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Mr. Trump repeated the baseless claim on Friday in an interview with Fox & Friends, laying out the narrative and doubling down after a host gently pressed him on whether he was sure of one aspect of the debunked theory, that the F.B.I. gave a Democratic server to what Mr. Trump had inaccurately described as a Ukrainian-owned company.

That is what the word is, Mr. Trump replied.

Some Republicans have also focused on Hunter Biden, raising questions about whether his hiring by the Ukrainian energy company Burisma was corrupt. Burisma hired Mr. Biden while his father, former Vice President Joseph Biden Jr., a potential rival of Mr. Trumps in the 2020 election, was leading the Obama administrations Ukraine policy. On the July 25 call, Mr. Trump also demanded Mr. Zelensky investigate Burisma and Hunter Biden.

Moscow has long used its intelligence agencies and propaganda machine to muddy the waters of public debate, casting doubts over established facts. In her testimony, Dr. Hill noted Russias pattern of trying to blame other countries for its own actions, like the attempted poisoning last year of a former Russian intelligence officer or the downing of a passenger jet over Ukraine in 2014. Moscows goal is to cast doubt on established facts, said current and former officials.

The strategy is simply to create the impression that it is not really possible to know who was really behind it, said Laura Rosenberger, the director of the Alliance for Defending Democracy, which tracks Russian disinformation efforts.

Although American intelligence agencies have made no formal classified assessment about the Russian disinformation campaign against Ukraine, officials at several of the agencies have broadly agreed for some time that Russian intelligence services have embraced tactics to shift responsibility for the 2016 interference campaign away from themselves, officials said.

Russia has relentlessly tried to deflect attention since the allegations of its interference campaign in the 2016 election first surfaced, one official said.

Mr. Putin began publicly pushing false theories of Ukrainian interference in the early months of 2017 to deflect responsibility from Russia, said Senator Angus King, independent of Maine and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who declined to answer questions about the briefing.

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Charges of Ukrainian Meddling? A Russian Operation, U.S. Intelligence Says - The New York Times

Ukraines president will emerge from the Donald Trump impeachment inquiry unscathed, the countrys prime minister has predicted.

Ukraines leadership has been anxious to avoid becoming embroiled in the US political dogfight over the pressure allegedly placed on President Volodymyr Zelenskiy by Trump and his associates to announce an investigation into Burisma, a gas company with ties to the former Democratic vice-president Joe Bidens son, Hunter.

Democrats are seeking to prove Trump withheld aid to Ukraine until Zelenskiy complied with his demand to dig for dirt on Biden.

David Holmes, a state department official, told House impeachment investigators that the US ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, held a one-to-one meeting with Zelenskiys close aide Andriy Yermak in Kyiv on 26 July, following which Sondland was overheard telling Trump President Zelenskiy loves your ass and would do anything Trump asked. Sondland claimed that other US officials were excluded from the Yermak meeting at the instruction of the Ukrainians, according to Holmes.

Speaking in London, Honcharuk said he had no private knowledge of the Burisma situation but that he was sure that the impeachment inquiry would show Zelenskiy was never part of any attempt to manipulate investigations.

Appointed in August, the 39-year-old Honcharuk emphasised the need for international support in Ukraines fight against corruption.

In her testimony to the impeachment inquiry on Thursday, the White Houses former top expert on Russia Fiona Hill said the fight against corruption was being undermined by a separate foreign policy conducted by Trumps personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and other allies of the president.

Honcharuk sought to reassure those who were sceptical that Zelenskiy was freeing his government of oligarch influence, and insisted money illegally obtained by oligarchs would never be returned to them.

Zelenskiy has been accused of still being under the influence of oligarchs, especially the Cypriot-Ukranian billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky, who owns the TV station that used to run Zelenskiy old television show. Zelenskys chief of staff, Andriy Bohdan, also represented Kolomoisky in legal disputes concerning PrivatBank, the largest commercial bank in Ukraine.

The court of appeal in London last month upheld an asset freeze imposed against Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Bogolyubov, the former owners of PrivatBank in 2017. The court also allowed the bank to pursue claims against the two men. PrivatBank was nationalised in December 2016 after regulators found a $5.5bn (4.3bn) hole in its balance sheet, much of it allegedly stemming from fraudulent and related-party lending.

The bank is under new management and is trying to recover through English and US courts assets it says were stolen by the previous owners. Kolomoisky is seeking the overturn of the 2016 nationalisation in Ukrainian courts.

Kolomoskiy and Bogolyubov have denied any allegations of wrongdoing in relation to PrivatBank. Kolomoskiy has previously dismissed the allegations as nonsense.

Honcharuk said: I am sure the president knows that the case is outstanding for the rest of the world and for the Ukraine itself. This is a pre-eminent issue for Ukraine. That is why we stand firmly on the position that neither the bank itself nor the money should be returned to the former investors that is our clear position.

Honcharuk said he expected a top line agreement between the International Monetary Fund and Ukraine to replace a $3.9bn stand-by facility to be ready very soon. The IMF is demanding signals that Ukraine is on the path to irreversible reform, including an independent judiciary rule of law and anti-corruption bureau.

Honcharuk said no vested interests had been involved in the budget recently agreed by the parliament at record speed.

He also claimed the incredible pace of reform meant influential groups feel very bad and that is why they are speaking in pubic broadcast interviews, and in media, but this only demonstrates that these people pretend they are still influential when that is no longer the case.

He said there would be no attempt to appease any vested interest, adding the biggest value the government needed to create was trust.

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Zelenskiy will emerge from Trump inquiry unscathed, says Ukraine PM - The Guardian

DOBBS: John Solomon reported back in March and I want to get this right that [former US embassy official] George Kent had pressured Ukrainian prosecutors to back off an investigation into AntAC, the anti-corruption action center that George Soros group sponsored. This is a complicated deal here. And it seems that he wanted to keep an investigation of Ukrainian corruption with limits on it, even as he answered questions today. Your thoughts, Joe?

DIGENOVA: Well, theres no doubt that George Soros controls a very large part of the career Foreign Service at the United States State Department. He also controls the activities of FBI agents overseas who work for NGOs, work with NGOs. That was very evident in Ukraine. Kent was part of that. He was a very big protector of Soros. His testimony today showed this kind of stern, sort of discomfort with not being included in certain discussions. But the truth is George Soros had a daily opportunity to tell the State Department through [former State Department official] Victoria Nuland what to do in the Ukraine. And he ran it, Soros ran it. He corrupted FBI officials, he corrupted Foreign Service officers. And the bottom line is this: George Soros wants to run Ukraine, and hes doing everything he can, to use every lever of the United States government to make that happenfor business interests, not for good government

The argument here hinges on AntAC, the anti-corruption group Dobbs invoked in his question, which received roughly 17 percent of its funding through 2018 from Soros Open Society Foundations. In March, then-Ukrainian prosecutor-general Yuri Lutsenko told Solomon that he was handed a list by then-US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch of several individuals that Ukraine should not prosecute, including a founder of AntAC and two lawmakers supportive of its anti-corruption efforts. Shortly before Lutsenko took office, the prosecutor-generals office was investigating whether $4.4 million in US aid had been misused by various recipients, including AntAC. As Solomon detailed it in the Hill, the supposed do-not-prosecute list looked like an Obama administration effort to shield Soros.

Kent, in his capacity as the US embassys deputy chief of mission, told the prosecutor-generals office in a letter that the United States had no concerns that its grant money had been misused and did not see any grounds for the investigation of AntAC. Solomon portrayed Kents letter as the US embassy meddling in Ukrainian law enforcement matters, but Kent dismissed this view in closed-door testimony last month. The accusations were completely without merit, Kent said, adding that his critics in the Ukrainian prosecutors office fundamentally misunderstood how our assistance is administered.

The probe into AntAC was later dropped due to a lack of evidence. More importantly, the central conceit of the storythat Yovanovitch instructed Lutsenko not to prosecute various individualswas retracted. Lutsenko eventually acknowledged to a Ukrainian news outlet that she never gave him a list of names.

On Tuesday, Kurt Volker, who until recently was the Trump administrations special representative for Ukraine negotiations, testified that he told Giuliani in July that Lutsenko was not credible and was acting in a self-serving capacity. According to Volker, Giuliani repliedthat he had already come to the same conclusion. Lutsenkos claims have nevertheless taken on a life of their own and are frequently invoked in the right-wing media as an example of Soros influence over the State Department and intelligence agencies.

In public, Giuliani would go on to embellish the tale further, suggesting in late September on several news shows that Soros somehow masterminded the federal investigation into Manaforts illicit lobbying for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine. Manafort was convicted in August 2018 of tax and bank fraud related to this lobbying and sentenced to more than seven years in prison.

In his media appearances, Giuliani has described AntAC as Soros NGO and falsely claimed it developed all of the dirty information that ended up being a false document that was created in order to incriminate Manafort. The document Giuliani seems to be referencing is the so-called black ledger, which listed secret payments to Manafort for off-the-books consulting work related to Ukraine. But AntAC did not produce that information and wasnt responsible for publicizing the document. Artem Sytnyk, director of the National Anticorruption Bureau of Ukraine, and Serhiy Leshchenko, a former member of the Ukrainian parliament, first disclosed the information, parts of which have since been verified by the Associated Press and other outlets. My desire to expose Manaforts doings was motivated by the desire for justice, Leshchenko wrote in a September op-ed in the Washington Post. Neither Hillary Clinton, nor Joe Biden, nor John Podesta, nor George Soros asked me to publish the information from the black ledger.

In September, as Giuliani was promoting the baseless view that Soros was steering a plot to bring down Trump, Soros camp issued a denial.Short answer is no, Soros was not somehow involved in cooking up charges against Trump in Ukraine, spokesperson Michael Vachon told the Daily Beast.

The implication, moreover, that AntAC is simply a tool for Soros to accrue power or wage political war on Trump is absurd. Soros was far from AntACs only donor. According to Daria Kaleniuk, the groups cofounder, it has also received funding from the European Union, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and more than 500 Ukrainians, among others.

Ukraine,of course, is not the only country where Soros has engaged in philanthropy. For decades, he has sponsored anti-corruption efforts across Central and Eastern Europe, including in his homeland of Hungary and in Russia, before his foundation was banned there in 2015. Soros Ukraine work is consistent with work hes done elsewhere in the region, Emily Tamkin, a freelance reporter who is writing a book about Soros, told me.

Soros name has become so toxic in Republican circles that lobbyistsrepresenting clients from Guatemala, Albania, and other countrieshave taken to linking US diplomats they dislike to Soros. The Daily Beastreported last week that the attacks are tailor-made to Trumps idiosyncratic sensibilities.Fiona Hill, formerly a senior official onTrumps National Security Council, was accused by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone of being a Soros mole. During her public testimony on Thursday, Hill called the anti-Soros conspiracy theories an absolute outrage and compared them to the notorious, anti-Semitic propaganda known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Tamkin told me that for decades, critics have impugned Soros efforts to promote democracy in Europe, but that these more recent criticisms have entered the realm of deeply anti-Semtic make-believe.

He has funded work throughout the world. He does know different world leaders. All of that is true, she said. Thats different from him running the State Department, which is he is not doing.

Continued here:
The George Soros Conspiracy Theory at the Heart of the Ukraine Scandal - Mother Jones

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. diplomat said on Wednesday that everyone was in the loop about a Trump administration effort to get Ukraine to carry out investigations that might ultimately benefit U.S. President Donald Trump, including Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Testifying before the Democratic-led impeachment inquiry, U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland said he followed the presidents orders to work with Trumps personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who in turn was pushing Ukraine to carry out two probes that could aid Trumps 2020 re-election campaign.

Sondlands appearance was significant in that it suggested that a wider array of top U.S. officials than previously known was aware of the pressure campaign against Ukraine, even though his comments prompted carefully worded denials.

A wealthy hotelier and Trump political donor, Sondland gave sworn testimony on the fourth day of public hearings in the inquiry.

The probe could lead the Democratic-led House of Representatives to approve formal charges against Trump - called articles of impeachment - that would be sent to the Republican-controlled Senate for a trial on whether to remove him from office. Few Republican senators have broken with Trump.

While Democrats said the envoys testimony had strengthened their case to impeach Trump, the White House and the president himself said it had exonerated him.

I think it was fantastic. I think they have to end it now, Trump told reporters of the impeachment inquiry.

White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said in a statement: Though much of todays testimony by Ambassador Sondland was related to his presumptions and beliefs, rather than hard facts, he testified to the fact that President Trump never told him that a White House meeting or the aid to Ukraine was tied to receiving a public statement from (Ukrainian) President (Volodymyr) Zelenskiy,

Sondland said he emailed officials including Pompeo, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and Energy Secretary Rick Perry on July 19 that the new Ukrainian president was ready to assure Trump he would run a fully transparent investigation and turn over every stone.

Everyone was in the loop. It was no secret, Sondland said of the email he sent ahead of the July 25 telephone call between Trump and Zelenskiy that triggered the impeachment inquiry.

The inquiry is focusing on Trumps request in the call that Zelenskiy investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a political rival; his son Hunter Biden, who had served on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma; and an unsubstantiated theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 U.S. election that brought Trump to office.

It is also examining whether Trump may have withheld $391 million in security aid to help Ukraine fight Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine as a way of pressuring Kiev to undertake the investigations.

Federal law prohibits candidates from accepting foreign help in an election.

Biden is a leading contender for the Democratic nomination to face Trump in the November 2020 presidential election. Trump has accused Biden of corruption without offering evidence. Biden has denied any wrongdoing.

Democrats accuse Trump of abusing his power by using the security aid and an offer to Zelenskiy of a prestigious visit to the White House as leverage to pressure a vulnerable U.S. ally to dig up dirt on domestic political rivals.

Sondland portrayed himself as a reluctant participant in the pressure on Ukraine and argued that he had kept his superiors at the State Department and White House abreast of his efforts.

The envoy quoted from an Aug. 22 email to Pompeo about his effort to get Zelenskiy to commit to undertake investigations, suggesting that might be a way to break the logjam over security aid as well as a Zelenskiy-Trump meeting.

Describing a group meeting he attended with Pence before the latters Sept. 1 meeting with Zelenskiy, Sondland said he had told Pence that I had concerns that the delay in aid had become tied to the issue of investigations.

In his testimony, Sondland said Pence had listened to his comments and nodded but did not reply.

Aides to Pompeo and Pence issued denials.

The vice president never had a conversation with Gordon Sondland about investigating the Bidens, Burisma, or the conditional release of financial aid to Ukraine based upon potential investigations, Marc Short, Pences chief of staff, said in a statement.

Gordon (Sondland) never told Secretary Pompeo that he believed the President was linking aid to investigations of political opponents. Any suggestion to the contrary is flat out false, said State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus.

Sondland described Trump in May telling him along with Perry and then-U.S. special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker to work with Giuliani - the former New York mayor who held no U.S. government job - on Ukraine policy.

We did not want to work with Mr. Giuliani. Simply put, we played the hand we were dealt. We all understood that if we refused to work with Mr. Giuliani, we would lose an important opportunity to cement relations between the United States and Ukraine. So we followed the presidents orders, Sondland said.

The efforts by Giuliani to get Zelenskiy to investigate the Bidens were a quid pro quo for arranging a White House visit for the Ukrainian leader, Sondland said, using a Latin term meaning to exchange a favor for another favor.

Trump has said he did nothing wrong in the Ukraine matter and specifically denied any quid pro quo.

Republicans defended Trump by pointing to a statement by Sondland that he was presuming the security aid for Ukraine was tied to investigations, but that no one had actually told him that.

This all is based on presumptions that turned out to be wrong, Steve Scalise, the No. 2 House Republican, wrote on Twitter. Why is this impeachment circus still going on?

Asked in Brussels about Sondlands testimony that he was in the loop, Pompeo told reporters: I didnt see the testimony.

Sondland, tapped as Trumps EU envoy after he donated $1 million to the presidents inauguration, said Trump told him on Sept. 9 there was no quid pro quo in the requests to Ukraine but that Zelenskiy should do the right thing.

The envoy also said Trump never told him directly the aid to Ukraine was conditioned on Kiev announcing investigations.

Sondland also said he eventually concluded that, absent any credible explanation for the aid suspension, the money would only flow when there was a public statement from Ukraine committing to the investigations of the 2016 election and Burisma, as Mr. Giuliani had demanded.

At the end of Sondlands roughly six hours of testimony, Democrat Adam Schiff, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee leading the inquiry, said he thought Trump was the one who decided whether a meeting would happen, whether aid would be lifted, not anyone who worked for him.

At the opening of a second hearing on Wednesday, where Undersecretary of State David Hale and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Laura Cooper testified, Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the panel, described the inquiry as an impeachment in search of a crime.

Cooper testified that Ukrainian officials may have known that Washington was withholding military aid as early as July 25, undercutting a Republican defense of the presidents actions that they did not learn this until later.

Reporting by Patricia Zengerle and Andy Sullivan; Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu, Susan Cornwell, Karen Freifeld, David Morgan, Andy Sullivan and Susan Heavey in Washington and Humeyra Pamuk in Brussels; Writing by Alistair Bell and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Will Dunham, Peter Cooney and Sonya Hepinstall

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'Everyone was in the loop' about Ukraine pressure campaign - Reuters

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday requesting documents related to Joe Bidens communications with Ukrainian officials. Grahams inquiry focuses on any calls Biden may have had with former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko about the firing of the countrys top prosecutor, or any calls that referenced Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company where Bidens son Hunter sat on the board. The Washington Post reports that Grahams letter appears to begin an investigation into Trumps widely debunked claim that Biden, who at the time was vice president, put pressure on Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor in an attempt to protect his son. Taylor Reidy, a spokeswoman for Graham, told the Post that the senator is now seeking the documents because [Rep.] Adam Schiff and the House Intel Committee have made it clear they will not look into the issues about Hunter Biden and Burisma. Graham is requesting documents which could shed additional light on that issue and hopes they will be able to answer some of the outstanding questions, Reidy said.

The rest is here:
Lindsey Graham Launches Senate Investigation Into Bidens and Ukraine - The Daily Beast