Jump to content

The Hill: Ukrainian Embassy confirms DNC contractor solicited Trump dirt in 2016


DKW 86

Recommended Posts

 

Quote

 

The Hill: Ukrainian Embassy confirms DNC contractor solicited Trump dirt in 2016

The boomerang from the Democratic Party’s failed attempt to connect Donald Trump to Russia’s 2016 election meddling is picking up speed, and its flight path crosses right through Moscow’s pesky neighbor, Ukraine. That is where there is growing evidence a foreign power was asked, and in some cases tried, to help Hillary Clinton.

In its most detailed account yet, the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington says a Democratic National Committee (DNC) insider during the 2016 election solicited dirt on Donald Trump’s campaign chairman and even tried to enlist the country's president to help.

In written answers to questions, Ambassador Valeriy Chaly's office says DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa sought information from the Ukrainian government on Paul Manafort’s dealings inside the country in hopes of forcing the issue before Congress.

Chaly says that, at the time of the contacts in 2016, the embassy knew Chalupa primarily as a Ukrainian American activist and learned only later of her ties to the DNC. He says the embassy considered her requests an inappropriate solicitation of interference in the U.S. election.

“The Embassy got to know Ms. Chalupa because of her engagement with Ukrainian and other diasporas in Washington D.C., and not in her DNC capacity. We’ve learned about her DNC involvement later,” Chaly said in a statement issued by his embassy. “We were surprised to see Alexandra’s interest in Mr. Paul Manafort’s case. It was her own cause. The Embassy representatives unambiguously refused to get involved in any way, as we were convinced that this is a strictly U.S. domestic matter.”

“All ideas floated by Alexandra were related to approaching a Member of Congress with a purpose to initiate hearings on Paul Manafort or letting an investigative journalist ask President Poroshenko a question about Mr. Manafort during his public talk in Washington, D.C.,” the ambassador explained.

Reached by phone last week, Chalupa said she was too busy to talk. She did not respond to email and phone messages seeking subsequent comment.

Chaly’s written answers mark the most direct acknowledgement by Ukraine’s government that an American tied to the Democratic Party sought the country’s help in the 2016 election, and they confirm the main points of a January 2017 story by Politico on Chalupa’s efforts.

In that story, the embassy was broadly quoted as denying interference in the election and suggested Chalupa’s main reason for contacting the ambassador’s office was to organize an event celebrating female leaders.

The fresh statement comes several months after a Ukrainian court ruled that the country’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, closely aligned with the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, and a parliamentarian named Serhiy Leshchenko wrongly interfered in the 2016 American election by releasing documents related to Manafort.

The acknowledgement by Kiev’s embassy, plus newly released testimony, suggests the Ukrainian efforts to influence the U.S. election had some intersections in Washington as well.

Nellie Ohr, wife of senior U.S. Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, acknowledged in congressional testimony that, while working for the Clinton-hired research firm Fusion GPS, she researched Trump's and Manafort’s ties to Russia and learned that Leshchenko, the Ukrainian lawmaker, was providing dirt to Fusion.

Fusion also paid British intelligence operative Christopher Steele, whose anti-Trump dossier the FBI used as primary evidence to support its request to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.   

In addition, I wrote last month that the Obama White House invited Ukrainian law enforcement officials to a meeting in January 2016 as Trump rose in the polls on his improbable path to the presidency. The meeting led to U.S. requests to the Ukrainians to help investigate Manafort, setting in motion a series of events that led to the Ukrainians leaking the documents about Manafort in May 2016.

The DNC’s embassy contacts add a new dimension, though. Chalupa discussed in the 2017 Politico article about her efforts to dig up dirt on Trump and Manafort, including at the Ukrainian Embassy.

Federal Election Commission records show Chalupa’s firm, Chalupa & Associates, was paid $71,918 by the DNC during the 2016 election cycle.

Exactly how the Ukrainian Embassy responded to Chalupa’s inquiries remains in dispute.

Chaly’s statement says the embassy rebuffed her requests for information: “No documents related to Trump campaign or any individuals involved in the campaign have been passed to Ms. Chalupa or the DNC neither from the Embassy nor via the Embassy. No documents exchange was even discussed.”

But Andrii Telizhenko, a former political officer who worked under Chaly from December 2015 through June 2016, told me he was instructed by the ambassador and his top deputy to meet with Chalupa in March 2016 and to gather whatever dirt Ukraine had in its government files about Trump and Manafort.

Telizhenko said that when he was told by the embassy to arrange the meeting, both Chaly and the ambassador’s top deputy identified Chalupa “as someone working for the DNC and trying to get Clinton elected.”

Over lunch at a Washington restaurant, Chalupa told Telizhenko in stark terms what she hoped the Ukrainians could provide the DNC and the Clinton campaign, according to his account.

“She said the DNC wanted to collect evidence that Trump, his organization and Manafort were Russian assets, working to hurt the U.S. and working with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin against the U.S. interests. She indicated if we could find the evidence they would introduce it in Congress in September and try to build a case that Trump should be removed from the ballot, from the election,” he recalled.

After the meeting, Telizhenko said he became concerned about the legality of using his country’s assets to help an American political party win a U.S. election. But he proceeded with his assignment.

Telizhenko said that as he began his research, he discovered that Fusion GPS was nosing around Ukraine, seeking similar information, and he believed they, too, worked for the Democrats.

As a former aide inside the general prosecutor’s office in Kiev, Telizhenko used contacts with intelligence, police and prosecutors across the country to secure information connecting Russian figures to assistance on some of the Trump organization’s real estate deals overseas, including a tower in Toronto.

Telizhenko said he did not want to provide the intelligence he collected directly to Chalupa and instead handed the materials to Chaly: “I told him what we were doing was illegal, that it was unethical doing this as diplomats.” He said the ambassador told him he would handle the matter and had opened a second channel back in Ukraine to continue finding dirt on Trump.

Telizhenko said he also was instructed by his bosses to meet with an American journalist researching Manafort’s ties to Ukraine.

About a month later, he said his relationship with the ambassador soured and, by June 2016, he was ordered to return to Ukraine. There, he reported his concerns about the embassy’s contacts with the Democrats to the former prosecutor general’s office and officials in the Poroshenko administration: “Everybody already knew what was going on and told me it had been approved at the highest levels.”

Telizhenko said he never was able to confirm whether the information he collected for Chalupa was delivered to her, the DNC or the Clinton campaign.

Chalupa, meanwhile, continued to build a case that Manafort and Trump were tied to Russia.

In April 2016, she attended an international symposium where she reported back to the DNC that she had met with 68 Ukrainian investigative journalists to talk about Manafort. She also wrote that she invited American reporter Michael Isikoff to speak with her. Isikoff wrote some of the seminal stories tying Manafort to Ukraine and Trump to Russia; he later wrote a book making a case for Russian collusion.

“A lot more coming down the pipe,” Chalupa wrote a top DNC official on May 3, 2016, recounting her effort to educate Ukrainian journalists and Isikoff about Manafort.

Then she added, “More offline tomorrow since there is a big Trump component you and Lauren need to be aware of that will hit in next few weeks and something I’m working on you should be aware of.”

Less than a month later, the “black ledger” identifying payments to Manafort was announced in Ukraine, forcing Manafort to resign as Trump’s campaign chairman and eventually to face criminal prosecution for improper foreign lobbying.

DNC officials have suggested in the past that Chalupa’s efforts were personal, not officially on behalf of the DNC. But Chalupa’s May 2016 email clearly informed a senior DNC official that she was “digging into Manafort” and she suspected someone was trying to hack into her email account.

Chaly over the years has tried to portray his role as Ukraine’s ambassador in Washington as one of neutrality during the 2016 election. But in August 2016 he raised eyebrows in some diplomatic circles when he wrote an op-ed for The Hill skewering Trump for some of his comments on Russia. “Trump’s comments send wrong message to world,” Chaly’s article blared in the headline.

In his statement to me, Chaly said he wrote the op-ed because he had been solicited for his views by The Hill’s opinion team.

Chaly’s office also acknowledged that a month after the op-ed, President Poroshenko met with then-candidate Clinton during a stop in New York. The office said the ambassador requested a similar meeting with Trump but it didn’t get organized.

Though Chaly and Telizhenko disagree on what Ukraine did after it got Chalupa’s request, they confirm that a paid contractor of the DNC solicited their government’s help to find dirt on Trump that could sway the 2016 election.

For a Democratic Party that spent more than two years building the now disproven theory that Trump colluded with Russia to hijack the 2016 election, the tale of the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington feels just like a speeding political boomerang.

 

So, a DNC Insider, possibly working thru a Contractor, was trying to get Ukraine to interfere in the 2016 Election...

I predict crickets for a response. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites





46 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

 

So, a DNC Insider, possibly working thru a Contractor, was trying to get Ukraine to interfere in the 2016 Election...

I predict crickets for a response. 

Investigate to see if that amounts to a crime. We now know Manafort is a felon and Trump’s colluding with Ukraine  in plain sight. In fact, he’s driving US policy to advantage himself politically. But go ahead David with your theories.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

i do not doubt the dnc of anything after the last election. they stacked the deck for hillary. they fired a few people but i am not sure they solved the problem. i guess time will tell.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, DKW 86 said:

 

So, a DNC Insider, possibly working thru a Contractor, was trying to get Ukraine to interfere in the 2016 Election...

I predict crickets for a response. 

Didn't take long. bet there is more of them to come.😀

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, Tiger Sue said:

Didn't take long. bet there is more of them to come.😀

Sue, "crickets" means no response was expected. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just now, Tiger Sue said:

Could be, ask DFK86

Don't have to. It's a well known euphemism he uses frequently. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Tiger Sue said:

Crickets aren't quiet.

Crickets imply the sound of silence. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, Tiger Sue said:

Let him say what he means. Or has he hired you as his interpreter?

I know what he means. There's no need for an interpreter. Years of conversation you're not privy to, in addition to knowledge of a very common and basic euphemism, leave no doubt. 

This is a hill you choose to die on? Jeez. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, Tiger Sue said:

Not to me. they get pretty noisy sometimes but I'm perfectly OK with that IF that's what DFK86 meant.

If you can hear the crickets, there's nothing else going on. Nobody is speaking up. That's the point of the euphemism. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, AUDub said:

I know what he means. There's no need for an interpreter. Years of conversation you're not privy to, in addition to knowledge of a very common and basic euphemism, leave no doubt. 

This is a hill you choose to die on? Jeez. 

Why don't you just follow your own advice and comment on the substance of the OP rather than arguing about crickets? I'm not on any hill unless it's the one you made a mountain out of a molehill.....er. I mean cricket.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just now, Tiger Sue said:

Why don't you just follow your own advice and comment on the substance of the OP rather than arguing about crickets?

Because I find you hilarious. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

46 minutes ago, Tiger Sue said:

Now....what do you think about the real substance of OP?

It's old news and a bad effort at equivocation. 

I mean, Chalupa's name has been bounced around for three years now. 

https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/09/29/some-of-where-trump-wants-to-go-with-the-server-in-ukraine-story/

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, TexasTiger said:

Investigate to see if that amounts to a crime. We now know Manafort is a felon and Trump’s colluding with Ukraine  in plain sight. In fact, he’s driving US policy to advantage himself politically. But go ahead David with your theories.

 

3 hours ago, aubiefifty said:

i do not doubt the dnc of anything after the last election. they stacked the deck for hillary. they fired a few people but i am not sure they solved the problem. i guess time will tell.

The last allegations got a special prosecutor. 

So, should we just investigate everyone and everything or should we just bypass all the butt hurt and hold some elections?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

 

The last allegations got a special prosecutor. 

So, should we just investigate everyone and everything or should we just bypass all the butt hurt and hold some elections?

You equate everything.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

in trumps case i say investigate.prosecute.lock him up. he is not even hardly trying to cover up. if people are not held accountable then it gets worse down the road.  i am a law and order guy.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Tiger Sue said:

Could be, ask DFK86. Crickets aren't quiet.

sometimes i love you sue.............and notice how polite i am to you on the football board? and just to be clear i am not hitting on you. you just make me smile or laugh now and again. so remember when i address you on here for the record i do not hate you. i just argue hard.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

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.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, aubiefifty said:

sometimes i love you sue.............and notice how polite i am to you on the football board? and just to be clear i am not hitting on you. you just make me smile or laugh now and again. so remember when i address you on here for the record i do not hate you. i just argue hard.

Wish we could all be nice and have civil discussions. I don't know why it is necessary to be rude to each other. I have family/neighbors who disagree on politics but we don't get nasty with it. Politicians of all stripes aren't worth it.

JMHO but I wish they would just eliminate the smack forum and have one political forum with the posted rules. This is the only AU board I know of which encourages snack (rudeness) among AU people.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...