship between Ukraine and Russia. Neither seemed to understand either the substance or
the intensity of Russia's geopolitical interests along its own borders or the likely consequences of increasing U.S. meddling in
what for centuries has been part of Russia's sphere of influence.
Both Taylor and Kent declared that America's vital national interest is wrapped up in Ukraine, though neither sought to explain
why in any substantive way. Spin out all the potential scenarios of Ukraine's fate and then ask whether any of them would materially
affect America's vital interests. Any affirmative answer would require elaborate contortions.
It could be argued, perhaps, that an expansion of Russian influence in Ukraine could affect the vital interests of the rest of
Europe, though that would hardly be inevitable. But cannot Europe handle any such threat vis-a-vis Russia, given that the EU has
a population of 512 million and a GDP of $18 trillion -- compared to Russia's population of 145 million and GDP of $1.6 trillion?
The Taylor/Kent outlook stems from the widespread demonization of Russia that dominates thinking within elite circles. Taylor's
rendition of recent events in Ukraine was so one-sided and selective as to amount to a falsehood. As he had it, Ukraine's turn to
the West after 2009 (when he left the country after his first diplomatic tour there) threatened Russia's Vladimir Putin to such an
extent that he tried to "bribe" Ukraine's president with inducements to resist Western influence, whereupon protests emerged in Kyiv
that drove the Ukrainian president to flee the country in 2014. Then Putin invaded Crimea, holding a "sham referendum at the point
of Russian army rifles." Putin sent military forces into eastern Ukraine "to generate illegal armed formations and puppet governments."
And so the West extended military assistance to Ukraine.
"It is this security assistance," he said, "that is at the heart of the [impeachment] controversy that we are discussing today."
In contrast to this misleading rendition, here are the facts, with appropriate context.
In 1989 and 1990, the George H. W. Bush administration assured Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that if he accepted German unification,
the West would not seek to exploit the situation through any eastward expansion -- not even by "one inch," as then-secretary of state
James Baker assured Gorbachev. But Bill Clinton reneged on that commitment, moving to expand NATO on an eastward path that eventually
led right up to the Russian border.
NATO, with just 16 members in 1990, now includes 29 European states, with all of the expansion countries lying east of Germany.
As this was unfolding, Russian leaders issued stern warnings about the consequences if America and the West sought to include in
NATO either Ukraine or Georgia. Both are considered as fundamental to Russian security.
As Nikolas K. Gvosdev of the U.S. Naval War College has written, Russia and Ukraine share a 1,500-mile border where Ukraine "nestles
up against the soft underbelly of the Russian Federation." Gvosdev elaborates: "The worst nightmare of the Russian General Staff
would be NATO forces deployed all along this frontier, which would put the core of Russia's population and industrial capacity at
risk of being quickly and suddenly overrun in the event of any conflict." Beyond that crucial strategic concern, the two countries
share strong economic, trade, cultural, ethnic, and language ties going back centuries. No Russian leader of any stripe would survive
as leader if he or she were to allow Ukraine to be wrested fully from Russia's sphere of influence.
And yet America, in furtherance of the ultimate aim of pulling Ukraine away from Russia, spent some $5 billion in a campaign to
gin up pro-Western sentiment there, according to former assistant secretary of state for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who spearheaded
much of this effort during the Obama administration. It was clearly a blatant effort to interfere in the domestic politics of a foreign
nation -- and a nation residing in a delicate and easily inflamed part of the world.
But Ukraine is a tragically divided nation, with many of its people drawn to the West while others feel greater ties to Russia.
The late Samuel Huntington of Harvard called Ukraine "a cleft country, with two distinct cultures." Contrary to Taylor's false portrayal
of an aggressive Russia trampling on eastern Ukrainians by setting up puppet governments and manufacturing a bogus referendum in
Crimea, the reality is that large numbers of Ukrainians there favor Russia and feel loyalty to what they consider their Russian heritage.
The Crimean public is 70 percent Russian, and its Parliament in 1992 actually voted to declare independence from Ukraine for fear
that the national leadership would nudge the country toward the West. (The vote was later rescinded to avoid a violent national confrontation.)
In 1994, Crimea elected a president who had campaigned on a platform of "unity with Russia."
True, many in western Ukraine have pushed for greater ties to the West and wanted their elected president, Viktor Yanukovych,
to respond favorably to Western financial blandishments. But Yanukovych, tilting toward Russia, eschewed NATO membership for Ukraine,
renewed a long-term lease for the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, and gave official status to the Russian language. These
actions eased tensions between Ukraine and Russia, but they inflamed Ukraine's internal politics. And when Yanukovych abandoned negotiations
aimed at an association and free-trade agreement with the European Union in favor of greater economic ties to Russia, pro-Western
Ukrainians, including far-right provocateurs, staged street protests that ultimately brought down Yanukovych's government. Victoria
Nuland gleefully egged on the protesters. The deposed president fled to Russia.
Nuland then set about determining who would be Ukraine's next prime minister, namely Arseniy Yatsenyuk. "Yats is our guy," she
declared to U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. When Pyatt warned that many EU countries were uncomfortable with a Ukrainian
coup, she shot back, "Fuck the EU." She then got her man Yats into the prime minister position, demonstrating the influence that
enables U.S. meddling in foreign countries.
That's when Putin rushed back to Moscow from the Winter Olympic Games at Sochi to protect the more Russian-oriented areas of Ukraine
(the so-called Donbass in the country's east and Crimea in the south) from being swallowed up in this new drama. He orchestrated
a plebiscite in Crimea, which revealed strong sentiment for reunification with Russia (hardly the "sham referendum" described by
Taylor) and sent significant military support to Donbass Ukrainians who didn't want to be pulled westward.
The West and America have always been, and must remain, wary of Russia. Its position in the center of Eurasia -- the global "heartland,"
in the view of the famous British geographic scholar Halford Mackinder -- renders it always a potential threat. Its vulnerability
to invasion stirs in Russian leaders an inevitable hunger for protective lands. Its national temperament seems to include a natural
tendency towards authoritarianism. Any sound American foreign policy must keep these things in mind.
But in the increasingly tense relationship between the Atlantic Alliance and Russia, the Alliance has been the more aggressive
player -- aggressive when it pushed for NATO's eastward expansion despite promises to the contrary from the highest levels of the
U.S. government; aggressive when it turned that policy into an even more provocative plan for the encirclement of Russia; aggressive
when it dangled the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia; aggressive when it sought to lure Ukraine out of the Russian
orbit with economic incentives; aggressive when it helped foster the street coup against a duly elected Ukrainian government; and
aggressive in its continued refusal to appreciate or acknowledge Russia's legitimate geopolitical interests in its own neighborhood.
George Kent and William B. Taylor Jr., in their testimony last week, personified this aggressive outlook, designed to squeeze
Russia into a geopolitical corner and trample upon its regional interests in the name of Western universalism. If that outlook continues
and leads to ever greater tensions with Russia, it can't end well.
American diplomacy is rather reminiscent of German diplomacy in 1917, in that expanding NATO into Ukraine and the Baltics is as
stupidly provocative to Moscow as the Zimmerman Telegram was to the US. Zimmerman's offer was incredibly stupid since it provoked
a US declaration of war but Germany had absolutely no way to provide Mexico any material assistance. Neither will NATO be providing
any real assistance to Ukraine or the Baltic states if the balloon goes up -- today's Bundeswehr is not your grandfathers Wehrmacht.
True. The stupidity of US policy toward Russia can only be defeated by stupidity of the limitrophus of Eastern Europe, like Poland
or the Baltic states. If "balloon goes up" they will be first to evaporate.
Thumbs up on the article - the valiant Ukraine facing perfidious Russia is a gross oversimplification. And as noted, the US is
involved in this mess up to its eyeballs. The first person to speak out publicly was the former diplomat (and godfather of "Containment")
George Kennan. In his last public comment, he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times warning against pushing NATO to the East as
a policy guaranteed to cause Russian fear and resentment. In the early years of the century, Mikhail Gorbachev - no friend of
Putin's - accused the West of trying to treat Russia like a third rate nation. It is sad that the "deep state" maneuvers against
Trump (up and running early enough to destroy Paul Manafort) derailed Trump's plans to talk openly with Putin and thus earn him
the blind hatred of John Brennan. The rest is history.
You need a foreign policy update. Ukraine and Europe are not longer our problems. They have grown ideologically distant and opposed
to US interests, which is self interest and transactional foreign policy now. The days of "altruistic" foreign policy are over
with. Marshall died long ago.
This is totally inaccurate. The current Russian system is not socialist, and it certainly has problems with corruption, but it
is opposed to the Western establishment and it is promoting a traditional Christian and nationalist outlook as opposed to the
liberal globalism of the Western elites. It is better than the alternative at the moment, and in a sense Putin, especially
his foreign policy , is executing the will of the people in Russia. Conservatives opposed Russia up until Trump because both
sides are controlled by the same Western establishment, which has been pursuing an anti-Russian agenda for a long time. They do
not want any resistance to their liberal world order.
"Democracy" is a lie and a fraud, Plato knew this 4,000 years ago, and "class consciousness" is only real in the sense that
the current situation in the West has an elite that is going against the interests of the people. I don't see how defending Russia
is "undermining class conscientious," actually arguing against the anti-Russian warmongering is a good thing. What "Russian state
attacks" are you talking about?
"To see US conservatives defending an autocracy reflects they have embraced those fascistic principles."
Do you even know how conservatism and the terms right and left wing originated? Conservatism and the right wing are terms that
are from the French Revolution, used to describe supporters of the Catholic French Monarchy of the Bourbons while the liberals
or the left were the revolutionaries. Historically Conservatives defended European Christian monarchies while the liberals always
wanted to overthrow throne and altar to replace them with secular democratic republics. In fact there is nothing more conservative
than autocracy, namely a Church-anointed monarchy. Americanism, or the ideology of the American founding fathers, was inherently
liberal. They were in revolt against the monarchy of their time. There is nothing conservative about democracy, it's quite to
the contrary. Autocracy is not "fascistic," that term is completely irrelevant in this historical context.
"Seeing similar headlines from opposite political poles exposes a 'horseshoe' phenomenon of left/right ideologies in which
the two poles are close together in significant contexts."
Are you really going to be so grug brained as to unironically bring up the horseshoe theory? Looks like we have a big brained
intellectual centrist over here. Not even worth giving an in depth analysis on this one.
Good comment. The Monarchists sat on the right side of the French assembly and the revolutionaries sat on the left. That is how
the modern spectrum morphed into Fascism (corporate state) on the right and Communism (revolutionary) on the left.
I've actually been to Russia, twice in the last year and a half, and I had a chance to meet and to converse with, and to hear
from, Russians of all sorts: academics, students, politicians, government employees, businessmen, environmentalists, scientists,
and journalists.
Based on what I saw and heard, I categorically reject your statement that Russians "are not all that free to express their
opinion."
I heard from people who are well known in Russia who disagree with Putin. I heard criticisms of the government from people
who are not well known, or who are just average people. People note that corruption is still a problem, at many levels of society
and government, but they did not seem at all reticent to make that point.
No one displayed any fear or reluctance to express his views. At the same time, Russians acknowledge a great deal of improvement
since the tragedy of the Yeltsin years.
And while there are people who criticize the government's domestic policies, they tend to be much more in support of what the
government under Putin has accomplished in terms of foreign policy. And that seems to me to be a very rational reaction.
First off I am Russian myself. Most people are in favour of an authoritarian government, nobody cares about or wants democracy.
Monarchist restoration would be ideal but Putin is good enough for now. Free press and elections are a fraud and a lie, as I said.
First of all, show me one single state on the planet today which is pro working class. Secondly, juxtaposing the concepts of working
class and fascism is just a demonstration of how badly you know the history. Suffice it to say that the set of political views
deriving from the ideas of Mussolini are called right-wing socialism. Hence, your ignorance of history logically begets that of
today's politics. No, Trump and Putin cannot be called truly pro working class. But they're at least are not so blatantly anti
working class as neolibs who oppose them.
Russia is associated with the image of the USSR which developed an alternative model to financial capitalism. Financial capitalism
is collapsing for objective and totally unavoidable reasons. The search for an alternative will continue drawing more attention
to Russia as a country that is, in principle, capable of offering an alternative development model.
Except that isn't what this is about. The disagreement IS over Ukraine policy, not this argument about what Trump may or may not
have done. DC is full of corruption of all kinds, including in foreign policy, but no one is ever punished. So we know that is
not the issue.
But we do know from the testimonies that they oppose Trump BECAUSE he changed Ukraine policy away from the policy of confrontation
with Russia, or tried to. They are all against that and against Trump doing that, as they said. The entire establishment has opposed
Trump on this since he got elected. So let's not be disingenuous. This charade has gone on long enough. The elites want their
proxy war with Russia.
1. From my perspective, the article is saying that our Ukraine policy is immoral, not that the impeachment is not founded.
2. Further to 1. above, your pizza analogy doesn't hold up. If pizza is bad for you, eating pizza harm nobody but the eater
and the eater's insurers.
By contrast, our Ukraine policy is the support of actual live Nazis and has resulted in the deaths of numerous innocents, not
to mention the economic destruction of Ukraine.
This is more like providing one pizza company weapons and support, knowing full well that they will use those weapons and cash
to murder rivals and customers who order from those rivals.
The good news is that the influence of apparatchiks like Mr. Kent and Mr. Taylor will be at an end within a few years. America
thought the blood of hundreds of thousands of foreign children was a "fair price" to pay for the dollar's continued role as a
reserve currency (Madeleine Albright's words) and cheaper gas at the pump. The effort was a bust. Endless trillion-dollar-a-year
deficits will come to an end quickly. There isn't that much liquidity in the private sphere to sop up at the price the U.S. Gov
can afford.
Americans have forgotten how much money a billion dollars is, much less a trillion: to wit, the Democrats future plans are
priced in dozens of trillions of dollars. Is it even possible to count that high (given that no one has any real idea how the
economy will react)?
Boomers destroyed the country. It only took one "me" generation to introduce such deep structural instability that there is
no recovery. Really, does anyone think a trillion dollars a year of demand can ever be pulled out of the economy? No. Does anyone
really think a trillion dollars a year will magically appear for free, from nowhere, for a decade or more? The intelligentsia
will reap the fruit of its effort within a few years. And it will be dried cat food for dinner. Bless them!
What "actual bloody invasion" of Ukraine and Georgia. Georgia attacked South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008, and got a bloody nose
for their trouble. They didn't lose any territory however, which is odd, if Russia were the attacker.
If Russia had actually invaded Ukraine, the Ukrainian clown army would be obliterated in days or hours. Note how there are
some 500 miles of open border between Donbass and Sumskaya Oblast - but no fighting? Do you think that the Russian military doesn't
know the geography of their own border?
Ukraine was already devided before it separated from USSR. People from western Ukraine called Russians and eastern Ukrainians
moskali. Eastern Ukraine spoke mostly Russian, western Ukraine spoke mostly Ukrainian. I believe tension escalated after Russia
was about to loose access to the Black Sea and its navy there. Sorry. That was a big mistake to even think that it would happen
easy. Russia annexed Crimea from Ottoman Empire in 18th century. Since then it was part of Russia. Khrushchev transferred it to
Ukrainian republic in 1954. You seriously believe that Russia would easy let it go after almost 2 centuries of its presence there?
Big chunk of Russian history associated with Black Sea Fleet.
The invasions were in response to them trying to acquire NATO memberships and NATO egging then on to do this and provoke Russia.
If they remain in the Russian sphere than that would not be a problem.
NATO goes where it was warned not to go, provokes the response it knew it would get, and claims that this is "aggression."
What a joke.
There was no "Russian meddling", that was debunked. There is no evidence that the DNC was hacked and the so called troll farm
had no connection to the Russian government and was merely a business marketing firm selling advertising space on their social
media pages.
Russia doesn't poison dissidents in foreign countries, if you are referring to the Skripal case, that narrative has fallen
apart, multiple journalists have written lengthy pieces about all of the inconsistencies and contradictions in the UK government's
narrative. Not to mention Yulia Skripal said she's still wants to go back to Russia, so clearly she doesn't think Russia poisoned
her.
We do have evidence to the show the opposite. The only ones who examined the DNC servers are a firm that was caught lying about
Russian hacking before and is owned by a Ukrainian millionaire that donated to the Clinton Foundation. Can't get more damning
than that.
What are you even talking about? The DNC refused to allow the server to be examined because they know there was no Russian hacking,
and why would Trump privately ask Zelensky to investigate Ukraine's role in all of this if he knew he were guilty? The point is
there is no evidence to prove Russian hacking, and the only claims come from a firm that is owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who
has been caught lying about Russian hacking before and donated millions to the Clinton Foundation.
How much mental gymnastics are you going to use to try to pretend like you don't understand?
Which is more aggressive, do you think -- invading one's neighbors, or "dangling the prospect of NATO membership" for them?
The US engineered and supported a coup in Ukraine to overthrow the constitutional government. Is this aggression? It seems
so to me. It certainly preceded any Russian response. As far as NATO membership for Ukraine, polls of Ukrainian opinion long before
the Maidan showed very strong feeling against Ukraine joining NATO.
I believe, when all facts fail, that the way through to some would be pointing out the absurdities of what they hear therefore
think. It might make them think twice before publicly embarassing themselves.
The Western actions are more aggressive, because they actually happened...
Russia's annexation of the Crimea was bloodless, and doubtless spared it the carnage that the regime in Kiev wrought in Donbass.
America's movements since the end of the Cold War have been consistently offensive in nature, and Russia's consistently defensive
in nature.
That defense has included counterattacks, feints, and opportunistic thrusts. In every 'attack' it made, Russia was reacting,
not taking the initiative.For their part the liberal hegemonists know what they're doing. Good PR is priceless, and they know it's essential for offensive
movements to not appear that way.
Problem is, you liberals are still unable to prove a single allegation of those you uttered in your comment.
How come the previous Ukrainian government didn't manage to beg one single satellite pic of, say, Russian tanks crossing their
border from the CIA or the DIA, given the purported "bloody invasion"? Russian armored vehicles have some cloaking devices or
what?
How come the Mueller's so-called "investigation" turned out to be such a pathetic juridical failure, given the purported "direct
meddling"?
What a naive poor dear one has to be to believe in poisonings with radioactive substances (as dangerous to the poisoner as
to his victim) in a world where poisons causing deaths looking like those from natural causes exist and are available to all secret
services (and even to private citizens having talents in chemistry)?
Plus, careful with (ab)using upper case. "Democratical countries" with a capital "D" reads like "countries, whose governments
are proxies of the Democratic Party". Blame Freud and his slips.
I love people like you. I mean since we were invaded by Germany, Napoleon, Charles the Tenth of Sweden, the Teutonic Knights,
the Golden Horde (Ghengis Khan started this), at the cost of countless millions of lives lost, I sense that we- as Americans-
have every need to push our frontiers to Russia's doorstep.
You demonstrate a phenomenal ignorance of Historical perspective: exactly the cannon fodder the establishment's looking for.
Nice and sober account. One detail that might be significant. Until 1954, Crimea was part of the Russian Federation (the Russian
State has wrestled that territory from the Tatars/Mongols and Ottomans more than 200 years before and fought for it against the
united Europe in 1850s). And Nikita Khrushchev, a Ukrainian, had bestowed Crimea in an unsanctioned administrative decision to
the then Ukrainian Socialist Republic in 1954.
Ukraine as a state is pretty much a creation of Russia and instead of being grateful for their extensive statehood, elements
in Ukraine would rather bite the hand that made them.
Lots of people all over the world get up and go to work. They do it in democracies, autocracies, and countries that are somewhere
in between. In fact, the United States is losing its position as global economic hegemon in large part because the Chinese (no
democracy there) are harder working than Americans.
The United States currency has value for two reasons - inside the United States, it's the only way you can pay taxes. Outside
the United States, the gulfie tyrannies only accept dollars for international sales of oil.
$5 billion thrown down the Ukraine rat hole. It is too bad that the money wasn't spent providing better care for our wounded veterans.
Watch the video "Delay, Deny, Hope They Die". As one of the very few, perhaps only, commentater who has criticized Victoria Nuland's
role in the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution, I have made many of the same points in recent days.
You know that is dishonest. This has nothing to do with what Trump tried to tell Zelensky, and anyway the US and Ukraine do in
fact have a treaty from 1998 that mandates them to cooperate on law enforcement matters. DC is full of corruption but none of
it is ever punished, so we know that is not the issue.
This is all about Trump's desire to end the proxy war with Russia. That is all this is about ultimately. Looking at the big
picture, that is a large part of the reason why the establishment wants to delegitimization him or remove Trump from office. This
phone call scandal is nothing more than the latest tactical move to get there. If you don't see that, and you genuinely think
that this is merely about Trump asking Zelensky to investigate something and get caught up in the minutiae of that, you are simply
naive and don't understand the true nature of politics. Think about the big picture.
A proxy war is nice cover for weapons smuggling. I've postulated for awhile now that Benghazi is the key to Deep State. Ask yourself
why the Obama administration allowed Stevens and his cohorts to die when there was ample air and naval power nearby. What did
he stumble upon? I think it was a vast smuggling operation designed to support Muslim Bros. and Al Shabbab-both of whom later
attacked US assets and who continue to worry the region with their raids of kidnappings, rapes and mass murders that go largely
unreported in the US press. There's a reason why so many liberals her and abroad claim to support open borders and it has nothing
to do with humanitarian goals and everything to do with an organized global crime group who is using sievelike borders to allow
drugs, fake licensed products, fake pharmaceuticals, weapons and even humans to become trade goods. People should really ask why
Democrats refuse to stop this. Europeans should ask who is getting rich off of unchecked migration of indigent people.
1. The military industrial complex needs a Big Enemy to justify their exorbitant budgets.
2. The spooks need a Big Enemy to justify Big Brother and also their increasingly open interference in domestic politics.
3. The people who run things need a distraction, lest the masses start to demand the sorts of reforms that would take money
out of rich people's pockets. A Big Enemy does this just fine.
Russia makes a better Big Enemy than does China, for US business is already too intertwined with China and its supply chains
reach deeply into that country. Any disruption to those links would cost a lot of money.
TAC has been doing great work covering the Ukraine.
Even so-called conservatives play along with the mainstream media's and establishment's narrative, with the likes of NRO's
warmongering neocons, such as the Jay Nordlinger, constantly banging-on about poor little Ukraine being a "struggling democracy"
in need, rather than a deeply divided and failed state that perhaps should never have existed in its present borders as a "sovereign
nation." The best solution for the Ukraine would probably be to split it into two, with Eastern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula
perhaps just becoming part of Greater Russia.
I believe Stratfor, no friend of Russia and close to the neocon faction in American politics, described the 2014 coup as "the
most blatant coup in history".
Exactly. This article is very good in detail, but they could also add that the first Minister of Finance in Ukraine's post-Maidan
government was a literal US State Department official who was only then granted Ukrainian citizenship. Not surprisingly she also
made Ukraine accept IMF loans, getting Ukraine into the IMF predatory lending/austerity scam.
FYI, the advocates for intervening in the Ukraine are the ones accusing Pres Putin
1. with invading Crimea -- false
2. interfering with US elections -- sabotage an offense that certainly means war -- unfounded
3. that the Russians and the President operated in as collaborators in sabotaging US election also false
this president in response signed a document that the Russians did spy and further implemented the worst sanctions to date
against Russia despite the lack of evidence
as it is that Pres. Putin is certainly not being excused -- ;laugh - not even from things he has not been proved to have done
:Laugh ---
It's like when the police say you did something but can't prove it so they get some others to say you did it because they know
you did it
-even there's no evidence you did.
If you don't understand just review the SP Mueller investigation and the subsequent impeachment inquiry -- this is not new
game for anyone familiar with prosecutor methods.
This is true, all of this could have easily been avoided if the US stopped meddling and withdrew its troops from the former USSR.
People like Taylor and Kent show there is an agenda to start a war with Russia. Hopefully the upcoming Ukraine-Russia peace summit
can settle this conflict.
1. The military industrial complex needs a Big Enemy to justify their exorbitant budgets.
2. The spooks need a Big Enemy to justify Big Brother and also their increasingly open interference in domestic politics.
3. The people who run things need a distraction, lest the masses start to demand the sorts of reforms that would take money
out of rich people's pockets. A Big Enemy does this just fine.
Russia makes a better Big Enemy than does China, for US business is already too intertwined with China and its supply chains
reach deeply into that country. Any disruption to those links would cost a lot of money.
TAC has been doing great work covering the Ukraine.
Even so-called conservatives play along with the mainstream media's and establishment's narrative, with the likes of NRO's
warmongering neocons, such as the Jay Nordlinger, constantly banging-on about poor little Ukraine being a "struggling democracy"
in need, rather than a deeply divided and failed state that perhaps should never have existed in its present borders as a "sovereign
nation." The best solution for the Ukraine would probably be to split it into two, with Eastern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula
perhaps just becoming part of Greater Russia.
FYI, the advocates for intervening in the Ukraine are the ones accusing Pres Putin
1. with invading Crimea -- false
2. interfering with US elections -- sabotage an offense that certainly means war -- unfounded
3. that the Russians and the President operated in as collaborators in sabotaging US election also false
this president in response signed a document that the Russians did spy and further implemented the worst sanctions to date
against Russia despite the lack of evidence
as it is that Pres. Putin is certainly not being excused -- ;laugh - not even from things he has not been proved to have done
:Laugh ---
It's like when the police say you did something but can't prove it so they get some others to say you did it because they know
you did it
-even there's no evidence you did.
If you don't understand just review the SP Mueller investigation and the subsequent impeachment inquiry -- this is not new
game for anyone familiar with prosecutor methods.
That's a strawman and there's nothing to refute, the article is correct. Because the US government and CFR globalist thinkers
like Zbigniew Brzezinski, George Friedman, and George Soros have talked about the geopolitical importance of Ukraine since the
1990s -- read Brzezinski's Grand Chessboard from 1996, where talks about the need for the US to take control of Ukraine from Russia
to prevent Russia from becoming a great power that can challenge US global hegemony, or Soros' admission on a 60 Minutes interview
from 1998 that he has invested billions in Ukraine, particularly in the Ukrainian military. As Brzezinski says, the US was quick
to recognise the geopolitical importance of an independent Ukrainian state, and became one of Ukraine's strongest backers in the
1990s for this reason. Globalist plans for Ukraine go back many years.
Polls before the Maidan show most Ukrainians had a very positive image of Russia as well, and increasingly people in Ukraine
are getting tired of the war, which is why they voted massively for Zelensky over Poroshenko.
When I look at our foreign policy, before Trump, you have to go back to Reagan to have any semblance of policy based in reality.
While Trump is kinda of a bull in a china shop, at least he highlights some of the asinine policies the 'experts' have been pursuing.
Russia's objection to US and EU interference into Ukrainian politics makes as much sense as US objection. would if Russia were
in Mexico attempting to draw them into a confederation with Moscow.
He may be as immoral as hell. Most of them, R or D, are, in case you haven't noticed. The fact is, there's still no factual evidence
he committed any impeachable in this specific case.
So, if the employees of the government who are involved in international affairs do not agree with the President, the President
is accused of an impeachable offense? These two are not patriots in the usual sense. Nor are they public servants. They see themselves
as somehow above the Law. Above the Constitution. Applauded by those trying ever since the election to bring down a President.
Seditionists.
The last 30 years has been a complete disaster for US foreign diplomacy. We are being led by complete morons! Trump is a big step
in the right direction.
The fact is, it was a U.S. sponsored coup by the Obama administration that overthrew a democratically elected government in Ukraine.
Here is the Feb 2015 Obama CNN interview with Fareed Zakaria...note that Obama says 'Yanukovich fleeing AFTER we brokered a deal
to transition power in Ukraine'...incredible. Play
Hide
Why is it wrong and improper to know whether or not a presidential candidate's family was involved in corrupt dealings abroad?
But that's not even the question, because the issue of what Trump may or may not have done is not the real issue. DC is full of
corruption and none of it is ever punished, so we know that's not what they care about. What this is about is Trump's disagreement
with the establishment on Russia-Ukraine policy and the greater geopolitical picture. Thinking this is about some minutiae over
who said what on a phone call and what he mayor may not have really meant is naive and ignorant of the true nature of politics.
These situations are not compartmentalised, these have to be seen from the the big picture of geopolitics.
He sensible policy would be to Finlandize Ukraine and Byelorus. NATO would not have them as members and Russia would let them
pursue economic ties with Europe. This worked for Finland through put the Cold War and kept the region peaceful
This is the legacy of careerism within the Foreign Service. People get positions in which they live comfortably, attending all
the right parties and getting a sophisticated world view and seldom have any loyalty or accountability to the Commander in Chief.
That's a problem.
When Vindman claimed he was disturbed by what he heard, instead of following the chain of command, which he
invokes almost as often as his rank, he lawyers up. Why? Who is Vindman reporting to if not the President? Too many of these folks
act as if the change in administrations is merely a formality to which they can choose to embrace or not. Almost without exception,
we have seen testimony from people whose personal history is in the Russian/Ukraine theater and who have family and history there.
This is problematic. If anyone ever looked and sounded the part of a mole, it was Vindman today.
These maniacs are provoking nuclear war.
They fail to understand that, unlike 50 years ago when America had a decentralized industrial economy and banking system, 2
large nukes aimed at NYC and DC would destroy the country.
This is the only conservative site worth reading. I do love me some serious and deep analysis from Conservatives in important
geopolitical issues. God for a return to the days of Buckley. It would be glorious.
Fantastic analysis of the 3D chess game. But we are talking about Biden and Clinton so we need not overthink this. Obama gave
1 billion of taxpayer money to Ukraine. Ukraine gave Burisma some of that according the government of the UK. And once Burisma
was in receipt of our aid funds, millions flow through right back to the very same bad actors like Biden who directly controlled
the one billion in foreign aid. I wish this was more complicated. I wish it made Americans seem smarter. But to this old guy it
seems like a good old fashioned and very simple run of the mill scam . And in this scam the only person we know for fact cashed
the checks is Biden.
Come on Barr. It's time to do what we all know what needs to be done.
"But cannot Europe handle any such threat vis-a-vis Russia, given that
the EU has a population of 512 million and a GDP of $18
trillion -- compared to Russia's population of 145 million and GDP of $1.6
trillion?"
An excellent question. The cold war is over. We won. We don't need to keep fighting it. Russia is not that much of a threat
to us.
Think about it. Our State Department has been in operation for well over 100 years in some form or another. Are we ANY safer?
Fire them all. No pension for failure.
For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.
Putin is a serious strategist – on the premises of Russian history. Understanding US values and psychology are not his strong
suits. Nor has understanding Russian history and psychology been a strong point among US policymakers.
-- Henry A. Kissinger in 2014 at the start of the Ukraine crisis (writing in the Washington Post.)
I cannot believe that the State Department was unaware of the intertwined history of Russia and the Ukraine or rather given State's
rigid worldview I can believe it. The Russians knew perfectly well that the United States was pulling the strings of the so-called
Maidan revolution and that the end would be to plant Nato and the EU right on Russia's doorstep.
Previous attempts to push Nato into parts of the south of the former Soviet empire had been fought off. Nothing could be more
predictable than that the Kremlin would do everything it could to oppose what it saw as hostile interference in the Ukraine on
behalf of "reformers". The US plays by the same rules. Cuba and the earlier Monroe doctrine are prize exhibits.
Obama slotted temperamentally into the State Department worldview or maybe it was the other way round. It was a worldview that
got the Middle East profoundly wrong at every turn including misundertanding the Arab Spring, support for the deeply anti-Western
Muslim Brotherhood, the appeasement and promotion of Iran, the abandonment of the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran, the destruction
of Libya as a going concern and how to tackle Syria. If there was an opportunity to get something wrong, Obama and the bow ties
managed it. They left behind a trail of wreckage.
Worst of all, Obama, the great opponent of nuclear proliferation, turned out to be its greatest enabler but ensured that he
would be long out of office when it happened and the media started asking "who lost Iran?" If Obama achieved one thing, it was
finally to kill off nuclear non-proliferation as a viable ambition. A nuclear Iran isn't just a threat to its neighours. It is
a direct missile threat to the EU which has happily collaborated in advancing Iranian power.
Unsurprisingiy, Trump rejected all this and it is for this that he is vilified by the foreign police dinosaurs who try to delude
the nation into believing that even when what they do ends in manifest disaster, there is no alternative. There is hardly a word
leaked by the foreign policy to the willingly ignorant media that is not a lie. The mess is theirs and they hate Trump for wakening
Americans up to their self-serving, somnolent incompetence.
The usual response to posts like this is to accuse the writer of being a traitrous Putin lover. On the contrary, know thy enemy.
The maxim doesn't mean have a beer with him. It means understand him.
Excellent statement of the "Thucydides trap" argument for caution regarding Russia and its traditional sphere of concern. But
Merry leaves us with a cliffhanger: what is the sound US Russian policy given his concerns and cautions? Moreover, his rendition
is vulnerable to a counterargument, namely, that Putin's Russia has gone far beyond the seizure or control of "protective lands"
towards an encirclement or menacing of Europe. This can be seen unfolding in Russia's military presence on Syria's (and potentially
Libya's) Mediterranean coast, its sale of weapons to Turkey, its connivance with Iran's Middle Eastern proxy wars, and the potential
for petro-blackmail of its energy customers. Add to this the affirmative case for European interest in Poland, whose capital Warsaw
is exposed to attack from its eastern and southern flanks just as Moscow is immediately threatened from its western and southern
flanks. Perhaps all this just confirms how far down the path to the "Thucydides trap" the principal parties have traveled. Yet,
all the same, on what grounds do we rationalize Russian inroads into the Mediterranean? Free navigation of the seas?
I like this article but Russia is no longer a declining power technically. It's GDP is slowly rising again in the last few years.
They did take a hit from sanctions and low oil prices but they are staring to recover to some degree.
Russians like Putin because their economy is much better now than it was during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The problem this country has with Russia is that they were a declining power and now are back on the rise. China is more of
a threat but the imbeciles in the establishment keep focusing on trying to undermine Russian security. They seem to really believe
Putin is their enemy without realizing the overwhelming majority of Russians have issues with our stupid foreign policy.
Google Russian GDP, especially through time, and you'll see what I mean.
Is it any wonder that the old foreign service establishment "embrace a geopolitical outlook that is simplistic, foolhardy, and
dangerous"?
The foreign service exam of that era (probably no better today) tested substantially on ones knowledge of fiction: novels and
such. Rather like choosing career foreign service officers based on a person's performance in the entertainment trivia night at
the local watering hole. It was a test of memory not logic or insightfulness or historical perspective. These folks are not latter-day
De Toquevilles or great historians, even if many came from colleges viewed as top drawer.
One thing that few appreciate is that US actions in the Ukraine in 2013/14 prompted Russian retaliation in the 2016 election.
The Russians had been playing by our rules. (Party of the Regions won a free and fair election in the Ukraine) and then we supported
a violent extra-constitutional takeover.The Obama administration wanted to see a repeat of the performance in Kiev, in Moscow
with Putin playing the part of Yanukovych. The Russian response was to attack the fault lines in American Society. Their ultimate
goal is to see the kind of rioting in the US that we had supported in Kiev in the Winter of 14.
American diplomacy has become dangerously simplistic and one-dimensional in outlook. Turkey bad, Kurds good. Iran bad, Israel
good. Russia bad, Ukraine and NATO good. You try talking with Russia, Iran or Turkey you'll be crucified in domestic politics.
Russia on the other hand doesn't have this simplistic view. They wisely recognize that the world is varying shades of gray.
Excellent piece. Bottom line: the Ukraine is within Russia's "sphere of influence", not ours. Not our problem. The last time a
major power attempted to insert itself within another country's sphere of influence was in 1962. Anybody remember the Cuban Missile
Crisis?
Mr. Merry is entitled to his point of view, but I find his remarks to be out of touch -- sort of like another "Chicken Kiev" speech
with the date "2019" slapped on it. Perhaps he would benefit from a couple of tours of duty in Kyiv, like George Kent and Bill
Taylor. Then he would appreciate the fact that the United States does have real interests in preserving Ukrainian sovereignty,
along with the independence of all the former Soviet states who have split off from Russia. He should also not be so quick to
characterize Kent's and Taylor's testimony. They were in Congress not to express a policy position on Russia, but to act as fact
witnesses to the potentially impeachable actions of the President and his circle. So, let's not get into conspiracy theories about
what "elites" believe. It's one short step from that to muttering darkly about the 'Deep State" and Comet Pizza.
Is it any wonder that the old foreign service establishment "embrace a geopolitical outlook that is simplistic, foolhardy, and
dangerous"?
The foreign service exam of that era (probably no better today) tested substantially on ones knowledge of fiction: novels and
such.
Rather like choosing career foreign service officers based on a person's performance in the entertainment trivia night at the
local watering hole. It was a test of memory not logic or insightfulness or historical perspective. These folks are not latter-day
De Toquevilles or great historians, even if many came from colleges viewed as top drawer.
This is another remnant for Bush neocon team, a protégé of Bolton. Trump probably voluntarily appointed this rabid neocon, a
chickenhawk who would shine in Hillary State Department.
Interestingly she came from working class background. So much about Marx theory of class struggle. Brown, David (March 4, 2017).
"Miner's daughter
tipped as Trump adviser on Russia" . The Times.
She also illustrate level pf corruption of academic science, because she got
PhD in history from Harvard in 1998 under Richard
Pipes, Akira Iriye, and
Roman Szporluk. But at least this was history, not
languages like in case of Ciaramella.
Such appointment by Trump is difficult to describe with normal words as he understood what he is buying. So he is himself to blame for his current troubles and his inability
to behave in a diplomatic way when there was important to him question about role of CrowdStrike in 2016 election and creation of Russiagate
witch hunt.
There is something in the USA that creates conditions for producing rabid female neocons, some elevator that brings ruthless female
careerists with sharp elbows them to the establishment. She sounds like a person to the right of Madeline Albright, which is an achievement
With such books It is unclear whether she is different from Max Boot. She buys official Skripal story like hook and sinker. The
list of her book looks like produced in UK by Luke Harding
Being miner daughter raised in poverty we can also talk about betrayal of her class and upbringing.
This also rises wisdom of appointing emigrants to the Administration and the extent they pursue policies beneficial for their
native countries.
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."
[
"... She looked to be a most convincing and dignified victim but it was difficult to work out quite what she'd been a victim of. ..."
"... I think our closest equivalent over here would be Lady Ashton, who headed up the pre-coup European negotiations with the Ukraine. It was Lady Ashton who gave the most famous diplomatic response in modern history, when she was told that the snipers might be provocateurs. "Gosh." ..."
"... And Chairman Schiff looked as scary as usual. If I could open my eyes that wide I'd make a fortune in horror movies. Which I suppose is more or less what he does. ..."
"... Colonel, your description of Ambassador Yovanovitch as "a secular nun" is spot on. Congratulations ! On the other hand, why is a nun continuing a civil war with 1% predatory oligarchs and Bandera thugs on our side, versus 99% of un-armed local nobodies who want a return to normalcy? ..."
"... Lastly, note that Representative Stefanik caught Ambassador Marie in a lie about Hunter Biden and Burisma. Marie claimed under oath that she had never encountered the issue pre-arrival in the Ukraine, while she had admitted earlier that Obama staff coached her about Hunter / Burisma responses for her Senate Confirmation Hearings. ..."
... She seems to live alone, alone with her work. She tried living with her 88 year old mother
three years ago but that did not last. What would the old girl have done with herself in Kiev
with her daughter working all the time?
So, the maman went home to the States. Marie is still employed as a Career Ambassador
(a high rank) in the Foreign Service of of the United States She is currently assigned at
Georgetown U.
That's the first time I've seen "winsome" used with an edge.
I watched her for some time and didn't know what on earth to make of her. She looked to
be a most convincing and dignified victim but it was difficult to work out quite what she'd
been a victim of.
I think our closest equivalent over here would be Lady Ashton, who headed up the
pre-coup European negotiations with the Ukraine. It was Lady Ashton who gave the most famous
diplomatic response in modern history, when she was told that the snipers might be
provocateurs. "Gosh."
A very safe pair of hands, is what would be said of both and almost certainly often
is.
I did know what to make of the histrionics just before the recess. They looked false. That
man wasn't really crying. And Chairman Schiff looked as scary as usual. If I could open my
eyes that wide I'd make a fortune in horror movies. Which I suppose is more or less what he
does.
EO,
Zelensky did not like her and suggested that she was involved with corrupt people and
undermining the President. I don't understand how Trump gets all of the blame for her being
relieved of her position.
Marie IMO was always the second best looking girl in the class but maybe teacher's pet,
and has never had anyone take anything away from her before. "Gosh." She doesn't look like
someone you could safely make a pass at unless you had an awful lot of rank.
Colonel, your description of Ambassador Yovanovitch as "a secular nun" is spot on.
Congratulations ! On the other hand, why is a nun continuing a civil war with 1% predatory
oligarchs and Bandera thugs on our side, versus 99% of un-armed local nobodies who want a
return to normalcy?
Then again, since when does a Presidential emissary not only criticize him and the
President of her host country, but also instruct local law enforcement on which oligarchs he
may investigate and which oligarch's (admittedly ours) he may not.
Lastly, note that Representative Stefanik caught Ambassador Marie in a lie about Hunter
Biden and Burisma. Marie claimed under oath that she had never encountered the issue
pre-arrival in the Ukraine, while she had admitted earlier that Obama staff coached her about
Hunter / Burisma responses for her Senate Confirmation Hearings.
To take your cue, Ambassador Marie is a secular nun with very bad ideas, who wandered to a
profession she is not at all suited.
"... Senator Rand Paul has urged President Trump to shut out neoconservative war hawks from the State Department, as it has emerged that Elliott Abrams , a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, could be appointed to serve in the number two spot. ..."
"... "Elliott Abrams is a neoconservative too long in the tooth to change his spots, and the president should have no reason to trust that he would carry out a Trump agenda rather than a neocon agenda," Paul writes in an opinion piece for the libertarian website Rare . ..."
"... "Congress has good reason not to trust him -- he was convicted of lying to Congress in his previous job," Paul notes in his piece. ..."
"... Abrams is also believed to have been involved in approving the attempted Venezuelan coup against Hugo Chávez in 2002 while serving as Special Assistant to the President and holding office in the National Security Council. ..."
"... It is believed that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is the one pushing for Abrams to join him at the State Department. ..."
Senator
Rand Paul has urged President Trump to shut out neoconservative war hawks from the State
Department, as it has emerged that Elliott Abrams , a senior fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations, could be appointed to serve in the number two spot.
"Elliott Abrams is a neoconservative too long in the tooth to change his spots, and the
president should have no reason to trust that he would carry out a Trump agenda rather than a
neocon agenda," Paul writes in an opinion piece for the libertarian website
Rare .
Abrams was intimately tied in with the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s, and was even
convicted of withholding information from Congress about covert government activities in
Nicaragua and El Salvador. He was later pardoned by President George H. W. Bush.
"Congress has good reason not to trust him -- he was convicted of lying to Congress in his
previous job," Paul notes in his piece.
Abrams is also believed to have been involved in approving the attempted Venezuelan coup
against Hugo Chávez in 2002 while serving as Special Assistant to the President and
holding office in the National Security Council.
Senator Paul urges Trump not to appoint Abrams, adding that his "neocon agenda trumps his
fidelity to the rule of law."
Paul points out that during the election, Abrams publicly spoke out against Trump's
intention to withdraw from policing the world.
"He is a loud voice for nation building and when asked about the president's opposition to
nation building, Abrams said that Trump was absolutely wrong; and during the election he was
unequivocal in his opposition to Donald Trump, going so far as to say, 'the chair in which
Washington and Lincoln sat, he is not fit to sit,'" Paul writes.
It is believed that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is the one pushing for Abrams to join
him at the State Department.
Paul, a member of the Committee on Foreign Relations, hopes Tillerson "will continue the
search for expert assistance from experienced, non-convicted diplomats who understand the
mistakes of the past and the challenges ahead."
The State (War) Department is really the neocons viper nest
Notable quotes:
"... Listening to our "world's best diplomats" convinced me that the deep state is real. These people think they, not elected officials, make policy. Plus, they are sneaky and conniving in trying to establish and protect their own little fiefdoms. They have never seen a foreign aid budget that in their humble yet expert opinion shouldn't be increased tenfold. They are political but pretend otherwise. And, their sanctimony is unbearable. Let's just say that I don't think that Foggy Bottom made a good impression with the general public this week. ..."
"... Oh, please. Every time it looks like we might actually pull out of Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria, the generals pop up on the TV talk shows and in the Op-Ed pages warning of the dire consequences and pleading for more time. The neo-cons used to pull this "OMG, the military is the most competent part of the federal government" stuff back in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, and TAC is not the only publication that has blown up that myth. ..."
Listening to our "world's best diplomats" convinced me that the deep state is real. These
people think they, not elected officials, make policy. Plus, they are sneaky and conniving
in trying to establish and protect their own little fiefdoms. They have never seen a
foreign aid budget that in their humble yet expert opinion shouldn't be increased tenfold.
They are political but pretend otherwise. And, their sanctimony is unbearable. Let's just
say that I don't think that Foggy Bottom made a good impression with the general public
this week.
Straight fire out of Peter Van Buren. The State is the "The Blob." They're the ones who
want to promote a policy of interventionism and nation-building. The military actually
prefers to stay out of wars and don't want to pursue nation-building.
Oh, please. Every time it looks like we might actually pull out of Iraq, Afghanistan or
Syria, the generals pop up on the TV talk shows and in the Op-Ed pages warning of the dire
consequences and pleading for more time. The neo-cons used to pull this "OMG, the military
is the most competent part of the federal government" stuff back in the build-up to the
invasion of Iraq, and TAC is not the only publication that has blown up that myth.
The State Department, where I worked for 24 years as a Foreign Service officer (FSO) and
diplomat, reminds me a lot of my current hometown, New York City. Both places spend an
inordinate amount of time telling outsiders how great they are while ignoring the obvious
garbage piled up around them. It's almost as if they're trying to convince themselves that
everything is okay.
Like New York City telling itself the Broadway lights mean folks won't notice the homeless
problem and decaying infrastructure, the State Department fully misunderstands how it appears
to others. Across Facebook groups and internal channels, FSOs this week are sending each other
little messages tagged #FSProud quoting former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch's closing soliloquy
from her impeachment testimony.
Yovanovitch's testimony otherwise read like an HR complaint from hell, as if she were
auditioning for a Disgruntled Employee poster-child position to cap off her career. She had
already been fired by the time the alleged impeachable act took place -- Trump's July 25 phone
call -- and was stuck in a placeholder job far removed from Ukrainian policy. She witnessed
nothing of the "high crimes and misdemeanors" the House is investigating, and basically used
her time to complain she knew more than her boss did so he fired her.
At the end of her
testimony , Yovanovitch unfurled a large metaphorical flag and wrapped herself and the
entire Foreign Service in it. Her lines had nothing to do with Ukraine: they were recruiting
boilerplate about how FSOs are nonpartisan servants of the Constitution, how they all live in
harm's way, yada yada. She name-checked diplomats from four decades ago held hostage in Iran,
and rolled in a couple of CIA contractors when tallying up the "State" death toll from
Benghazi. She omitted the we-don't-talk-about-that-one death of FSO
Anne Smedinghoff in Afghanistan, whose 25-year-old life was destroyed participating in a
propaganda photo-op.
This is the false idol image the State Department holds dear of itself, and people inside
the organization today proudly christened Ambassador Yovanovitch its queen. Vanity Fair
summed it up better than the long-winded FSOs bleating across social media: "A hero is born
as Yovanovitch gives voice to widespread rage at State. 'I think people are feeling huge pride
in Masha,' says a former ambassador." Yovanovitch uses her Russian nickname, Masha, without
media comment, because of course she does.
And that's the good part. Alongside Yovanovitch, bureaucrat-in-a-bow-tie George Kent issued
pronouncements against Trump people he never met who ignored his tweedy advice. Ambassador Bill
Taylor leaked hoarded personal text messages with Trump political appointees. Taylor's deputy,
David Holmes, appeared deus ex machina (Holmes had a photo of Yovanovitch as his Facebook
page cover
photo until recently!) to claim that back in the summer, he somehow overheard both sides of a
phone conversation between Trump and political appointee, EU ambassador Gordon Sondland. Holmes
eavesdropped on a presidential call and dumped it in the Democrats' laps, and now he's
nonpartisan #FSProud, too.
Interesting that the major political events of the last few years have all crisscrossed the
State Department: Clinton emails and Foundation shenanigans, the Steele Dossier and all things
Russiagate, and now impeachment and Ukraine. And never mind that two major Democratic
presidential candidates-in-waiting, Clinton and Kerry, had a home there. That's an awful lot of
partisanship for an organization bragging about being nonpartisan.
Gawd, I need to wash my hands. I am #FSProud that in my 24 years as a diplomat, I never
perjured myself, or claimed to or actually did eavesdrop on someone else's phone call, then
spoon-fed the info months later to my boss on TV to take down a president mid-campaign, all
while accepting cheers that I was nonpartisan and thinking my role as a snitch/bootlicker was
going to help people view my organization as honorable.
FSOs see themselves as superheroes who will take down the Bad Orange Man. The organization
flirted with the role before: "
dissent " by State strayed close to insubordination opposing Trump's so-called Muslim Ban.
Everyone remembers the Department's slow-walking the release of Hillary Clinton's emails (after
helping hide the existence of her private server). The Department turned a blind eye to
Clinton's nepotism in hiring her campaign aides (remember
Huma ?) and use of America's oldest cabinet position to create B-roll ahead of her soiled
campaign.
Maybe the State Department's overt support for Candidate Clinton did not make clear enough
what happens when the organization betrays itself to politics.
While FSOs are gleefully allowing themselves to be used today, they fail to remember that
nobody likes a snitch. No matter which side you're on, in the end nobody will trust you,
Democrat or Republican, after seeing what you really are. What White House staffer of any party
will interact openly with his diplomats knowing they are saving his texts and listening in on
his calls, waiting? State considers itself a pit bull when in fact it's betrayed its golden
nonpartisan glow. Hey, in your high school, did anyone want to have the kids who lived to be
hall monitors and teacher's pets as their lunch buddies?
The real problems go much deeper. A Government Accountability Office (GAO)
report showed more than one fourth of all Foreign Service positions were either unfilled or
filled with below-grade employees. At the senior levels, 36 percent of positions were vacant or
filled with people of lower rank and experience pressed into service. At the crucial mid-ranks,
the number was 26 percent unfilled.
The thing is, that GAO report is from 2012 , and it showed similar results to one
written in 2008. The State Department has danced with irrelevancy for a long time, and its
efforts to be The Resistance as a cure today feel more like desperation than heroism. State's
somnolent response, even during the mighty Clinton and Kerry years, to what should have been a
crisis call (speculate on what the response might be to a report saying the military was
understaffed by 36 percent) tells the tale.
As the world changes, State still has roughly the same number of
Portuguese speakers as it does Russian among its FSOs. No other Western country uses
private citizens as ambassadors over career diplomats to anywhere near the
extent the United States does, where about a third of the posts are doled out as political
patronage mainly because what they do doesn't matter. The secretary of state hands out lapel
buttons reading " Swagger
"; imagine a new secretary of defense doing the same -- and then being laughed out of
office.
FSOs wade in the shallowest waters of the Deep State. Since the 1950s, the heavy lifting of
foreign policy -- the stuff that ends up in history books -- mostly moved into the White House
and the National Security Council. The increasing role of the military in America's foreign
relations further sidelined State. The regional sweep of the AFRICOM and CENTCOM generals, for
example, paints State's landlocked ambassadors as weak.
State's sad little attempt to stake out a new role in nation-building failed in Iraq , failed in Afghanistan , and failed in Haiti . The organization's Clinton-Kerry era joblet promoting
democracy through social media was a flop. Trade policy has its own bureaucracy outside Foggy
Bottom.
What was left for State was reporting, its on-the-ground viewpoint that informs
policymakers. Even there the intelligence community has eaten State's sandwiches with the
crusts cut off lunch -- why listen to what some FSO thinks the prime minister will do when the
NSA can provide the White House with real-time audio of him explaining it in bed to his
mistress? The überrevelation from the 2010 Wikileaks documents dump was that most of
State's vaunted reporting is of little value. State struggled through the Chelsea Manning trial
to convince someone that actual harm was done to national security by the disclosures.
For the understaffed Department of State, that leaves pretty much only the role of concierge
abroad, the one Ambassadors Taylor and Yovanovitch, and their lickspittles Kent and Holmes,
complained about as their real point during the impeachment hearings. Read their testimony and
you learn they had no contact with principals Trump, Giuliani, and Pompeo (which is why they
were useless "witnesses," they didn't see anything firsthand) and griped about being cut out
of the loop and left off conference calls. They testified instead based on overheard
conversations and
off-screen voices. Taylor whined that Pompeo ignored his reports.
Meanwhile, America's VIPs need their hands held abroad, their motorcades organized, and
their receptions handled, all tasks that fall squarely on the Department of State. That is what
was really being said underneath it all at the impeachment hearings. It is old news, but it
found a greedy audience repurposed to take a whack at Trump. State thinks this is its moment to
shine, but all that is happening is a light is being shined on the organization's partisanship
and pettiness in reaction to its own irrelevance.
Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well:
How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People , Hooper's
War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent .
Taylor is a neocon and he is against detente with Russia. So he is part of State Department
nest of neocon vipers.
Taylor was very evasive. but he is a trained diplomat. Taylor will definitely regret his role
( and may be already started to regret ) but he has nothing to lose; he is old enough to
retire.
Notable quotes:
"... I love how CBS completely edited out Nunes first part of his speech about all the lowlife activities the left pulled. ..."
"... My favorite part was at 25:40 where Castro says "And at the heart of this corruption is this oligarchical system." .... for a second, I thought he was talking about the United States. ..."
My favorite part was at 25:40 where Castro says "And at
the heart of this corruption is this oligarchical system." .... for a second, I thought he
was talking about the United States.
I have learned to HATE everything the Democrats, their deep state and MSM stand for. It's
beyond comprehension that they have hijacked the greatest nation on earth and subverted the
constitution for personal power and gain! A government takeover by the citizens is not far
off, and the only people who will be safe are a few Republicans in government.
Now this amounts to the impeachment of The President of the United States, for "shaking
the confidence of a close partner for our reliability" Ambassador Taylor. 21:21
18:40 - 19:50 Turner gives a
confused explanation of the "6th Amendment" - right of criminal defendant to “to be
confronted with the witnesses against him” versus The Hearsay Rule - which is evidence
(statements made outside court setting) that may or may not be admissible at trial. Which, in
part, why Judges are present to rule on whether exceptions, exclusions to the Hearsay Rule
apply.
He obviously had his script written before this hearing and didn't listen to what was
actually said. He referenced things that were never even brought up but were talking points
for the Democrats.
...What a blinder and hypocrisy in the highest echelons of power. What a little petty
thinking....Democrats are clearly communists. Do you Americans know what this mean? Obviously
not.
Democrat lunacy on parade Taylor was about as clear as mud and so where his he said, they
said, or i heard someone say something, are we really taking these people seriously.?
Do these republicans not realize that the Ukrainian President is going to say whatever
trump tells him to say so he gets his money and weapons....he’s got a war going on and
must have those resources...what else is he going to say?
If Giuliani seeking information in Ukraine is such an abnormal thing as to cause alarm
then please explain DNC operative Alexandra Chalupa and the years she has spent in Ukraine
performing opposition research along with maintaining close ties with the NSCand the Obama
whitehouse.
There is no evidence against Trump and Taylor was so tongue-tied that he couldn't answer
some of those questions. I loved Jordan asking all those questions and putting those two
witnesses in place. In the court of law they WILL NOT TAKE HEARSAY because I worked for the
courts and lawyers so I know what the Judge would say. this is nothing but a scham and when
Trump gets to be President again I hope he puts Schiff in prison!!!!!!!
"... It's remarkable how tone deaf the Beltway Bubble has made these bureaucrats and their clingers. The United States elected Donald Trump, to get rid of people like Marie Yovanovitch. If anything, he needs to speed things up. ..."
"... The ambassador also shows her true state between various masks she wears during impeachment interviews, the cameras have an easy time capturing it, it's a smirk, & she seems to show it to the democrats as well. One bad actor. ..."
"... For more than six months now, EVERYONE on planet Earth has known about the Deep State, Obama, Biden, Pelosy, Brennan, Comey, McCabe Stzrok, Page, Lynch, Rice ,Powers, Misfud, Fusion GPS ,Halper, Neuland, Schiff, Nadler, Wray, Rosenstein, the entire Mainstream Media and three dozen other ******* treasonous assholes tearing this country apart. ..."
"... Was she even actually intimidated? She had already known Trump's opinion of her job performance for some time. She had been reassigned, as was the administration prerogative. There was no threat to take further action against her. Trump merely again stated he was unhappy/disappointed wherever she had been assigned. ..."
After House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) took time out of today's impeachment testimony to
rebuke President Trump for "witness intimidation," President Trump hit back.
During testimony from former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, Trump took aim at her over
Twitter, saying "
Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad
. She started off in
Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke
unfavorably about her..."
Following Trump's tweet, Schiff dramatically interrupted questioning from his staff counsel to read
Trump's tweet aloud - asking Yovanovitch what effect Trump's tweet might have on future witnesses, to
which she replied that it would be "very intimidating.
Trump's tweet was so troubling that former Media Matters employee Paul Waldman wrote in the
Washington Post
that Trump "talks and acts like a Mafioso" in an article entitled
"Yovanovitch hearing confirms that
Trump is running a thugocracy
."
Following Schiff's dramatic exchange, Trump was asked whether his words can be intimidating, to
which he said "I don't think so at all."
"
I have the right to speak. I have freedom of speech just like other people do
,"
Trump told White House reporters following remarks on a health care initiative, adding that he's
"allowed to speak up" and defend himself.
It's remarkable how tone deaf the Beltway Bubble has made these
bureaucrats and their clingers. The United States elected Donald
Trump, to get rid of people like Marie Yovanovitch. If anything, he
needs to speed things up.
We are at a turning point in our history. The Dems and
their Deep State agents have once again proven that they will go to
any lengths to destroy the constitution, upend the rule of law, lie,
cheat, steal and twist words to accomplish any goal.
The ambassador also shows her true state between various masks she
wears during impeachment interviews,
the cameras have an easy time
capturing it, it's a smirk, & she seems to show it to the democrats
as well.
One bad actor.
I pretty much stopped having an ounce of sympathy for Trump this
week. On day two of his presidency he should have locked up Hillary,
and he didn't. He then has the ******* balls to tell us that "they"
meaning the Clintons "are good people". Are you ******* kidding me ?
? ?
For more than six months now, EVERYONE on planet Earth has
known about the Deep State, Obama, Biden, Pelosy, Brennan, Comey,
McCabe Stzrok, Page, Lynch, Rice ,Powers, Misfud, Fusion GPS ,Halper,
Neuland, Schiff, Nadler, Wray, Rosenstein, the entire Mainstream
Media and three dozen other ******* treasonous assholes tearing this
country apart.
And what exactly has Trump done to bring these people to justice
for treason and seditious conspiracy ? Jack ******* squat !
Epstein allegedly gets murdered in his cell/disapears, and all
Barr does is ******* shrug his shoulders like Schultz and says "I
know nothing". Assange is slowly being murdered in his cell while
Trump claims " I never heard of Wikileaks". Snowden and Manning are
enemies of the state, and nobody seems to care.
Meanwhile the entire country is being overrun up to our eyeballs
with illegals, the mentally ill are walking around like a zombie
apocalypse and the rule of law is totally dead.
As that photoshopping suggests, these Democrats live in an altered
reality. Fantasy. Insanity? Not sure Joseph Goebbels meant telling
oneself lies over and over eventually turns them into truths. But it
seems to for these Democrats.
And they vote their fantasies...
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will
eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for
such time as the State can shield the people from the political,
economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes
vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to
repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and
thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."-
Joseph Goebbels
Was she even actually intimidated?
She had already known Trump's
opinion of her job performance for some time.
She had been reassigned, as was the administration prerogative.
There was no threat to take further action against her.
Trump merely again stated he was unhappy/disappointed wherever she
had been assigned.
"Intimidated"?
B.S. She is/was supposedly a top diplomat/negotiator.
If her skin is that thin, and she is that easily "intimidated",
then she is clearly at a job level well above her competence.
of course, during her testimony,
she would not even have known
about the tweet,
much less been allegedly intimidated by it,
nor could her "testimony" been affected in any way by the tweet,
except that Adam Schiff showed it to her to elicit a response.
"... "In direct contravention of U.S. interests" says the NBC and quotes a member of the permanent state who declares "it is clearly in our national interest" to give weapons to Ukraine. ..."
"... But is that really in the national U.S. interest? Who defined it as such? ..."
"... And that's where the policy community and I part company. It is the president, not the bureaucracy, who was elected by the American people. That puts him -- not the National Security Council, the State Department, the intelligence community, the military, and their assorted subject-matter experts -- in charge of making policy. If we're to remain a constitutional republic, that's how it has to stay. ..."
"... The constitution does not empower the "U.S. government policy community", nor "the administration", nor the "consensus view of the interagency" and certainly not one Lt.Col. Vindman to define the strategic interests of the United States and its foreign policy. It is the duly elected president who does that. ..."
"... Mr. Kolomoisky, widely seen as Ukraine's most powerful figure outside government, given his role as the patron of the recently elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, has experienced a remarkable change of heart: It is time, he said, for Ukraine to give up on the West and turn back toward Russia. ..."
"... "They're stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations," he said, comparing Russia's power to that of Ukraine. "People want peace, a good life, they don't want to be at war. And you" -- America -- "are forcing us to be at war , and not even giving us the money for it." ..."
"... Mr. Kolomoisky [..] told The Times in a profanity-laced discussion, the West has failed Ukraine, not providing enough money or sufficiently opening its markets. ..."
"... Instead, he said, the United States is simply using Ukraine to try to weaken its geopolitical rival. "War against Russia," he said, "to the last Ukrainian." Rebuilding ties with Russia has become necessary for Ukraine's economic survival, Mr. Kolomoisky argued. He predicted that the trauma of war will pass. ..."
"... Kolomoisky's interview is obviously a trial balloon for the policies Zelensky wants to pursue. He has, like Trump, campaigned on working for better relations with Russia. He received nearly 73% of all votes. ..."
"... Ambassador Taylor and the other participants of yesterday's clown show would certainly "mess it up and get in the way" if Zelensky openly pursues the policy he promised to his voters. They are joined in this with the west-Ukrainian fascists they have used to arrange the Maidan coup: ..."
"... Only some 20% of the Ukrainians are in favour of continuing the war against the eastern separatists who Russia supports. During the presidential election Poroshenko received just 25% of the votes. His party European Solidarity won 8.1% of the parliamentary election. Voice won 5.8%. ..."
"... on Yovanovitch, She added: "If our chief representative is kneecapped, it limits our effectiveness to safeguard the vital national security interests of the United States." ..."
"... She wasn't fired, she was kneecapped, and Ukraine is a US vital national security interest, especially after it installed a new government with neo-fascism support.. . .Kneecapping is a form of malicious wounding, often as torture, in which the victim is injured in the knee ..."
NBC News
is not impressed by the first day of the Democrats' impeachment circus. But it fails to
note what the conflict is really about:
It was substantive, but it wasn't dramatic.
In the reserved manner of veteran diplomats with Harvard degrees, Bill Taylor and George
Kent opened the public phase of the House impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump on
Wednesday by bearing witness to a scheme they described as not only wildly unorthodox but
also in direct contravention of U.S. interests.
"It is clearly in our national interest to deter further Russian aggression," Taylor, the
acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and a decorated Vietnam War veteran, said in explaining why
Trump's decision to withhold congressionally appropriated aid to the most immediate target of
Russian expansionism didn't align with U.S. policy.
But at a time when Democrats are simultaneously eager to influence public opinion in favor
of ousting the president and quietly apprehensive that their hearings could stall or
backfire, the first round felt more like the dress rehearsal for a serious one-act play than
the opening night of a hit Broadway musical.
"In direct contravention of U.S. interests" says the NBC and quotes a member of the
permanent state who declares "it is clearly in our national interest" to give weapons to
Ukraine.
But is that really in the national U.S. interest? Who defined it as such?
President Obama was against giving weapons to Ukraine and never transferred any to Ukraine
despite pressure from certain circles. Was Obama's decision against U.S. national interest?
Where are the Democrats or deep state members accusing him of that?
Which brings us to the really critical point of the whole issue. Who defines what is in the
"national interest" with regards to foreign policy? Here is a point where for once I agree with
the right-wingers at the National Review where Andrew McCarthy writes :
[O]n the critical matter of America's interests in the Russia/Ukraine dynamic, I think the
policy community is right, and President Trump is wrong. If I were president, while I would
resist gratuitous provocations, I would not publicly associate myself with the delusion that
stable friendship is possible (or, frankly, desirable) with Putin's anti-American
dictatorship, which runs its country like a Mafia family and is acting on its revanchist
ambitions.
But you see, much like the policy community, I am not president. Donald Trump is.
And that's where the policy community and I part company. It is the president, not the
bureaucracy, who was elected by the American people. That puts him -- not the National
Security Council, the State Department, the intelligence community, the military, and their
assorted subject-matter experts -- in charge of making policy. If we're to remain a
constitutional republic, that's how it has to stay.
The U.S.
constitution "empowers the President of the United States to propose and chiefly
negotiate agreements between the United States and other countries."
The constitution does not empower the "U.S. government policy community", nor "the
administration", nor the "consensus view of the interagency" and certainly not one Lt.Col.
Vindman to define the strategic interests of the United States and its foreign policy. It is
the duly elected president who does that.
The president does not like how the 'American policy' on Russia was built. He rightly
believes that he was elected to change it. He had stated his opinion on Russia during his
campaign and won the election. It is not 'malign influence' that makes him try to have good
relations with Russia. It is his own conviction and legitimized by the voters.
...
[I]t is the president who sets the policies. The drones around him who serve "at his
pleasure" are there to implement them.
There is another point that has to be made about the NBC's assertions. It is not in
the interest of Ukraine to be a proxy for U.S. deep state antagonism towards Russia. Robber
baron Igor Kolomoisky, who after the Maidan coup
had financed the west-Ukrainian fascists who fought against east-Ukraine, says so directly in
his
recent NYT interview :
Mr. Kolomoisky, widely seen as Ukraine's most powerful figure outside government, given his
role as the patron of the recently elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, has experienced a
remarkable change of heart: It is time, he said, for Ukraine to give up on the West and turn
back toward Russia.
"They're stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations," he said, comparing Russia's
power to that of Ukraine. "People want peace, a good life, they don't want to be at war. And
you" -- America -- "are forcing us to be at war , and not even giving us the money for
it."
... Mr. Kolomoisky [..] told The Times in a profanity-laced discussion, the West has failed
Ukraine, not providing enough money or sufficiently opening its markets.
Instead, he said, the United States is simply using Ukraine to try to weaken its
geopolitical rival. "War against Russia," he said, "to the last Ukrainian." Rebuilding ties
with Russia has become necessary for Ukraine's economic survival, Mr. Kolomoisky argued. He
predicted that the trauma of war will pass.
...
Mr. Kolomoisky said he was feverishly working out how to end the war, but he refused to
divulge details because the Americans "will mess it up and get in the way."
Kolomoisky's interview is obviously a trial balloon for the policies Zelensky wants to
pursue. He has, like Trump, campaigned on working for better relations with Russia. He received
nearly 73% of all votes.
Ambassador Taylor and the other participants of yesterday's clown show would certainly "mess
it up and get in the way" if Zelensky openly pursues the policy he promised to his voters. They
are joined in this
with the west-Ukrainian fascists they have used to arrange the Maidan coup:
Zelenskiy's decision in early October to accept talks with Russia on the future of eastern
Ukraine resulted in an outcry from a relatively small but very vocal minority of Ukrainians
opposed to any deal-making with Russia. The protests were relatively short-lived, but
prospects for a negotiated end to the war in the eastern Donbas region became more remote in
light of this domestic opposition.
...
The supporters for war with Russia are ex-president Poroshenko and two parliamentary
factions, European Solidarity and Voice, whose supporters are predominantly located in
western Ukraine. Crucially, however, they can also rely on right-wing paramilitary groups
composed of veterans from the hottest phase of the war in Donbas in 2014-5.
Only some 20% of the Ukrainians are in favour of continuing the war against the eastern
separatists who Russia supports. During the presidential election Poroshenko received just 25%
of the votes. His party European Solidarity won 8.1% of the parliamentary election. Voice won
5.8%.
By pursuing further conflict with Russia the deep state of the United States wants to ignore
the wishes not only of the U.S. voters but also those of the Ukrainian electorate. That
undemocratic mindset is another point that unites them with the Ukrainian fascists.
Zelensky should ignore the warmongers in the U.S. embassy in Kiev and sue for immediate
peace with Russia. (He should also investigate
Biden's undue influence .) Reengaging with Russia is also the easiest and most efficient
step the Ukraine can take to lift its desolate economy.
It is in the national interest of both, the Ukraine and the United States.
Posted by b on November 14, 2019 at 18:23 UTC |
Permalink
next page " agree with mccarthy about who conducts foreign policy, disagree about who
the aggressor is; it's the USA, trying to weaken Russia, which is the aggressor.
thanks b... typo - immediate piece with Russia - 'peace' is the spelling here...
the comments from Kolomoisky in the recent nyt interview are very telling.. aside from
being a first rate kleptomaniac who will willingly play both sides if he can profit from it,
he is also speaking a moment of truth..for him Ukraine is available to the highest bidder...
he could give a rats ass about Ukraine or the people... but still, it is refreshing that the
NYT published his comments in this regard..
the quote "the Americans "will mess it up and get in the way." is very true... it was true
before kolomisky picked a side too.. this guy is very shrewd.. i wonder if his own country is
able to see thru him?
national interest.... yes, trump gets to decide and he won on the idea of having closer
relations with russia, but the cia-msm has been lambasting him and anyone else associated
with him since before the election over the clinton e mails... they have painted a scenario
that it is all russias fault and have been relentless in this portrayal... hoping trump is
going to turn this around is like hoping someone is going to turn the titanic around from
hitting a giant iceberg... the usa is too far gone and will be hitting the iceberg.. they are
in fact...
From NYT about Kolomo???? (spelling in English is highly variable)
George D. Kent, a senior State Department official, said he had told Mr. Zelensky that his
willingness to break with Mr. Kolomoisky -- "somebody who had such a bad reputation" -- would
be a litmus test for his independence. [If is good to be independent, i.e. to do what we
want.]
And William Taylor, the acting ambassador in Kiev, said he had warned Mr. Zelensky: "He,
Mr. Kolomoisky, is increasing his influence in your government, which could cause you to
fail." [La Paz is a fresh reminder for Kiev?]
Well the thing about Zelensky is he's still there, and he is making changes in Donbass.
Kolomoisky was interested in the fracked gas in Donbass, the completion of NordStream II
has made a mess of that idea. It is good that he has seen the light, as it means Zelensky
will have support in his attempts to adapt to reality. But Kolomoisky is still a crook no
doubt.
My immediate reaction was that Kolomoisky realises he has to act - the Ukrainian oligarchs
have got too close to America. I agree with James that he is a extremely clever man.
Ukraine's traditional business is playing both ends against the middle and sending the
proceeds to Switzerland (or the Caribbean in Porosyonok's case). Since 1990 a few of these
robber barons have made a very good business winding up the west against Russia, it could go
on ever - why spoil it by lifting the rock and seeing all the insects scurrying around in the
light?
Another rock that has been lifted is in Washington, where the khokhol diaspora are
desperately trying to get Uncle Sam to right the wrongs of a century ago.
"Deep state" is misleading and actually a false construction.
There is an Imperial State (the ruling faction)which consists of imperial apparatchiks
placed in every key position in government.
There is one and only one Western Empire and its deep state spreads throughout Western
governments and society. They are the owners oif the world and they run the world they
own.
... @ b -- "Only some 20% of the Ukrainians favor to continue the war against the eastern
separatists who Russia supports."
The are not 'separatists', but rather Ukrainians who want to stay in a federated Ukraine
as 'provinces' with powers to pass their regional laws, similar to those in Canada.
The segment of empire in the US that are against Russia act so because it was Russia that
stymied them in Syria and continues to be in their way of expanding the control from that
part of empire...the US segment.
I still believe that the global private finance core segment of empire is behind Trump and
throwing America(ns) under the bus as the world turns more multilateral. The cult of global
private finance intends on still having some overarching super-national role in the new
multilateral world and holding debt guns to everyones heads to make it ongoing.
I don't believe that strategy will work but as long as they can be fronted by a MAD player
of some sort (Occupied Palestine comes to mind) they can be bully players in international
matters.
As the world economies grind to a "halt" there will be lots of pressure everywhere and
very little clarity about the key civilization war over public/private finance, IMO
For a military dictatorship, diplomacy is the continuation of war by other means. The US has
been at war with Russia since the right-wing coup at the Democratic convention of 1944. All
presidents have been servants of the military, which includes the police/intel/security
apparatus; the few who did not entirely accept their figurehead role were "dealt with."
Kennedy, Nixon, Carter and now Trump. The Washington permanent state bureaucrats are shocked
and understandably offended; they have after all, been running US foreign policy for 75
years!
Wow! The depth of delusion on display is as breathtaking as its complete projection of the
intentions and actions of the Evil Outlaw US Empire! Oh so many saying I'm displaying four
fingers instead of two. Too bad there isn't a padded cell big enough to contain all the
lunatics. I recall the pre- and post-coup discussions from 2014--that Russia was going to
make NATO own Ukraine until it was forced to concede it has no business being there; that
Russia would teach the would-be leaders of Ukraine a serious lesson in where their national
interests lay. NATO is ready to cede and the lesson's been learned.
IMO, two referendums must be held. The first within Russia: Will you accept portions of
Ukraine wanting to merge with Russia: Yes/No? Second to be given within Ukraine provided Yes
wins in #1: Do you wish to join Russia or remain in Ukraine? IMO, this is a very longstanding
unresolved issue of consequence for the people involved. The political leaders of Russia and
Ukraine might both be against such a vote, but IMO that merely kicks the can further down the
road and opens the door for more mischief making by the Evil Outlaw US Empire. Assuming a Yes
from Russia and some from Ukraine, a strategic threat to Russia and Europe would be
mitigated. Additional questions about those parts of Ukraine not wanting to join Russia could
be solved via additional referenda in the Ukraine and neighboring nations that might prove
willing to absorb the remnants and their people. Such action would of course negate the Minsk
Agreements.
Given the ideological passions of those living in Western and Northern Ukraine, I don't
see any hope for the continuation of the Ukrainian state as currently arranged, thus the
proposed referenda. However, if Russia says Nyet, then Minsk must be implemented.
"Democracy" is not about letting the people as a whole have a say in how the country is
governed. That would be fascist, and racist, and populist, and LITERALLY HITLER. Letting the
people decide on things like foreign policy, is literally anti-democratic.
No, "Democracy" is about privatizing power and socializing responsibility. The elites get
to set the policy, but the public at large gets to take responsibility when things go wrong.
Because you see, we are a "Democracy."
Breaking off long established economic and cultural ties with a large neighbouring country,
virtually overnight, is a rash act, and certain to create dislocation and hardship. The
craziness of the idea was only achievable through the traumatizing psy-op of the sniper
event, leading directly to the coup and the state of war. The EU and the US were clearly
malevolent in orchestrating the Association agreement with its ridiculous terms and the
corresponding Maidan pressures.
The fools in Hong Kong, after protester-sponsored screenings of the World On Fire
documentary, were actually quoted as presuming the Maidan protests had "won" and expressed
their hopes that they too could "win". Good luck to them.
Kolomoisky and Zelensky know what needs to be done, but they fear the blood that will flow
with Nazi-Banderist scum! Zelinski's balls are not that big, and has no options left after
compromising his position from day one. Who will make the first move, I fear not him? Russia
has time, and patience, which is sorely lacking in the west who feel they have to push the
envelope.
The Minsk II protocol was agreed to on 12 February 2015 by the leaders of Ukraine, Russia,
France, and Germany, It included provisions for a halt in the fighting, the withdrawal of
foreign forces, new constitution to allow special status for Donbass, and election in Donbass
for local self governance. Control of the present border of Ukraine would be restored to the
Ukraine government. Donbass would continue to be in Ukraine with some autonomy here (scroll down).
There are many such autonomous zones in the world, and in Europe, seen here .
The problem in Ukraine is that the neo-Nazi factions promoted by the US don't want to see a
resolution, and will fight it with US support.
Kolomoysky is obviously a master thief and general scumbag...but he is no fool...
I think the writing on the wall became obvious with the Nordstream 2 finalization, where,
it is noted, Denmark came in just under the wire in terms of not disrupting the
timetable...
Obviously the interests of German business have prevailed...and rightly so in this
case...
And what of the famous EU line about 'protecting' Ukraine as a gas transit
corridor...?
LOLOLOL...that is in the same category of nothingburger as the EU noises about 'alternate
payment' mechanisms for trade with Iran...
As soon as the Denmark story broke, Gazprom and Russian energy analysts talked openly
about the tiny volumes that Ukraine could expect to see transiting its territory...as part of
a new agreement to replace the one that has expired...
It works out to a small fraction of the several billion dollars in transit fees the
Ukraine was getting...
Also considering that the IMF appears to be finally shutting off the tap of loans to this
failed gangster state...and that the promises from the EU in 2013 were just so much fairy
tales...hard-nosed operators like Kolomoysky are recalculating...
The chaos and national ruin has really cost these gangster capitalists nothing [in fact
they have profited wildly]...so it is easy for them to reverse course and come begging back
to Russia...
Bryan MacDonald has a good piece about this today in RT...
So, here we are, almost six years since the first "EuroMaidan" protests in Kiev, and
Ukraine's most prominent oligarch has finally voiced the unmentionable: the project has
failed.
As for Kolomoysky...like Trump, there is something to like about dirtballs who speak their
minds openly...LOL
Quite a turnaround by Kolomoisky. Wasn't he once caught on a tapped phone call admitting
while chuckling about Ukrainian complicity in shooting down MH-17? i.e. NOT Donbas rebels and
NOT Russia.
@12 karlof1... a referendum... as if the usa would agree to that, lol.... look how they
processed the one in crimea...
@18 flankerbandit... last line is true, but it pales in relation to the ugliness these 2
exhibit 99% of the time, although the 1% when they don't it's refreshing! ukraine will
continue to be used as a tool by the west..
forget about any referendum.. that makes too much sense and won't be allowed..
Nordstream 2 will come online in less than 2 months and the Ukrainian gas exports at that
time will cease (I.e. no oil for the Oligarchs to steal), no matter what the US says they
can't replace the Russian oil exports in terms of money & support to Ukraine, so the
Oligarchs are now positioning themselves to abandon the US in order for the Russians to keep
even a tiny bit of oil flowing into their pockets
It's a tough balancing act, being a Ukrainian oligarch. For two decades they stole what they
could from the Ukraine (and from perverting the various sweetheart deals Russia was
providing). Once the industry and energy money was stripped, and Russia started closing the
spigots, they managed to get the West to pump in ungodly amounts of cash so long as they
would agree to talk mean about Russia, and didn't mind the US machine taking its cut of the
loot.
But now the Ukrainian thieves are beginning to realize that the Western thieves are going
to steal the very ground from under their feet, so there will be no more Ukraine to steal
from. That's not a very good business model. Plus they're no doubt seeing how the US treats
its partners in crime in Syria and elsewhere, and realize they could easily find themselves
the next meal for the US beast. Pretty easy to see why the smarter ones are getting
nervous.
they need to make peace with Russia or they will be left out in the cold, literally. They
seemed to have previously bought into some insane lie that they'd be a part of the EU and
NATO if theyd do Washington's bidding. The Deep state vastly underestimated Putin's resolve
when it became clear to the Russians that Washington may try and turn Crimea into a NATO port
one day. The game is over. Ukraine needs to find a way forward now for itself or it will be a
failed state in the near future. It's clear Merkel and Europe want no part of this headache
I don't think Russians want to 'own' any part of Ukraine...at least that is the nearly
unanimous opinion of my own contacts and colleagues in Russia...so I don't think any
referenda will be on the table...
What I do think is possible is what Yanukovich and Russia agreed to in terms of a trade
and economic deal...which was a lot more practical [not to mention generous] than the EU
'either or' nonsense...
Ukraine has run itself into the ground, literally...now they are selling vast tracts of
agricultural land to huge Euro agribusiness concerns...literally dispossessing themselves of
their own food security...
At the time of the Soviet dissolution, Ukraine had the highest living standards and some
of the world's prime industry and technology...including for instance the Yuzhnoye design
bureau [rocket engines and spacecraft] and many more such cutting edge aerospace
concerns...
For years these crucial enterprises were able to keep going due to the Russian
market...that all ended in 2014 [and in fact was tapering off even before due to the massive
corruption]...
Now the Chinese are looking to scoop up these gems at firesale prices...
It is really quite unbelievable that the nutcases in the Ukraine would be willing to cut
off their own arm just to bleed on Russia's shirt...
Why did the Ukraine never recover from the gangster capitalism like Russia did...because
no Putin ever came along to reign in the oligarchy...[It could be argued Putin hasn't done
nearly enough in this regard].
The Ukraine is actually a preview of what we can expect to see in our own future...as the
unleashed oligarchy similarly runs everything into the ground in order to extract maximal
wealth for a parasite elite...already we are nothing but a Ponzi Scheme on the verge of
toppling...
Kolomoisky is talking his book and helping USA to make the case that Nordstream is a NATO
security issue. To pretend that he's serious about a rapproachment with Russia just plays
into that effort.
And b ignores my comment on the prior thread that he references (about Trump being
Constitutionally charged with foreign policy). Repeating: the "Imperial Presidency" has flung
off Constitutional checks and balances by circumventing the need to get Congressional
approval for spending. Wars (like Syria) are now be funded by Gulf Monarchies, black ops, and
black budgets.
While for practical reasons the Executive Branch of USA government has the power to
negotiate treaties and manage foreign relations, Constitutionally he does so for the
sovereign (the American people) and his efforts are subject to review and approval of the
people's representatives via the power of the purse.
Ignoring how the "Imperial Presidency" has usurped power leads to faulty analysis that
supports that power grab.
Ukrainegate IS a farce, but for other reasons. Chief among them being the inherent fakery
of 'managed democracy' which manifests as kayfabe.
There is an Imperial State (the ruling faction)which consists of imperial apparatchiks
placed in every key position in government.
There is one and only one Western Empire and its deep state spreads throughout Western
governments and society. They are the owners of the world and they run the world they
own.
Nicely put:- that is the reality. Thanks b for your intrepid reports.
Paul Craig Roberts has a deeply aggrieved rant at zero hedge if barflies want a chuckle.
What a shitshow.
Crimea?
It has been part of Russia about as long as the USA has been a country.
9 out of 10 residents are of Russian origin, and Russian is the spoken language.
I guess it could be returned to the 10%-- but out of fairness, we must turn the USA over to
its original occupants.
If you live in the USA, get your ass ready to leave.
One of the problems that the anti-nazis face in Ukraine is that there are occupying armies in
the country. Armies which cannot be trusted to obey instructions which are not agreed upon by
NATO warmongers.
One such army is Canadian, commanded I believe by a descendant of the Ukrainian SS refugees
and reporting to the Foreign Minister in Ottawa, a Russophobe with a family background of
nazi collaboration.
The actual political situation is much more delicate than media reports suggest: what are
called elections feature, in the Washington approved fashion, the banning of socialist and
communist candidates. Bans which are enforced by a combination of fascist commanded police
forces and, even less responsible, private nazi militias. Opponents of the Maidan regime are
driven into exile, jailed or murdered.
Those who wonder as Jackrabbit, in a rare essay into rationality, does above, about the
nature of the US Constitution after decades of the erosion of checks and balances thanks to
the Imperial Presidency, will recognise that a dialectic is at work here. Washington's
support for fascism abroad has instituted fascism at home which has led in turn to the
installation of fascist regimes abroad, not just occasionally but routinely. Wherever the US
intervenes it leaves a fascist regime, in which socialists are banned and persecuted, behind
it.
And what this means is that, among other things, the ability of the population to effect
political change is cancelled: there is no way that the people of Ukraine can decide what
they want because the decisions have been taken for them, in weird cult like gatherings of SS
worshiping Bandera supporters in Toronto and Chicago. It is no accident that most of the
'Ukrainians' being wheeled out by the Democrats to testify against Trump are actually greedy
expatriates who have never really lived in Ukraine.
There was a moment, not long ago, when it looked as if the Minsk accords promised a path to
peace and reconciliation. Unfortunately the plain people of Ukraine, the poorest in Europe
though living in one of the richest countries, Washington, Ottawa and NATO didn't like the
sound of Minsk. Nor did the fascists in the Baltic states and Poland, for whom, for
centuries, Ukraine has been a cow to milk, its people slaves to be exploited and its rich
resources too tempting to ignore.
As Thomas Jefferson explained the President's role in foreign affairs in 1790, and the lack
of advisors' policy making decisions: ''as the President was the only channel of
communication between the United States and foreign nations, it was from him alone 'that
foreign nations or their agents are to learn what is or has been the will of the nation';
that whatever he communicated as such, they had a right and were bound to consider 'as the
expression of the nation'; and that no foreign agent could be 'allowed to question it,' or
'to interpose between him and any other branch of government, under the pretext of either's
transgressing their functions.' Mr. Jefferson therefore declined to enter into any discussion
of the question as to whether it belonged to the President under the Constitution to admit or
exclude foreign agents. 'I inform you of the fact,' he said, 'by authority from the
President.'
Might also be worth yesterdays hero's asking if dear Mr Kolomoisky, joint Uki/Israeli
national, took a part in authorising the shoot down of MH17 as a news cover for Operation
Protective Edge. Heave ho zionist USA ....et al.
1.The decisions to with hold and release aid have nothing to do with the President making
foreign policy but with his campaign. Saying it was about foreign policy is a damned lie.
2.Trump as president is supposed to lead foreign policy, which means actually setting a
policy. Military aid to Ukraine, yes, except no, except yes, personal handling without asking
anybody with experience how to achieve the national goal desired, national agenda kept secret
from the people who have to carry it out, abuse of officials, demands for dubiously legal
actions without rationale...Saying it was about the president's executive role is a damned
lie.
3.Trump has not made even a tweet that questions US support for fascists. That not even a
issue for Trump. Saying this is about support for fascism is a damned lie.
4.Kolomoyskiy is a bankroller of fascists. It is not impossible even a billionaire might get
frightened by the genie he's let out of the bottle, even if he's Jewish and rich enough to
run away. But actually undoing the fascist regime means taming the paramilitaries and this is
not even on the horizon. Given the rivalry between Poroshenko and Kolomoyskiy it's not even
certain it's a real change of heart or just soothing words for the non-fascist people. Nor is
it even clear the Zelensky will follow even the Steinmeier formula. If he does, good, but
until something actually happens? Saying it's about the antifascist turn is a damned lie.
The only thing that isn't a lie is that Trump was not committing treasons, "merely" a
campaign violation. But then, Clinton never did either. The crybabies who dished it out but
can't take it deserve zero respect, and zero time.
Curious to know how Kolomoisky is working "feverishly" to end the war in the Donbass region.
Wonder if he is planning to come clean on what he knows of the Malaysia Airlines MH17
shootdown and crash in an area not far from Slavyansk and near where his Privat Group's
subsidiary company Burisma Holdings holds a licence to drill for oil and natural gas. What
does he know about Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk air traffic control personnel's direction to MH17
to fly at 10,000 metres in the warzone and not an extra 1,000 metres above as the flight crew
had requested? He had been governor of Dnepropetrovsk region at the time.
Somewhere I read it alleged that the actual owner of Burisma was or is Kolomoiski.
Anything to this?
And via John Helmer (via Checkpointasia and dances with bears) comes the perspective that
it's not so much Kolomoiski floating trial balloons (though that may also be true) but that K
is being given space in the NYT to build his credentials as the new Borg villain, thereby
making it still harder for Zelensky to reconcile with Russia.
fb @ 25 said;"The Ukraine is actually a preview of what we can expect to see in our own
future...as the unleashed oligarchy similarly runs everything into the ground in order to
extract maximal wealth for a parasite elite...already we are nothing but a Ponzi Scheme on
the verge of toppling..."
Yup, aided and abetted by our current regime, while pretending not to...
@23
"It's a tough balancing act, being a Ukrainian oligarch. For two decades they stole what they
could from the Ukraine (and from perverting the various sweetheart deals Russia was
providing). Once the industry and energy money was stripped, and Russia started closing the
spigots, they managed to get the West to pump in ungodly amounts of cash so long as they
would agree to talk mean about Russia, and didn't mind the US machine taking its cut of the
loot."
This is it in a nutshell. The Russians were fed up with Ukraine stealing gas. Hence, Nord
Stream 2. That was always the plan. Whether the Yanks truly grasped the rationale here
---Russia is cutting off gas to Ukraine, simple---has never been clear to me. Although it is
a fairly simple plot. The Russians had decades of shenanigans with the Ukes and said Basta.
By not overreacting to the Ukrainian-USA freakout and keeping their eyes on the prize (Nord
Stream and disengaging, gas-wise, from Uk), they have managed to reach their goal of getting
Nord Stream 2 online.
Kolomoiski is the bankroller and commander of the Azov Battalion. Has close arrangements with
other paramilitaries. And is the current principal of Burisma. And is Privatbank, the only
bank left in Ukraine. He gets a cut of all the action.
When Trump queries Zelensky, all that Zelensky is thinking is this guy does not know the
score. This guy does not know who's on first. He wants me to investigate the boss? Let him
talk to the boss. And who does Z talk to in D.C.? Pointless getting into detail with
Trump.
Trump has no team. No one in D.C. is on his side. He's unable to finish anything.
1) Say the fantasy happens and the US/Russia become BFFs like US/UK...
- Say hello to the new boss, same as the old boss?
- Tough to answer, many unknowns- Russia may act different once its on top, actors may
derail schemes, Deep State temper tantrum, etc...
In general, governments are the order-providing solution for chaos and problems that only
first existed inside the minds of those seeking power over others.
Kolomoiski is a U.S. asset. His interview with the NYTimes proves it.
His threats are meant to mobilize NATO and Russia haters in general; because Trump and
most of his cadre care nothing for Ukraine.
Does anyone think Russia will give Kolomoiski 100 million dollars? Why was he given an
opportunity to threaten the USA? For no reason? Something else is afoot but Russia still
won't take the bait because they are winning.
Russia is quite happy with the status quo. The war in Ukraine keeps the war against Russia
on a level which is easy to manipulate and therefore geostrategically beneficial. Kolomoiski
will get nothing.
Thank you, b, for that snippet from NY Interview with Kolomoisky . I had glanced the headline
on RT but didn't read it because of RT's usual clumsy writing.
Kolomoiski is taunting the empire: investigate my crimes and
ukraine will seek reconciliation and alliance with russia.
Russia won't fall for it. They want kolomoiski's scalp even
more than the empire. From the statements putin has made, maybe
the only concession russia would accept is the dissolution of
ukraine as a sovereign entity and reintegration with russia, minus galicia.
Putin has remarked that they are not one people but one state. Ukraine
already knows that its domestic industry is only viable in competition
with the eu industrial powerhouses if it is integrated with russia.
What does [Kolomoysky] know about Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk air traffic control
personnel's direction to MH17 to fly at 10,000 metres in the warzone and not an extra 1,000
metres above as the flight crew had requested?
Okay..so an interesting can of worms here...
First is the fact that Kolomoysky was the governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast at the
time...
Now as to the flight and Dnipro Radar [the regional air traffic control facility that
controls a very big chunk of airspace over eastern Ukraine]...
First the issue of the airplane cruising altitude...the crew had filed their flight plan
to climb from flight level 330 [33,000 ft] to FL350 after passing a certain waypoint in
eastern Ukraine...
Now the controllers did instruct the crew to go ahead and climb to their planned altitude,
but the crew declined the clearance and opted to stay at FL330...this was done very
likely because the atmospheric conditions at that height were better for fuel economy...
[To be even more specific...the Boeing manual gave an optimum flight altitude of 33,800
ft, but flying eastward you only have odd numbered flight levels to choose from, so the crew
figured they would be better off staying at 33 than climbing to 35...]
BUT...there are a couple of very curious things here...
First is the fact that Dnipro controllers deviated the airplane from its flight
plan just before it went down...ostensibly due to other traffic...
We can see this in the following map, which is what's called a high altitude en route
chart, which is used by pilots to plan and execute their flight...
You will note a couple of things here...the airplane is flying on the L980 airway
[basically a highway in the sky] when it is turned south by controllers to the RND waypoint,
which is in Russian territory...
This is NOT the route filed by the crew...which can be seen here...
They were supposed to continue flying on L980 right to the TAMAK waypoint, which is
visible on the previous chart and is right on the border with Russia...
They would have continued on the A87 airway to their next waypoint in Russia which is
TIKNA...
Now here is the thing...right after they were turned south, they got shot down...
According to the radio transcripts, the crew acknowledged the course change, but did not
object...however, usually these kinds of course changes aren't appreciated on the flight deck
because the crew is trying to minimize wasted time and wasted fuel on course
deviations...
Most times you will just not bother to complain to controllers...but for sure there will
always be chatter between the captain and copilot about being yanked around like that...
No mention is made in the Dutch Safety Board report about such chatter from the cockpit
voice recorder, which I find very odd...
Also odd is the fact that Dnipro ATC primary radar was down, and only the so-called
'secondary' was working which uses the transponder signals from the airplane...
This is very busy airspace because a lot of flights from western Europe to South Asia
traverse this territory...the plan is always to fly what's called a 'great circle route'
which is basically a straight line, if you flattened out the globe...
Plus considering that you have a war going on underneath...it's very unusual to have your
PRIMARY radar inoperable...
This is significant also because military aircraft will not be using transponders and so
will not be visible to the secondary surveillance...
The Russian primary radar did pick up two other aircraft very nearby MH17...but the Dutch
have made some kind of excuse about that data not being in 'raw' form and thus not
usable...
So we see some very suspicious anomalies here...
The Ukrainian authorities did have a NOTAM [notice to airmen] in effect up to FL320
[32,000 ft] so commercial traffic could not fly under that height...but clearly they should
have closed the airspace over the hot conflict area...
They didn't do that...and Kolomoysky was in charge...
The Deep State's view on the members' God given right to make foreign policy decisions (it
must be the God who has give it to them, because the people certainly have not) just reminds
the of the general attitude of the Government's bureaucracy. Give any fartbag a position in
the government and he/she becomes "a prince/princes over the people", give him or her a
monopoly over violence and you got yourself a king/queen. All these police and military kings
& queens milling around and lording over us. "Deep State" is such a totally natural
consequence of the government bureaucracy corrupted by power that it appropriated.
Pillaging taxes from the sheeple (and taking young maidens like Sheriff of
Nottingham/Epstein) could have never ever been enough. Did you seriously think that the Deep
Staters would constrain themselves to only stealing your money, taking your children for
their pleasure and to die in their wars of conquest, and putting you into a totally unsafe
airplanes to die for their profit? Constrain themselves when there is a whole globe out there
to be lorded over, like Bidens over Ukraine? It is the poor people of Ukraine who just have
too much money, thus had to give it through the gas monopoly to the Biden gang, which
selflessly brought them "democracy" at $5B in US taxpayers' expense. Therefore, it is the
Deep State which has been chosen by God, or someone just like that, to make the decisions
about the imperialist/globalist foreign policy and have billions of dollars thrown by the
grateful natives into their own pockets, as consulting fees:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/leaked-bank-records-confirm-burisma-biden-payments-morgan-stanley-account
So far the only clear-cut globalization is that one of crime, which has become
global.
What is the US National Interest b asks? Who defines it as such?
Ome magazine that might know is none other than The National Interest. Hopefully I won't
get attacked for quoting from what seems like a fairly sane article to me....
"The US should consider whom they are giving weapons to. Ukraine is a debt-ridden state
and only five years beyond an extralegal revolution. Should the government collapse again,
then American weapons could end up in the possession of any number of dubious paramilitary
groups.
It wouldn't be the first time. In the 2000s, CIA operatives were forced to repurchase
Stinger missiles that had fallen into the hands of Afghani warlords -- at a markup.
Originally offered to the Mujahideen in the 1980s, the Stingers came to threaten American
forces in the region. Similarly, many weapons provided with US authorization to Libyan rebels
in 2011 ended up in the possession of jihadists."
It's difficult to find clean information on happenings within Ukraine and those involving
Russia. The Ministry of Foreign affairs has this page
dedicated to the "Situation Around Ukraine." Of the three most recent listings,
this one --"Comment by Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova on the NATO
Council's visit to Ukraine"--from 1 November is quite important as it deals with the reality
on the ground versus the circus happening thousands of miles away, although it's clear the
delusions in Washington and Brussels are the same and "continue to be guided by the Cold War
logic of exaggerating the nonexistent 'threat from the East' rather than the interests of
pan-European security."
In the
second most recent listing --"Remarks by Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian
Federation to the OSCE Vladimir Zheglov at the OSCE Permanent Council meeting on the
situation in Ukraine and the need to implement the Minsk Agreements, Vienna, October 31,
2019"--the following was noted:
"There's more to it. The odious site Myrotvorets continues to function using servers
located in the United States. The UN has repeatedly stated that this violates the presumption
of innocence and the right to privacy. Recently, Deputy Head of the UN Human Rights
Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, Benjamin Moreau, reiterated the recommendation to shut down
this website. A similar demand was made by other representatives of the international
community, including the German government. The problem was brought to the attention of the
European Court of Human Rights. The other day, the representative of Ukraine at the ECHR was
made aware of the groundlessness of the Ukrainian government's excuses saying that it
allegedly 'has no influence' on the above website.
"In closing, recent opinion polls in Ukraine indicate that its residents are expecting the
government to do more to bring peace to Donbas. The path to a settlement is well known, that
is, the full implementation of the Minsk Package of Measures of February 12, 2015, that was
approved by the UN Security Council."
Clearly, Zelensky's government is much like Poroschenko's when it comes to listening to
those who empowered it, the above citation is one of several from the overall report.
The latest report deals with an ongoing case at the International Court of Justice at The
Hague that reveals some of the anti-Russian bias there. It has no bearing on this discussion,
although it does provide evidence of the contextual background against which the entire
affair, including the circus in Washington, operates.
MoA consensus is Minsk backed NATO and its Ukrainian minions into a corner from which
there's only one way out, which is the implementation of the Accords they continue to oppose
to implement despite their promise to do so. Clearly an excellent example of not being
agreement capable that hasn't changed since 2015.
If the Republicans had any brains, they'd turn the Ukrainian aspect of the hearings into
an indictment against Obama/Biden for illegally overthrowing Kiev and trying to obtain their
piece-of-the-action, but then that would be the logical thing to do and thus isn't an option.
The prospect of each day providing similar spectacle is mind numbing as it airs the sordid,
unwashed underwear if the Evil Outlaw US Empire.
I normally do not reply to trolls, but I make an exception for you. Pedo-dollar? Do you have
any more such crap to dilute the valid points discussed here?
i liked what @ 32 tod said - "he's just doing the old Jewish threatening/begging
dance!
"And you are forcing us to be at war, and not even giving us the money for it." Wink!
Wink!"
stating the obvious is one remedy for any possible confusion here..
@54 karlof1... i don't believe trump is allowed to shine any light on the usas illegal
actions as that would be sacrilege to all the americans who see their country in such a
great, exceptional-ist light... how would trumps MAGA concept swallow that? it wouldn't, so
it won't happen...
You are a bit off on that story. NS2 pipeline will increase the capacity not transitioning
via Ukraine and reduce the price banditry by the Ukrainian & US gangs, but it will not
make gas transit via Ukraine unnecessary. The planned switch off of the German nuclear and
coal power plants will gradually increase the German demand for gas, that is the Russian gas
by so much that NS1 and NS2 will not be enough. Primarily, NS2 is a signal to the Ukrainian
& US Democrat gangs that if they try excessive transit fees and stealing of gas again,
that they will be circumvented within a few years by NS 3,4,5 ...
BTW, the globalized pillaging of the population is clearly not an invention of the DNC
crime gang only. For example, the 737Max is a product of primarily Republican activity on
deregulating what should have never been deregulated and subjugation to the Wall Street (aka
financialization). The pillaging of the World is strictly bipartisan, just differently
packaged:
1) R - packaging the deregulation to steal & kill as "freedom" or
2) D - packaging the regime change as responsibility to protect R2P (such regime change and
stuffing of own pockets later).
karlof1 @54 - "Minsk backed NATO and its Ukrainian minions into a corner from which
there's only one way out, which is the implementation of the Accords"
Yes. As you well know, and as we have well discussed, Minsk was in its very essence the
surrender terms dictated to the US by NAF and Russia in return for letting the NATO
contractors go free and secretly out of the Debaltsevo cauldron. Either actually or
poetically, this was the basis. The US lost against NAF. The only way to prevent Donbass
incursion into the rest of Ukraine was to freeze the situation. The US had no choice, and
surrendered.
Out of the heat and fog of warfare came a simple document made of words which, even so,
illustrated perfectly just how elegantly the Kremlin had the entire situation both war-gamed
and peace-gamed. Minsk from that day until forever has locked the Ukraine play into a lost
war of attrition for the US sponsors, with zero gain - except for thieves.
To attempt to parse Ukraine in terms of statecraft is to miss the point that Ukraine can
only be parsed in terms of thievery. This is not cynicism, simply truth.
Now they sell their land because this is all there is left to sell. Kolomoisky proposes
selling the entire country to Russia for $100 billion but not only will Russia not bite, the
country isn't worth even a fraction of that - because of Minsk, it can cause zero harm to
Russia. But this ploy raises the perceived value (Kolomoisky hopes) in the eyes of the west,
and starts the bidding.
In Russia the people see all this very clearly, including on their TV. Yakov Kedmi in this
Vesti News clip of
Vladimir Soloviev's hugely popular talk show, discusses the situation. He baits Soloviev by
saying that the Ukrainian thieves are only doing what the Russian thieves did in the 1990's -
and one must filter through this badinage to take out the nuggets he supplies. Here are
three:
1. Zelensky has no security apparatus that follows his command, therefore how can he be
considered the leader of the country?
2. There is no power in Ukraine, only forces that contend over the scraps of plunder.
3. These forces are creating the only law there is, which is the sacred nature of private
property for the rich - the only thing the US holds sacred.
Therefore sell the very soil.
~~
The Minsk agreement is a sheer wall of ice reaching to the sky. No force imaginable can
scale it or break it. Against that ultimate, immovable wall the US pounds futilely, with
Ukraine caught in the middle, while Russia waits for Ukraine to devolve into whatever it
can.
And the Russian people and government regard the people of the Ukraine as brothers and
sisters. But until the west has worn itself down, and either gone away or changed the
equation through a weakening of its own position in some significant way, nothing can be done
by Russia except to wait.
What Tod @32 described is spot-on, "the old Jewish threatening/begging dance". It is not that
the Russians do not know this about Kolomoyskyi. They will play along not expecting anything
from the Zelo-on-a-String and his master. The Russians like to let those scumbags (Erdo comes
to mind) huff & puff and embarrass themselves by flips. They know - it could always be
worse if those did something intelligent. Kolomoyskyi is vile but he ain't no genius, not any
more than Erdo.
Sure Cheeza...everybody's a 'bit off' except you...
Gazprom is talking about 10 bcm a year through Ukraine for the new 10 year deal, as
opposed to the 60 bcm [billion cubic meters] that Ukraine is hoping for...
"Deep state" is misleading and actually a false construction.
There is an Imperial State (the ruling faction/)which consists of imperial apparatchiks
placed in every key position in government. Babyl-on @ 8
? before I begin , how do you measure the political and economic power of money
as opposed to the political and economic power of the intentions and needs of the masses.
Does $1 control a 100 people? A million dollars control 100,000,000 people? How do we measure
the comparative values between money power and people power? I think the divisions of
economics and the binaries of politics established by the nation state system means that the
measurement function (political and economic values) varies as a function of the total wealth
vs the total population in each nation state. If true, become obvious how it is that: foreign
investments displaces the existing homeostatis in any particular nation state, the smaller
the poorer the nation state, the more impact foreign wealth can have; in other words outside
wealth can completely destroy the homeostatis of an existing nation state. I think it is this
fact which makes globalization so attractive to the ruling interest (RI) and so damning to
the poorest of the poor.
Change by amendment is impossible There is one and only one Western Empire but
there is also an Eastern Empire, a southern empire, and a Northern Empire and I believe the
ruling interest (faction) manipulate all nations through these empires. In fact, they can do
this in any nation they wish. The world has been divided into containers of humans and
propaganda and culture have highly polarized the humans in one container against the humans
in other containers. <=divide, polarize, then exploit: its like pry the window, and gain
access to the residence, then exploit. It is obvious that the strength of the resistance to
ruling class exploitation is a function of common cause among the masses. But money allows to
control both the division of power and the polarization of the masses. The persons who have
the powers described in Article II of the US Constitution since Lincoln was murdered can be
controlled (Epstein, MSM directed propaganda, impeachment, assassination, to accomplish the
objects of the ruling interest (faction). Article II of the USA constitution removes foreign
activity of the USA from domestic view of the governed at home Americans. Article II makes it
possible for the POTUS to use American assets and resources to assist his/her feudal lords in
exploiting foreign nations almost at will and there is no way governed Americans can control
who the ruling interest place in the Article II position.
A little History Immigration to NYC from Eastern (the poor) and Western (the
rich) Europe transitioned NYC and other cities from Irish majority to a Jewish majority; and
the wealthy interest used the Jewish majorities in key cities to take control over both
Article I and Article II constitutional powers by electing field effect controlled
politicians (political puppets are elected that can be reprogrammed while they are in office
to suit the ruling interest. The source code is called rule of law, and money buys the
programmers who write the code. So the ruling interest can reprogram in field effect fashion,
any POTUS they wish. Out of sight use of the resources of America in foreign lands is nothing
new, it was established when the constitution was written in Philadelphia in 1787 and
ratified in 1788.
Propaganda targeted to the Jewish Immigrants allowed the wealthy interest to
control the outcome of the 1912 election. That election allowed to destroy Article I,
Section 9, paragraph 4 " No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid unless in
Proportion to the Census of enumeration herein before directed to be taken". and to enact a
law which privatized the USA monopoly on money into the hands of private bankers (the federal
reserve act of 1913)
What was the grand design Highly competitive, independent too strong economic
Germany was interfering with Western hegemony and the oil was in the lands controlled by the
Ottomans. It took two wars, but Germany was destroyed, and the Ottoman empire (basically the
entire Middle East) became the war gained property of the British (Palestine), the French
(Syria) and the USA (Israel). Since then, the ruling interest have used their (field effect
devices to align governments so the wealthy could pillage victim societies the world over.
Field effect programming allows wealth interest to use the leaders of governments to use such
governments to enable pillage in foreign places. The global rich and powerful, and their
corporations are the ruling interest.
psychohistorian says it well "..the global private finance core segment of empire is
behind Trump and throwing America(ns) under the bus as the world turns more multilateral. The
cult of global private finance intends on still having some overarching super-national role
in the new multilateral world and holding debt guns to everyone's heads to make it
ongoing..." by psychochistorian @ 10
NOBITs @ 11 says it also "All presidents have been servants of the military, which includes
the police/intel/security apparatus; the few who did not entirely accept their figurehead
role were "dealt with." Kennedy, Nixon, Carter and now Trump. The Washington permanent state
bureaucrats are shocked and understandably offended; they have after all, been running US
foreign policy for 75 years!" by: NOBTS @ 11
According to TG @ 13 "Democracy" is about privatizing power and socializing
responsibility. The elites get to set the policy, but the public at large gets to take
responsibility when things go wrong. Because you see, we are a "Democracy."by: TG @ 13 <=
absolutely not.. the constitution isolates governed Americans from the USA, because the USA
is a republic and republics are about privatizing power and socializing responsibility;
worse, there ain't nothing you can do about it.
Vonu @ 19 says "According to Kevin Shipp, the National Security Council really runs the
executive branch, not the president. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11&v=XHbrOg092GA"
by: Vonu @ 19 <=but it is by the authority of Ariicle II that the NSC has the power to run
the executive branch?
KAdath @ 22 says "the Oligarchs are now positioning themselves to abandon the US in
order for the Russians to keep even a tiny bit of oil flowing into their pockets by: Kadath @
22" <=exactly.. but really its not abandoning the USA, its abandoning the oligarchs local
to the pillaged nation..
J Swift @ 23 says "the US treats its partners in crime in Syria and elsewhere,"
[poorly] but its not the USA per say, because only one person has the power to deal in
foreign places. Its that the POTUS, or those who control the Article II powers vested in the
POTUS, have or has been reprogrammed.. J. Switft @23>>
flankerbandit @ 25 says " Ukraine has run itself into the ground, literally...now they
are selling vast tracts of agricultural land to huge Euro agribusiness concerns...literally
dispossessing themselves of their own food security..." flankerbandit @ 25 <=Not really
the wealthy (investor interest) have pushed the pillage at will button.. since there is no
resistance remaining, the wealthy will take it all for a song..
Jackrabbit @ 26 says "Trump [is].. Constitutionally charged with foreign policy. Repeating:
the "Imperial Presidency" has flung off Constitutional checks and balances by circumventing
the need to get Congressional approval for spending. Wars (like Syria) are now be funded by
Gulf Monarchies, black ops, and black budgets.by Jackrabbit @ 26 <== Trumps orders
military to take 4 million day from Syria in oil?
your observation that the money has circumvented Article I of the COUS explains why the
democraps are so upset.. the wealthy democrap interest has been left to rot? Your comment
suggest s mafia is in charge?
Tod @ 32 says "As soon as some money goes his way, he'll discover democracy again.
Sorry to burst you bubbles." by: Tod @ 32" <==understatement of the day.. thanks.
Bevin @ 32 says "a dialectic is at work here. Washington's support for fascism abroad
has instituted fascism at home which has led in turn to the installation of fascist regimes
abroad, not just occasionally but routinely. Wherever the US intervenes it leaves a fascist
regime, in which socialists are banned and persecuted, behind it. this means.. the ability of
the population to effect political change is cancelled" by bevin @ 33 <= yes but there is
really no difference in a republic and its rule of law, and a fascist government and its
military police both rule without any influential input from the governed.
michael @ 34 reaffirms "The President was the only channel of communication between the
United States and foreign nations, it was from him alone 'that foreign nations or their
agents are to learn what is or has been the will of the nation'" michael @ 34 well known to
barflies, the design of national constitutions is at the heart of the global problem. Until
constitutional powers are placed in control of the governed there will never be a change in
how the constitutional powers ( in case of the USA Article II powers) are used and
abused.
OutofThinAir @45 says "In general, governments are the order-providing solution for
chaos and problems that only first existed inside the minds of those seeking power over
others.by: OutOfThinAir @ 45" <+governments are the tools of wealth interest and the
governors their hired hands.
by: War is Peace @48 " Trump is a moron, groomed by Jewish parents ( Mother was Jewish,
Father buried at biggest Jewish cementary in NYC ) to be a non-Jew worked for the mob under
Cohen ( lawyer for 1950's McCarthy ); Became the 'Goyim Fool" real estate developer as a
cover for laundering mob money. So that it didn't appear that it was Jewish Mafia Money, so
they could work with the Italian Mafia. Trump went on for his greatest role ever to be the
"fool in Chief" of the USA for AIPAC. What better way to murder people, than send out a fool,
it causes people to drop their guard. by War is Peace @48 <= yes this is my take, What
does it mean. com suggest the global wealth interest may be planning to reprogram Trump to
better protect the interest of the global wealthy.
Kiza @ 51 the reason for globalization is explained see above=> response to Babyl-on @
8
dh @ 53 says ""The US should consider whom they are giving weapons to." by dh @53 <
the USA cannot consider anything, if its foreign the POTUS (Article II) makes all decisions
because Art II gives the POTUS a monopoly on talking to, and dealing with, foreign
governments.
Deagel @ 56 says "The American people don't care, they're all drugged out, and shitting
on the side-walks all over the USA, and sleeping in their own shit. This is the best time in
USA history for the Zionists to do anything they wish." by: Deagel @ 56 <= I think you
under estimate the value Americans place on democracy and human rights, until recently
governed Americans believed the third party privately produced MSM delivered propaganda that
nearly all overseas operations by the USA were to separate the people in those places from
their despotic leaders, and to help those displaced people install Democracy.. many Americans
have come to understand such is far from the case.. the situation in the Ukraine has been an
eye opener for many Americans. thoughts are sizzling, talk is happening, and people are
trying to shut google out of their lives. that is why i think Trump is about to be
reprogrammed from elected leader to .. God in charge
I watched that Soloviev segment with Kedmi the other day...always interesting to say the
least...
Btw...I'm not really up to speed on that whole Debaltsevo cauldron thing...I've heard
snippets here and there...[there is a guy, Auslander, who comments on the Saker blog that
seems to have excellent first hand info, but I've only caught snippets here and there]...
I hadn't heard this part of the story before about Nato contractors as bargaining
chips...if you care to shed a bit more light I will be grateful...
I suggest going to The Saker Blog and
enter Debaltsevo Cauldron into the site's search box and click Submit where you'll be greeted
with numerous results.
Grieved @62--
Thanks for your reply and excellent recap. As I recall, Putin wants Donbass to remain in
Ukraine and Ukraine to remain a whole state, although I haven't read his thoughts on the
matter for quite some months as everything has revolved around implementing Minsk. The items
at the Foreign Ministry I linked to are also concerned with Minsk.
The circus act in DC is trying to avoid any mention of Minsk, the coup or anything
material to the gross imperial meddling done there to enrich the criminal elite, which
includes Biden, Clinton, other DNC members--a whole suite of actors that omits Trump in this
case, although they're trying to pin something on him. The issue being studiously ignored is
Obama/Biden needed to be busted for their actions at the time, but in time-honored fashion
weren't. And the huge rotted sewer of corruption related to that action and ALL that came
before is the real problem at issue.
Typical reaction of a zelf-zentered person as evidenced by The New Yorker 737Max article
in the previous thread. This good article could only be measured by how much it agrees with
your own opinion that MCAS was put in to mimic the pilots' usual fly-stick feel. If anyone
does his home work, such as the journalist of this article, then he must agree with you,
right? With experts such as you out there, why would anyone dare apply common sense and say
that it would be an unimaginably stupid idea to put in ANY AUTOMATED SYSTEM which pushes
the plane's nose down during ascent (the most risky phase of a civilian flight, when almost
desperately trying to get up and up and up) for any DUMBLY POSSIBLE REASON !? What could
ever go wrong with such an absolutely dumbly initiated system relying on one sensor? Maybe it
was a similar idea to putting a cigarette lighter right next to the car's gas tank because it
lights up cigarettes better when there are gasoline vapors around. Or maybe an idea of
testing the self-driving lithium battery (exploding & flammable) cars near kindergartens
(of some other people's children)!?
An intelligent person would have said - whatever the reason was to put in MCAS it was a
terribly dumb idea, instead of congratulating himself on understanding the "true reason".
"If I were president, while I would resist gratuitous provocations, I would not publicly
associate myself with the delusion that stable friendship is possible (or, frankly,
desirable) with Putin's anti-American dictatorship, which runs its country like a Mafia
family and is acting on its revanchist ambitions."
Really?
From what have gleaned from the alternative media available on the internet ,of which MOA is
an important part. Putin and Lavrov are the two most moral and diplomatic statesmen on the
world stage today Compared to Trump, Johnson, Macron, Merkel, Stoltenberg, Pompeo, Bolton and
whoever else blights the international scene these days these two are colossi.
To describe
them as like a Mafia family seems to me to be 180 degrees wrong. Maybe Putin overreacted, in
his early days in power, to the Chechen conflict but look at the situation today.
Look at how
Gorbachev and Yeltsin were played by the west. I appreciate you did not write the words
quoted above but you said you agree with them and I find that startling given I am usually
very admiring of your insight and knowledge of geopolitical events.
According to the Impeachniks, it is Schiff's staff who decides how Schiff votes and his
policies. It would be illegal for Schiff to make decisions. But Schiff's recommendation will
make or break the careers of his staff, so elected Schiff has some influence. That's not true
for elected Trump, because those in his service already have made careers and/or a host of
outsiders looking to place them.
Although, he didn't get impeached for it Obama did get criticized for not sending the aid to
Ukraine. He was also criticized when he did intervene, but not fast enough for the deep
state. Remember "leading from behind" in response to Libya. Obama was much more popular and
circumspect than Trump, which protected him from possible impeachment when he went off the
deep state's script.
Discussion of the USC and the responsibilities assigned therein is probably a foolish and
merely moot exercise, as law is, ultimately simply custom over time, and since '45 or so the
custom has become dissociated from the documents' provisions, particularly with regard to
war-making and the "licensed" import and sale of dangerous drugs, dope. The custom in place
is essentially ukase - rule by decree. Many decree are secret.
I do not object, simply pointing to the obvious.
This is a public secret anybody can know. Inter alia see The Politics of Heroin in
Southeast Asia (McCoy)
...........
Custom includes also permitted theft, blackmail, trafficking children and so forth.
...........
zerohedge put up some documents tying TGM Hunter B to the money from Ukraine...
................
I would not worry about the name of the person called president. The real sitrep is more
like watching rape and murder from the dirty windows of a runaway train.
Upon the dissolution of the USSR, Ukraine was left with the fifth-largest nuclear arsenal in
the world. In exchange for financial assistance in the costs of removing all the nukes, the
West guaranteed to defend Ukraine's territorial integrity.
In the meantime, Russia has annexed the Crimea and rebels have taken control of parts of
Eastern Ukraine. The West has not provided any direct military assistance to restore those
territorial infringements.
Since the West has reneged on its end of the deal, would it not only be fair to return
Ukraine's nukes so it can defend itself like the Big Boys do, namely with threat of nuclear
annihilation?
I hate this trope. The Russian Fed. is not launching offensive operations to capture
Kharkov or Kiev. Western Ukraine is shelling ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. What would
U.S. Congressman say if these were Jews? (I would condemn that as well).
The next time someone pontificates, 'Ukrainians are dying because Trump held up aid' ask
them how many. The number is ZERO. Javelins are not being used on the front line.
Mr. Kolomoisky is spot on, i.e. when he says that the Americans will only use Ukrainians as
their little bitches to fight and die for America's gain against Russia. Just like the
Americans fucked over the Kurds in Syria, using them as proxy fighters to do USA/Israel's
dirty work. Wherever the USA shows up and starts interfering, everything turns into shit:
Iraq...Afghanistan...Venezuela...Bolivia...Ukraine...Libya...Yemen...Nicaragua...Ecuador...the
list is quite long. It remains to be seen if Mr. Kolomoisky can bring about rapprochement
with Russia. He'd better watch his back.
"Wow. My opinion of Kolomoisky has just improved ... somewhat." --Seamus Padraig @73
Yes, Kolomoisky has moved up a notch in my estimation as well; from the low of
"monstrously inhuman spawn of satan" all the way up to "rabid dog" . That's
quite the dramatic improvement, I must admit.
I am very glad to see you back, Grieved, and your 'wall of ice' metaphor is indeed accurate.
To me, the promising signs in Ukraine were even as here in the US when voters fought back
against what b calls Deep State, which I am sure in my heart was even more of an overwhelming
surge than registered - the best the corrupters of the system could do was make it close
enough to be a barely legitimate win for their side, and they didn't succeed. Maybe somewhere
along their line of shenanigans a small cog in the wheel got religion and didn't do their
'job'. An unsung hero who will sing when it's safe.
I hope, dearly hope, it gets safe in Ukraine very soon. They are us only further down the
line than we are, but we will get there if we can't totally remove the cancer in our midst.
That's our job; I wish Ukraine all the best in removing theirs.
Jen...I should have made clear that the two aircraft picked up by Russian PRIMARY RADAR were
unidentified...
The two commercial flights you mention were in the area and were known to both Russian and
Ukrainian controllers by means of the SECONDARY SURVEILLANCE RADAR, which picks up the
aircraft transponder signals...
However, secondary WILL NOT pick up military craft that have their transponders
off...which is normal operating procedure for military craft...
So the airspace situation was this...you can see this from one of the illustrations I
provided from the DSB prelim report...
You had MH17...you had that other flight coming from the opposite direction [flying
west]...and you had that airplane that overtook the MH17 from behind [they were in a hurry
and were going faster, so when MH17 decided to stay at FL330, they were cleared to climb to
FL350 so they could safely overtake with the necessary vertical separation...]
Those three aircraft were all picked up on the Ukrainian SECONDARY [transponder]
surveillance...as well as the Russians...on both their PRIMARY AND SECONDARY...
But what the Russians picked up were two craft ONLY ON THEIR PRIMARY...those would have
been military aircraft flying with their transponders off [they're allowed to do that and do
that most of the time in fact]...
That's why those two DIDN'T SHOW UP ON THE SECONDARY DATA HANDED OVER TO THE INVESTIGATORS
BY THE UKRAINIANS...
Only primary radar would pick those up...and, very conveniently, the Dnipro primary was
inop at the time...[so the data handed to investigators by the Ukrainians would have no trace
of any military aircraft nearby]...
But with the Russian primary radar data, there is in fact evidence that there were
military aircraft in the air at the time...just that the Dutch investigators simply decided
to exclude the very vital Russian radar data on some stupid technicality...
[Really this is a very poorly done report, both prelim and final, and I've read many over
the years...]
The other thing I should have emphasized more clearly is about that course deviation that
controllers steered MH17 to, just seconds before it was hit...
The known traffic was those three commercial aircraft, as shown on the chart...here it is
again...
Those three commercial flights are clearly labeled...and the big question is... why was
MH17 DIVERTED SOUTH...OFF ITS PLANNED ROUTE...?
We can see the deviation track by the dotted red line...
Clearly there was no 'other traffic' that required MH17 to be vectored south by the
controllers...
In fact we see that there was a FOURTH commercial flight [another B777] that was flying
south exactly to that same waypoint that MH17 was diverted to...we see this airplane is
flying west on the M70 airway and is heading to the RND waypoint...
This does not make sense...why would you divert MH17 from going to TAMAK as flight
planned...in order to go south toward RND where another airplane is heading...
If nothing else this is very bad controller practice right there...yet again, the DSB
[Dutch Safety Board] does not even raise this question...
Like I said, leaving aside any guesswork, these are the simple facts and they raise
serious questions...both about the competence of the Dutch report, and the way the
controllers handled that flight...
Ukrainian think tank Ukrainian Institute of the Future and Ukrainian media outlet Zerkalo
Nedeli (both anti-Russian, but slightly more intellectual than typical Ukrainian outlets)
have contracted a Kharkov-based pollster to conduct a poll among DNR/LNR residents from
October 7 to October 31 (method: face-to-face interviews at the homes of the respondents,
sample size: 806 respondents in DNR and 800 respondents in LNR, margin of error: 3.2%) and
published its results in an article: Тест
на сумісність
[Compatibility Test] (in Ukrainian).
It's a long and rambling article, interspersed with
Ukrainian propagandistic clichés (perhaps to placate Ukrainian nationalists), but the
numbers look solid, so I've extracted the numbers I consider important and put them in a
table format. Here they are:
GENERAL INFORMATION
Gender 46.5% male 53.5% female
Age 8.3% <25 years old 91.7% ≥25 years old
Education 31.5% no vocational training or higher education 45.2% vocational training 23.3% higher education
Religion 57% marry and baptize their children in Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) 31% believe in God, but do not go to any church 12% other churches, other religions, atheists
Political activity 3% are members of parties 97% are not members of parties
Language 90% speak Russian at home 10% speak other languages at home
Nationality 55.4% consider themselves Ukrainians 44.6% do not consider themselves Ukrainians
ECONOMY
Opinion about the labor market 24.3% there are almost no jobs 39.3% high unemployment, but it's possible to find a job 15.7% there are jobs, even if temporary 17.1% key enterprises are working, those who want to work can find a job 2.9% there are not enough employees
Personal financial situation 4.9% are saving on food 36.4% enough money to buy food, but have to save money to buy clothing 43.6% enough money to buy food and clothing, but have to save money to buy a suit, a mobile
phone, or a vacuum cleaner 12% enough money to buy food, clothing, and other goods, but have to save money to buy
expensive goods (e.g. consumer electronics) 2.7% enough money to buy food, clothing, and expensive goods, but have to save money to buy a
car or an apartment 0.4% enough money to buy anything
Personal financial situation compared to the previous year 28.4% worsened 57.3% stayed the same 14.2% improved
Personal financial situation expectations for the next year 21% will worsen 58.6% will stay the same 18.7% will improve
Opinion on the Ukraine's (sans DNR/LNR) economic situation compared to the previous
year 50.3% worsened 41.4% stayed the same 6.3% improved
CITIZENSHIP
Consider themselves citizens of 57.8% the Ukraine 34.8% DNR/LNR 6.8% Russia
Russian citizenship 42.9% never thought about obtaining it 15.5% don't want to obtain it 34.2% would like to obtain it 7.4% already obtained it
Considered leaving DNR/LNR for 5.2% the Ukraine 11.1% Russia 2.9% other country 80.8% never considered leaving
Visits to the Ukraine over the past year 35.1% across the DNR/LNR–Ukraine border (overwhelming majority of them -- 32.2% of all
respondents -- are pensioners who visit the Ukraine to receive their pensions) 2.6% across the Russia–Ukraine border 62.3% have not visited the Ukraine
WAR
Is the war in Donbass an internal Ukrainian conflict? 35.6% completely agree 40.5% tend to agree 14.1% tend to disagree 9.3% completely disagree
Was the war started by Moscow and pro-Russian groups? 3.1% completely agree 6.4% tend to agree 45.1% tend to disagree 44.9% completely disagree
Who must pay to rebuild DNR/LNR? (multiple answers) 63.6% the Ukraine 29.3% Ukrainian oligarchs 18.5% DNR/LNR themselves 17% the U.S. 16.5% the EU 16% Russia 13% all of the above
ZELENSKIY
Opinion about Zelenskiy 1.9% very positive 17.2% positive 49.6% negative 29.3% very negative
Has your opinion about Zelenskiy changed over the past months? 2.7% significantly improved 7.9% somewhat improved 44.8% stayed the same 22.9% somewhat worsened 20.5% significantly worsened
Will Zelenskiy be able to improve the Ukraine's economy? 1.4% highly likely 13.3% likely 55.3% unlikely 30% highly unlikely
Will Zelenskiy be able to bring peace to the region? 1.7% highly likely 12.5% likely 59% unlikely 26.5% highly unlikely
MEDIA
Where do you get your information on politics? (multiple answers) 84.3% TV 60.6% social networks 50.9% relatives, friends 45.9% websites 17.4% co-workers 10% radio 7.4% newspapers and magazines
What social networks do you use? (multiple answers) 70.7% YouTube 61% VK 52.3% Odnoklassniki 49.8% Viber 27.1% Facebook 21.4% Instagram 12.4% Twitter 11.1% Telegram
FUTURE
Desired status of DNR/LNR 5.1% part of the Ukraine 13.4% part of the Ukraine with a special status 16.2% independent state 13.4% part of Russia with a special status 50.9% part of Russia
Desired status of entire Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts 8.4% part of the Ukraine 10.8% part of the Ukraine with a special status 14.4% independent state 13.3% part of Russia with a special status 49.6% part of Russia
Just listening to a bit of the testimony of the ex-ambassador to Ukraine.
It is all BS hearsay!
Also, this lady doesn't seem to grasp that as an employee of the State Department, she
answers to Trump. Trump is her boss.
The questioning is full of leading questions that contains allegations and unproved
premises built into them. I can't imagine that such questioning would be allowed in a normal
court of justice in the USA.
Sure, Trump is a boor. But he is still the boss and he gets to pull out ambassadors if he
wants to.
This is total grandstanding.
Also, a lot of emotional stuff like "I was devastated. I was shocked. Color drained from
my face as I read the telephone transcript . . . "
This is BS!
IIRC the Russian radar showed that the two mystery planes in questions were flying in
MH17's blindspot . That's way too close to be half an hour away. Also, the fact that
the two planes were flying over a war zone with their transponders turned off (which is why
they couldn't be conclusively identified) strongly suggests that they were military.
@ Posted by: ralphieboy | Nov 15 2019 11:24 utc | 71
When the US launched a coup in Kiev, wasn't that a violation of Ukraine's sovereignty
too?
@ Posted by: Christian J Chuba | Nov 15 2019 12:36 utc | 72
You know the real reason why they have yet to deliver the javelins to Ukraine? It's
because they're afraid that they'll be sold on the black market and end up in the ME
somewhere targeting US tanks. That's why.
@ Posted by: William Gruff | Nov 15 2019 13:30 utc | 75
That's quite the dramatic improvement, I must admit.
on Yovanovitch,
She added: "If our chief representative is kneecapped, it limits our effectiveness to
safeguard the vital national security interests of the United States."
She wasn't fired, she was kneecapped, and Ukraine is a US vital national security
interest, especially after it installed a new government with neo-fascism support.. .
.Kneecapping is a form of malicious wounding, often as torture, in which the victim is
injured in the knee
Cheeza decides to launch a personal attack...also completely off topic...
Typical reaction of a zelf-zentered person [sic]...With experts such as you out there,
why would anyone dare apply common sense...an intelligent person would have said...blah
blah blah...
Look man...I'm not going to take up a lot of space on this thread because it's not about
the MAX...
BUT...I need to set the record straight because you are accusing me here of somehow
muddying the waters on the MAX issue...
That is a complete inversion of the truth...I have been very explicit in my [professional]
comments about the MAX...and it is the exact opposite of what you are trying to tar me with
here...
Yes, it is important to understand these things...which is why I have made the effort to
explain the issue more clearly for the layman audience...
Your pathetic attack here shows you have no shame, nor self-respect...
Let's rewind the tape here...I said that Gazprom is looking to cut supplies to Ukraine in
the new 10 year deal that comes up for negotiation in January...and that they are going to be
pumping much less gas through Ukraine because NS2 now allows to bypass Ukraine...
You took a run at this comment, calling it wrong, and putting up a bunch of your own
hypothesizing...
I responded by linking to the
Russian news report quoting officials saying exactly that...that gas to Ukraine will be
greatly reduced...
Instead of responding to that by admitting you were full of shit...you decide to attack me
on the MAX issue...everybody here knows my [professional] position on the MAX...and that I
have said repeatedly THAT IT CANNOT BE FIXED...[which is also why I have offered detailed
technical explanations...]
I'm not going to let you screw with my integrity here...everything you attributed to me
on the MAX is completely FALSE and in fact turning the truth on its head...
As Kiza #55 noted - Nordstream 1 and 2, combined, only equal half of Ukraine's transit
capacity.
The primary impact is that Ukraine can't hold far Western European customer gas hostage
anymore with its gas transit "negotiations" as Nordstream allows Russia to sell directly to
Germany.
There can still be Russian gas sold via Ukraine, but this will be mostly to near-Ukraine
neighbors: Romania, Slovakia, Austria, Czech as well as Ukraine itself.
Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania can transit from Turk Stream, but there are potential Turk (and
Bulgarian) issues.
Poland is already committing to LNG in order to not be dependent on Russian gas transiting
Ukraine - a double whammy.
The ultimate effect is to remove Ukraine's stranglehold position over Russian gas exports,
which in turn severely undercuts Ukraine's ability to both get really cheap Russian gas and
additional transit fees - a major blow to their economy.
Therefore, the continuation of gas transit via Ukraine in volumes greater than the 26 bcm/y
suggested above will depend on the European Commission and European gas importers, and
their insistence that gas transit via Ukraine continues.
Otherwise, gas transit via Ukraine will be reduced to delivering limited volumes for
European storage re-fills in the 'off-peak' summer months...
This prospect will undoubtedly complicate any negotiations between Gazprom and its
Ukrainian counterparty over a new contract to govern the transit of Russian gas via
Ukraine, once the existing contract expires at the end of December 2019.
...Gazprom may be willing to commit to only limited annual transit volumes...
European gas importers don't give a shit about Ukraine...and they have the final
word...they care only about getting the gas they need from Russia in a reliable way and at a
good price...
The news report I linked to makes it perfectly clear that the Europeans are demanding that
the Ukranians get their act together on the gas issue, or they will be dropped
altogether...
You know...FOOL...it really makes me wonder how fools like you decide to make statements
here with a very authoritative tone...when it is quite clear you are talking out your rear
end...
Nobody needs that kind of bullshit here...if you don't know a subject sufficiently well,
then maybe you should keep quiet...or when making a statement, phrase it as your own OPINION
and nothing more...
"... In the spring and summer of 2019, did you ever become aware of any U.S. intelligence or U.S. treasury concerns raised about incoming Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and his affiliation or proximity to certain oligarchs? Did any of those concerns involve what the IMF might do if a certain oligarch who supported Zelensky returned to power and regained influence over Ukraine's national bank? ..."
"... John Solomon reported at The Hill and your colleagues have since confirmed in testimony that the State Department helped fund a nonprofit called the Anti-Corruption Action Centre of Ukraine that also was funded by George Soros' main charity. That nonprofit, also known as AnTac, was identified in a 2014 Soros foundation strategy document as critical to reshaping Ukraine to Mr. Soros' vision. ..."
"... In March 2019, Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko gave an on-the-record, videotaped interview to The Hill alleging that during a 2016 meeting you discussed a list of names of Ukrainian nationals and groups you did not want to see Ukrainian prosecutors target. Your supporters have since suggested he recanted that story. Did you or your staff ever do anything to confirm he had recanted or changed his story, such as talk to him, or did you just rely on press reports? ..."
"... Your colleagues, in particular Mr. George Kent, have confirmed to the House Intelligence Committee that the U.S. embassy in Kiev did, in fact, exert pressure on the Ukrainian prosecutors office not to prosecute certain Ukrainian activists and officials. These efforts included a letter Mr. Kent signed urging Ukrainian prosecutors to back off an investigation of the aforementioned group AnTac as well as engaged in conversations about certain Ukrainians like Parliamentary member Sergey Leschenko, journalist Vitali Shabunin and NABU director Artem Sytnyk. Why was the US. Embassy involved in exerting such pressure and did any of these actions run afoul of the Geneva Convention's requirement that foreign diplomats avoid becoming involved in the internal affairs of their host country? ..."
"... If the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States suddenly urged us to fire Attorney General Bill Bar or our FBI director, would you think that was appropriate? ..."
"... At any time since December 2015, did you or your embassy ever have any contact with Vice President Joe Biden, his office or his son Hunter Biden concerning Burisma Holdings or an investigation into its owner Mykola Zlochevsky? ..."
The next big witness for the House Democrats' impeachment hearings is Marie Yovanovitch, the
former American ambassador to Ukraine who was recalled last spring at President Trump's
insistence.
It is unclear what firsthand knowledge she will offer about the core allegation of this
impeachment: that Trump delayed foreign aid assistance to Ukraine in hopes of getting an
investigation of Joe Biden and Democrats started.
Nonetheless, she did deal with the Ukrainians going back to the summer of 2016 and likely
will be an important fact witness.
After nearly two years of reporting on Ukraine issues, here are 15 questions I think could
be most illuminating to every day Americans if the ambassador answered them.
Ambassador Yovanovitch, at any time while you served in Ukraine did any officials in Kiev
ever express concern to you that President Trump might be withholding foreign aid assistance
to get political investigations started? Did President Trump ever ask you as America's top
representative in Kiev to pressure Ukrainians to start an investigation about Burisma
Holdings or the Bidens?
What was the Ukrainians' perception of President Trump after he allowed lethal aid to go
to Ukraine in 2018?
In the spring and summer of 2019, did you ever become aware of any U.S. intelligence
or U.S. treasury concerns raised about incoming Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and
his affiliation or proximity to certain oligarchs? Did any of those concerns involve what the
IMF might do if a certain oligarch who supported Zelensky returned to power and regained
influence over Ukraine's national bank?
Back in May 2018, then-House Rules Committee chairman Pete Sessions wrote a letter to
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggesting you might have made comments unflattering or
unsupportive of the president and should be recalled. Setting aside that Sessions is a
Republican and might even have donors interested in Ukraine policy, were you ever questioned
about his concerns? At any time have you or your embassy staff made comments that could be
viewed as unsupportive or critical of President Trump and his policies?
John Solomon reported at The Hill and your colleagues have since confirmed in
testimony that the State Department helped fund a nonprofit called the Anti-Corruption Action
Centre of Ukraine that also was funded by George Soros' main charity. That nonprofit, also
known as AnTac, was identified in a 2014 Soros foundation strategy document as critical to
reshaping Ukraine to Mr. Soros' vision. Can you explain what role your embassy played in
funding this group and why State funds would flow to it? And did any one consider the
perception of mingling tax dollars with those donated by Soros, a liberal ideologue who spent
millions in 2016 trying to elect Hillary Clinton and defeat Donald Trump?
In March 2019, Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko gave an on-the-record,
videotaped interview to The Hill alleging that during a 2016 meeting you discussed a list of
names of Ukrainian nationals and groups you did not want to see Ukrainian prosecutors target.
Your supporters have since suggested he recanted that story. Did you or your staff ever do
anything to confirm he had recanted or changed his story, such as talk to him, or did you
just rely on press reports?
Now that both the New York Times and The Hill have confirmed that Lutsenko stands by his
account and has not recanted, how do you respond to his concerns? And setting aide the use of
the word "list," is it possible that during that 2016 meeting with Mr. Lutsenko you discussed
the names of certain Ukrainians you did not want to see prosecuted, investigated or
harassed?
Your colleagues, in particular Mr. George Kent, have confirmed to the House
Intelligence Committee that the U.S. embassy in Kiev did, in fact, exert pressure on the
Ukrainian prosecutors office not to prosecute certain Ukrainian activists and officials.
These efforts included a letter Mr. Kent signed urging Ukrainian prosecutors to back off an
investigation of the aforementioned group AnTac as well as engaged in conversations about
certain Ukrainians like Parliamentary member Sergey Leschenko, journalist Vitali Shabunin and
NABU director Artem Sytnyk. Why was the US. Embassy involved in exerting such pressure and
did any of these actions run afoul of the Geneva Convention's requirement that foreign
diplomats avoid becoming involved in the internal affairs of their host country?
On March 5 of this year, you gave a speech in which you called for the replacement of
Ukraine's top anti-corruption prosecutor. That speech occurred in the middle of the Ukrainian
presidential election and obviously raised concerns among some Ukrainians of internal
interference prohibited by the Geneva Convention. In fact, one of your bosses, Under
Secretary David Hale, got questioned about those concerns when he arrived in country a few
days later. Why did you think it was appropriate to give advice to Ukrainians on an internal
personnel matter and did you consider then or now the potential concerns your comments might
raise about meddling in the Ukrainian election or the country's internal affairs?
If the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States suddenly urged us to fire Attorney
General Bill Bar or our FBI director, would you think that was appropriate?
At any time since December 2015, did you or your embassy ever have any contact with
Vice President Joe Biden, his office or his son Hunter Biden concerning Burisma Holdings or
an investigation into its owner Mykola Zlochevsky?
At any time since you were appointed ambassador to Ukraine, did you or your embassy have
any contact with the following Burisma figures: Hunter Biden, Devon Archer, lawyer John
Buretta, Blue Star strategies representatives Sally Painter and Karen Tramontano, or former
Ukrainian embassy official Andrii Telizhenko?
John Solomon obtained documents showing Burisma representatives were pressuring the State
Department in February 2016 to help end the corruption allegations against the company and
were invoking Hunter Biden's name as part of their effort. Did you ever subsequently learn of
these contacts and did any one at State -- including but not limited to Secretary Kerry,
Undersecretary Novelli, Deputy Secretary Blinken or Assistant Secretary Nuland -- ever raise
Burisma with you?
What was your embassy's assessment of the corruption allegations around Burisma and why
the company may have hired Hunter Biden as a board member in 2014?
In spring 2019 your embassy reportedly began monitoring briefly the social media
communications of certain people viewed as supportive of President Trump and gathering
analytics about them. Who were those people? Why was this done? Why did it stop? And did
anyone in the State Department chain of command ever suggest targeting Americans with State
resources might be improper or illegal?
"... To become a Foreign Service Officer you must take a written and an oral exam. If you pass these exams then you win the golden ticket granting you entrance into the FSO club. FSOs have convinced themselves that only the smartest, the brightest, the most able can pass this exam. If you have not taken the exam and passed it then you are by definition not a very smart person. ..."
"... Many FSOs looked down their nose at these knuckle dragging gorillas masquerading as Special Operations forces at U.S. They assumed they were barely literate. Imagine their shock when the FSOs discovered that a member of the elite U.S. Army CT unit or a member of the SEALS could actually speak a foreign language, had read some real literature and held an advanced college degree. Not making this up. ..."
"... The Foreign Service contains many officers who take arrogance and prickishness to new heights. You make a fatal error if you believe that because they tend to be soft spoken and non-confrontational that they are not dangerous and devious. Au contraire. Many that rise in the Foreign Service have a knack for sticking a knife in the back of a perceived rival. ..."
"... Just another day in the life of a Pomposity. From what I have seen of tomorrow's witness, Marie Yovanovitch, an FSO, is the same kind of person I encountered in the Office of Counter Terrorism. Arrogant and aggrieved and convinced that she is so much smarter than the troglodytes who will be asking her questions. ..."
"... You get to the point of not caring if you don't get the credit. You just want to be able to do your job better and go home each night ..."
"... It's common for females in almost every work situation I held. Pompous men getting the credit for what a whole office of females actually did -- sometimes doing things and making decisions they just didn't ask the boss to "approve." ..."
14 November 2019Understanding the Foreign Service Officer Nerd Behavior by Larry C Johnson
A group of lions is called a "pride." A group of crows is called a "murder." A group of
geese is called a "gaggle." So what do you call a group of Ambassadors? A pomposity (that term
was coined by Colonel Lang when the two of us were working on an exercise on Iran and there
were three Ambassadors huddled in a corner scheming--brilliant).
There are two types of Ambassadors--political appointees and Foreign Service Officers who
have made their way to the top of the Foreign Service mountain. The two fellows testifying at
the opening of the House Impeachment inquiry -- Kent and Taylor -- are Foreign Service
Officers. They are a strange lot. There are some exceptions who are normal people, such as
Ambassador Morris (Buzz) Busby and Ambassador Anthony Quainton. I worked for Buzz and dealt
with Ambassador Quainton on a variety of policy issues.
I conducted training for U.S. military Special Ops forces for several years in the aftermath
of 9-11. My task was to teach them how to understand the culture of the Foreign Service
Officers and offer tips on how to interact. In the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks,
U.S. SpecOps personnel were deployed to U.S. Embassies around the world and were having some
trouble interacting with the so-called diplomats.
To become a Foreign Service Officer you must take a written and an oral exam. If you pass
these exams then you win the golden ticket granting you entrance into the FSO club. FSOs have
convinced themselves that only the smartest, the brightest, the most able can pass this exam.
If you have not taken the exam and passed it then you are by definition not a very smart
person.
Many FSOs looked down their nose at these knuckle dragging gorillas masquerading as Special
Operations forces at U.S. They assumed they were barely literate. Imagine their shock when the
FSOs discovered that a member of the elite U.S. Army CT unit or a member of the SEALS could
actually speak a foreign language, had read some real literature and held an advanced college
degree. Not making this up.
The Foreign Service contains many officers who take arrogance and prickishness to new
heights. You make a fatal error if you believe that because they tend to be soft spoken and
non-confrontational that they are not dangerous and devious. Au contraire. Many that rise in
the Foreign Service have a knack for sticking a knife in the back of a perceived rival.
Let me give you a personal example. A female Ambassador who was a Deputy in the Office of
the Coordinator for Counter Terrorism had a blow up when I helped a Navy SEAL Commander, who
was detailed to State, revamp a memo she had already approved because an important overseas
asset deployed for responding to a international terrorist incident had been inadvertently left
out of the memo. When my SEAL buddy went in to brief her on the change she started screaming at
him, broke her lamp and threw a bottle of hand lotion at him. If she had been a man my friend
would have physically retaliated. Instead, my SEAL buddy walked out of the office and recounted
the incident to a Civil Service employee in the office. That employee happened to be the
neighbor of Ambassador A. Peter Burleigh, who was in charge of S/CT during that time.
When Ambassador Burleigh learned of her outburst he called her to his office and read her
the riot act. What did she do? She assumed I was the one (I was not) who had ratted on her to
Ambassador Burleigh. She set out to destroy me. My boss at the time was a retired Marine Corps
Colonel, Dominick "Dick" Gannon. What a gentleman. I counted him as a mentor and a second
father. Hard as woodpecker lips and a man who lived by a code of honor.
Dick prepared my fitness report and submitted it to his supervisor, the crazy female FSO.
She demanded he change it to trash me and he refused. So she waited. Dick went overseas on a
diplomatic mission and the female Ambassador snuck upstairs to the 7th floor (i.e., the
Secretary of State's suite). She filed a complaint against Dick accusing him of failing to do
the evaluation in a timely manner. Fortunately, the admin person she talked to, Joanne Graves,
looked it over, saw that Dick had signed and informed the female FSO that the person who had
failed to act in a timely manner was her. She was furious but beaten.
Just another day in the life of a Pomposity. From what I have seen of tomorrow's
witness, Marie Yovanovitch, an FSO, is the same kind of person I encountered in the Office of
Counter Terrorism. Arrogant and aggrieved and convinced that she is so much smarter than the
troglodytes who will be asking her questions.
I am not saying that all FSOs are like this. But a large number are. You will be seeing
another one of these critters in Friday's testimony.
Ah, troglodytes ... a decade ago I was told that I was one too. Because I can ... count.
As a student I worked in a marketing company that sold US credit cards. My part of the job
was more honourable: I was tasked with administering the phone numbers called to do that.
It's like that with these numbers: You call someone and he sais " Never ever call me
again, never ever, you a**hole " the number is blocked to be recalled for 6 weeks and was
then called again. If the person agrees to appointment with a seller, the number is blocked
for a year etc pp.
The point is, the more you call the less numbers you have left. Call in a city for a week,
starting with 5000 numbers - after a week you're left with, say, 300 (mostly crap).
To make after that many or any more appointments then is simply impossible or requires a
lot of luck or, much worse, to re-use the numbers by nullifying all blockings (= burning
resources).
It's that simple: To make fried eggs you need eggs, a stove and a pan (or a really hot
engine hood), to make bricks you need clay, if you want to drive from Europe to Vladivostok
you need ... a visum, money, time, food, good weather, a warm jacket, to know russian, have a
robust car and a lot of fuel etc pp.
One day another employee (nice ties, glued hair and IMO seriously business study damaged)
negotiated a new contract with the credit card company with very ambitious goals, without
asking whether we had the resources (phone numbers) to achieve that.
And we didn't have what was needed and the bosses decided and chose not to buy more
numbers. So I told the unfortunate guy tasked with achieving the demanded sales that, with
the numbers left, we simply couldn't do it.
I was then wildly insulted to be a ... troglodyte, wicked, mean, illoyal, evil, that I
would lie and some more of that sort. I was fired 15 minutes later, which annoyed as hell
but, on the plus side, with luck led me to a three times better paid much better job
elsewhere.
The part more entertaining me was that I was absolutely correct, which I learned a few
months later from a former colleague:
The company was bankrupt eight weeks later, and the guy who fired me had a burnout or
mental breakdown three weeks later. One of the bosses went from having been a millionaire to
work as a waiter. The contract partner simply chose another "executor" (who was amusingly
employing the same salesmen).
So, I was right, and what did it give me? Not much but a bad experience and, with luck,
something much better elsewhere. Alas, and good riddance.
Yes, it's not often that someone who is right first gets the credit. It's true in business,
educational organizations--well everywhere I ever worked. I just got used to someone else
getting credit for things I had put in place first.
You get to the point of not caring if you don't get the credit. You just want to be able
to do your job better and go home each night.
It's common for females in almost every work situation I held. Pompous men getting the
credit for what a whole office of females actually did -- sometimes doing things and making
decisions they just didn't ask the boss to "approve."
I am struck by the fact that a woman mentioned above actually threw a bottle of hand
lotion at a SEAL who came to Main State to brief her. Much the same thing happened to me with
a male FSO who was DCM in an embassy in which I was DATT.
I had drafted a lengthy report to DIA that described the local armed forces as inept and difficult to train. The embassy had
the right to append remarks to my report but not to change it or block it without my
agreement. The DCM tried for half an hour to pressure me into changing my report to make it
more favorable to the local forces.
When I refused repeatedly to do so he threw the fifteen
page message form across the room at me. I got up and left, leaving it where it fell. After
talking to the ambassador the man apologized and the embassy sent my message.
Someone's ox is getting slowly and methodically gored. Solomon's reporting on Ukraine and
the State Department has been spot on and backed up by solid evidence.
This is how filthy neocon fifth column typically works: "The senior U.S. diplomat in Ukraine said Tuesday he was told release of
military aid was contingent on public declarations from Ukraine that it would investigate the Bidens and the 2016 election, contradicting
President Trump’s denial that he used the money as leverage for political gain." Who told him? Some State Dept. apparatchik? Unless
it was directly from Trump it's just a hearsay and evidence of nothing whatsoever.
"It’s absolutely insane that neoconservatism is still a thing, let alone still a thing that mainstream America tends to regard
as a perfectly legitimate set of opinions for a human being to have. As what Dr. Paul Craig Roberts rightly
calls “the most dangerous ideology that has ever
existed,” neoconservatism has used its nonpartisan bloodlust to work with the Democratic party for the purpose of escalating tensions
with Russia on multiple fronts, bringing our species to the brink of what could very well end up being a
world war with a nuclear superpower and its allies."
This is not okay. Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan member
or a child molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives.
Taylor notably expressed his concerns in a Sept. 9 text message to US ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, saying: " I think
it's crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign. "
To which Sondland replies " Bill, I believe you are incorrect about President Trump's intentions. The President has been crystal
clear no quid pro quo's of any kind, " adding "I suggest we stop the back and forth by text."
On Tuesday, Mr. Taylor directly addressed accusations surrounding Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and Burisma, a Ukrainian
gas company that employed Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., one of the leading Democratic candidates
for president.
He "drew a very direct line in the series of events he described between President Trump's decision to withhold funds and refuse
a meeting with Zelensky unless there was a public pronouncement by him of investigations of Burisma and the so-called 2016 election
conspiracy theories," Ms. Wasserman Schultz said. -
New York Times
As the
Washington
Post notes, Taylor said "By mid-July it was becoming clear to me that the meeting President Zelenskyy wanted was conditioned
on the investigations of Burisma," the Ukrainian gas firm which employed Hunter Biden, "and alleged Ukrainian interference in the
2016 U.S. elections."
He's a Liar. There's no QPQ. We have the transcript of the call. No QPQ. This Frail looking Douche Bag is lying. He's obviously
on the Ukrainian-Take like the rest of them. DNC kept Servers in the Ukraine. Why would they do that??? (wink, wink)
Democrats have called the testimony the most damaging account yet, as Taylor provided an "excruciatingly detailed" opening
statement, according to the
New York Times .
Taylor was a democratic appointee from the Obama administration...shocker. And he was the only one suggesting this was politically
motivated. Sondland corrected him immediately. Nobody else, including the Ukrainians, agree with his "interpretation".
Schiff's bitch said it like he was told to. Nothing to see folks.
Bobzilla. Do not piss him off , 12 minutes ago
link
Wasn't creepy uncle joe doing a quid pro quo when he said no billion $ unless you fir the prosecutor?? Seems the demonrats
have two sets of rules. ******* hypocrites.
That's right, I followed everything Ukraine in detail in 2013, so did my Mom who is 81. She knows more Ukraine than any of
my dirtbag Democrat friends. Hunter Biden corruption old news.
First of all Ukraine had already started to investigate Biden and Burisma in March, second of all the aid was turned over to
them already and there is no resolution to the investigation yet. Third, the Ukrainians have gone on the record saying there was
no pressure. Last, the president has a responsibility to look into corruption even if it was a Demonrat.
Tandem of CIA and the State Department against Trump ?
Notable quotes:
"... Yovanovitch, who was removed from her post in May, testified that President Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani led a campaign to oust her as ambassador over unsubstantiated allegations that she badmouthed the president and was seeking to stop Ukraine from opening an investigation into Joe Biden and his son. -Axios ..."
"... Last month, Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan reportedly told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Trump recalled Yovanovitch after Giuliani singled her out for having an anti-Trump agenda. ..."
"... McKinley testified to impeachment investigators that he resigned over the State Department's unwillingness to support foreign service officers caught up in the Ukraine scandal and the apparent "utilization of our ambassadors overseas to advance domestic political objectives. ..."
On Monday, the House committees conducting impeachment inquiries into President Trump released transcripts of testimony from several
witnesses, including former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and career diplomat and former senior adviser to Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo, Michael McKinley.
Yovanovitch, who was removed from her post in May, testified that President Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani led a campaign to
oust her as ambassador over unsubstantiated allegations that she badmouthed the president and was seeking to stop Ukraine from opening
an investigation into Joe Biden and his son. -Axios
Yovanovitch, who left her position in May, testified that she "assumed" Trump's lack of support for her stemmed from a "partnership"
between Giuliani and Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko .
Last month, Deputy Secretary of State
John Sullivan reportedly told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Trump recalled Yovanovitch after Giuliani singled her
out for having an anti-Trump agenda.
McKinley testified to impeachment investigators that he resigned over the State Department's unwillingness to support foreign
service officers caught up in the Ukraine scandal and the apparent "utilization of our ambassadors overseas to advance domestic
political objectives." -Axios
"Meet the witnesses: Diplomats start off impeachment hearings" [Associated Press].
"Diplomats and career government officials, they're little known outside professional circles,
but they're about to become household names testifying in the House impeachment inquiry . The witnesses will
tell House investigators -- and Americans tuning into the live public hearings -- what they
know about President Donald Trump's actions toward Ukraine First up will be William Taylor, the
charge d'affaires in Ukraine, and George Kent, the deputy Assistant Secretary in the European
and Eurasian Bureau, both testifying on Wednesday." • You can read the full article for
the bios. First, William Taylor:
"Op-Ed in Novoye Vremya by CDA Taylor: Ukraine's Committed Partner" [ U.S.
Embassy in Ukraine ]. From November 10, 2019, the penultimate paragraph. I've helpfully
underlined the dogwhistles:
But as everyone who promotes democracy knows, strengthening and protecting democratic
values is a constant process, requiring persistence and steady work by both officials and
ordinary citizens. As in all democracies, including the United States, work
remains in Ukraine, especially to strengthen rule of law and to hold
accountable those who try to subvert Ukraine's structures to serve their personal aims,
rather than the nation's interests .
It's kind of Taylor to let the Ukrainians know who's really in charge of foreign policy,
isn't it? Now, Kent–
"George Kent Opening Statement At Impeachment Hearing: Concerned About
"Politically-Motivated Investigations" [
RealClearPolitics ]. From the full text as prepare for delivery:
Ukraine's popular Revolution of Dignity in 2014 forced a corrupt pro-Russian leadership to
flee to Moscow.
By analogy, the American colonies may not have prevailed against British
imperial might without help from transatlantic friends after 1776. In an echo of
Lafayette's organized assistance to General George Washington's army and Admiral John Paul
Jones' navy , Congress has generously appropriated over $1.5 billion over the past five
years in desperately needed train and equip security assistance to Ukraine.
Similar to von Steuben training colonials at Valley Forge, U.S. and NATO allied
trainers develop the skills of Ukrainian units at Yavoriv near the Polish border, and
elsewhere.
Are these people out of their minds? See, e.g., "America's Collusion With Neo-Nazis" [
The Nation ]:
Not even many Americans who follow international news know the following, for example:
That the snipers who killed scores of protestors and policemen on Kiev's Maidan Square in
February 2014, thereby triggering a "democratic revolution" that overthrew the elected
president, Viktor Yanukovych, and brought to power a virulent anti-Russian, pro-American
regime -- it was neither democratic nor a revolution, but a violent coup unfolding in the
streets with high-level support -- were sent not by Yanukovych, as is still widely reported,
but instead almost certainly by the neofascist organization Right Sector and its
co-conspirators.
§ That the pogrom-like burning to death of ethnic Russians and others in Odessa
shortly later in 2014 reawakened memories of Nazi extermination squads in Ukraine during
World War II has been all but deleted from the American mainstream narrative even though it
remains a painful and revelatory experience for many Ukrainians.
(To be fair, the Ukrainian neo-Nazis we supported weren't slaveholders, unlike to many of
our own Founders. So there's that.)
The Hearings should be in a room that lets in sunlight, that universal disinfectant. Make
the Front Row Kid Careerists sit by the windows.
Thus far, my main reaction is that the State Department needs to be shaken up to get rid of
those entrenched FRK'ing Careerists and to bring in some accountability. Inspector General
positions and functions should not be optional at the whim of some SoS or other.
Not change for its own sake, just bringing things out of the shadows. In keeping with my
light theme, a Sunset Provision would help, too. That is one step toward eliminating the
hearsay, innuendo and nonsense suppression of Due Process as that is anti-Constitutional. The
people, including back-row, dropouts and all, deserve better from their government.
House Democrats on Tuesday released excerpts of closed-door depositions with former US
Special Envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker, as well as revised testimony from US Ambassador to
the EU, Gordon Sondland which was a complete reversal from what he said in text messages
revealed last month as well as prior testimony.
In them, Sondland reveals in four new pages of sworn testimony he told a top Ukrainian
official that a meeting with President Trump may be contingent upon its new
administration committing to investigations Trump wanted, according to the New York
Times.
Mr. Sondland provided a more robust description of his own role in alerting the
Ukrainians that they needed to go along with investigative requests being demanded by the
president's personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani. -New York Times
Bloomberg reports "Sondland testified that a promise by Ukraine to investigate Joe
Biden's son and the 2016 election was a condition that "would have to be complied with"
for the country's leaders to get a meeting with Trump."
"That was my understanding," he said.
SO if that is Sondland's [mis]understanding, let's compare. Read his Sept 9 text message
to Taylor.
The image of Biden and son in link, speaks truth. Take a look.
These are the offenses designated in the Constitution for which presidents may be
impeached and removed from office.
Which of these did Trump commit?[.]
According to his accusers in this city, his crime is as follows:
The president imperiled our "national security" by delaying, for his own reasons, a
transfer of lethal aid and Javelin missiles to Ukraine -- the very weapons President
Barack Obama refused to send to Ukraine, lest they widen and lengthen the war in the
Donbass.
Now, if Trump imperiled national security by delaying the transfer of the weapons, was
not Obama guilty of a greater crime against our national security by denying the weapons
to Ukraine altogether?
The essence of Trump's crime, it is said, was that he demanded a quid pro quo. He
passed word to incoming President Volodymyr Zelensky that if he did not hold a press
conference to announce an investigation of Joe Biden and son Hunter, he, Zelensky, would
not get the arms we had promised, nor the Oval Office meeting that Zelensky
requested.
Again, where is the body of the crime? [.]
By the way, what was Biden doing approving a $1 billion loan guarantee to Petro
Poroshenko's regime, which was so corrupt that it ferociously fought not to fire a
prosecutor whose dismissal all of Europe was demanding?
Should Biden be nominated and elected, a special prosecutor would have to be appointed
to investigate this smelly deal, as well as the $1 billion Hunter got for his equity fund
from the Chinese after his father visited the Middle Kingdom.[.]
Ever since the whistleblower complaint from inside the CIA first surfaced against President Donald Trump,
a steady stream of national security and State Department officials have testified about their consternation at his dealings
with Ukraine. The dominant impression that they have left, however, is that they are blurring the line between what constitutes
unsavory behavior when it comes to pressuring Ukraine for information on domestic political opponents, on the one hand,
and what are legitimate policy disagreements. Indeed, it appears that they are, more often than not, substituting their
own political judgments for the president's when it comes to the conduct of American foreign policy-something that should
concern Democrats as much as Republicans. A whole caste of government officials seems to believe that for an American president
to aim to improve relations with Russia is an illegitimate, even treasonous, aspiration.
Today was no exception. Consider the testimony of State Department official Catherine Croft. In her brief opening statement,
she declared, "As the Director covering Ukraine, I staffed the President's December 2017 decision to provide Ukraine with
Javelin anti-tank missile systems. I also staffed his September 2017 meeting with then-President Petro Poroshenko on the
margins of the UN General Assembly. Throughout both, I heard-directly and indirectly-President Trump describe Ukraine as
a corrupt country." The implication was that Trump had no business complaining about corruption in Ukraine. But why not?
The persistence of corruption, which President Volodymyr Zelensky was elected by an overwhelming majority to combat, is
hardly a secret.
Perhaps even more revealing was Croft's declaration to the House Intelligence Committee that in November 2018 the White
House refused to approve the release of a statement condemning Russia for seizing three Ukrainian ships located close to
Crimea. It sounds damning at first glance. But once again, why shouldn't Trump have practiced restraint in this instance
if he was intent on improving relations with Russia, a platform that he was elected on? As it happens, the Zelensky campaign
depicted the ship incident as a political provocation on the part of the Poroshenko government.
The implicit assumptions that appear to guide these veteran members of the bureaucracy were even more obvious in the
case of Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman. As the media has underscored, he is the first person to testify in the impeachment
inquiry who participated in the July 25 phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Initially, Trump's defenders sought to portray him as guilty of "espionage" or dual loyalty because he emigrated to America
as a toddler. But this was always preposterous. More telling is that Vindman, no less than Croft, epitomizes a mindset that
seems to regard a deviation from the strictures of the foreign policy establishment as by definition unacceptable.
In his opening statement, Vindman declared, that Ukraine is a "frontline state and a bulwark against Russian aggression."
He added, "the U.S. government policy community's view is that the election of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the promise
of reforms will lock in Ukraine's Western-leaning trajectory, and allow Ukraine to realize its dream of a vibrant democracy
and economic prosperity." But what if Trump has a different view of matters than the "U.S. government policy community's
view"? After all, Trump was elected in part on his explicit declarations that he would not rely on the experts who had plunged
America into Iraq and Libya.
Consider as well the attention that Vindman has lavished upon Trump's phone call with Zelensky. According to Vindman,
portions of the call he considered important were not included in the document kept by the government that was released
to the last month. This includes President Trump claiming there are recordings of former Vice President Joe Biden discussing
Ukrainian corruption, and President Zelensky specifically referring to Biden's son's company, Burisma Holdings. The document
released by the administration includes Zelensky talking about "the company" and Trump saying, "Biden went around bragging
that he stopped the prosecution," which is an interpretation of a video of Joe Biden describing how the Obama administration
made firing Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin a prerequisite for receiving foreign aid. Vindman's recollection
of the call does not change the substance of what was already understood. However, the changes in language are being portrayed
as more analogous to Richard Nixon editing the White House tapes than the routine process that produced a routine document.
"Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, who heard President Trump's July phone call with Ukraine's president and was alarmed, testified
that he tried and failed to add key details to the rough transcript," blared the New York Times headline.
For two months, major media outlets have described the document as a "transcript," as a shorthand term. But as the document,
and TNI's previous reporting
makes clear, it is not a transcript in the strict sense of the term. "This is what's known as a memorandum of conversation:
MEMCON. It is a standard tool that is used throughout the government and the procedures can vary from agency to agency,
or who your boss is. But generally, they're all done about the same way," explains Peter Van Buren, a former Foreign Service
Officer in the State Department.
"In my own experience in government for 24 years it's a pretty standardized practice. The idea is, for all sorts of reasons,
most interactions are not recorded. Instead, they're memorialized through this process of MEMCON. Typically, while there
are many people who may be listening in or present at a meeting, someone (or sometimes two people) are designated as official
notetakers and they take down the conversation. And they're not trying necessarily to get an exact word-for-word account,
but they're certainly trying to get an idea for idea. And in many cases when you're dealing at the White House level, they
are getting it pretty much word for word," Van Buren tells TNI.
As a participant on the phone call, Vindman would have been one of the early editors. As the process continued, officials
higher than him made changes, just like the editor of a magazine would for a writer. The precise reasons for the changes
are open-ended and probably unknowable. There exists no evidence that the changes were nefarious or anything other than
mundane word choice. The document released to the public is the official U.S. government record of what happened.
John Marshall Evans, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer and Ambassador to Armenia, narrows down what should be the
focus of this inquiry-and what it's actually becoming. "The issue is indeed not one of policy, which the President can change,
but of the purpose that was pursued in the July 25th call: whether it was in the national interest or a private gain," he
says. So far, no one has shown that Trump demanded that the Ukrainian government produce a specific result or fabricate
evidence about the Bidens.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi is supposed to hold a House vote on the impeachment inquiry tomorrow, after a barrage of criticism
from Republicans for moving forward without one. Whether the open hearings and public testimony will provide any more substance
than a parade of national security bureaucrats ventilating their grievances about a president who sought to take a different
course in foreign policy is questionable.
Vindman declared, that Ukraine is a "frontline state and a bulwark against Russian aggression.
Complete bull. The truth is that there is no Russian aggression. What we're seeing from Russia is actually pushback against
American aggression. The US is trying to turn Ukraine into a NATO member, knowing that doing so would severely undermine Russia's
national security. The American goal is to reduce Russia's influence in world affairs, and to be in geostrategic position to relate
to Russia coercively. Little wonder, then, that Russia lashed back by taking Crimean and Donbass.
For Vindman to assert that Ukraine is "bulwark against Russian aggression" and a matter vital to the US's national interests
only goes to prove that America is under the influence of liars. The American people are being mislead about the truth.
Ukraine's on Russia's front door step. It overlaps with Russia territorially, demographically, and geopolitically. By entering
Ukraine for strategic reasons, the US has provoked and threatened Russia. There is no justification for this reckless foreign
policy move by the US.
First off, 'improving relations with Russia' does NOT mean doing whatever is best for Russia at our expense. Every foreign
policy move this president has made has only benefited Russia, not the US! Secondly, I have slowly but surely become convinced
Trump is a wholly owned subsidiary of Putin Inc. I don't know what Putin has on Trump (but I think money laundering would be a
solid guess) or if it's the promise of Putin's blessing for a Trump Tower Moscow, but whatever it is, he has Trump in his back
pocket. And lastly, if everyone has not figured out all The Donald cares about is money in his pocket they are fools. Face it,
writer, you either have bought that bag of magic beans Trump sold the electorate in the last election or you are being willfully
blind to who and what this 'man' is.
First off, 'improving relations with Russia' does NOT mean doing whatever is best for Russia at our expense.
That's confusing. How exactly is America doing something for Russia at the expense of the US? If you really believe this, then
you've been fooled by American propaganda into thinking that Ukraine is an extension of the continental US. The reality, of course,
is that Ukraine is on the other side of the world, and does not in any way matter to America's vital national interests.
In Ukraine, America is overstretching its ambitions, and is behaving like an aggressor.
Let's start with the sanctions passed by Congress on Russian oligarchs for invading the Ukraine. Somehow, they just weren't
imposed until Trump was forced to. Then there is the deliberate sabotage of all of our alliances. Now it's stabbing the kurds
in the back so Putin and Erdogan can split that area up between them. The only thing Trump, Turkey and Russia have in common are
Trump Tower Istanbul and his desire for Trump Tower Moscow. He is, quite literally selling us out.
P.S. Nice try, Russkie, but it wasn't us who invaded and seized Crimea and western Ukraine. That was you. We may stick our
noses into world affairs more than we should, but we have not stolen any land or resources of any country we are in. Get right
down to it, if it wasn't for your nukes, we'd put you down like a rabid dog. Don't think we can? Your economy is the size of our
state of Georgia and it ain't even close to the top. Just another commie basket case.
As Bette Davis said in All About Eve , "Fasten your seatbelts -- it's going to be a bumpy night."
The ride started last night with Rep. Devin Nunes' appearance on Hannity , escalated with arrests of figures tied to Rudy
Giuliani, and will possibly come to a complete halt when former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch meets with three House committees
tomorrow -- assuming the State Department allows the testimony to take place at all.
Kicking this off, Kicking this off, Kicking this off,
Nunes went on Hannity last night to claim that Yavonovitch may have been spying on Americans -- including journalists.
Sean Hannity expresses his anger over what his own sources are telling him about surveillance of John Solomon among others, although
Nunes more cautiously advises patience:
"What I can tell you is that we know what Pete Sessions, congressman from Texas now retired, we know what he had to say. We
know that there are people within that were not only Ukrainians but also Americans that worked at the State Department who have
raised concerns about this ambassador, that's why she was ultimately removed," Nunes said.
"We also have concerns that possibly they were monitoring press from different journalists and others," he continued. "That
we don't know, but, you know, we have people who have given us this information and we're going to ask these questions to the
State Department and hopefully they'll get the answers before she comes in on Friday."
Hannity then said three sources have told him there "is evidence that shows government resources were used to monitor communications"
of a journalist, The Hill's John Solomon.
"Well, what I have heard, and I want to be clear. I think there is a difference. What I've heard is that there were strange
requests, irregular requests to monitor, not just one journalist, but multiple journalists," Nunes said. "Now perhaps that was
okay. Perhaps there was some reason for that, that it can be explained away. But that's what we know and that's what we are going
to be looking into."
Keep Pete Sessions in mind as our ride progresses to its next sharp turn. Earlier today, two of Rudy Giuliani's clients -- and
donors to a PAC funding Giuliani's investigation of the Bidens --
got arrested for criminal campaign finance violations . Among the allegations are that those violations intended to mask foreign
influence on US elections:
Two Soviet-born donors to a pro-Trump fundraising committee who helped Rudy Giuliani's efforts to investigate Democrat Joe
Biden were arrested late Wednesday on criminal charges of violating campaign finance rules, including funneling Russian money
into President Trump's campaign.
Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two Florida businessmen, have been under investigation by the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan,
and are expected to appear in federal court in Virginia later on Thursday, the people said. Both men were born in former Soviet
republics.
Mr. Giuliani, President Trump's private lawyer, identified the two men in May as his clients. Both men have donated to Republican
campaigns including Mr. Trump's, and in May 2018 gave $325,000 to the primary pro-Trump super PAC, America First Action, through
an LLC called Global Energy Producers, according to Federal Election Commission records.
The men were charged with four counts, including conspiracy, falsification of records and lying to the FEC about their political
donations,
according
to the indictment that outlines a conspiracy to funnel a Russian donor's money into U.S. elections.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the two have been instrumental in helping Giuliani make contacts in Ukraine. One of them
happened to be part of a meeting Giuliani had with the now-unemployed envoy Kurt Volker:
Since late 2018, Mr. Fruman and Mr. Parnas have introduced Mr. Giuliani to several current and former senior Ukrainian prosecutors
to discuss the Biden case.
Mr. Parnas in July accompanied Mr. Giuliani to a breakfast meeting with Kurt Volker, then the U.S. special representative for
Ukraine negotiations. "We had a long conversation about Ukraine," Mr. Volker wrote in his testimony to House committees last week.
During that breakfast, Mr. Giuliani mentioned the investigations he was pursuing into Mr. Biden and 2016 election interference.
The
indictment
released today has a very telling reference to a former US congressman who involved himself in the effort to oust Yovanovitch:
And now let's go back to the WSJ for some dot-connecting:
In May 2018, Pete Sessions, at the time a GOP congressman from Texas, sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asking
for her removal, saying he had been told Ms. Yovanovitch was displaying a bias against the president in private conversations.
The indictment references a congressman, identifiable as Mr. Sessions, whose assistance Mr. Parnas sought in "causing the U.S.
government to remove or recall the then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine." The indictment says those efforts were conducted "at least
in part, at the request of one or more Ukrainian government officials." Mr. Sessions didn't respond to a request for comment.
Hoo boy . If nothing else, this certainly looks bad, which makes Nunes' citation of Session suspect on its face.
The Department of Justice is essentially accusing Sessions of being bought by foreign influence in going after Yovanovitch, and clearly
intends to press that case against Giuliani's associates on that basis.
Bear in mind that this is William Barr's DoJ, too. Barr got read into the case soon after taking over the Attorney General
job in February, and apparently found it convincing enough to proceed to indictment. The arrest also made it very convenient for
House Democrats to
issue subpoenas for testimony from the pair , although it likely complicates how cooperative they're willing to be. At the very
least, they'll be easy to find.
Giuliani responded by attacking the DoJ for its "extremely suspect" timing in unsealing the indictment and arresting his associates.
He promised Fox News' Catherine Herridge that he would shortly reveal how all of this is connected to his investigation into the
Bidens:
What about the "extremely suspect" timing? It turns out that the pair were
trying to leave
the country , which forced the DoJ to make the arrests now:
The two Giuliani-linked defendants, Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas, were detained at Dulles International Airport outside of Washington
on Wednesday and are scheduled to appear in court in Virginia at 2 p.m. ET Thursday.
Meanwhile, Yovanovitch continues to prepare for her own testimony, which is still
scheduled to take place tomorrow . The Washington Post reported late last night that she's "on board" for cooperating with the
committees, and perhaps now even more so after Nunes' allegations on Hannity last night. The State Department could still
bar her from discussing her work with Congress (she remains employed by State), but
ABC reports today that Mike Pompeo is already facing a rising level of discontent over Yovanovitch's treatment and Pompeo's lack
of a public defense for her:
Marie Yovanovitch, who was recalled early from her post this spring, is scheduled for a deposition Friday with three committees
in the House of Representatives, but it is unclear whether she will be allowed to show up after the U.S. ambassador to the European
Union was blocked by the Trump administration from testifying on Tuesday.
Either way, the manner in which Yovanovitch has been treated by Trump and the silence from Pompeo has already rankled many
rank and file at the State Department, according to half a dozen current and former officials, who are also upset by the administration's
use of career diplomats in the president's efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political opponents.
So where does this ride come to a stop? How much of this is true -- all of it, none of it, or only some of it? Trump loyalists
will surely consider all of this as more evidence of a Deep State plot that now involves both the State and Justice Departments.
Trump haters will see this as another case of foreign influence on the administration and a plot to smear Trump's opponents, both
electoral and otherwise. The rest of America might just be hoping that the [expletive deleted] ride would come to an end, period
.
At this point, the mess is too complicated to suss out which conclusion reflects the truth. What does appear to true is
that we're not going to know for sure what's true for a long, long time -- and it might turn out, ironically, that the DoJ
could end up as the most credible player in Ukraine-Gate.
Right-wing media tries to smear former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch
Despite grave Judicial Watch allegations about a "surveillance" campaign from right-wing figures,
the facts so far point to mere tracking of a pro-Trump disinformation campaign
UPDATE (10/24/19)
: It
turns out
that the list Marie Yovanovitch allegedly used to "spy" on conservatives was really a basic Facebook
search on CrowdTangle, a
mundane and widely-used
social media
tool that
tracks
public
social media activity.
Judicial Watch
described CrowdTangle as a "Soros-linked media tracking tool."
Representatives of right-wing group Judicial Watch have been claiming during appearances on
conservative media shows that former Ukrainian Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was "spying" on media figures
close to President Donald Trump by monitoring public statements they made on social media regarding
Ukraine.
Judicial Watch is alleging that Yovanovitch -- who recently
testified to House impeachment investigators
that Trump pressured the State Department to remove her
over baseless allegations -- was "basically running a war room" by monitoring public statements regarding
Ukraine
made by
figures in right-wing media like Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, Trump personal lawyer Rudy
Giuliani, and Donald Trump, Jr. The list also includes former Obama ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul.
Judicial Watch also claims that the searches were looking for the following keywords: "Biden,"
"Giuliani," "Soros," and "Yovanovitch."
That Yovanovich would monitor public statements made by public figures is unsurprising given her
recent testimony
claiming that Giuliani had been criticizing her in the months before her ousting,
and the people she allegedly monitored are connected to the smear campaign Giuliani was waging. He had
accused her of privately criticizing the president and trying to protect the interests of Biden and his
son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. The smear included accusations that
Soros was funding a conspiracy to hurt Trump's presidency and elect Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
Yovanovich said she was "incredulous" about her removal and that it was based on "unfounded and false
claims by people with clearly questionable motives" -- claims that have been
promoted publicly
by conservative media figures.
The Washington Post
reported that George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state responsible
for Ukraine, became concerned around October 2018 that Yovanovitch was the target of a "classic
disinformation operation."
NBC News
indicated that the State Department was concerned over the effort to oust Yovanovich,
reporting that the agency "attempted to ring alarm bells" regarding Giuliani's efforts to smear her:
The documents also show that Giuliani, through conservative writer John Solomon's columns in The Hill,
attempted to tie former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch to the liberal donor George Soros as part
of a massive conspiracy to take down Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort and help Hillary
Clinton win the 2016 election.
...
When State Department officials saw the disinformation campaign, they attempted to ring alarm bells
and strategized to correct the record, the documents show.
Yovanovitch, who has over 30 years of experience in foreign diplomacy, further testified that, as
The Washington Post
put it, "under Trump's leadership, U.S. foreign policy has been compromised by
self-interested actors who have badly demoralized and depleted America's diplomatic corps." The testimony
of
White House aide Fiona Hill
confirmed Yovanovitch's depiction of foreign policy under the Trump
administration.
Still, Judicial Watch is attempting to push the narrative that Yovanovitch nefariously
spied on Trump allies among right-wing media, appearing on the radio shows of Sebastian Gorka and Sean
Hannity and Fox Business host Lou Dobbs' prime-time show to spread the message. Some Fox News figures
responded with paranoia regarding their own conversations.
Judicial Watch
also shared
its report on Twitter, announcing that it is "investigating if prominent conservative figures/journalists
& persons [with ties] to @realDonaldTrump were unlawfully monitored by the State Dept in Ukraine at the
request of ousted U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, an Obama appointee."
Fox & Friends
hosted Judicial Watch
President Tom Fitton, who repeated that his "sourcing tells us that she was asking that folks like Rudy
Giuliani, Don Trump Jr., a whole list of your colleagues there at Fox, be monitored on certain phrases."
Co-host Steve Doocy invited Fitton to "go ahead and speculate for a second" about Yovanovitch's motives,
to which Fitton replied, "It looks an awful lot like an enemy's list to me." Doocy noted that Yovanovitch
is "keeping an eye on television, of all things," and he called it "particularly disturbing that, you
know, somebody in the federal government would be tracking people on TV."
FOX News contributor John Solomon revealed fired Ukrainian Ambassador Maria Yovanovich's
links to a radical Soros group. Yovanovich appeared before Congress on Friday, claiming that
she was unjustly fired just because she badmouthed the president, prevented Ukrainian officials
from coming to the US to expose Democrat corruption, and giving Ukrainian prosecutor a do not
prosecute list. Now, investigative reporter John Solomon reports on her link to a
Soros-supported group. Lutsenko told Solomon that in April 2016, Ukrainian prosecutors were
investigating an alleged anti-corruption group, AntAC, over $4.4 million that was illegally
diverted. AntAc was founded by the Obama administration and George Soros.
Trump's Little Surprise Is Making Liberals Cry! Got Yours Yet? Liberty Journalists x Ads by Revcontent Find Out More >
21,994
On Friday fired Ambassador Yovanovich testified behind closed doors in front of the
Pelosi-Schiff impeachment committee.
Yovanovich believes she was unjustly fired despite the fact that she was an Obama holdover,
was speaking out against President Trump and she was
colluding with the DNC and Hillary Campaign to undermine the US presidential election.
On Friday John Solomon told Lou Dobbs about the fired ambassador's links to a radical Soros
group operating in Ukraine.
On March 20th Solomon
published his interview with Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko alleging
Yovanovitch gave him a "do not prosecute list," back in 2016.
It will be clear once the transcripts are released, that the crew
testifying for Adam Schiff are upset about the President fulfilling his
Constitutional responsibility to run foreign policy rather than letting
them run it, about his determination to get to the bottom of Ukraine's role
in intervening in the 2016 U.S. Election, and the ongoing coup against him,
which implicates many of these very same "witnesses." The President,
knowing that Ukraine tried to take him out by intervening in the 2016
election, refused to meet with the Poroshenko government. That government
jockeyed for favor by revealing its role in the 2016 illegalities and
documenting the Biden story for Rudy Guilani and others.
When new
President Zelensky was elected, President Trump used an alternate channel
to assess him, rather than the State Department and National Security
Council operatives who were either involved in the coup against him or
refused to stand against it. That appears to have included Ukraine envoy
Kurt Volker, Ambassador Gordon Sondland, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry.
There is nothing unusual in this but it drove the unelected Mandarins,
including John Bolton, crazy, along with the considerable military
industrial complex grouping in the Congress who want permanent war with
Russia.
Here are the key players so far based on the applause provided by
Democrats and the Main Stream Media:
William B. Taylor, Jr.
Presented hearsay testimony, based on conversations with NSC John Bolton
protégé Tim Morrison, and others that somehow the President presented a
quid pro quo in his July 25th phone call with Zelensky, despite the fact
that the actual transcript of the call and repeated statements by President
Zelensky evidence no quid pro quo. Taylor's career has featured every U.S.
imperial disaster possible:
– "Economic development" coordinator for Eastern Europe, former Soviet
Union, resulting in the economic decimation of those countries and their
looting
– Coordinator for U.S. assistance of Afghanistan. Said the U.S. had the
right to stay forever until the country was secured to U.S. specifications
– Coordinator for Iraq Reconstruction. Program lost billions and left
the country destitute and mired in religious warfare.
– Ambassador to Ukraine in 2006-2009 right after the Orange Revolution,
the nation's first color revolution delivered by the British and the State
Department.
– Under Obama, Special Coordinator for Mideast "transitions" in the wake
of the Arab Spring, the program which set all of Southwest Asia on fire and
birthed the present round of Isis terrorism.
– Serves on the U.S./Ukraine Business Council with David J. Kramer as a
senior advisor. Kramer leaked the dirty Christopher Steele dossier against
Donald Trump to Buzzfeed. The Council coordinates the "investment" of
various vulture and "turnaround" funds in Ukraine. According to Breitbart's
Aaron Klein, Taylor met with a member of Adam Schiff's staff, Thomas Eager,
in Ukraine, prior to his testimony.
Marie Yovanovitch
U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine from August 18, 2016, until she was recalled,
in May of 2019. She claimed she was the victim of a smear campaign by Trump
attorney, Rudy Giuliani and Ukrainians who opposed her. But, she was at the
helm of the Embassy at the point when the Manafort black ledger smear
campaign was at full roar.
Way back in March, 2019, U.S. Embassy employees at the Ukrainian Embassy
were leaking that the Ambassador was telling Embassy employees and
Ukrainians not to pay any attention to President Donald Trump because he
was going to be impeached.
This was before a wave of articles featuring Ukraine's former prosecutor
Yuriy Lutsenko claiming that Yovanovitch had provided him with a list of
"do not prosecute" names, including those Ukrainians most involved in the
Ukrainian efforts to target and smear former Trump Campaign Advisor Paul
Manafort as a Russian agent.
Judicial Watch has just filed a FOIA request based on State Department
sources who claim that during her tenure in Ukraine, Yovanovitch ordered
the monitoring of various journalists who published negative stories about
her or who generally support President Trump.
Her resume evidences a trail of destruction. Dubbed the "Iron Lady" by
colleagues, she replaced the infamous Ambassador Geoffey Pyatt in Ukraine.
In 2002, after serving as one of the key State Department anti-Russian
diplomats, Yovanovitch played a central role in the Ukraine regime change
operation known as the "Orange Revolution." She promoted the scandal of
Ukraine selling 4 Kolchuga radar systems to Iraq in violation of the United
Nations sanctions. This led to the pro-Russian Ukrainian President Leonid
Kuchma being replaced by Washington and London's choice, Viktor
Yushschenko..
She was Ambassador to the Kyrgyz Republic at the time the British-U.S.
Tulip Color Revolution occurred in that country, led by the State
Department and the British.
In 2008-2011 Yovanovitch was U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, where she was
heavily involved in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in neighboring Azerbaijan
(a separatist operation as part of a regime-change operation).
Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman
A Ukrainian born Army veteran, Vindman joined the NSC in July of 2018,
under John Bolton, as the NSC's "Ukraine expert." He claimed that all of
his corrections to the transcript of the Zelensky/Trump call were not
accepted although he admitted that his corrections were minor and did not
change the call substantively. He testified that he discussed with
Ukrainian colleagues how to "handle Trump."
The key to who he is and why he is testifying is contained in his
opening statement:
"When I joined the NSC in the Spring of 2019, I became aware of
outside influencers promoting a false narrative of Ukraine inconsistent
with the consensus views of the interagency. This narrative was harmful for
U.S. government policy."
There you have it, the "interagency" dictates U.S. foreign policy, not
the President as specified in Article II of the Constitution. Vindman also
says he authored the Russia strategy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff for
managing "competition" with Russia, an undoubtedly very bellicose document.
Amidst the media fanfare claiming that Vindman represents "the ultimate
immigrant hero" story, the Republicans finally leaked something substantive
about what happened behind closed doors. Asked to cite in the transcript of
the call where the President offered a quid pro quo, Vindman apparently
testified that the entire call evidenced this, since the President was in a
"position of power" over President Zelensky. If true, foreign policy is now
being managed on the same terms as the Me Too movement.
A parade of Washington's unelected diplomatic elite has been appearing before the House
Intelligence Committee in a tiny room in the House basement, a SCIF (sensitive compartmented
information facility), walled off from the world by a blanket of electronic security to enforce
absolute, total secrecy. There, in a proceeding reminding most of the British Star Chamber,
they are making claims against a man they hate, a man whom the voters elected in 2016 to throw
them all out of any power whatsoever over the nation -- the President of the United
States. Here is how America voted.
Here is a map of US counties, colored red and blue to indicate Republican and Democratic
majorities respectively. Source: personal.umich.edu
They are claiming that President Trump withheld necessary military aid for Ukraine in
exchange for a promise by the Ukrainians to investigate Joe Biden and his cocaine-addled son,
Hunter. This is the so-called "impeachment inquiry" which follows two previous impeachment
campaigns in sequence, launched by the Democrats and the Anglo-American defense and
intelligence establishment on the day Donald Trump won the election.
In this brief we will show you that Donald Trump should have withheld military aid from the
Ukrainians, but for a reason different than that stated. And, we will demonstrate that Joe
Biden should be investigated, for supervising a coup, led by neo-Nazis in Ukraine, which has
collapsed that country. Thousands have been killed or fled the country. Many of the foreign
policy mandarins now testifying against Trump were Biden's managers of that horrific crime, and
other similar crimes, which have created America's "forever" wars.
Joe Biden otherwise
played a key role as Obama's Vice President in the 2016-2017 illegalities against candidate
and President-elect Donald Trump, actively joining a small group of "principals" (John Brennan,
Attorney General Loretta Lynch, James Clapper, Jim Comey) discussing and implementing the
intelligence feed for a propaganda campaign intended to defeat Trump by smearing him as a
Russian agent. These conversations included Susan Rice, Avril Haines, and Lisa Monaco from the
White House side, in addition to Joe Biden. Biden also played a significant role in the
attempted coverup of the White House's direct role in the 2016 foreign interference
operation against Donald Trump.
After the string of illegalities against Trump, which continued through his firing of FBI
Director James Comey, and after the brutal
Robert Mueller inquisition , which destroyed many lives but came up empty as to any crimes
by the President, we have now entered phase three of the coup against the President. As
Congressman Al Green (D-TX) and even Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) have admitted: impeachment now
is necessary because, without it, Trump will win a second term. The same sentiment was
pronounced by the British House of Lords in their 2018 "UK Foreign
Policy in a Shifting World Order," in an order to their American satrapy: a second Trump
term must not happen.
Everyone who has appeared before the House Intelligence Committee so far, is up to their
ears in U.S./British regime-change operations, particularly the one conducted by the Obama
Administration in 2013-2014 in Ukraine, where Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland engineered regime
change on Russia's border, using Neo-Nazis as muscle, and creating a post-coup vassal-state
which included the very same Neo-Nazis as government officials. Joe Biden, who served as the
Obama Administration's "point man" on Ukraine, and Biden's State Department, National Endowment
for Democracy, and Atlantic Council buddies misnamed their atrocity, the "Revolution of
Dignity." Victoria Nuland, the case officer with Joe Biden for the coup, says the United States
spent $5 billion dollars in creating this fiasco. Her figures do not include substantial funds
delivered by the British government and NATO, along with George Soros and other privateers.
Like other regime-change wars, most prominently Iraq, this one installed a government of
colonial administrators, and resulted in a perfectly predictable, violent insurgency from those
sections of Ukraine that would never agree to an occupation government, particularly after
being attacked by the coup's "Right Sector" neo-Nazis. In Ukraine, this insurgency involved the
Russian-speaking population of Eastern Ukraine, the Donbass, where, after the coup, the regions
of Donetsk and Lugansk declared themselves autonomous Republics. There is plenty of evidence
that the insurgency was provoked to facilitate a full-scale ethnic cleansing of this asset-rich
area which formerly housed that nation's manufacturing capacity and skilled
workforce.
March in Kiev on anniversary of the birthday of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera (depicted
on flag), January 2015, Photo: All-Ukrainian Union
The conflict in the Donbass has killed over 13,000 people to date. And the coup resulted in
the further disintegration of Ukraine into Europe's poorest country. The operation replaced one
set of corrupt oligarchs who stole the country's riches after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
but were considered "soft" on Russia, with a different set of oligarchs who have voiced a
desire to go to war with Russia, while continuing the stealing.
Biden, Ukraine, and
Burisma
This is the context for the real Joe Biden corruption story in Ukraine and his son's
estimated $3 million dollar haul from one of the largest and most corrupt Ukrainian gas and oil
companies: Burisma . This is a story about the obsession of Joe Biden and others who went
out to cripple Russia's economy by shutting down the gas transit lines that pass from Russia,
through Ukraine, to Europe, while supplying Ukraine through Western oil companies shepherded
into the country by Biden, along with a scheme for fracking in the war-torn Donbass. They
pursued this while overtly threatening Russia with nuclear war, facilitated by their new vassal
state, Ukraine, on Russia's border -- placing the entire world in jeopardy by their madness. To
accomplish his gas gambit, Biden had to capture Burisma.
Then Vice President Joe Biden with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, Secretary of
State John Kerry, Ambassador Victoria Nuland, and others in a bilateral meeting with Ukrainian
President Petro Poroshenko on February 7, 2015.
Many of the British and American intelligence operatives who accomplished the Ukraine
"regime change" in 2014, turned their attention, in 2016, to destroying the political candidacy
of Donald Trump, smearing him as a Manchurian candidate because he publicly stated a desire for
better relations with Russia.
When Rudy Giuliani started to investigate Kiev's role in the illegal 2016 attempt to defeat
Donald Trump, he touched a "third rail" of British and American intelligence, one that goes all
the way back to British and American adoption and support of the Organization of Ukrainian
Nationalists (OUN-B) led by Stepan Bandera and Mykola Lebed. Bandera was an MI-6 agent, Lebed
became CIA. Earlier, during World War II, in collaboration with the Nazis, they slaughtered
thousands of Poles and Jews -- all in the name of defeating Russia. The Right Sector groups
used by Joe Biden for the coup and subsequently installed in the government, idolize Stepan
Bandera.
Now that Attorney General William Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham have, as anticipated,
undertaken a full criminal investigation of the U.S., British and other intelligence figures
who led the 2016-2017 effort to defeat Donald Trump and subvert his presidency, the Ukrainian
aspect of this operation has become a very, very hot potato.
The appearance of the bogus Ukraine-aid "whistleblower" -- himself, we now know, a CIA
agent, expert in Ukraine, who previously worked with Joe Biden in the Obama White House --
represents an effort to block this story from serious investigation at all costs. It also aims
to delegitimize the entire Barr/Durham criminal investigation, as well as the imminent report
of the Justice Department's Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Both DOJ investigations center
on illegalities in the first stage of the coup against Trump, prior to Mueller's appointment as
Special Counsel. And, most important, the bogus impeachment "inquiry" is yet another
full-spectrum information-warfare operation, using the media, fed by cascading, 24/7 bogus
headlines and leaks from the intelligence community and the Democrats in Congress, to tank the
President's standing with the American people and either impeach him or defeat him in
2020.
The Present Charade
We now know that the bogus whistleblower worked, covertly, with Congressman Adam Schiff's
staff to launder leaks about the President's July 25th phone call with incoming Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelensky, into a new bogus narrative about the President. This
whistleblower is represented by a law firm that has actively sought whistleblowers from the
intelligence agencies against the President, posting leaflets and billboard ads outside the
agencies and offering to cover any and all expenses.
Paul Sperry, in an October 30th
article at Real Clear Investigations , states that everyone in Washington and the national
news media "knows" that the bogus whistleblower is Eric Ciaramella. If true, it only highlights
the scandal embodied in the sham impeachment proceedings being run by the Democrats, it is the
equivalent of a hand grenade. Ciaramella worked in the Obama White House with Susan Rice, John
Brennan and Joe Biden on Ukraine. He also worked with Alexandra Chalupa, who ran Ukraine's
illegal 2016 election interference in the United States on behalf of Hillary Clinton. According
to a former NSC official, he got caught leaking to the media as an Obama holdover at the NSC
under Trump, where he chaired the Ukraine desk. His leaks framed the totally bogus narrative
that Putin caused the firing of James Comey by Trump. Rather than being fired,
Ciaramella returned to the CIA and his close friends, according to Sperry's story, joined Adam
Schiff's House Intelligence Committee, a most convenient setup.
The bogus whistleblower was also assisted by a new Inspector General of the Intelligence
Community, Michael Atkinson, who dubbed this bogus complaint "credible" and "urgent." Atkinson
migrated from the leadership of the National Security Division of the Justice Department -- a
central control point in Phases 1 and 2 of the coup -- to the IG post, and promptly rewrote the
rules so that whistleblower complaints could be based on total hearsay and gossip, rather than
first-hand knowledge. In Atkinson's January 2019 confirmation hearing before the Senate
Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner (D-VA) charged him with a mission of protecting
whistleblowers first and foremost. This was most strange coming from a committee that has
repeatedly acquiesced in the destruction of actual whistleblowers such as Tom Drake, Bill
Binney, Jeff Sterling, and Julian Assange. It suggests that a new "insurance policy" was being
worked on already by the higher echelons of the intelligence community and the most corrupted
committee in the Senate.
Surprise: the Transcript
To the surprise of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and the coup's strategists, the President
released the actual transcript of his July 25th phone conversation with President Zelensky,
which, in any reasonable culture, should have ended the entire affair. The bogus
whistleblower's gossip was proven demonstrably false by the transcript. Washington, D.C. is
not, presently, such a culture.
In the call, President Trump congratulated Zelensky on his victory in the parliamentary
elections, and Zelensky promptly announced that he would be reforming his government to clean
up its legendary and horrific corruption. The President and Zelensky discussed the fact that
the United States is shouldering the burden of support for Ukraine, while Germany and other
European countries, which have the most immediate strategic interest, are not contributing
enough.
In the portion of the call the Democrats are trying to make an impeachable crime, President
Trump said he was concerned about Ukraine's intervention into the 2016 U.S. election on behalf
of Hillary Clinton and expressed concern that Zelensky is surrounded by some of the same people
who conducted those activities. Trump asked whether the Democratic National Committee (DNC)
computer server examined by CrowdStrike is in the possession of a Ukrainian oligarch. He asks
Zelensky to work with Attorney General Barr, who is conducting the investigation into the 2016
presidential election illegalities. He characterizes this request to investigate possible
Ukrainian illegalities in the 2016 election, and to speak with Attorney General Barr, as doing
him (Trump) a "favor."
The "favor," it is clear, had nothing to do with the 2020 elections or asking Ukraine to
"attack" Democrats and Joe Biden, as repeatedly mischaracterized by Democrats and the bogus
whistleblower. Instead, it had to do with investigating the ongoing coup in the United
States which threatens this nation's very existence .
It is Zelensky who brings up Rudy Giuliani, the President's lawyer, who has been conducting
his own investigation of Ukraine's interference on behalf of Hillary Clinton since January of
2019. The President then says that he had heard that a very good prosecutor in Ukraine was shut
down by some very bad people, and that the former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie
Yovanovitch, was bad news, as were the people she was dealing with. The President then relates
that Joe Biden bragged about stopping the prosecution of Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company
where Hunter Biden sat on the Board. He says that whatever Zelensky can tell Attorney General
Barr about this would be great. Zelensky responds that Marie Yovanovitch was a bad ambassador
as she admired Petro Poroshenko, the previous President, and refused to accept Zelensky's
election.
That's it. There was absolutely nothing illegal or wrong here, despite the hair-on-fire
headlines fulminated daily by the news media and Adam Schiff -- the same "walls closing in"
nonsense that occurred daily during Russiagate. There is no reference to, "if you do this, I'll
do that." In fact, the Ukrainians were not even aware that the lethal military aid they were
expecting had been placed on temporary hold.
Unfortunately, the President, after the call, approved the lethal military aid to Ukraine
which Congress' war-mongers had ordered up in their continuing destructive madness about
"Russia, Russia, Russia." The aid was issued without any requirement whatsoever that Ukraine
produce anything to meet President Trump's concerns about 2016 election interference or the
corruption surrounding Burisma and/or Joe Biden. The aid was issued without any real guarantees
in place to ensure that lethal weaponry would not be put in the hands of the various Neo-Nazis
integrated into Ukraine's National Guard and militias, and who are now arrayed against
President Zelensky himself, charging that his effort to settle the war in the Donbass is a
sell-out to Russia.
Now if the President and his supporters choose to tell the real and whole truth to the
American people about what the Ukraine issue is really all about, the impeachers, so desperate
to block this from coming to light, will have hoisted themselves on their own petard in true
Shakespearian fashion, in the best boomerang imaginable. That story, the real story about Joe
Biden, Ukraine corruption, and the Ukrainian role in the effort to fix the 2016 election for
Hillary Clinton, is what we will set forth, in summary fashion, in what follows.
House Republicans on Thursday said that testimony from the State Department's former envoy to Ukraine, sought by
House Democrats with regards to their impeachment inquiry, won't advance the drive to impeach President Donald Trump.
Emerging from the day-long deposition, New York Republican
Lee Zeldin
said that former U.S. Envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker's private Thursday testimony, "blows a hole in the
argument" presented by Democrats that Trump asked the president of Ukraine for a quid pro quo.
Volker on Thursday spent hours testifying with congressional investigators who are seeking to discover if he
played any role in Trump's efforts to obtain from Ukrainian officials information on Hunter Biden, the son of 2020
presidential hopeful
Joseph R. Biden Jr.
House Intelligence Chairman
Adam B. Schiff
briefly addressed reporters during the testimony, charging that Trump encouraging a foreign nation
to investigate his political rival was a "fundamental breach of the president's oath of office."
"It endangers our elections, it endangers our national security, it ought to be condemned by every member of this
body, Democrats and Republicans alike," Schiff said.
While Volker testified, Ohio Republican
Michael R. Turner
, an Intelligence Committee member, released a statement saying he does "not believe that
Volker's testimony advanced Schiff's impeachment agenda."
Zeldin urged the relevant congressional committees to make public a transcript of Volker's deposition, along with
text messages Volker sent to Ukrainian officials, which have become a source of intrigue in the fledgling impeachment
push.
About two-and-a-half hours into Volker's deposition,
Jim Jordan
, an Ohio Republican and founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, emerged and told reporters that
Schiff wanted to limit certain members from questioning Volker and that the California Democrat had barred State
Department lawyers from participating in the closed briefing.
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"If this is how Mr. Schiff is going to conduct these types of interviews in the future," Jordan said, "that's a
concern."
Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo
has drawn the ire of congressional Democrats this week for rejecting a subpoena and rebuffing
congressional requests to question five current and former State Department officials to testify in the impeachment
inquiry.
Trump: House Intel Chairman Adam Schiff should "resign from office"
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Jordan praised Volker, calling him "impressive." Turner called Volker "an incredible diplomat," in his statement.
Volker resigned from his position as special envoy less than a week ago after his name appeared in a whistleblower
complaint alleging that Volker was coordinating with Ukrainian officials on how to handle requests from Trump's
personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. That whistleblower report is central in justifying House Democrats' impeachment
inquiry.
Turner said he doesn't believe Volker would have done anything untoward during his State Department service.
"It is my strong belief that Volker would not have been involved in nor permitted anything inappropriate, let
alone illegal, in his service to our country," Turner said. "Today he continued his legacy of integrity under
questioning from Schiff's staff."
"... The anti-Russian/pro-Ukrainian fanatics in the Borg, to which Lt.Col. Vindman belongs, are trying to prevent Trump from achieving his large picture vision of U.S. strategic interest and from defining U.S. foreign policy goals. They want to implement their own polices independent of what the president thinks or believes. ..."
"... If the deep state is allowed to make its own policies against the will of the elected officials why should we bother with holding elections? ..."
"... The Democrats are stupid to applaud this and to even further these schemes. They are likely to regain the presidency in 2024. What will they do when all the Civil Service functionaries Trump will have installed by then organize to ruin their policies? ..."
"... I surmise he is reflecting Israeli disquiet with the idea of a peace in Syria that leaves Assad in power. ..."
"... I first heard this idea that Trump is supposed to implement the foreign policy of the "government policy community" just a few days ago on the PBS Snooze Hour. It was startling to hear such a blatant admission of the existence of the "Deep State", and that Trump is supposed to obey it. I wonder who wrote the memo that says its now OK to publicly criticize Trump for not following the orders of the "government policy community". ..."
"... Trump is truly a horrible excuse for a human being, but apparently that is what is required to successfully rip the facade off the Deep State, however one wants to define it. Brain-dead Dummycrats will nod and exclaim that of course Trump is supposed to follow policy established by "knowledgeable experts". But I speculate that this new public attitude of the stink tank talking heads will enrage Trump supporters. ..."
"... Our foreign policies have, IMO, long been tailored to the needs and expectations of our major corporations. Notably, the fossil fuel corporations and their allies on Wall street. ..."
"... Our corporate empire wishes to export predatory capitalism around the globe, and pity any nation who stands in our way.. ..."
"... Isn't it something, b. Could you imagine ever reading a headline out of Russia or Germany where a subordinate went on record declaring he made attempts to edit Putin or Merkel's classified phone transcript, he then admits to sharing this classified information with a group of peers OUTSIDE classified channels and ended his 15 mins of fame by declaring Putin nor Merkel's policies on Ukraine fit the consensus of a national security bureaucratic group of nobodies. It's simply unimaginable! ..."
"... Which tells me they are fighting for something else entirely. Maybe more light will be shed following the release of the IG's FISA report. Then again, maybe they are motivated by fear that their lining their pockets with taxpayers gazillions has finally caught up to them. ..."
"... When Vindman admitted his crime, the Sergeant at Arms should have arrested him immediately after his testimony, but he was allowed to walk--yet another perversion of justice! By cutting off the line of questioning, Schiff was engaging in the obstruction of justice--the very crime he accuses Trump of committing! IMO, the application of the law must be depoliticized and all offenders arrested regardless of their station in life. ..."
"... A guy like this Vindman character, a walking identity problem first and foremost, given his background, should never have made it through the ranks of the US forces, let alone be given a job at the Security Council. A loyalty issue waiting to get worse. It's just wrong, a ridiculous notion. ..."
"... If you want to join the British forces e.g. you are required to have parents who were already born in Britain. Kept me from applying to join their navy back when I tried to. I was disappointed then, but it makes sense to handle the nationality question just like that. I can see that now. ..."
"... Regarding Washington, seems like the Beast, aka the Deep State, is finally coming out of its lair. Trump is way too salacious as bait for them to be careful and keep in hiding. Before they realize that trying to snatch Trump will be their own undoing, things will have way too much momentum for them to stop. Just look at Rep. Schiff moving from blunder to blunder. He'd be so much better off just doing nothing for half a year and keeping his mouth shut, but he somehow cannot do that. Neither can the Times. ..."
"... American citizens lost their voice in foreign policy a long time ago. It's a question I ask when the party politicians meet with lobbyists or attend events like Bilderberg. I am thankful for the alt media. Americans should be disgusted by their politicians and political parties. ..."
President Trump and many other people believe that it would be better for the United
States to ally with Russia against an ever growing China than to push Russia and China into
an undefeatable alliance against the United States. Trump often alluded to this during his
campaign. The voters seem to have liked that view.
The U.S. coup in the Ukraine made that policy more difficult to achieve. But within the
big picture the Ukraine is just a bankrupt and corrupt state that has little strategic value
and can be ignored.
One can disagree with that view and with other foreign policy priorities Trump set out and
pursues. I certainly disagree with most of them. But for those who work "at the pleasure of
the President" his views are the guidelines that set the direction of their duties.
The anti-Russian/pro-Ukrainian fanatics in the Borg, to which Lt.Col. Vindman belongs, are
trying to prevent Trump from achieving his large picture vision of U.S. strategic interest
and from defining U.S. foreign policy goals. They want to implement their own polices
independent of what the president thinks or believes.
We have warned that such interference by the Borg, the 'deep state' or 'swamp', is a
danger
to democracy :
If the deep state is allowed to make its own policies against the will of the elected
officials why should we bother with holding elections?
The Democrats are stupid to applaud this and to even further these schemes. They are
likely to regain the presidency in 2024. What will they do when all the Civil Service
functionaries Trump will have installed by then organize to ruin their policies?
It is unfortunate that the above points have to be repeated again and again. But when
powerful media try to sell the lies about the Ukrainian interferences by repeating the same
falsehoods over and over again the truth has only a chance to win when it is likewise spread
repeatedly.
Vindman is a Jew born in Ukraine and brought up in the Little Odessa
neighborhood of Brooklyn. I surmise he is reflecting Israeli disquiet with the idea of a
peace in Syria that leaves Assad in power.
I first heard this idea that Trump is supposed to implement the foreign policy of the
"government policy community" just a few days ago on the PBS Snooze Hour. It was startling to
hear such a blatant admission of the existence of the "Deep State", and that Trump is
supposed to obey it. I wonder who wrote the memo that says its now OK to publicly criticize
Trump for not following the orders of the "government policy community".
Everyone was shocked when Trump won the election, especially Trump and the "government
policy community". He is the proverbial dog that caught the speeding car. It's quaint that
Trump thinks he can make real policy changes. His failures in medical insurance, controlling
the FED, etc. underscore the point that being the leader is useless if underlings don't obey.
The "government policy community" will never follow Trump and it won't stop until Trump is
gone one way or another.
Trump is truly a horrible excuse for a human being, but apparently that is what is
required to successfully rip the facade off the Deep State, however one wants to define it.
Brain-dead Dummycrats will nod and exclaim that of course Trump is supposed to follow policy
established by "knowledgeable experts". But I speculate that this new public attitude of the
stink tank talking heads will enrage Trump supporters.
I'm starting to think that things may get really ugly in the "Home of the Brave and the
Land of the Free".
Our foreign policies have, IMO, long been tailored to the needs and expectations of our major
corporations. Notably, the fossil fuel corporations and their allies on Wall street.
Our corporate empire wishes to export predatory capitalism around the globe, and pity
any
nation who stands in our way..
Isn't it something, b. Could you imagine ever reading a headline out of Russia or Germany
where a subordinate went on record declaring he made attempts to edit Putin or Merkel's
classified phone transcript, he then admits to sharing this classified information with a
group of peers OUTSIDE classified channels and ended his 15 mins of fame by declaring Putin
nor Merkel's policies on Ukraine fit the consensus of a national security bureaucratic group
of nobodies. It's simply unimaginable!
Last night I watched a report by Catherine Herrhidge of Fox state that in Vindman's
statement he admits to sharing POTUS' classified transcripts and other readouts to a small
group of others outside the NSC. In essence he admitted to leaking classified information.
When Rep Jim Jordan started to drill down into that line of questioning, Schiff cut him
off.
This entire shitshow honestly tells any w/an open mind that the D's and their leadership
are desperate. Imagine a committee chairman not allowing members to question a witness about
who he shared the President's classified information with. That's not the rascally Dem Party
I know. It's painfully obvious these radicals will walk on hot coals, climb the Himalayans
and swim across the Atlantic to pin anything and I mean anything on Trump. They do not care
about downstream impacts, catastrophic as they may turn out to be.
Which tells me they are fighting for something else entirely. Maybe more light will be
shed following the release of the IG's FISA report. Then again, maybe they are motivated by
fear that their lining their pockets with taxpayers gazillions has finally caught up to
them.
When Vindman admitted his crime, the Sergeant at Arms should have arrested him immediately
after his testimony, but he was allowed to walk--yet another perversion of justice! By
cutting off the line of questioning, Schiff was engaging in the obstruction of justice--the
very crime he accuses Trump of committing! IMO, the application of the law must be
depoliticized and all offenders arrested regardless of their station in life.
A guy like this Vindman character, a walking identity problem first and foremost, given
his background, should never have made it through the ranks of the US forces, let alone be
given a job at the Security Council. A loyalty issue waiting to get worse. It's just wrong, a
ridiculous notion.
If you want to join the British forces e.g. you are required to have parents who were already
born in Britain. Kept me from applying to join their navy back when I tried to. I was
disappointed then, but it makes sense to handle the nationality question just like that. I
can see that now.
And nothing good ever comes from Ukraine. It's a psyched country, or would-be country, just
there to give the world trouble.
Regarding Washington, seems like the Beast, aka the Deep State, is finally coming out of its
lair. Trump is way too salacious as bait for them to be careful and keep in hiding. Before
they realize that trying to snatch Trump will be their own undoing, things will have way too
much momentum for them to stop. Just look at Rep. Schiff moving from blunder to blunder. He'd
be so much better off just doing nothing for half a year and keeping his mouth shut, but he
somehow cannot do that. Neither can the Times.
Looks like
Real Clear Investigations is suggesting a certain Eric Ciaramella is the "whistleblower",
which might upset Schiff since the Democrats want he name and political attachments kept a
secret. Anyway the article provides some more pieces for the Russiagate/Ukrainegate jigsaw
puzzle.
American citizens lost their voice in foreign policy a long time ago. It's a question I ask
when the party politicians meet with lobbyists or attend events like Bilderberg. I am
thankful for the alt media. Americans should be disgusted by their politicians and political
parties.
Okay, so just what is the Outlaw US Empire's Foreign/Imperial Policy? I'm glad I asked!
The overarching #1 policy goal of the Outlaw US Empire is to establish Full Spectrum
Domination over the planet and its people as enunciated publicly in 1996 policy paper
Joint
Vision 2010 which was modified and republished as Joint Vision 2020 , both of
which are essentially military policies, not National Defense as they're espousing 100%
offensive doctrines. In tandem is the much older economic policy plot known as the Washington
Consensus, which I've referenced many times and is best explained by Dr. Hudson's book
Super
Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire , and began at the end of WW2
but was greatly expanded/escalated in 1978.
Now it's obvious that Trump's trying to implement his own policies since he's getting so
much resistance. On the previous thread having this topic, I noted that Pepe Escobar had
written several pieces citing members of the Current Oligarchy who are Trump supporters who
provided him with info as to the likely directions of Trump's policies if he became POTUS. In
response to a request by Evelyn, I went and looked for those old items and found several.
This one IMO is worthy
of close scrutiny. Pepe opens:
"And for all the 24/7 scandal time of non-stop groping and kissing and lewd locker room
misbehaving, Trump seems to be ready to limp toward the finish line just as he began; an
all-out populist/nativist/nationalist fighting open borders (a Clinton mantra, as revealed by
the latest WikiLeaks Podesta email dump); 'free' trade; neoliberal globalization; and regime
change/bomb them into democracy/'humanitarian' imperialism."
Yes, there's more, but the above's more than enough to show that Trump's 100% against the
two major policies of the Outlaw US Empire--and--he's actually done what the above suggests
he might do. I remember reading that just a little more than 3 years ago and thought Pepe was
fed a line of bull from his sources--he wasn't.
S.O. 2
"> Will lock in Ukraine's Western-leaning trajectory, and allow Ukraine to realize its
dream of a vibrant democracy and economic prosperity.
Take a look at that statement and realise how diseased it is."
I totally agree. It is diseased on multiple levels. "lock in"? he says? What if Ukrainians
change their minds??? Say, by electing a Russia-leaning politico?
Oh, right, that's what happened back in 2014. Hence, the Maidan "lock-in." to me this "lock
in" comment is an open confession of ongoing meddling in Ukraine's internal affairs.
That is quite apart from the sick joke that is reference to "a dream of vibrant democracy
and economic development" brought about by the "West-leaning trajectory."
From what I have heard, Ukraine is an unmitigated disaster since "the West" decided to
determine and "lock in" its political trajectory. Not to mention thousands dead in the
Donbass and Lukansk.
"Donald Trump's red wave on Election Day was an unprecedented body blow against
neoliberalism. The stupid early-1990s prediction about the 'end of history' turned into a
– possible – shock of the new....
"Once again. A body blow, not a death blow. Like the cast of The Walking Dead, the
zombie neoliberal elite simply won't quit. For the Powers That Be/Deep State/Wall Street
axis, there's only one game in town, and that is to win, at all costs . Failing that, to
knock over the whole chessboard, as in hot war...
"The angry, white, blue collar Western uprising is the ultimate backlash against
neoliberalism – an instinctive reaction against the rigged economic casino capitalism
game and its subservient political arms. That's at the core of Trump winning non-college
white voters in Wisconsin by 28 points. Blaming 'whitelash', racism, WikiLeaks or Russia is
no more than childish diversionary tactics." [My Emphasis]
No, they didn't quit but immediately put their very improvised "insurance policy" into
play based on the lies and contrivances concocted during the campaign and put into play by
Obama in the most unprecedented fashion ever as a sitting POTUS had never before sought to
undermine/sabotage the incoming POTUS in the manner being devised--essentially in my book,
Obama committed treason: again .
In his written testimony (from the Stars and Stripes account in Don Bacon's link at 146 in
the previous 'Deep State' thread) Lt. Colonel Vindman wrote:"...I am a patriot, and it is my
sacred duty and honor to advance and defend OUR country, irrespective of party or politics."
Thanks so much b, for elaborating on that first part - "...sacred duty and honor to
advance.."
It does seem the Constitutional duties and limitations got lost in the shuffle back when
George Bush (I think it was) joked the Constitution was 'just a piece of paper.' Still, even
he too thought foreign policy was his to dictate. I am remembering the 'first strike'
doctrine that he propounded and Al Gore gave a speech decrying back in the day.
That "advance" stuck in my craw - thanks for shining the light.
@29 Ghost Ship
fascinating... didn't realize how much the Trump Admin's seemingly simple
retaliation-for-Russiagate investigation of Biden really struck a nerve among the Obama era
CIA/NSC Ukraine team. Wonder what they know.
Acting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor, who provided key testimony to the Democrats' controversial
impeachment inquiry last week, led an election observation delegation in Ukraine earlier this year for a George
Soros-funded organization that at the time boasted Hunter Biden on its small chairman's council.
Two months before he came out of retirement to serve as the highest ranking U.S. official in Ukraine, Taylor led
an election observer delegation to Ukraine's April 21, 2019 second round presidential election for the National
Democratic Institute (NDI) organization.
The delegation's mission, according to NDI
literature
, was to "accurately and impartially assess various aspects of the election process, and to offer
recommendations to support peaceful, credible elections and public confidence in the process."
Taylor led the team along with former Director of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's Office
for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OSCE/ODIHR) Audrey Glover and former Minister for European Union
Affairs Birgitta Ohlsson.
Hunter Biden at the time served on NDI's ten person Chairman's Council, which
describes itself
as
bringing together "leaders from corporate, philanthropic, and academia sectors to provide expertise, counsel and
resources to help the Institute meet these evolving challenges."
Biden was engaged in Ukraine in his role as a board member for Burisma, the Ukranian natural gas company at the
center of allegations regarding Joe Biden's involvement in Ukraine policy during the Obama administration while his
son was being paid by Burisma.
NDI did not immediately respond to a Breitbart News inquiry about when Hunter Biden was removed from the
organization's chairman's council. The WayBack Internet archive
shows
Biden was
listed on NDI's website in that position until at least August 2019, encompassing the period when Taylor led the
organization's delegation.
Earlier this month, an attorney for Biden
said
the former vice president's son had stepped down from the Burisma board and that he planned to step down
from the board of BHR, a Chinese company seeking to invest Chinese funds outside China.
The NDI is not Taylor's only seemingly conspicuous link. Last week, Breitbart News
reported
that Taylor has evidenced a close relationship with the Atlantic Council think tank, writing Ukraine
policy pieces with the organization's director and analysis articles published by the Council. The Atlantic
Council is
funded
by
and works in partnership with Burisma.
In addition to a direct relationship with the Atlantic Council, Taylor for the last nine years also served as a
senior adviser to the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC), which has
co-hosted
events
with the Atlantic Council and has participated in events co-hosted
jointly
by
the Atlantic Council and Burisma. USUBC events have been financially sponsored by Burisma.
Another senior
adviser
to
the USUBC is David J. Kramer, a long-time adviser to late Senator John McCain. Kramer played a central role in
disseminating the anti-Trump dossier to the news media and Obama administration.
Taylor participated in events and initiatives organized by Kramer.
The links may be particularly instructive after Breitbart News
reported
that
itinerary for a trip to Ukraine in August organized by the Burisma-funded Atlantic Council for ten Congressional
aides reveals that a staffer on Rep. Adam Schiff's House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held a meeting
during the trip with Taylor. The pre-planned trip took place after the so-called whistleblower officially filed his
August 12 complaint and
reportedly
after
a Schiff aide was contacted by the so-called whistleblower.
Common funding themes
Meanwhile, NDI, where Taylor led the election observation delegation,
lists
partners and sponsors who "provide much-needed resources," including Soros's Open Society Foundation, Google Inc.,
the National Endowment for Democracy, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S.
Department of State.
Besides Burisma funding, the Atlantic Council is also financed by Soros's Open Society Foundations, Google, and
the U.S. State Department. Another Atlantic Council funder is the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc.,
Google, Soros's Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Fund, and an agency of the State Department each also
finance a self-described investigative journalism organization repeatedly referenced as a source of information in
the so-called whistleblower's complaint alleging Trump was "using the power of his office to solicit interference
from a foreign country" in the 2020 presidential race.
The charges in the July 22 report referenced in the so-called whistleblower's document and released by the Google
and Soros-funded organization, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), seem to be the public
precursors for a lot of the so-called whistleblower's own claims, as Breitbart News
documented
.
One key section of the so-called whistleblower's document claims that "multiple U.S. officials told me that Mr.
Giuliani had reportedly privately reached out to a variety of other Zelensky advisers, including Chief of Staff
Andriy Bohdan and Acting Chairman of the Security Service of Ukraine Ivan Bakanov."
This was allegedly to follow up on Trump's call with Zelensky in order to discuss the "cases" mentioned in that
call, according to the so-called whistleblower's narrative. The complainer was clearly referencing Trump's request
for Ukraine to investigate the Biden corruption allegations.
Even though the statement was written in first person – "multiple U.S. officials told me" – it contains a footnote
referencing a report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
That footnote reads:
In a report published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) on 22 July, two associates
of Mr. Giuliani reportedly traveled to Kyiv in May 2019 and met with Mr. Bakanov and another close Zelensky adviser,
Mr. Serhiy Shefir.
The so-called whistleblower's account goes on to rely upon that same OCCRP report on three more occasions. It does
so to:
Write that Ukraine's Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko "also stated that he wished to communicate directly
with Attorney General Barr on these matters."
Document that Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani "had spoken in late 2018 to former Prosecutor General Shokin, in a
Skype call arranged by two associates of Mr. Giuliani."
Bolster the charge that, "I also learned from a U.S. official that 'associates' of Mr. Giuliani were trying to
make contact with the incoming Zelenskyy team." The so-called whistleblower then relates in another footnote, "I
do not know whether these associates of Mr. Giuliani were the same individuals named in the 22 July report by
OCCRP, referenced above."
The OCCRP
report
repeatedly
referenced is actually a "joint investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and
BuzzFeed News, based on interviews and court and business records in the United States and Ukraine."
BuzzFeed infamously also first
published
the
full anti-Trump dossier alleging unsubstantiated collusion between Trump's presidential campaign and Russia. The
dossier was paid for by Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and was produced by the
Fusion GPS opposition dirt outfit.
The OCCRP and BuzzFeed "joint investigation" resulted in both OCCRP and BuzzFeed publishing similar lengthy pieces
on July 22 claiming that Giuliani was attempting to use connections to have Ukraine investigate Trump's political
rivals.
The so-called whistleblower's document, however, only mentions the largely unknown OCCRP and does not reference
BuzzFeed, which has faced scrutiny over its reporting on the Russia collusion claims.
Taylor, Atlantic Council, Kramer
Multiple U.S. media outlets last week
obtained
Taylor's
full opening statement to the House Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees.
In the leaked pre-written full opening statement, Taylor alluded to work he said he did for a "small Ukrainian
non- governmental organization" but he omitted the name of the organization.
"In the intervening 10 years, I have stayed engaged with Ukraine, visiting frequently since 2013 as a board member
of a small Ukrainian non- governmental organization supporting good governance and reform," he said.
The name of the organization is the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC), where Taylor served for nine years as
senior advisor. The USUBC has co-hosted or participated in scores of events with the Atlantic Council. Taylor has
also authored numerous analysis pieces published by the Atlantic Council itself and has co-authored opeds written
together with the Atlantic Council's director.
Burisma is a key financial backer of the Atlantic Council. In 2017, Burisma and the Atlantic Council
signed
a
cooperative agreement to develop transatlantic programs with Burisma's financial support reportedly to focus "on
European and international energy security." Burisma specifically finances the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center.
Besides funding the Atlantic Council, Burisma also routinely partners with the think tank. Only four months ago,
the company
co-hosted
the
Atlantic Council's second Annual Kharkiv Security Conference. Burisma
advertises
that
it committed itself to "15 key principles of rule of law and economic policy in Ukraine developed by the Atlantic
Council."
In March, three months before he became Trump's ambassador to Ukraine, the Atlantic Council
featured
an
oped co-authored by Taylor in which the diplomat argued Ukraine "has further to travel toward its self-proclaimed
European goal" of reformation.
In 2017, Taylor wrote a
piece
for
the Atlantic Council about a Ukrainian parliament vote on health care reform.
Last year, he
participated
in
an online Atlantic Council Q & A on the Crimea.
In November 2011, the Atlantic Council
hosted
Taylor
as the featured speaker at a discussion event when he was appointed that year as Special Coordinator for Middle East
Transitions at the State Department.
In March 2014, Taylor co-authored an analysis piece at Foreign Policy
magazine
written
together with John E. Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who serves as director of the Eurasia Center for
the Atlantic council – the same Eurasia Center that is specifically funded by Burisma.
That same year, Taylor also co-authored a
New York Times
op-ed
with
the Atlantic Council's Herbst on Ukraine. The duo co-authored another
Times
op-ed
one
year later on the future of Ukraine. The op-ed was
reprinted
on
the USUBC's website.
The USUBC, where Taylor was a senior adviser for nine years along with Kramer, has
hosted
Herbst
for briefings and other events.
Kramer of the USUBC, infamous for his role in disseminating the anti-Trump dossier, also held a November 2011
event
at
the Atlantic Council's D.C. offices for a group that he heads called Freedom House. Taylor was one of six featured
speakers at Kramer's event.
The Atlantic Council published what it deemed a
24-point
plan
for ending the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. In conjunction with the plan, Kramer, in his role as
director of Freedom House, organized a letter by American and European experts and former officials urging Russia to
end its conflict with Ukraine. Signatories of the letter,
published
on
the Burisma-funded Atlantic Council's website, include Taylor, Kramer and the Atlantic Council's Herbst.
As late as this past March, Taylor was
listed
as
one of nine members of the Friends of Ukraine Network Economic Security Task Force. Another member is Kramer.
When he deployed to Ukraine as Trump's ambassador in June, the USUBC
authored
a
piece in the Kyiv Post welcoming him.
In the USUBC
piece
welcoming
Taylor to Ukraine, Kramer himself commented about Taylor's ambassador position. "He's a great choice for now," Kramer
gushed.
The USUBC's piece noted that the "USUBC has worked closely with Ambassador Taylor for many years," touting his
role as the business group's senior adviser.
On June 26, just nine days after arriving in Ukraine as ambassador, the USUBC already
hosted
Taylor
for a roundtable discussion about his new position.
Vadym Pozharskyi, adviser to the board of directors at Burisma Holdings, was also previously
hosted
as
a USUBC featured speaker.
Geysha Gonzalez is the sponsoring Atlantic Council officer listed on the Congressional disclosure form for the
Schiff staffer's trip to Ukraine in August. She is deputy director of the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center.
Gonzalez is also one of eleven members of the rapid response
team
for
the Ukrainian Election Task Force, which says it is working to expose "foreign interference in Ukraine's democracy."
Another
member
of
the team is Kramer.
Kramer revealed in testimony that he held a meeting about the anti-Trump dossier with a reporter from BuzzFeed
News, who he says snapped photos of the controversial document without Kramer's permission when he left the room to
go to the bathroom. That meeting was held at the McCain Institute office in Washington, Kramer stated.
BuzzFeed infamously
published
the
Christopher Steele dossier on January 10, 2017, setting off a firestorm of news media coverage about the document.
The Washington Post
reported
last
February that Kramer received the dossier directly from Fusion GPS after McCain expressed interest in it.
In a deposition taken on December 13, 2017, and
posted
online
earlier this year, Kramer revealed that he met with two Obama administration officials to inquire about
whether the anti-Trump dossier was being taken seriously.
In one case, Kramer said that he personally provided a copy of the dossier to Obama National Security Council
official Celeste Wallander.
In the deposition, Kramer said that McCain specifically asked him in early December 2016 to meet about the dossier
with Wallander and Victoria Nuland, a senior official in John Kerry's State Department.
Taylor testimony and Burisma
In his testimony to the Democrats secretive impeachment inquiry, Taylor said that he "understood" from U.S.
Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland that a White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky "was dependent on a public announcement of the investigations." Taylor was referring to the announcement of
an investigation that included Burisma, as well as alleged Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Taylor's testimony was
characterized
by
CNN as "explosive" and was similarly hyped by other news media outlets despite it not being unusual for the U.S. to
condition aspects of relations on participation in ongoing American investigations involving the foreign country in
question.
Still, Taylor conceded that there was no quid pro quo.
"Ambassador Sondland said that he had talked to President Zelensky and Mr. Yermak and told them that, although
this was not a quid pro quo, if President Zelensky did not 'clear things up' in public, we could be at a 'stalemate.'
I understood 'stalemate to mean that Ukraine would not receive the much-needed military assistance," Taylor
testified.
Aaron Klein is Breitbart's Jerusalem bureau
chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk
radio program, "
Aaron
Klein Investigative Radio
." Follow him on
Twitter
@AaronKleinShow.
Follow him on
Facebook.
Joshua Klein contributed research to this article.
The State Department is a neoliberal Trojan horse in the USA government, with strong
globalist ethos. They will sabotage any change of foreign policy. and they intend to kick the
neoliberal can down the road as long as possible. They are the same type of neoliberals as Joe
Biden and Hillary Clinton. Probably less corrupt them those two, but still.
They are imperial soldiers par excellence; these whole life concentrated on serving the
imperial interests, and strive for the strengthening and expansion of neoliberal empire via
opening new markets for the expansions of US based multinationals, staging wars and color
revolutions to overthrows the governments which resists Washington Consensus, etc.
They probably can't be reformed, only fired, or forced into retirement. 72 years old neocon
stooge Taylor is just the tip of the iceberg.
From Wikipedia: He directed a Defense Department think tank at Fort Lesley J. McNair . Following that
assignment, he went to Brussels for a five year assignment as the Special
Deputy Defense Advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to NATO From 1992 until 2002 Taylor served with the rank of
ambassador coordinating assistance to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union , followed by an assignment in
Kabul coordinating U.S. and
international assistance to Afghanistan . In 2004 he was transferred to
Baghdad as Director of the
Iraq Reconstruction Management Office
Taylor was nominated by President George W. Bush to be United States ambassador to
Ukraine while he was serving as Senior Consultant to the Coordinator of Reconstruction and
Stabilization at the Department of State. [10] He was
confirmed by the U.S. Senate on May 26, 2006, and was
sworn in on June 5, 2006. At the time Taylor assumed responsibilities at the embassy it was, with
over 650 employees from nine U.S. government departments and agencies, the fifth-largest
bilateral mission in Europe
Notable quotes:
"... As William Taylor's testimony about Ukraine creates shock waves in Washington, a self-anointed mandarin class or, if you prefer, deep state, that has largely operated unmolested until the advent of Trump now appears to believe that it can foil, or even subvert, the policies of a president it deems unfit for office, a development that should worry Democrats and Republicans alike. ..."
"... One reason is that those who seek to repair the damage caused by a thirty-year deterioration in trust and cooperation face an uphill battle against what recently has been given the colloquial name, "the Blob." The term, coined by Obama White House staffer Ben Rhodes, refers to the foreign-policy establishment, mostly located in Washington, DC and constantly focused on the putative decline of American influence abroad. It has been distinguished by its unwillingness, or inability, to reconsider or reprioritize national interests that were first defined after World War II, and then continued, by and large, on auto-pilot after the end of the Cold War. ..."
"... Another reason is that Trump himself has been largely indifferent to who assumes positions in his administration, calculating that by sheer force of will he, and he alone, can be the decider. In September, Trump referred to his search for a fresh national security adviser in the following terms: "It's great because it's a lot of fun to work with Donald Trump, and it's very easy, actually, to work with me. You know why it's easy? Because I make all the decisions. They don't have to work." This insouciant approach has now boomeranged on Trump. ..."
"... Taylor, as his testimony made clear, was able to observe first-hand many of the Trump administration's ham-fisted moves to extract, in one form another, concessions from Ukraine. But however clumsy and counterproductive Trump's moves may have been, Taylor offered an overly simplistic survey of events in the region. Indeed, his Manichean introductory and concluding remarks suggested that he views Russia as an inveterate enemy of America and Ukraine as a white knight. ..."
"... Foreign policy is rarely a morality play and the fairy-tale that Taylor presented was more redolent of a post–Cold War cold warrior who, like too many of his colleagues at the foreign desk, are committed to retrograde thinking, than of an official offering an incisive look at a complex and troubled region. It is not as though Ukraine, where Taylor served as ambassador during the George W. Bush administration, has ever been free from the plague of corruption or murky machinations by local competing factions. Reflexively taking the side of Ukraine does not serve American interests any more than trying to pummel it for political favors. The testimony of Taylor and other State Department witnesses before the House Intelligence Committee is a case in point. ..."
"... ow that the fight between Trump and the permanent bureaucracy is now in the open? ..."
"... Vice President Mike Pence told Laura Ingraham , host of Fox's The Ingraham Angle , "There is no question when President Trump said we were going to drain the swamp, but an awful lot of the swamp has been caught up in the State Department bureaucracy and we're just going to keep fighting it. And we are going to fight it with the truth." For his part, Evans thinks that there is a modicum of hope for improved relations with Moscow. "Taylor will have to resign now," he says. "We might even see a moderation of the uncritical support for Ukraine, as some of the ugly underside starts to emerge, although anti-Russian sentiment is the mother's milk of Congress." ..."
As William Taylor's testimony about Ukraine creates shock waves in Washington, a
self-anointed mandarin class or, if you prefer, deep state, that has largely operated
unmolested until the advent of Trump now appears to believe that it can foil, or even subvert,
the policies of a president it deems unfit for office, a development that should worry
Democrats and Republicans alike.
President Donald Trump campaigned and was elected on a platform of improved relations with
Russia. Yet, three years after his election, no real improvement has materialized and, if
anything, they have deteriorated. Why?
One reason is that those who seek to repair the damage caused by a thirty-year
deterioration in trust and cooperation face an uphill battle against what recently has been
given the colloquial name, "the Blob." The term,
coined by Obama White House staffer Ben Rhodes, refers to the foreign-policy establishment,
mostly located in Washington, DC and constantly focused on the putative decline of American
influence abroad. It has been distinguished by its unwillingness, or inability, to reconsider
or reprioritize national interests that were first defined after World War II, and then
continued, by and large, on auto-pilot after the end of the Cold War. Now Trump is
taking a wrecking ball to
this world order. But a self-anointed mandarin class or, if you prefer, deep state, that has
largely operated unmolested until the advent of Trump now appears to believe that it can foil,
or even subvert, the policies of a president it deems unfit for office, a development that
should worry Democrats and Republicans alike.
Another reason is that Trump himself has been largely indifferent to who assumes
positions in his administration, calculating that by sheer force of will he, and he alone, can
be the decider. In September, Trump referred to his search for a fresh national security
adviser in the following terms: "It's great because it's a lot of fun to work with Donald
Trump, and it's very easy, actually, to work with me. You know why it's easy? Because I make
all the decisions. They don't have to work." This insouciant approach has now boomeranged on
Trump.
Enter William B. Taylor, Jr. Taylor has been the U.S. Chargé d 'Affaires Ukraine
since June of this year (having previously held the position of ambassador 2006–2009),
and yesterday he testified behind-closed-doors as part of the House impeachment inquiry into
Trump. Taylor, as his testimony made clear, was able to observe first-hand many of the
Trump administration's ham-fisted moves to extract, in one form another, concessions from
Ukraine. But however clumsy and counterproductive Trump's moves may have been, Taylor offered
an overly simplistic survey of events in the region. Indeed, his Manichean introductory and
concluding remarks suggested that he views Russia as an inveterate enemy of America and Ukraine
as a white knight.
In his opening statement, Taylor emphasized that Ukraine is a strategic partner of the
United States that is "important for the security of our country as well as Europe," as well as
a country that is "under armed attack from Russia." Well, yes. But this sweeping description
occludes more than it reveals. Foreign policy is rarely a morality play and the fairy-tale
that Taylor presented was more redolent of a post–Cold War cold warrior who, like too
many of his colleagues at the foreign desk, are committed to retrograde thinking, than of an
official offering an incisive look at a complex and troubled region. It is not as though
Ukraine, where Taylor served as ambassador during the George W. Bush administration, has ever
been free from the plague of corruption or murky machinations by local competing factions.
Reflexively taking the side of Ukraine does not serve American interests any more than trying
to pummel it for political favors. The testimony of Taylor and other State Department witnesses
before the House Intelligence Committee is a case in point.
Will anything change n ow that the fight between Trump and the permanent bureaucracy is
now in the open? On Tuesday night, Vice President Mike Pence told Laura
Ingraham , host of Fox's The Ingraham Angle , "There is no question when President
Trump said we were going to drain the swamp, but an awful lot of the swamp has been caught up
in the State Department bureaucracy and we're just going to keep fighting it. And we are going
to fight it with the truth." For his part, Evans thinks that there is a modicum of hope for
improved relations with Moscow. "Taylor will have to resign now," he says. "We might even see a
moderation of the uncritical support for Ukraine, as some of the ugly underside starts to
emerge, although anti-Russian sentiment is the mother's milk of Congress."
Hunter DeRensis is a reporter at the National Interest .
There was always an element of this in US foreign policy. Teddy Roosevelt took the
opportunity of the Navy Sec being out for the weekend to send orders for the Asiatic
Fleet to move to position to attack the Philippines. The returning Sec was appalled, but
it was too late. For that adventure, he was rewarded by becoming President in due
time.
Forty years later, the US oil embargo on Japan happened the same way. The boss away
for the weekend, the deputy ordered it, and then left his bosses the options of
supporting it or appearing weak and appearing to make a concession by withdrawing it. For
that adventure, he was rewarded by becoming Sec of State in due time.
The pattern is not new. Doing it domestically is new. Doing it to remove a President
is new. Doing it to reverse a US election is new, though reversing foreign elections that
way by the same people was routine.
If we are to fix this, we need to face that it is a problem very deeply embedded. It
is not new, and does not have recent nor shallow roots.
"What goes unmentioned is that many of the dead are Eastern Ukrainians with deep
language and cultural connections to Russia, who acted upon secessionist impulses only
after the emergence of the new regime in Kiev."
This is true. Putin/Lavrov team gets a lot criticism for that in Russia. Maybe, of all
those Kalibrs going to Raqqa, Syria, just a few could make a detour to Lvov, Ukraine, for
demonstration purposes? While I greatly respect the diplomatic acumen of the Russian
leadership, i think support for pro-Russia East Ukrainians has been insufficient. More
could and should have been done. Donbass people were allowed to receive Russian passports
recently, so hopefully this will change things for the better, and more Russian support
will arrive, but we will see. West won't like a more pro-active Russian approach, but
since Russia-West relations won't improve in a foreseeable future, Russia can safely
discard Western opinion and agree to disagree on this particular matter.
According to Deng Xiaoping's maxim, we should "seek truth from facts," and after three
years Trump recognizes the fact that it is in U.S. national interest to avoid great power
conflict either with China or Russia. If we were to be honest and "seek truth from facts"
judging Putin with fairness by his action, we would see that Putin's intellect and
character have benefitted the international community at large in every regions across
the globe. Sadly, the American mandarin class is like Mao's Chinese Gang of Four who
insisted on continuing with outdated Cold War political ideology. Americans would never
vote for any chaos president, and Trump realizes that in time for 2020.
Russia has its own fair share of neo-naztis, so what?
Ukrainian neo-nazis (Azov etc.) get paided and armed by the Ukrainian state.
On Wednesday, New York Rep. Max Rose, who chairs the
counterterrorism subcommittee, submitted a letter to the State
Department, co-signed by 39 members of Congress . It urged the department
to designate Azov Battalion (a far-right paramilitary regiment in
Ukraine), National Action (a neo-Nazi group based in the U.K.), and
Nordic Resistance Movement (a neo-Nazi network from Scandinavia) as
terrorist organizations .
The reason they think Azov is neo-nasti organization is because the suspect in
Christchurch mosque got military
training in Ukraine.
I think this is typical illustration of the "Post hoc" fallacy.
There are no records of Azov perpetuating anti semitic or anti muslim actions in
Ukraine, so it is not clear if there is a relation.
Russia, on the other hand, openly peddling supremacy - Russian civilization, Russian
world, Russian character, Russian language - are the best and superior to anything
else.
"... As for impeachment, ringmaster Rep. Adam Schiff is surely steaming straight into his own historic Joe McCarthy moment when somebody of incontestable standing denounces him as a fraud and a scoundrel and the mysterious workings of nonlinear behavior tips the political mob past a criticality threshold, shifting the weight of consensus out of darkness and madness. It has happened before in history. ..."
It was interesting to watch the Cable News divas go incandescent under the glare of their
own gaslight late yesterday
when they received the unpleasant news that the Barr & Durham
"review" of RussiaGate had been officially
upgraded to a "criminal investigation."
Rachel Maddow's trademark pouty-face got a workout as she strained to imagine " what
the
thing
is that Durham might be looking into."
Yes, that's a riddle, wrapped in a mystery,
inside an enigma, all right with a sputtering fuse sticking out of it. Welcome to the Wile E. Coyote
Lookalike Club, Rache. You'll have a lot of competition when the Sunday morning news-chat shows rev
up.
Minutes later, the answer dawned on her:
"It [
the thing
] follows the wildest conspiracy theories from Fox News!"
You'd think that someone who invested two-plus years of her life in the Mueller report, which blew
up in her pouty-face last spring, might have felt a twinge of journalistic curiosity as to the
sum-and-substance of the thing. But no, she just hauled on-screen RussiaGate intriguer David Laufman,
a former DOJ lawyer who ran the agency's CounterIntel and Export Control desk during the RussiaGate
years, and also helped oversee the botched Hillary Clinton private email server probe.
"They have this theory," Rachel said, "that maybe Russia didn't interfere in the election ."
"It's preposterous," said Laufman, all lawyered up and ready to draw a number and take a seat
for his own grand jury testimony.
Over in the locked ward of CNN, Andy Cooper and Jeff Toobin attempted to digest the criminal
investigation news as if someone had ordered in a platter of shit sandwiches for the green room just
before air-time.
Toobin pretended to not know exactly who the mysterious Joseph Misfud was,
and struggled to even pronounce his name: " Mifsood? Misfood ? You mean the Italian professor?"
No Jeff, the guy employed by several "friendly" foreign intelligence agencies, and the CIA,
to sandbag Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, and failed. I guess when you're at the beating
heart of TV news, you don't have to actually follow any of the stories reported outside your locked
ward, and maybe entertain a few angles outside your
purview
, i.e. your range of thought and
experience.
Next Andy hauled onscreen former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (now a
paid CNN "contributor") to finesse a distinction between the "overall investigation of the Russian
interference" or "the counterintelligence investigation that was launched by the FBI."
Consider that Mr. Clapper was right in the middle between the CIA and the FBI. Since he is known to be
a friend of Mr. Comey's and a not-friend of Mr. Brennan's one can easily see which way Mr. Clapper is
tilting. One can also see the circular firing squad that this is a setup for. And, of course, Mr.
Clapper himself will be a subject in Mr. Durham's criminal case proceedings. I predict October will be
the last month that Mr. Clapper draws a CNN paycheck -- as he hunkers down with his attorneys awaiting
the subpoena with his name on it.
The
New
York Times story
on this turn of events Friday morning is a lame attempt to rescue former FBI
Director Jim Comey by pinning the blame for RussiaGate on the CIA, shoving CIA John Brennan under the
bus.
The Times report says: "Mr. Durham has also asked whether C.I.A. officials might have
somehow tricked the F.B.I. into opening the Russia investigation." There's the next narrative for you.
Expect to hear this incessantly well into 2020.
I wonder if there is any way to hold the errand boys-and-girls in the news media accountable for
their roles as handmaidens in what will be eventually known as a seditious coup to overthrow a
president.
We do enjoy freedom of the press in this land, but I can see how these birds merit
charges as unindicted co-conspirators in the affair.
One wonders if the various boards of
directors of the newspaper and cable news outfits might seek to salvage their self-respect by firing
the executives who allowed it happen. If anything might be salutary in the outcome of this hot mess,
it would be a return to respectability of the news media.
As for impeachment, ringmaster Rep. Adam Schiff is surely steaming straight into his own
historic Joe McCarthy moment when somebody of incontestable standing denounces him as a fraud and a
scoundrel
and the mysterious workings of nonlinear behavior tips the political mob past a
criticality threshold, shifting the weight of consensus out of darkness and madness. It has happened
before in history. Two centuries before Joe McCarthy, the French national assembly suddenly turned on
the Jacobins Robespierre and St. Just after their orgy of beheading 17,000 enemies. The two were
quickly dispatched themselves to the awe of their beloved guillotine and the Jacobin faction was not
heard of again -- until recently in America, where it first infected the Universities and then sickened
the polity at large almost unto death
Former national security officials fight back as Trump attacks impeachment as 'deep
state' conspiracy
"What is happening currently is not normal," said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, who served as
a U.S. intelligence officer on Russia and Eurasia before stepping down in 2018. "This
represents a deviation from the way that these institutions regularly function. And when the
institutions don't work, that is a national security threat."
She was among 90 national security veterans who signed an open letter published Sunday
in support of the anonymous whistleblower who filed a complaint that Trump had acted
improperly in asking the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden in a July phone
call.
Trump has attempted to intimidate other government officials into not cooperating by
casting those who offered information to the whistleblower as "close to spies." The open
letter emphasized that the whistleblower "is protected from certain egregious forms of
retaliation."
Looks like a testimony of a member of Nuland neocons clique.
A reasonable Trump administration gesture of delaying military aid now is interpreted as a
pressure on Zelensky government. But not everybody in Zelensky government is interesting in the
USA military aid; most including probably Zelensky himself understand that this carrot s the way
US neocon push Ukraine in self-destructive game of to catching hot potatoes from the fire to
advance the USA strategic anti-Russian interests in the region.
Trump is right that Ukraine participated in Russiagate, but he is wrong that Poroshenko
administration acted as a supplementary force in Russiagate on its own initiative: in reality
Poroshenko was the USA marionette fully controlled from Washington and would do anything to
please Obama administration.
Notable quotes:
"... "He said that Ukraine was a corrupt country, full of 'terrible people.' He said they 'tried to take me down.' ..."
"Second, in May of this year, I became concerned that a negative narrative about Ukraine,
fueled by assertions made by Ukraine's departing Prosecutor General, was reaching the President
of the United States, and impeding our ability to support the new Ukrainian government as
robustly as I believed we should."
"Fifth and finally, I strongly supported the provision of U.S. security assistance,
including lethal defensive weapons, to Ukraine throughout my tenure."
...While Volker said Biden did not come up explicitly in his conversations, he made a point
of defending the former vice president in his remarks. "I have known former Vice President
Biden for 24 years, and the suggestion that he would be influenced in his duties as Vice
President by money for his son simply has no credibility to me," he wrote. "I know him as a man
of integrity and dedication to our country."
... ... ...
Volker also testified that while he was aware that the Trump administration
had put a hold on needed military aid to Ukraine at the same time that he was connecting
Giuliani with Zelensky's government, "I did not perceive these issues to be linked in any way."
Volker said that "no reason was given" for the holdup, but it concerned him; he "stressed"
to staff at the State Department, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council that the aid
was vital to Ukraine's security, "deterrence of Russian aggression," and Ukraine's relationship
with the US.
"That said, I was not overly concerned about the development because I believed the decision
would ultimately be reversed," Volker told Congress, citing the "unanimous position" of
Congress, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the NSC in favor of restoring the aid. "I
knew it would just be a matter of time."
...On his contacts with Rudy Giuliani, Volker said he became aware early this year about "an
emerging, negative narrative about Ukraine in the United States, fueled by accusations made by
the then–prosecutor general of Ukraine, Yuriy Lutsenko, that some Ukrainian citizens may
have sought to influence" the 2016 presidential election in the US, "including by passing
information that was detrimental to" Trump, which they hoped would reach Hillary Clinton's
campaign.
"I believed that these accusations by Mr. Lutsenko were themselves self-serving, intended to
make himself appear valuable to the United States, so that the United States might weigh in
against his being removed from office by the new government," Volker said.
...Volker told Congress that he learned in May this year that Giuliani planned to travel to
Ukraine to look into the unsubstantiated allegations that Biden had used his position as vice
president to benefit his son Hunter Biden. Volker said he contacted Giuliani to say that
Lutsenko was not credible -- Volker said they had a brief phone call, but didn't say how
Giuliani responded. Giuliani later canceled his trip. Volker noted that Giuliani claimed at the
time that Zelensky was surrounded "by enemies of the United States," a sentiment that Volker
said he "fundamentally disagreed" with.
...Giuliani came up repeatedly in Volker's conversations with Zelensky and the Ukrainian
president's administration. Volker said he had a private conversation with Zelensky in early
July, and told Zelensky that a "negative view" of Ukraine -- one that Giuliani held -- was
"likely making its way to" Trump. A week later, Volker met with Yermak, the Zelensky aide, who
asked to be connected to Giuliani.
...
Volker also testified to Congress that he met with Trump in May and suggested that
the president invite Zelensky to the White House, arguing Zelensky could help clean up
corruption in Ukraine. But Volker said that Trump was "very skeptical" of Zelensky at the
time.
"He said that Ukraine was a corrupt country, full of 'terrible people.' He said they
'tried to take me down.' In the course of that conversation, he referenced conversations
with Mayor Giuliani," Volker said. "It was clear to me that despite the positive news and
recommendations being conveyed by this official delegation about the new President, President
Trump had a deeply rooted negative view on Ukraine rooted in the past. He was clearly receiving
other information from other sources, including Mayor Giuliani, that was more negative, causing
him to retain this negative view."
Michael McFaul was the key person in failed "white color revolution in Russia in 2011-2012
designed to prevent reelection of Putin. h was recalled soon after Putin elections. So his praise
instantly suggests that the other person might be a color revolution specialist as well
In this sense his participation in Ukrainegate is just a top of his long carier as colore
revolution specialist. Ukrainegate does looks like the second Maydan.
Michael
McFaul, who served as the US ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, called Taylor, who he's
known for three decades, "just a consummate public servant."
"I do remember when he was ambassador to Ukraine he saw the bigness of the moment -- this is
well before Russia annexed Crimea and went into Donbass -- that fighting for sovereignty for
Ukraine and democracy and anti-corruption, he was very committed to that," McFaul said.
Yet another female neocon hawk of the mold of Samantha Power. Hillary have found not only
Nuland, but several of them ;-) She denied that Nulandgate create a civil war in Ukraine to
advance the US geopolitical goals. She also denied influencing Ukrainian leadership, while in
reality Ukraine now is governed from the US embassy (which is sometimes called by locals called
Washington Obcom) . Such a hypocrite.
As for "do not prosecute" list -- do not believe anything government officials say
until it is officially denied.
And that EuroMaydan actually promote corruption to the level unheard during Yanukovich tenure
but with different players.
Notable quotes:
"... creates an environment in which U.S. business can more easily trade, invest and profit. ..."
"... the Embassy's April 2016 letter to the Prosecutor General's Office about the investigation into the Anti-Corruption Action Center or AntAC ..."
"... the departure from office of former Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin ..."
"... As Mr. Lutsenko, the former Ukrainian Prosecutor General has recently acknowledged, the notion that I created or disseminated a "do not prosecute" list is completely false ..."
"... Equally fictitious is the notion that I am disloyal to President Trump. I have heard the allegation in the media that I supposedly told the Embassy team to ignore the President's orders "since he was going to be impeached." That allegation is false. I have never said such a thing, to my Embassy colleagues or to anyone else. ..."
"... I have never met Hunter Biden, nor have I had any direct or indirect conversations with him. And although I have met former Vice President Biden several times over the course of our many years in government, neither he nor the previous Administration ever, directly or indirectly, raised the issue of either Burisma or Hunter Biden with me. ..."
"... With respect to Mayor Giuliani, I have had only minimal contacts with him -- a total of three that I recall. None related to the events at issue. I do not know Mr. Giuliani's motives for attacking me. But individuals who have been named in the press as contacts of Mr. Giuliani may well have believed that their personal financial ambitions were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine. ..."
The Revolution of Dignity, and the Ukrainian people's demand to end corruption, forced the
new Ukrainian government to take measures to fight the rampant corruption that long permeated
that country's political and economic systems. We have long understood that strong
anti-corruption efforts must form an essential part of our policy in Ukraine; now there was a
window of opportunity to do just that.
Why is this important? Put simply: anti-corruption efforts serve Ukraine's interests. They
serve ours as well. Corrupt leaders are inherently less trustworthy, while an honest and
accountable Ukrainian leadership makes a U.S.-Ukraine partnership more reliable and more
valuable to the U.S. A level playing field in this strategically located country -- one with a
European landmass exceeded only by Russia and with one of the largest populations in Europe --
creates an environment in which U.S. business can more easily trade, invest and
profit. Corruption is a security issue as well, because corrupt officials are vulnerable
to Moscow. In short, it is in our national security interest to help Ukraine transform into a
country where the rule of law governs and corruption is held in check.
Two Wars
But change takes time, and the aspiration to instill rule-of-law values has still not been
fulfilled. Since 2014, Ukraine has been at war, not just with Russia, but within itself, as
political and economic forces compete to determine what kind of country Ukraine will become:
the same old, oligarch-dominated Ukraine where corruption is not just prevalent, but is the
system? Or the country that Ukrainians demanded in the Revolution of Dignity -- a country where
rule of law is the system, corruption is tamed, and people are treated equally and according to
the law? During the 2019 presidential elections, the Ukrainian people answered that question
once again. Angered by insufficient progress in the fight against corruption, Ukrainian voters
overwhelmingly elected a man who said that ending corruption would be his number one priority.
The transition, however, created fear among the political elite, setting the stage for some of
the issues I expect we will be discussing today.
... ... ...
I arrived in Ukraine on August 22, 2016 and left Ukraine permanently on May 20, 2019.
Several of the events with which you may be concerned occurred before I was even in
country.
Here are just a few:
the release of the so-called "Black Ledger" and Mr. Manafort's subsequent resignation
from the Trump campaign;
the Embassy's April 2016 letter to the Prosecutor General's Office about the
investigation into the Anti-Corruption Action Center or AntAC ; and
the departure from office of former Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin .
Several other events occurred after I was recalled from Ukraine. These include:
President Trump's July 25 call with President Zelenskiy;
All of the discussions surrounding that phone call; and
Any discussions surrounding the reported delay of security assistance to Ukraine in
Summer 2019.
During my Tenure in Ukraine
As for events during my tenure in Ukraine, I want to categorically state that I have
never myself or through others, directly or indirectly, ever directed, suggested, or in any
other way asked for any government or government official in Ukraine (or elsewhere) to
refrain from investigating or prosecuting actual corruption. As Mr. Lutsenko, the former
Ukrainian Prosecutor General has recently acknowledged, the notion that I created or
disseminated a "do not prosecute" list is completely false -- a story that Mr. Lutsenko,
himself, has since retracted.
Equally fictitious is the notion that I am disloyal to President Trump. I have heard
the allegation in the media that I supposedly told the Embassy team to ignore the President's
orders "since he was going to be impeached." That allegation is false. I have never said such
a thing, to my Embassy colleagues or to anyone else.
Next, the Obama administration did not ask me to help the Clinton campaign or harm the
Trump campaign, nor would I have taken any such steps if they had.
I have never met Hunter Biden, nor have I had any direct or indirect conversations
with him. And although I have met former Vice President Biden several times over the course
of our many years in government, neither he nor the previous Administration ever, directly or
indirectly, raised the issue of either Burisma or Hunter Biden with me.
With respect to Mayor Giuliani, I have had only minimal contacts with him -- a total
of three that I recall. None related to the events at issue. I do not know Mr. Giuliani's
motives for attacking me. But individuals who have been named in the press as contacts of Mr.
Giuliani may well have believed that their personal financial ambitions were stymied by our
anti-corruption policy in Ukraine.
Seems that the opposition press wants us to display mob outrage to make Trump foreign
policy for him.
The democrats are painting a picture aimed at handcuffing any attempt to determine if the
regime in Kyiv [Saudi ARAMCO, UAE,....]is worth tilting world war over.
A novel approach while Trump at odds with the neocon currents in State, CIA and
FBI.
It takes a lot more than some good at grammar NYTimes writer to substantiate claims that
allegations against the former VP and his son's cushy Ukraine oligarch job are
unsubstantiated. That is work for prosecutors and defense attorneys.
The Biden oligarch links go back to before the Obama neocon [Nuland] coup in 2014 when
Biden was VP. Out of context is no reason to make a conclusion.
Why I support impeachment. The evidence will be put out and the solicitors will argue on
complete evidentiary lines. It is getting to be anything Trump wants to do they find some
phony reason to be outraged.
I did a 20 minute telephone poll today. They called me! You can count on one respondent
"strongly opposed" to impeachment for trying to get to the bottom of Biden family
corruption.
"A novel approach while Trump at odds with the neocon currents in State, CIA and
FBI."
No. Nothing new here. This is just Russiagate II. Same actors, same methods.
But it is unclear to me why they even bothered? Trump folded long ago, In April 2017 to be
exact. And before impeachment, his chances in 2020 were far from certain. Especially against
Warren.
Also Biden should not even be discussed anymore. At this point he is history.
Warren now is the official frontrunner. Which is probably the only good thing emerging out
of this CIA-inspired mess.
The democrats are in the midst (started when Obama ignored the source of the fallacious
dossier which started the FISA spying on a campaign) of a strategic blunder. The polling on
Ukrainegate show it is libelously political. Democrat respondents largely see it serious,
independents are about 40% and GOP about 30%. This nugatory+, political ambush is not playing
well to independents!
No one is asking if this nugatory, political ambush the CIA/democrats are using to run a
circus in congress is troubling about Biden. As you say Biden is history, as are the
democrats' chances in 2020 for every national office.
Ukraine's most recent popularity among cold warriors started when Bill Clinton decided that
NATO should surround Russia. Coincidental with breaking and continuity of certain oligarchs'
fortunes. up Serbia.
Then the pro West coup in 2014....
Maybe as part of the impeachment the house could go in to what US was doing in Kyiv up to
and through the coup.
Note in the article Javelin systems are a foreign military sales case, run by the DoD,
"approved" by Depts of Commerce and State.
Javelin, guided anti tank missile system, is not solely a defensive weapon unless you look
at U S Grant on Richmond as a defensive campaign...... Reply Monday, September 30, 2019 at 06:50 AM ilsm said in reply to
Fred C. Dobbs... "Deductive reasoning" within the media message is mob control.
"It ain't what you know... it's what you know that ain't so"#. Keep reading the mainstream
media!
Given enough time [and strategy wrt 2020 election] we will get to the bottom of Obama's
"criminal influence" on 2016 election.
It takes a lot more to debunk the Biden, Clinton, Nuland, Obama Ukraine drama. To my mind,
Ukraine needs to be clean as driven snow* to "earn" javelins to kill Russian speaking
rebels.
Why do US from Obama+ fund rebels in Syria (Sunni radicals mainly) and want to send tank
killers to suppress rebels where we might get in to the real deal?
# conservatives have been saying that about the 'outrage' started by the MSM for
decades.
"... The senior prosecutor Kostiantyn Kulyk never got an answer, and he says it's because the visas were blocked by the U.S. Ambassador. The Ambassador, Marie L. Yovanovitch is a career diplomat (since 1986) who served under both Democratic and Republicans and was appointed to her present position in August 2016 by former President Obama. ..."
The FBI knew the
Steele dossier was nonsense before they used it to get the FISA court to issue the warrant
to begin spying on Carter Page leading to the Russia collusion hoax. John Solomon of
The Hill found a second document that the FBI knew contained false information, but they
used it to get the search warrant against Paul Manafort anyway.
Per Solomon:
The second document, known as the "black cash ledger," remarkably has escaped the same
scrutiny, even though its emergence in Ukraine in the summer of 2016 forced Paul Manafort to resign as
Trump's campaign chairman and eventually face U.S. indictment.
In search warrant affidavits, the FBI portrayed the ledger as one reason it resurrected a
criminal case against Manafort that was dropped in 2014 and needed search warrants in 2017
for bank records to prove
he worked for the Russian-backed Party of Regions in Ukraine.
There's just one problem: The FBI's public reliance on the ledger came months after the
feds were warned repeatedly that the document couldn't be trusted and likely was a fake,
according to documents and more than a dozen interviews with knowledgeable sources.
When
the NY Times reported the news about the ledger, they positioned it as a big scandal as
they do with almost everything associated with Donald Trump:
Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr.
Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych's pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to
Ukraine's newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau. Investigators assert that the
disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included
election officials.
( ) The papers, known in Ukraine as the "black ledger," are a chicken-scratch of Cyrillic
covering about 400 pages taken from books once kept in a third-floor room in the former Party
of Regions headquarters on Lipskaya Street in Kiev. The room held two safes stuffed with $100
bills, said Taras V. Chornovil, a former party leader who was also a recipient of the money
at times. He said in an interview that he had once received $10,000 in a "wad of cash" for a
trip to Europe.
Nazar Kholodnytsky, Ukraine's top anti-corruption prosecutor, told John Solomon that he had
told his State Dept contacts and FBI agents that his colleagues who found the ledger thought it
was bogus around the same time the Times published the story late August 2916.
"It was not to be considered a document of Manafort. It was not authenticated. And at that
time it should not be used in any way to bring accusations against anybody," Kholodnytsky
said, recalling what he told FBI agents.
This is the second incident of Obama's State Department ignoring Ukraine evidence.
Two months ago we
learned that senior member of Ukraine's Prosecutor General's International Legal
Cooperation Dept. told John Solomon that since last year, he's been blocked from getting visas
for himself and a team to go to the U.S. to deliver evidence of Democratic party wrongdoing
during the 2016 election to the DOJ. The senior prosecutor Kostiantyn Kulyk never got an
answer, and he says it's because the visas were blocked by the U.S. Ambassador. The Ambassador,
Marie L. Yovanovitch is a career diplomat (since 1986) who served under both Democratic and
Republicans and was appointed to her present position in August 2016 by former President
Obama.
Solomon gives some more examples of the FBI being told the ledger was as real as a
three-dollar bill. But that's when it gets really dicey because according to three of Solomon's
sources, Mueller's team of political hitmen and the FBI were given copies of one of the
warnings.
Because they knew the ledger was false Mueller and the FBI couldn't use the ledger to
establish probable cause to investigate Manafort because it " would require agents to discuss
their assessment of the evidence -- and instead cited media reports about it." Even though the
feds assisted on one of those stories as sources
For example, agents mentioned the ledger in an affidavit
supporting a July 2017 search warrant for Manafort's house, citing it as one of the reasons
the FBI resurrected the criminal case against Manafort.
"On August 19, 2016, after public reports regarding connections between Manafort, Ukraine
and Russia -- including an alleged 'black ledger' of off-the-book payments from the Party of
Regions to Manafort -- Manafort left his post as chairman of the Trump Campaign," the July
25, 2017, FBI agent's affidavit stated.
Three months later, the FBI went further in
arguing probable cause for a search warrant for Manafort's bank records, citing a
specific article about the ledger as evidence Manafort was paid to perform U.S. lobbying work
for the Ukrainians.
"The April 12, 2017, Associated Press article
reported that DMI [Manafort's company] records showed at least two payments were made to DMI
that correspond to payments in the 'black ledger,' " an FBI agent
wrote in a footnote to the affidavit.
Guess who helped the AP with their story -- the DOJ's Andrew Weissmann who later moved to
the special prosecutor's office and became Mueller's chief hit-man.
So just as they had done in the anti-Trump investigation "the FBI cited a leak that the
government had facilitated and then used it to support the black ledger evidence, even though
it had been clearly warned about the document."
Whether or not Paul Manafort deserved to be jailed is irrelevant. Part of the search
warrants against him were lies that the prosecutors knew were false. The judgments against him
should be tossed out because they contain the fruit of the poisonous tree. Our justice system
promises equal justice for all, but the FBI and Special Prosecutor cheated in the case of
Manafort.
How a Shadow Foreign Policy in Ukraine Prompted
an Impeachment Inquiry https://nyti.ms/2m0n5aY
NYT - Kenneth P. Vogel, Andrew E. Kramer
and David E. Sanger - September 28
WASHINGTON -- Petro O. Poroshenko was still the president of Ukraine earlier this year
when his team sought a lifeline. With the polls showing him in clear danger of losing his
re-election campaign, some of his associates, eager to hold on to their own jobs and
influence, took steps that could have yielded a signal of public support from a vital ally:
President Trump.
Over several weeks in March, the office of Ukraine's top prosecutor moved ahead on two
investigations of intense interest to Mr. Trump. One was focused on an oligarch -- previously
cleared of wrongdoing by the same prosecutor -- whose company employed former Vice President
Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s son. The other dealt with the release by a separate Ukrainian law
enforcement agency to the media of information that hurt Mr. Trump's 2016 campaign.
The actions by the prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, did not come out of thin air. They were the
first visible results of a remarkable behind-the-scenes campaign to gather and disseminate
political dirt from a foreign country, encouraged by Mr. Trump and carried out by his
personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani. In the last week their engagement with Ukraine has
prompted a formal impeachment inquiry into whether the president courted foreign interference
to hurt a leading political rival.
The story of how Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani operated in Ukraine has emerged gradually in
recent months. It was laid out in further detail in the past week in a reconstructed
transcript of Mr. Trump's phone call this summer with a new Ukrainian president and in a
complaint filed by a whistle-blower inside the United States government.
Along with documents and interviews with a wide variety of people in Ukraine and the
United States, the latest revelations show that Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani ran what amounted
to a shadow foreign policy in Ukraine that unfolded against the backdrop of three elections
-- this year's vote in Ukraine and the 2016 and 2020 presidential races in the United
States.
Despite the findings of United States intelligence agencies and the Justice Department
that Russia was responsible for interfering in the 2016 election, Mr. Trump was driven to
seek proof that the meddling was linked to Ukraine and forces hostile to him, even fixating
on a fringe conspiracy theory suggesting that Hillary Clinton's missing emails might be found
there.
Backed by Mr. Trump, Mr. Giuliani, who once aspired to be secretary of state, sought to
tar Mr. Biden with unsubstantiated accusations of impropriety, while he and associates
working with him in Ukraine on the president's agenda pursued their own personal business
interests.
With the political landscape scrambled by Mr. Poroshenko's defeat in April and the arrival
of a new cast of Ukrainian officials, the approach pursued by Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump
undercut official United States diplomacy.
And the signals sent by Mr. Trump -- long skeptical of the strategic value of backing
Ukraine against Russia, its menacing neighbor to the east -- complicated efforts by the new
Ukrainian government to fortify itself against Moscow.
The intensifying overlap this summer between Mr. Trump's political agenda in Ukraine and
his official foreign policy apparatus is now at the center of an impeachment inquiry that
will examine whether the president of the United States directed or encouraged his
subordinates to lean on a vulnerable ally for personal political gain.
Among the subjects covered in a subpoena sent Friday by House Democrats to Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo and demands for depositions from American diplomats was Mr. Trump's
decision to freeze a $391 million military aid package to Ukraine this summer not long before
his July 25 call with Ukraine's new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who defeated Mr.
Poroshenko this spring.
Democrats are also looking into the recall in the spring of the United States ambassador
to Kiev, Marie L. Yovanovitch, a career foreign service officer who was seen as
insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump by some of his conservative allies. On Friday evening, the
State Department's special envoy for Ukraine, Kurt Volker, abruptly resigned, not long after
receiving a summons from House Democrats to sit for a deposition in the coming week.
Mr. Trump has dismissed the impeachment investigation as another "witch hunt."
In an interview on Friday, Mr. Giuliani defended his efforts to push the Ukrainians to
investigate Mr. Biden, his son, Hunter Biden, and others. He asserted that he was not doing
it to try to influence the 2020 presidential election, though Mr. Biden is a leading
contender for the Democratic nomination to challenge Mr. Trump.
"I was doing it to dig out information that exculpates my client, which is the role of a
defense lawyer," he said.
Mixing Business and Politics
In the months before the steps taken in March on the politically explosive investigations
sought by Mr. Trump, Mr. Giuliani had met at least twice with the man who would become a
central figure in his efforts and a target of criticism in both countries: Mr. Lutsenko, 54,
Ukraine's top prosecutor.
First at a meeting in New York and later in Warsaw, Mr. Giuliani pushed Mr. Lutsenko for
information about -- and investigations into -- a pair of cases of keen interest to his
client.
They included the Bidens' activities in Ukraine and the release during the 2016 campaign
of incriminating records about Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump's campaign chairman. Mr. Giuliani
said early this year he had become increasingly convinced that the Manafort records were
doctored and disseminated by critics of Mr. Trump to sabotage his campaign, and later used to
spur the special counsel's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
No evidence supports this idea and Mr. Manafort's own retroactive filings under the
Foreign Agents Registration Act corroborated the Ukrainian documents, which also matched
financial records in the United States.
Still, it was not long before Mr. Trump, sensitive to any questions about the legitimacy
of his 2016 victory, began echoing Mr. Giuliani's language about what they viewed as the
Ukrainian origins of the Russia investigation.
But Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani had also taken a growing interest in the role played by Mr.
Biden, as vice president, in the dismissal of a previous Ukrainian prosecutor who had
oversight of investigations into an oligarch who had served in a previous Ukrainian
government and whose company had employed Hunter Biden. No evidence has surfaced that the
former vice president intentionally tried to help his son by pressing for the dismissal of
that prosecutor, whose ouster was being sought by other Western governments and institutions
concerned about corruption in the Ukrainian government.
In their first meeting, in January, Mr. Lutsenko later told people, Mr. Giuliani called
Mr. Trump and excitedly briefed him on the discussions. And once Mr. Lutsenko's office took
procedural steps to advance investigations involving the Manafort records and the oligarch
linked to Hunter Biden, Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump and their allies aggressively promoted
stories about the developments to conservative journalists at home, further turning a foreign
government's action to the president's advantage.
"As Russia Collusion fades, Ukrainian plot to help Clinton emerges," Mr. Trump wrote on
Twitter in March, echoing the headline of one of the first such pieces by a Trump-friendly
journalist.
Mr. Giuliani had seemed to slide eagerly into his new role. After his hopes of becoming
secretary of state were dashed -- in part, former administration officials said, because of
his extensive foreign business ties -- he became a personal lawyer for Mr. Trump when the
president came under scrutiny by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.
Mr. Trump was publicly lobbying his own Justice Department for an investigation of Mrs.
Clinton and other Democrats. When he got no satisfaction on that score, Mr. Giuliani
volunteered to take on the role of independent investigator, empowered by nothing other than
Mr. Trump's blessing.
Mr. Giuliani rejected the suggestion that he was interfering in the execution of American
foreign policy, noting that Mr. Volker and the State Department eventually helped connect him
with a top aide to Mr. Zelensky.
"If they were concerned, I don't think they would ask me to handle a mission like this
that's sensitive," he said. "I feel perfectly comfortable with what we did in Ukraine."
Ukraine was familiar ground to Mr. Giuliani, a former New York City mayor and presidential
candidate who had built a thriving consulting and security business.
Mr. Giuliani's activity on behalf of Mr. Trump allowed him to maintain, and increase, his
marketability to prospective clients around the world. Hiring him came to be seen as a way to
curry favor with the Trump administration. ...
Kurt Volker, Trump's Envoy for Ukraine,
Resigns https://nyti.ms/2mex0tH
NYT - Peter Baker -September 27
WASHINGTON -- Kurt D. Volker, the State Department's special envoy for Ukraine who got
caught in the middle of the pressure campaign by President Trump and his lawyer, Rudolph W.
Giuliani, to find damaging information about Democrats, abruptly resigned his post on
Friday.
Mr. Volker, who told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday that he was stepping down,
offered no public explanation, but a person informed about his decision said he concluded
that it was impossible to be effective in his assignment given the developments of recent
days.
His departure was the first resignation since revelations about Mr. Trump's efforts to
pressure Ukraine's president to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and
other Democrats. The disclosures have triggered a full-blown House impeachment inquiry, and
House leaders announced on Friday that they planned to interview Mr. Volker in a deposition
on Thursday.
Mr. Volker, a widely respected former ambassador to NATO, served in the part-time, unpaid
position of special envoy to help Ukraine resolve its armed confrontation with
Russia-sponsored separatists. He was among the government officials who found themselves in
an awkward position because of the search for dirt on Democrats, reluctant to cross the
president or Mr. Giuliani yet wary of getting drawn into politics outside their purview.
The unidentified intelligence official who filed the whistle-blower complaint that brought
the president's actions to light identified Mr. Volker as one of the officials trying to
"contain the damage" by advising Ukrainians how to navigate Mr. Giuliani's campaign.
Mr. Volker facilitated an entree for Mr. Giuliani with the newly elected government in
Ukraine, acting not at the instruction of Mr. Trump or Mr. Pompeo, but at the request of the
Ukrainians, who were worried because Mr. Giuliani was seeking information about Mr. Biden and
other Democrats and had denounced top Ukrainian officials as "enemies of the president."
...
(CNN) -- Former US Special Envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker plans to appear at his deposition
next Thursday in front of the House Foreign Affairs committee, according to a source familiar
with his plans.
The source would not say if the White House is seeking to use executive privilege to
constrict Volker in terms of what he can say or provide.
Volker's appearance before the committee was announced just hours before the news broke
Friday evening that he had resigned.
Volker didn't offer a comment when contacted Saturday by CNN.
The former US special envoy is expected to face tough questioning after finding himself in
the middle of the controversy surrounding the intelligence whistleblower who had alleged a
coverup by the White House over a call made by President Donald Trump to Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky. That whistleblower also mentioned Volker's name in his complaint when
discussing interactions between himself and Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani,
concerning pushing Ukraine to look into activities of Joe Biden's son, Hunter.
There is no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe or Hunter Biden. ...
NYT: ... the United States Embassy in Kiev (Ukraine) is still without an ambassador after the
administration yanked home Marie L. Yovanovitch, a career diplomat who was targeted by the
president and Mr. Giuliani for ostensibly being insufficiently loyal, a charge heatedly
disputed by her colleagues. ...
Ukraine is the place where US politicians, like the bear in Winne the Pooh, get their heads
caught in the honey jar.
As Andrew Higgins writes today: "Ukraine's allure for American carpetbaggers, political
consultants and adventurers has put it at the center of not just one but now two presidential
elections in the United States and a host of second-tier scandals...
Caught between the clashing geopolitical ambitions of Russia and the West, Ukraine has for
years had to balance competing outside interests and worked hard to cultivate all sides, and
also rival groups on the same side -- no matter how incompatible their agendas -- with offers
of money, favors and prospects for career advancement."
For Democrats and Republicans alike, Ukraine is a place where dirt on opponents can be
fabricated and distributed, free from the prying eyes of fact checkers. Biden swears that any
corruption on his part has been firmly debunked by Ukrainians who are part of a regime he
brought into existence and whose careers he helps determine. Right!
All we know for certain is, like Mark Twain once said, "An honest politician is somebody
who, when he is bought, stays bought." IMO, this is how we need to interpret any story that
is sourced from the Ukraine.
Trump is trying to get to the bottom of that story by making it clear that the success of
the regime now depends on him. He wants reliable source information to create a narrative
about how Democrats tried to delegitimize him. Good Luck!
Meanwhile, Democrats and top figures in the intelligence services are pushing back, trying
to preserve their original, Trump-Putin conspiracy narrative, created in part from dubious
Ukranian sources.
So now the world is going to be subjected to these dueling narratives, neither of which
can ever be verified or confirmed because they originated in the shadowy world of the
Ukraine.
Ulimately, it will be up to Congress and the American people to decide which narrative
they prefer: Trump's or the one pushed by Biden, Team Pelosi and their allies in the
intelligence services.
Personally, I hope they both embarrass themselves to the point where we can finally be rid
of both sides.
The Last but not LeastTechnology is dominated by
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt.
Ph.D
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21,994
20191031-ukrainegate.pdf by Barbara Boyd, [email protected] - Be the first to be notified when we release the next parts, text sc20 to (202)609-8371 - text stop to leave at anytime. Part 2 is now available.
