Well his source,Lutsenko, who alleges about the "apology" and the contradictory narrative that Shokin was actually investigating Burisma in Solomon's interview literally backtracked on the claims recently. Sean Hannity is literally on the bottom of the list of places to go that give you airtime over credible breaking news. There are hundreds of conservative leaning journalists and media reporters who aren't literal mouth pieces of the president who don't like Biden and are perfectly fine hearing a credible story such as Chris Wallace unlike Hannity who would run literally anything on the show to make Trump happy. Also something this damning with credibility behind it, he would go to the FBI. No, he went to ****ing Hannity and the source literally recanted his statements in Solomon's interview. Solomon is also the journalist who brought us the oh so credible Uranium One story. The dude might have been a decent journalist at one time but he obviously can't refuse the right wing grift. He understands the right wing will latch on to the least credible of journalistic quality to hammer a narrative. So let's summarize the events here. Donald Trump got curious over a Biden conspiracy on Hannity, requested Giuliani and 2 other Fox News tv lawyers to go to Ukraine and find more dirt while having his staff tell him the story was debunked and then proceed to freeze 400 million dollars worth of military aid to Ukraine over a Hannity segment and a few days later called the Ukrainian president to tell him how much the US has helped his country and there wasn't enough reciprocity and follows that up with asking for a favor to have the Ukrainian President cooperate with Trump's private lawyer over a investigation of his political rival. Good lord how open and shut is this? Trump froze military aid over a Hannity segment to find dirt on a political opponent. My god.
Your rants are always inaccurate so I must ask for a source for half of this, especially the Hannity theory, but I'll assume it's mostly true for the sake of arguing what I'm about to get into. At the end of your post, you say he was looking for dirt on a political rival. Do you have any proof that this was why other than your assumption? Assumption is really not strong enough, when you consider there are alternative reasons a President could ask about white house corruption issues. Now I find it also very interesting you are so upset about freezing aid for something in return, but you are completely OK with Biden doing it and admitting to it on camera. Very interesting indeed.
I suggest reading articles. Especially the ones I linked. And Solomon breaking his findings to the public about Lutsenko's statements was on Hannity. That is the first time we heard this contradiction by Lutsenko and that is how Trump first heard of this story which again, his own staff tried to convince him it was debunked. We already know through Trump and Gulianni's admission that Trump sent a personal lawyer that isn't employed by the state department, DOJ or FBI to find dirt in Ukraine. The using of a personal lawyer instead of proper channels is further evidence that this was done for personal political benefit. All the pieces have already been readily admitted by Trump and Gulliani. The only defense they have is that "but Biden" and that all these events are magically legal. I really can't force you to read. That is up to you.
Thanks for the article. I'll take this over a youtube "Gotcha that is not a Gotcha" any day. Solomon hasn't made many friends among his colleagues with his Hannity appearances. I have some trust of the intercept in their reporting especially with this type of stuff. They sometimes break stories neither side likes nor knows how to handle. There's a shitton to read though. May 18- https://theintercept.com/2019/05/10...ndal-ukraine-absolute-nonsense-reformer-says/ A Republican Conspiracy Theory About a Biden-in-Ukraine Scandal Has Gone Mainstream. But It Is Not True. excerpt summary- Biden's didn't talk to each other. Even if they knew, Joe's actions would mean using Hunter as an insurance policy did NOT work. Why? Because Shoken refused to investigate Zlochevsky, the President of Burisma, when he was assigned to him. Knowing this, does this make Solomon's affidavits one side of the He Said, She Said argument rather than a wholly different revelation? Official corruption Shokin had failed to pursue was against Yanukovych’s environment and natural resources minister, Mykola Zlochevsky, who had oversight of all Ukrainian energy firms, including the largest independent gas company, Burisma, which he secretly controlled through shell companies in Cyprus. After Zlochevsky was forced from office along with Yanukovych in 2014, his gas company appointed Hunter Biden to its board. “Shokin was fired,” Kaleniuk observed, “because he failed to do investigations of corruption and economic crimes of President Yanukovych and his close associates, including Zlochevsky, and basically it was the big demand within society in Ukraine, including our organization and many other organizations, to get rid of this guy.” By getting Shokin removed, Biden in fact made it more rather than less likely that the oligarch who employed his son would be subject to prosecution for corruption. As the former Reuters correspondent Oliver Bullough explains in his book “Moneyland,” just weeks before Hunter Biden joined the Burisma board in May 2014, ostensibly “to strengthen corporate governance,” Britain’s Serious Fraud Office had frozen $23 million of Zlochevsky’s assets in a money laundering investigation. (Zlochevsky and Burisma have denied all allegations of corruption.) At the time, Bullough writes, “The White House insisted that the position was private matter for Hunter Biden unrelated to his father’s job, but that is not how anyone I spoke to in Ukraine interpreted it. Hunter Biden is an undistinguished corporate lawyer with no previous Ukraine experience. Why then would a Ukrainian tycoon hire him?” Indeed, hiring the vice president’s son might have seemed to Zlochevsky like a way to protect his business from scrutiny by international investigators. But the facts show that the Obama-Biden administration strenuously opposed the decision by Ukrainian prosecutors to let Zlochevsky off the hook. Vitaliy Kasko, a former deputy prosecutor who resigned in 2016 and accused Shokin’s office of being a “hotbed of corruption,” told Bullough that he had tried and failed to get his colleagues in the prosecutor general’s office to offer proper assistance to the British inquiry in 2014. But the British investigation was eventually stymied because Ukrainian prosecutors failed to provide a court with evidence that the $23 million — the proceeds from the sale of an oil storage facility Zlochevsky owned via a shell company in the British Virgin Islands — were related to criminal abuse of office by the former natural resources minister. New reporting from Bloomberg News this week revealed that the 2014 case against Zlochevsky “was assigned to Shokin, then a deputy prosecutor. But Shokin and others weren’t pursuing it, according to the internal reports from the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office reviewed by Bloomberg.” In December 2014, U.S. officials threatened Ukrainian prosecutors that there would be consequences if they failed to assist the British investigation, according to the documents obtained by Bloomberg. Instead, the Ukrainian prosecutors provided a letter to Zlochevsky’s lawyer stating that they knew of no evidence that the former minister had been involved in embezzlement. The British investigation collapsed soon after that and the funds were unfrozen and quickly moved to Cyprus. Kasko, the former deputy prosecutor, told Bloomberg News that there was no truth to the accusation that Biden or anyone in the Obama administration had tried to block the investigation of Zlochevsky. “There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against Zlochevsky,” Kasko said. “It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015.” On her center’s website, Kaleniuk has been working to debunk a series of conspiratorial stories about supposed “Ukrainian collusion” in the 2016 election which have recently been embraced and promoted by President Donald Trump, his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and his son, Donald Trump Jr. But Kaleniuk was stunned and annoyed by a New York Times report published last week that focused on how the politics of the accusation against Biden might play. The report failed, in her view, to make it clear that the innuendo was false. “What I’m pissed off about,” Kaleniuk said, “is that Shokin, who was totally corrupt, who undermined the reform of prosecution, and reformers, and who didn’t want to investigate Zlochevsky, now appears in the New York Times as the hero who wanted to investigate Zlochevsky and Burisma and who suffered because Joe Biden demanded to dismiss him because of his willingness to investigate Burisma — which is absolute nonsense.”
Re: Solomon https://theintercept.com/2019/09/22...g-donald-trump-spread-lies-joe-biden-ukraine/ Reporters Should Stop Helping Donald Trump Spread Lies About Joe Biden and Ukraine Another excerpt Sergii Leshchenko, a former investigative journalist and reformist member of parliament who helped publicize the off-the-books payments, told me on Friday that Giuliani “is a liar” for saying that the black ledger was a forgery. “It is a real document, with real signatures,” Leshchenko said in a telephone interview, explaining that it had been examined by Ukrainian law enforcement experts. But if there is no evidence that the payment records incriminating Manafort were fake, where did Giuliani get this idea? In his interview with Cuomo, he attributes the claim to “people in Ukraine” who “were trying to get to us, but they were being blocked by the ambassador, who was a Obama appointee, in Ukraine, who was holding back this information.” This is a reference to a part of the conspiracy theory developed by John Solomon, an opinion columnist for the Hill in Washington, who relied on the word of a disgraced Ukrainian prosecutor, Nazar Kholodnytsky. Last year, Kholodnytsky was wiretapped by Ukraine’s independent anti-corruption bureau and caught on tape advising suspects in a corruption probe on how not to get caught. Kholodnytsky told Solomon that the ledger “was not authenticated.” After Kholodnytsky was caught in that sting operation, Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, the Obama appointee who was the top American diplomat in Ukraine until May, demanded that he be fired. Kholodnytsky retaliated by helping Solomon and other right-wing pundits smear Yovanovitch as an anti-Trump, deep-state plotter, prompting the State Department to recall her from Kiev. Solomon’s other main source for the claim that the ledger was false was Konstantin Kilimnik, Manafort’s former Ukrainian business partner, who has been linked to Russian intelligence. Despite the questionable nature of his sources, Solomon’s reporting that the black ledger records were fake has been accepted as fact by the president and his surrogates. Giuliani also wrongly claimed that, last December, there was “a finding by a court in Ukraine that a man named … Leschenko that he produced a phony affidavit that was given to the American authorities and an FBI agent named … Greenwood, and they found him guilty of that.” In reality, as the reformist Ukrainian politician and journalist Sergii Leshchenko told me on Friday, “there was an administrative court ruling” in December that he, and the head of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, had wrongly interfered in the 2016 presidential election in the United States, by publicizing the secret payments to Manafort, who was then leading Trump’s campaign. “But this decision of the court was never implemented, because I appealed and won that appeal in July,” Leshchenko added. The appeals court overturned the administrative court’s ruling against both men. “Giuliani is continuing to misinform American society” about the ledger, Leshchenko told me, “by saying it’s fraudulent.” As for the allegation that he gave false testimony to an American investigator, Leshchenko said, “It’s total nonsense. I never made any affidavit to the FBI.” “I told the FBI only about one payment to Manafort,” he said. “I met with an FBI person in 2017 only once, and I gave them a contract found in the office of Manafort in Kiev.” That contract, Leshchenko explained, showed that “former President Yanukovych paid Manafort $750,000 in 2009 to sell 1,000 computers to an offshore company registered in Belize, and this company had its accounts in Kyrgyzstan.” The agent he met with was also not named Greenwood, Leshchenko said. Giuliani was possibly struggling to recall the name Karen Greenaway, a supervisory special agent in the FBI’s International Corruption Unit, who supported the efforts of anti-corruption activists in Ukraine to recover looted assets and was attacked by John Solomon for doing so. “I will always be angry at Manafort,” Leshchenko wrote in a rebuttal to Giuliani published on Saturday by the Washington Post. “His work contributed greatly to Yanukovych’s election victory in 2010; Yanukovych then used his position as president to enrich himself and his inner circle. I have no doubt that Yanukovych paid Manafort for his services out of the funds he robbed from Ukrainian taxpayers.” ... Early in the CNN interview, Giuliani also claimed that, by threatening to withhold loan guarantees unless the chief prosecutor who failed to pursue corruption cases was removed, Biden had, “bribed the president of the Ukraine in order to fire a prosecutor who was investigating his son.” What’s most telling about this claim is that while there is no evidence at all that Biden abused his power over U.S. aid to Ukraine to advance his own interests, there is plenty of evidence that Trump did delay $250 million in U.S. military aid to Ukraine this summer just as he was pressing its new president, Zelensky, to do him a political favor by opening a phony investigation into the man he trails in general election polls. The whistleblower complaint filed by a member of the intelligence community last month reportedly concerns, in part, Trump’s conversation with Zelensky on July 25. More in the article about antac, Solomon and Soros... Thought this was interesting in the last paragraphs On Monday morning at the United Nations, the president who has refused to make his tax returns public, secretly pursued a deal to build a tower in Moscow as he campaigned for office, handed his daughter and son-in-law jobs in the White House without asking them to divest themselves of business interests, and used the presidency to constantly promote his golf resorts and hotels, told reporters that he was really just concerned about the former vice president’s son having apparently benefited from his father’s position. “What Biden did is a disgrace; what his son did is a disgrace,” he said. Asked to say what he told the Ukrainian president about Joe Biden and his son during the phone call in July, Trump then accidentally offered a clear explanation of why Biden’s intervention as vice president — pressing Ukraine to tackle corruption in return for U.S. aid — was logical and correct. “We’re supporting a country, we want to make sure that country’s honest,” the president said. “It’s very important to talk about corruption. If you don’t talk about corruption, why would you give money to a country that you think is corrupt? One of the reasons the news president got elected is he was going stop corruption. It’s very important that on occasion you speak to somebody about corruption.” When another reporter followed up by asking, “Are you willing to clear this up by releasing the whistleblower report, sir?” Trump just pointed his finger at him and said, “Quiet.” Later on Monday, at meeting with his Polish counterpart, the president continued his unlikely attempt to reinvent himself as an anti-corruption crusader, by stating flatly that “Joe Biden and his son are corrupt.” Without offering any evidence to support that debunked claim, the president who has used his office to enrich himself added, “If a Republican ever did what Joe Biden did, if a Republican ever said what Joe Biden said, they’d be getting the electric chair by right now.”
Good for him. That's fine. Not sure what that has to do with anything. Your response makes it clear that this is all political theater to you, though, and you don't particularly seem to care about the law and right and wrong, just winning. So, you know, good luck with that. But I'm pretty sure if Trump is impeached for corruption, that'll put a damper on his reelection campaign.
Unpaid personal lawyer to the Potus Rudy G knew this made its media rounds in May, yet still went all in leading up to the events in July. They really want to play this like the corrupt Hillary angle by seeding just enough reasonable doubt to drip more conspiracy theories later into the cycle. Not sure why they used the government to do all this, but who knew this was impeachable?? Fuggin Deep State Whistleblowers. You stomp one dead and another one shows up!
See its that elite sarcasm in which you think you're so much smarter than others is why Americans always deny the northeastern elite candidate like the John Kerry, Michael Dukakis and now Elizabeth Warren. That leads you to then question why you're not as wealthy or don't have as much power as some hick with a tractor company that didn't read Voltaire and Keynes. So then these alleged intellectuals resent the wealth of business owners as they themselves feel they are smarter and therefore should be respected and ultimately live the life they desire in which wealth is needed but not greatly had. Owning a business is how wealth and power is created. You can debate all day about philosophies but until one works in or builds a business one cannot know how individual incentives are and what constitutes the building of society at its core. it is not the intellectual government planner, but the the investor and entrepreneur that moves society. he creates while the government planner sucks off of that in order to then try to control. Get out of your bubble and understand how things work outside of a textbook written by other people who haven't experienced the cycle of business and the risk of capital and effort which is the lifeblood of America.
Not really. Most are just monitoring the events with Trump as they occur, rolling eyes at the brazen displays of stupidity and blatant criminality. The right are trying to manufacture conspiracy to try and justify their support for an obviously incompetent idiot. Frankly, its embarrassing to read.
... The impeachment investigation literally hinges upon an unproven conspiracy theory. But yeah ok. Get the right! Gotta get'em!!
The impeachment inquiry is based on the White House's own statement. Once that idiotic transcript was released, the whistle blower no longer mattered. Its remarkable because of how simple it is.
The transcript actually proves nothing. People are just doubling down and going with the flow of it because they don't want to see that it's painfully lacking in specific details to confirm such a conspiracy theory. Confirmation bias at its finest.
Trump is the current President did the clintons do this while Bill was president? Did they run businesses while being elected politicians?
I'm actually surprised the Intercept would publish an article to defend Biden. I'm proud of you. Why do you think I went to a school for liberal arts? Didn't read Voltaire. Isn't really part of a mechanical and aerospace engineering ciriculumn.
Of course it doesn't prove anything, nor is it supposed too. It is lacking, but illustrates enough to show probable cause, hence why they opened an investigation into its accuracy. You really have no idea how any of this works do you?
People in the Northeast start and own small businesses as well. Even ones who graduated from elite schools. Of course, they also developed all kinds of agricultural innovations that improve efficiency and allows people to purchase tractors. There are also those that came up with the Federally funded government program of Interstates as well as the socialist government program of Rural Electrification. Without those two things, your business wouldn't be possible. In addition, the banks which give loans, manage money and of all of that which enables people to buy your products, and you to make your products. Then are those brainiacs with good educations that have made and improved refrigeration, storage, marketing, advertising, etc. In short people from a whole range of educations and backgrounds work to make people and businesses successful. My philosophy is that recognizing and appreciating that is a better way of conducting ourselves than pretending it is only because of ourselves and then trying to put on an air of superiority to others. Also, your definition of success isn't everyone's. Some people measure success by the art they create, the services they provide for others, the happiness they bring to themselves and others and a whole range of criteria.
The proof is that Trump himself claimed that he asked the President of Ukraine to look into corruption by Biden (who happens to be a political rival.) That isn't based on anyone's assumption. That is what Trump himself said. There are no other reasons the President would ask about investigating someone who's investigation had already concluded there was no wrongdoing by Biden or his son. The corruption happened two years before Hunter Biden was at the company.
