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The Transcript We Really Want to See – Taki’s Magazine – Taki’s Magazine

Posted by M. C. on September 27, 2019

https://www.takimag.com/article/the-transcript-we-really-want-to-see/

by Ann Coulter

The transcript of President Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky is yet another illustration of the rule: Never ask a question you don’t know the answer to.

But on the basis of one drama queen’s overreaction to a rumor she’d heard about what was said on a phone call she didn’t hear (I’m assuming the whistleblower is Christine Blasey Ford), the Democrats have launched impeachment proceedings against the president.

I guess they figured it’s easier than flying to South Dakota with picks and chisels and carving Trump into Mount Rushmore. But it will have the same effect.

Now that the transcript has been released, it’s The New York Times that doesn’t want anyone to see it.

The transcript I’d like to see is the one of Nancy Pelosi reading the Trump transcript.

F@@@@@@CK! Whose f***ing idea was it to demand this goddamn transcript?

F@CK!
F@@CK!
F@@@CK!

The absolute worst version for Trump — i.e. the one being repeated non-stop on MSNBC — is that he did exactly what Obama and Biden were doing to Ukraine: intimidating an ally into giving us something in exchange for the foreign aid we were giving them.

Biden himself bragged about getting Ukraine’s prosecutor fired by threatening to withhold a big fat check from them.

The Democrats’ argument is: No, no, no! When WE were pressuring Ukraine, we were doing it for good! Don’t you understand? We’re good; they’re bad.

The other reason the media are going to have to bury this transcript is that Trump brought up a few items that the media have been hoping the public would never find out about.

Trump said: “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution, so if you can look into it … It sounds horrible to me.”

“The transcript I’d like to see is the one of Nancy Pelosi reading the Trump transcript.”

Well, that’s something the media haven’t mentioned before. Ninety-nine percent of Americans will be hearing about the funny business with Biden’s son, Hunter, for the first time with the release of this transcript.

Why did Vice President Biden order the Ukrainian president to fire the prosecutor investigating the Ukrainian company paying his son millions of dollars? Are Democrats claiming that this company was clean as a whistle and it was an absolute OUTRAGE that it was being investigated?

Ukraine was looking into the company that conveniently placed Hunter Biden on its board long before Trump came on the scene. Something must have made the Ukrainian prosecutor want to investigate Biden’s company — and it sure wasn’t to curry favor with the Obama/Biden administration.

The second issue the media does not want anyone to think about is CrowdStrike.

What is CrowdStrike, you ask? That is the cybersecurity firm that is the sole source of the claim that the Russians hacked the DNC’s emails — which launched the conspiracy theories that tied our country in knots for the past three years.

The Russian collusion story was originally hatched by Hillary Clinton in the summer of 2016 to cover up the utter corruption revealed by the dump of Democratic National Committee emails on Wikileaks. As was her practice whenever a scandal threatened to engulf her, Hillary rushed out and told the press to investigate something else.

And “the great story” about the DNC email hack wasn’t about a “vast right-wing conspiracy” — as she claimed when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. No, this time, it was a vast Russian conspiracy!

At the time, the entire media laughed at Hillary’s Russian conspiracy nonsense — The New York Times, New York Newsday, the Los Angeles Times and so on. But then Trump won the election, and suddenly the Russia conspiracy seemed totally believable. What else could explain how Americans could put this boob in the White House?

The subsequent three years of breathless Russia coverage was based entirely on the word of one cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike, that the DNC’s emails had been hacked by Russia. Recall that the DNC wouldn’t allow the FBI or any other U.S. government official anywhere near its computers. That’s precisely why so many cybersecurity experts doubted that it was the Russians: The FBI was never allowed to perform its own investigation.

CrowdStrike was founded by Ukrainian Dmitri Alperovitch (now an American citizen apparently — because who isn’t?) and funded by the fanatically anti-Russian Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk Foundation.

Talk about interfering with our democracy! Alperovitch and Pinchuk sent one political party and nine-tenths of the American media off on a wild goose chase into Russian collusion that, after years of accusations, investigations and embarrassing conspiracy-mongering … turned up goose eggs.

The entire Russian insanity was launched by a couple of Ukrainians. I think a lot of us would like to get to the bottom of that.

This is why Trump said to President Zelensky: “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people … The server, they say Ukraine has it.”

(How’d you like to be the Ukrainian translator for a Trump conversation?)

Trump has been justly criticized for hiring his daughter and son-in-law at the White House. But at least when he pressures a foreign leader for a favor, it’s to investigate corruption, not to get a prosecutor off his son’s back. Maybe Biden’s son was guilty, maybe he was innocent. But it is a fact that Joe Biden held up foreign aid to a desperately needy ally in exchange for their halting prosecution that implicated his son. It’s not Trump’s fault that Biden is now running for president.

I’ll give the Democrats this: They’ve gotten so good at trying to remove Trump from office that, instead of three years, their insane accusations blow up in their faces within a week.

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Democrats Wrote to Ukraine in May 2018, Demanding It Investigate Trump | Breitbart

Posted by M. C. on September 26, 2019

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/09/24/democrats-wrote-to-ukraine-in-may-demanding-it-investigate-trump/

by Joel B. Pollak

Democrats wrote to the Ukrainian government in May 2018 urging it to continue investigations into President Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign — collusion later found not to exist.

The demand, which came from U.S. Senators Robert Menendez (D-NJ), Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Patrick Leahy (D-VT), resurfaced Wednesday in an opinion piece written by conservative Marc Thiessen in the Washington Post.

Ironically, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) declared Tuesday that the mere possibility that President Trump had asked Ukraine to continue an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden — even without a quid pro quo — was enough to trigger an impeachment inquiry. (Biden boasted in 2018 that he had forced Ukraine to remove its prosecutor by threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid; he did not tell his audience at the Council on Foreign Relations that the prosecutor was looking into a firm on whose board his son, Hunter Biden, was serving.)

Thiessen observed (original links):

It got almost no attention, but in May [2018], CNN reported that Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote a letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four investigations they said were critical to the Mueller probe. In the letter, they implied that their support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine was at stake. Describing themselves as “strong advocates for a robust and close relationship with Ukraine,” the Democratic senators declared, “We have supported [the] capacity-building process and are disappointed that some in Kyiv appear to have cast aside these [democratic] principles to avoid the ire of President Trump,” before demanding Lutsenko “reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this important investigation.”

The Democrats’ letter is available online here. In it, Menendez, Durbin, and Leahy demanded that the Ukrainian government answer their questions about the Mueller probe, and issued an implied threat: “This reported refusal to cooperate with the Mueller probe also sends a worrying signal — to the Ukrainian people as well as the international community — about your government’s commitment more broadly to support justice and the rule of law.”

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Brazen Acts of Corruption – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on September 26, 2019

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/09/andrew-p-napolitano/brazen-acts-of-corruption/

By

Last week, media outlets reported the existence of a whistleblower complaint filed with the inspector general of the intelligence community against President Donald Trump. The IC encompasses all civilian and military employees and contractors who work for the federal government gathering domestic and foreign intelligence.

The inspector general — a position appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate — exists in all parts of the executive branch of the government, except for the White House, to examine and determine if officials are following the law.

A whistleblower refers to a person who works for the government and who believes that her or his colleagues and bosses are engaged in unconstitutional or unlawful or dangerous behavior. A federal statute expressly provides procedures for federal employees to follow in order to make known to an inspector general the potentially unlawful or dangerous behavior.

In the case of the IC, since the subject of a whistleblower complaint can be so serious — often involving classified materials that affect national security — the rules provide for an immediate review of the complaint.

The complaint against Trump alleged that he offered a “promise” to a foreign head of state that was unlawful or threatening to national security. The IC inspector general — a Trump appointee — evaluated the complaint, interviewed the whistleblower, examined documents that the whistleblower provided and concluded that the complaint was “urgent and credible.”

The complaint related that Trump held up the sale of $250 million worth of military equipment and the delivery of $140 million in congressionally mandated foreign aid until the government of Ukraine opened a criminal investigation against the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, the leading Democratic contender to oppose Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

Can the president of the United States legally ask a foreign government to provide assistance to his reelection? In a word: No…

Yet, as if to flaunt the Mueller findings, Trump apparently personally and directly committed the crime for which he claimed Mueller exonerated him.

What was that crime? It was the attempt to solicit foreign assistance for his campaign. It was the manipulation of American foreign and military policy for a corrupt purpose. A corrupt purpose puts the president personally above the needs of the nation.

In short, the whistleblower alleges that Trump offered a bribe to his Ukrainian counterpart: Go after my likely opponent’s son and you will get the $390 million in goods and cash that we are holding up.

If demonstrable, this behavior is far worse than anything alleged or uncovered by Mueller. The acts of obstruction that Mueller found arguably constitute impeachable offenses. That’s because the constitutional language of “high crimes and misdemeanors” as one of the three bases for impeachment has been found by the House of Representatives, in three different generations, to include obstruction. Yet there is still wiggle room as to how much personal presidential obstruction and underlying criminality is needed to constitute an impeachable offense.

There is no such wiggle room for bribery. The Constitution is quite clear that “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” shall constitute a basis for impeachment.

Was Trump offering to bribe the Ukrainian president? The circumstantial evidence is: Yes. The transcript of Trump’s critical conversation with the Ukrainian president shows he asked his counterpart to coordinate with American authorities to prosecute the son of his likely political opponent in 2020. That is the solicitation of something of value from a foreign government — a felony.

Within a week of that conversation, Trump put his hold on the $390 million in aid. That’s when the Ukrainian president got the message.

Where does this leave us? We are at the precipice of a constitutional crisis. We have a president whose apparent corruption is palpable. We have a Constitution that prescribes a remedy. We have an attorney general who acts as if he were the president’s personal lawyer. We have Republicans in Congress who see and hear no evil from this president. And we have congressional Democrats hesitant to do their constitutional duty.

We have a mess.

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John Solomon devastates Democrats on Ukraine

Posted by M. C. on September 25, 2019

Is delivering a knockout punch to brain-dead person devastating?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/john_solomon_devastates_democrats_on_ukraine.html

By Thomas Lifson

Writing in The Hill, John Solomon demonstrates that it is Democrats who first sought to intimidate Ukraine for their own political ends and who continue to do so.

Earlier this month, during a bipartisan meeting in Kiev, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) delivered a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

While choosing his words carefully, Murphy made clear — by his own account — that Ukraine currently enjoyed bipartisan support for its U.S. aid but that could be jeopardized if the new president acquiesced to requests by President Trump‘s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to investigate past corruption allegations involving Americans, including former Vice President Joe Biden‘s family.

Murphy boasted after the meeting that he told the new Ukrainian leader that U.S. aid was his country’s “most important asset” and it would be viewed as election-meddling and “disastrous for long-term U.S.-Ukraine relations” to bend to the wishes of Trump and Giuliani.

“I told Zelensky that he should not insert himself or his government into American politics. I cautioned him that complying with the demands of the President’s campaign representatives to investigate a political rival of the President would gravely damage the U.S.-Ukraine relationship. There are few things that Republicans and Democrats agree on in Washington these days, and support for Ukraine is one of them,” Murphy told me today, confirming what he told Ukraine’s leader.

The implied message did not require an interpreter for Zelensky to understand: Investigate the Ukraine dealings of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, and you jeopardize Democrats’ support for future U.S. aid to Kiev.

As with Joe Biden’s public boast to the Council on Foreign Relations that he threatened to withhold a billion dollars unless Ukraine fired prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the company that employed his son as a board member for $50,000 a month, Democrats believe that they have immunity for the very acts they now accuse President Trump of carrying out (though there is no public evidence of any such Trump acts).

Solomon goes on to show that “since at least 2016, Democrats repeatedly have exerted pressure on Ukraine, a key U.S. ally for buffering Russia, to meddle in U.S. politics and elections.”

For instance:

Nazar Kholodnytsky, Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, told me that, soon after he returned from the Washington meeting, he saw evidence in Ukraine of political meddling in the U.S. election. That’s when two top Ukrainian officials released secret evidence to the American media, smearing Manafort.

The release of the evidence forced Manafort to step down as Trump’s top campaign adviser. A Ukrainian court concluded last December that the release of the evidence amounted to an unlawful intervention in the U.S. election by Kiev’s government, although that ruling has since been overturned on a technicality.

Read the whole thing.

The accusations against Trump are based on hearsay, evidence that no court in the United States would accept.

This is going to blow up in Democrats’ faces even bigger than I believed yesterday.

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Rand Corporation: How to Destroy Russia – Global ResearchGlobal Research – Centre for Research on Globalization

Posted by M. C. on May 31, 2019

Rand Corporation

This is the future that is planned out for us by the Rand Corporation, the most influential think tank of the Deep State – in other words the underground centre of real power gripped by the economic, financial, and military oligarchies – which determines the strategic choices not only of the USA, but all of the Western world.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/rand-corp-how-destroy-russia/5678456

By Manlio Dinucci

Force the adversary to expand recklessly in order to unbalance him, and then destroy him. This is not the description of a judo hold, but a plan against Russia elaborated by the Rand Corporation, the most influential think tank in the USA. With a staff of thousands of experts, Rand presents itself as the world’s most reliable source for Intelligence and political analysis for the leaders of the United States and their allies.

The Rand Corp prides itself on having contributed to the elaboration of the long-term strategy which enabled the United States to win the Cold War, by forcing the Soviet Union to consume its own economic resources in the strategic confrontation. It is this model which was the inspiration for the new plan, Overextending and Unbalancing Russia, published by Rand [1].

According to their analysts, Russia remains a powerful adversary for the United States in certain fundamental sectors. To handle this opposition, the USA and their allies will have to pursue a joint long-term strategy which exploits Russia’s vulnerabilities. So Rand analyses the various means with which to unbalance Russia, indicating for each the probabilities of success, the benefits, the cost, and the risks for the USA.

Rand analysts estimate that Russia’s greatest vulnerability is that of its economy, due to its heavy dependency on oil and gas exports. The income from these exports can be reduced by strengthening sanctions and increasing the energy exports of the United States. The goal is to oblige Europe to diminish its importation of Russian natural gas, and replace it by liquefied natural gas transported by sea from other countries.

Another way of destabilising the Russian economy in the long run is to encourage the emigration of qualified personnel, particularly young Russians with a high level of education.

In the ideological and information sectors, it would be necessary to encourage internal contestation and at the same time, to undermine Russia’s image on the exterior, by excluding it from international forums and boycotting the international sporting events that it organises.

In the geopolitical sector, arming Ukraine would enable the USA to exploit the central point of Russia’s exterior vulnerability, but this would have to be carefully calculated in order to hold Russia under pressure without slipping into a major conflict, which it would win.

In the military sector, the USA could enjoy high benefits, with low costs and risks, by increasing the number of land-based troops from the NATO countries working in an anti-Russian function.

The USA can enjoy high probabilities of success and high benefits, with moderate risks, especially by investing mainly in strategic bombers and long-range attack missiles directed against Russia.

Leaving the INF Treaty and deploying in Europe new intermediate-range nuclear missiles pointed at Russia would lead to high probabilities of success, but would also present high risks.

By calibrating each option to gain the desired effect – conclude the Rand analysts – Russia would end up by paying the hardest price in a confrontation, but the USA would also have to invest huge resources, which would therefore no longer be available for other objectives. This is also prior warning of a coming major increase in USA/NATO military spending, to the disadvantage of social budgets.

This is the future that is planned out for us by the Rand Corporation, the most influential think tank of the Deep State – in other words the underground centre of real power gripped by the economic, financial, and military oligarchies – which determines the strategic choices not only of the USA, but all of the Western world.

The “options” set out by the plan are in reality no more than variants of the same war strategy, of which the price in sacrifices and risks is paid by us all.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on Il Manifesto. Translated by Pete Kimberley.

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image is from Zero Hedge

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Joe Biden’s Ukraine Scandal Is His Policy, Not Personal Interests – Bloomberg

Posted by M. C. on May 15, 2019

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-08/joe-biden-s-ukraine-scandal-is-his-policy-not-personal-interests

By

…The conflict of interest story isn’t worth much on its merits. But if it plagues Biden, he will deserve it for the ham-handed way he interfered in Ukrainian politics — a snake-pit that isn’t kind to badly informed outsiders. Biden’s cowboy-style interventions didn’t do Ukraine any good, and its wily politicians ran circles around him. Americans shouldn’t pay too much attention to the shaky corruption allegations, but Biden’s record in Ukraine doesn’t speak well for his judgment on foreign policy.

The central allegation spun up by Trump and his allies involves Hunter Biden’s work for the oil and gas company Burisma Holdings, where he served as a board member from 2014 until recently. Burisma is owned by Mykola Zlochevsky, who had been a cabinet minister under President Viktor Yanukovych. Zlochevsky fled Ukraine after the 2014 Revolution of Dignity that deposed Yanukovych, and was put under investigation by the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office. Last year, Biden famously boasted that he had forced Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire the prosecutor general by threatening to withhold a $1 billion U.S. loan if he failed to obey.

Now, that prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, says he was fired because he was pursuing Zlochevsky and Burisma. “I didn’t get the hints that we should stop the investigation of Burisma wrongdoing,” he said in an interview published this week, in which he also accuses Biden of pursuing “personal interests” in Ukraine and recruiting Ukrainian officials to protect them — charges Biden denies.

Shokin’s claims are highly questionable. The illegal enrichment and money laundering investigation against Zlochevsky was started in August 2014 at the request of Shokin’s deputy, Vitaly Kasko. He had a strained relationship with his boss, and resigned in early 2016, two months before Shokin’s firing. Shokin didn’t actually lead the Zlochevsky investigation, so his removal wasn’t necessary to stop it. Besides, Kasko denies there was any U.S. pressure to end the investigation: He told Bloomberg News that the case had been dormant for a while when Shokin was fired.

It’s likely, however, that Poroshenko was indeed interested in ending the Burisma investigation for reasons that may or may not have had anything to do with the Bidens. Global corruption watchdog Transparency International closely followed the transformation of the criminal investigation into a demand for back taxes. “There are reasonable grounds to believe that close associates of current Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko have significantly assisted Mykola Zlochevsky in dismissing criminal cases against him,” Transparency wrote in a detailed brief on the history of the Zlochevsky investigation…

Trump partisans will try to use the Burisma case to pump up the shaky claims into a scandal against Biden. But Biden opened himself up to the smears by diving into the Ukrainian cesspool — and bragging about it. Shokin’s words would be that much less credible had Biden not boasted that he’d personally gotten the prosecutor fired. Although Ukrainian anti-corruption activists had been clamoring for Shokin’s dismissal and his days in office were probably numbered, Biden decided for some reason to claim credit — a move as nearsighted as it was unnecessary.

Biden’s other boasts about Ukraine reveal a naivete about the country’s political landscape and the forces shaping it. In his 2017 memoir, “Promise Me, Dad,” Biden described making a call to Yanukovych “in late February of 2014, when his snipers were assassinating Ukrainian citizens by the dozens” to tell him to “call off his gunmen and walk away” because “his Russian friends” wouldn’t rescue him from the disaster. “The disgraced president fled Ukraine the next day,” Biden wrote.

If indeed Biden called Yanukovych the day before his flight, that would have been Feb. 21, when Yanukovych signed a European-brokered deal with opposition politicians that would have kept him in office for a transition period with drastically reduced powers. Protesters seized the government quarter in Kiev in the next few hours, and Yanukovych fled to his country residence, fearing for his life. It’s impossible to know now if it was Biden’s alleged call, coupled with the takeover of government buildings, that gave Yanukovych the idea the deal was never meant to be kept. If so, Biden could have inadvertently helped to set off the chain of events that led to the Russian takeover of Crimea as a reaction to what Russian President Vladimir Putin saw as a U.S.-led coup.

In other Ukraine interventions, Biden tried to keep the peace between Poroshenko and his first prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, whom Biden described as a “young patriot” in his book — long after the Yatsenyuk became deeply unpopular thanks to the corrupt schemes of his associates. Poroshenko listened to Biden’s exhortations about working with Yatsenyuk, then pushed him out anyway once Yatsenyuk had been thoroughly discredited.

Biden has publicly insisted that the Ukrainian authorities get tougher on corruption. He even made an impassioned speech about it to the Ukrainian parliament in 2015. But at the same time, he likely led Ukrainian leaders to believe that maintaining a good relationship with the U.S. vice president meant more than any substantive anti-graft measures when it came to getting foreign aid. Poroshenko, Biden wrote in his memoirs, “knew I had gone to bat for him to get aid from the International Monetary Fund and loan guarantees from the United States.” The IMF, of course, is supposed to issue loans based on strict criteria, not on political support; if Poroshenko indeed “knew” anything of the sort, it must have contributed to his imitation of reforms for the sake of foreign sponsors such as Biden. It didn’t help him much with Ukrainian voters this year, though.

Generally, open meddling in the politics of a foreign country, even one as troubled as Ukraine, isn’t a great idea for a U.S. politician, even if he was personally handed the Ukraine portfolio by the president. It’s even worse when the politician doesn’t have a clear idea of the consequences. The election of populist political novice Zelenskiy is a direct consequence of Poroshenko’s bungling rule, assisted by a bungling, boastful Biden. Once Zelenskiy takes office this month, the U.S. will have to turn a new leaf with Ukraine…

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Ukraine: Why “OU” Lost By A Landslide | PopularResistance.Org

Posted by M. C. on April 23, 2019

Why did Biden want him fired? The prosecutor was leading a wide-ranging corruption investigation into the natural gas firm – while Biden’s son, Hunter, sat on the board of directors.

https://popularresistance.org/ukraine-why-ou-lost-by-a-landslide/

By Kevin Zeese

Ukraine: Why “OU” Lost By A Landslide

With the landslide victory of Volodymyr Zelensky, who won 73 percent of the vote, the comedian will become the president of Ukraine. Understanding how this occurred becomes easy when people review US government documents published by Wikileaks about the outgoing president.

Who is “OU”? Our Ukraine. In a classified diplomatic cable from 2006 released by Wikileaks.org, U.S. officials refer to Poroshenko as “Our Ukraine (OU) insider Petro Poroshenko.” “Our Ukraine” has been in the pocket of the US government for 13 years.

The US government knew he was corrupt. A separate cable also released by Wikileaks makes that clear. The May 2006 cable states “Poroshenko was tainted by credible corruption allegations, but wielded significant influence within OU; Poroshenko’s price had to be paid.” The US government knew he was corrupt, but allowing his corruption was a price the US was willing to pay to have Our Ukraine serving as president.

The document also describes the “bad blood” between Poroshenko and  Yuliya Tymoshenko. This bad blood continues to this day as Tymoshenko came in third in the first round of the elections, and it seemed to continue through the General Election, as those who voted for her, voted for Zelensky — or against Poroshenko. The memo describes the Tymoshenko-Poroshenko relationship writing, “there is a thin line between love and hate,” and describing how  “Tymoshenko and Poroshenko might appear in public, shake hands, agree to ‘do business’ together” but a coalition between them was unlikely to last.

Joe Biden, who is expected to announce a run for president, is emblematic of the corruption of the US in Ukraine. Wikileaks reports, Biden pledged US financial and technical assistance to Ukraine for “unconventional” gas resources (i.e. fracking). And, not only was his son Hunter put on the board of the largest private gas company in Ukraine (along with a long-time Kerry family friend and financier) but when that gas company was threatened with investigation, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 saying that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion. Biden claimed he gave the country six hours to fire the prosecutor before he left Ukraine or he would bankrupt the country. OU fired him.

Why did Biden want him fired? The prosecutor was leading a wide-ranging corruption investigation into the natural gas firm – while Biden’s son, Hunter, sat on the board of directors. Corruption is a major problem in Ukraine, and Biden contributed to it, bringing US corruption to Ukraine. After Poroshenko replaced the prosecutor with one to Biden’s liking a Wikileaks document shows he was prepared to move forward with the signing of the third $1 billion loan guarantee agreement

Now the two pro-US politicians, Tymoshenko and Poroshenko, have been replaced by a political unknown in Zelensky, or “Ze,” as he’s more popularly known. The incoming president has been vague on what policies he will pursue but says he wants to negotiate peace with Russia over eastern Ukraine, saying he was prepared to negotiate directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Ukraine is sick of corruption. Adding to Poroshenko’s corruption, the US brought more corruption. Not surprisingly, corruption under Poroshenko worsened. The country is tired of the conflict between Kiev and East Ukraine and Zelensky said he would try to end the war. And, the country has become the poorest in Europe as the promise of close ties with the US have not resulted in the benefits promised.

While the country has gotten poorer, Poroshenko remains one of the wealthiest men in Ukraine. He has been surrounded by corruption scandals as various businessmen close to him have been caught up in scandals involving corruption. The common view is Ukraine has gotten poorer as Poroshenko has gotten richer.

All this was predictable with what the US knew about OU, and thanks to Wikileaks should not be a surprise to anyone.

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Inside the Extremist Group That Dreams of Ruling Ukraine

Posted by M. C. on February 27, 2019

Another Obama/Hillary state department regime change success story!

https://outline.com/z3FaKW

Michael Colborne

You can find it just off Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the city’s main square. A former hotel, three stories high, its thick metal front door emblazoned with a symbol the occupants continue to deny is the one used by several Waffen SS divisions and U.S. white supremacist terror group Aryan Nations (the Wolfsangel).

It’s called Cossack House, a social center for Ukraine’s far-right Azov movement.

Through the cold, dark lobby is a site “to develop yourself,” as the group’s Facebook page declares, “a place where you can express yourself!” There’s a gym, a shop that sells far-right music and clothing, an art studio and even a massage room. Upstairs, overlooking a courtyard that hosts concerts during less snowy times of year, is a literature club with a classroom and small library.

It is here where Haaretz heard firsthand from the movement’s members about what they’re up to, and how they like – and don’t like – to be discussed.

“We have always been dissatisfied by the way Western media represent our movement,” Azov’s international secretary, Olena Semenyaka, tells Haaretz. “They label us as far-right, sometimes as a neo-Nazi movement,” she says. “Of course that’s a misconception. We are new nationalists.”

But these “new nationalists” seem to act an awful lot like the old ones. They continue to form international connections with open anti-Semites and Nazi sympathizers. They promote and encourage the works of virulently anti-Semitic Nazi figures. They make Hitler salutes and “Sieg Heil” chants behind closed doors. Members even muse that some Jews would not be allowed to stay in Ukraine if they ever seized power. Read the rest of this entry »

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Latest Odds of a Shooting War Between NATO and Russia – Consortiumnews

Posted by M. C. on December 17, 2018

AG: Competition between US and Russian energy corporations is one of the main undercurrents to all this.

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/12/13/latest-odds-of-a-shooting-war-between-nato-and-russia/

by Ann Garrison

An Interview with George Szamuely

George Szamuely is a Hungarian-born scholar and Senior Research Fellow at London’s Global Policy Institute. He lives in New York City. I spoke to him about escalating hostilities on Russia’s Ukrainian and Black Sea borders and about Exercise Trident Juncture, NATO’s massive military exercise on Russian borders which ended just as the latest hostilities began.

Ann Garrison: George, the hostilities between Ukraine, NATO, and Russia continue to escalate in the Sea of Azov, the Kerch Strait, and the Black Sea. What do you think the latest odds of a shooting war between NATO and Russia are, if one hasn’t started by the time this is published?

George Szamuely: Several weeks ago, when we first talked about this, I said 60 percent. Now I’d say, maybe 70 percent. The problem is that Trump seems determined to be the anti-Obama. Obama, in Trump’s telling, “allowed” Russia to take Crimea and to “invade” Ukraine. Therefore, it will be up to Trump to reverse this. Just as he, Trump, reversed Obama’s policy on Iran by walking away from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, otherwise known as the Iran nuclear deal. So expect ever-increasing US involvement in Ukraine.

AG: NATO’s Supreme Commander US General Curtis M. Scaparrotti is reported to have been on the phone with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko “offering his full support.” Thoughts on that?

GS: There has been a proxy war within Ukraine since 2014, with NATO backing Poroshenko’s Ukrainian government and Russia backing the dissidents and armed separatists who speak Russian and identify as Russian in Ukraine’s southeastern Donbass region. But in the Kerch Strait the hostilities are between Russia and Ukraine, with NATO behind Ukraine.

A shooting war will begin if it escalates to where NATO soldiers shoot and kill Russian soldiers or vice versa. Whoever shoots first, the other side will feel compelled to respond, and then there’ll be a war between Russia and NATO or Russia and a NATO nation.

We don’t know whether NATO would feel compelled to respond as one if Russians fired on soldiers of individual NATO nations—most likely UK soldiers since the UK is sending more of its Special Forces and already has the largest NATO military presence in Ukraine. Russia could defeat the UK, but if the US gets involved, all bets are off… Read the rest of this entry »

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Are You Ready To Fight a War Over Ukraine? – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on December 11, 2018

https://original.antiwar.com/srichman/2018/12/09/are-you-ready-to-fight-a-war-over-ukraine/

by 

Today, the United States and Allies conducted an extraordinary flight under the Open Skies Treaty. The timing of this flight is intended to reaffirm U.S. commitment to Ukraine and other partner nations.?

The United States is resolute in our support for the security of European nations.

– Department of Defense news release, Dec. 6, 2018

Who wants to go to war against Russia in defense of Ukraine over the Kerch Strait, which lies between the Black and Azov seas and between Russia’s Taman Peninsula and Russian-annexed Crimea?

A show of hands, please.

But careful: don’t misconstrue my question. I’m not asking who wants the “United States” to go to war. I’m asking, rather: who is personally willing to fight the Russian military over the strait? Or: who is willing to see his or her sons and daughters fight, kill, and die in that cause?

Now, again, a show of hands, please. Anyone? No one? I didn’t think so. Read the rest of this entry »

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