Impeachment hearings

[_Smokey]

Are you saying that investigation into Hunter Biden’s shady business dealings in the Ukraine, and Joe Biden’s admitted extortion in Ukraine, and the meddling of Ukrainians in the 2016 election, is actually the corruption?

Investigation into corruption = corruption?

[_Smokey]

Are you saying that investigation into Hunter Biden’s shady business dealings in the Ukraine, and Joe Biden’s admitted extortion in Ukraine, and the meddling of Ukrainians in the 2016 election, is actually the corruption?

Investigation = corruption?

[_honorentheos]

Nazar Kholodnitzky: The lead anti-corruption prosecutor in Ukraine. He visited on January 19, 2016.

On March 7, 2019, The Associated Press reported that the then-U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch called for him to be fired.

https://apnews.com/b126f24a720a4978af37d1aa29b2bf64

(It was March 6, by the way)

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) — The U.S. ambassador to Kiev directed unusually scathing criticism at the Ukrainian government in remarks released Wednesday, urging authorities to replace a senior anti-corruption official and tackle the country’s corruption problem.

In a speech Tuesday, Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch said the government’s efforts have “not yet resulted in the anti-corruption or rule of law reforms that Ukrainians expect or deserve.” In the surprisingly blunt remarks, which were released Wednesday, the ambassador called on Ukrainian officials to fire the special anti-corruption prosecutor, Nazar Kholodnytsky, who has been accused of helping suspects avoid corruption charges.

“Nobody who has been recorded coaching suspects on how to avoid corruption charges can be trusted to prosecute those very same cases,” she said, referring to recent wiretaps that allegedly caught on tape Kholodnytsky giving advice to corruption suspects.

In late February, Ukraine’s Constitutional Court struck down a law against officials enriching themselves, raising concerns about the Ukrainian government’s resolve to fight endemic corruption.

The National Anti-Corruption Bureau issued a statement Wednesday saying that court ruling has forced it to close all 65 criminal inquiries it was pursuing into illegal enrichment, including a high-profile case against the mayor of the port city Odessa.

Ukrainian media also published an investigation last week into alleged embezzlement schemes in the country’s military industry. The report alleged that members of President Poroshenko’s inner circle were involved in the embezzlement.

Referring to that scandal, Yavonovitch called for a complete audit of a state-owned military procurement company and greater transparency for defense contracts.

Ukraine’s new government pledged to fight corruption when it came into power five years ago, and had set up several anti-corruption bodies. But corruption is still rampant in Ukraine.

The ambassador’s critical remarks appear to be timed to coincide with a visit by U.S. Under Secretary of State David Hale, who arrives in Kiev on Wednesday to discuss the country’s progress in fighting corruption among other things.

[_honorentheos]

In case you missed it, Smokey, the corruption is in helping people avoid prosecution. It's what Viktor Shokin was doing as well, including avoiding prosecuting the president of Burisma, that led to the US and our European allies calling for his removal. Biden was just the messenger.

Trump has been used by, and is using, corruption in the Ukraine not trying to tackle it.

[_Smokey]

So Joe Biden, when threatening Ukraine with withholding money if they did not fire the prosecutor who was investigating the energy company that was paying his son protection money a salary, was the one actually fighting corruption?

It was corrupt of Trump to push for a renewal in the investigation Biden quashed with extortion.

That makes sense. I’m sure he’ll be impeached any day now.

.

[_honorentheos]

That's a nice fantasy story.

What actually happened is Biden presented the US demand the Ukrainians remove the PG who was NOT proactively investigating the president of Burisma when he was supposed to be doing so as part of the broad anti-corruption support following the poster of a corrupt president oligarch in the pocket of Russia. Hmm.

[_Smokey]

That's a nice fantasy story.

What actually happened is Biden presented the US demand the Ukrainians remove the PG who was NOT proactively investigating the president of Burisma when he was supposed to be doing so as part of the broad anti-corruption support following the poster of a corrupt president oligarch in the pocket of Russia. Hmm.

So Joe Biden was fighting corruption by preventing an investigation into his son’s shady business dealings?

[Guest]

So Joe Biden was fighting corruption by preventing an investigation into his son’s shady business dealings?

No! Biden was fighting corruption by encouraging the removal of a corrupt prosecutor who was refusing to do his job of investigating the corruption of his son's boss at Burisma. In other words, Biden and his son had enough integrity to object to and expose the corruption of Burisma, even though Hunter was employed by Burisma. This is the exact opposite of corruption or lack of ethics on the part of the Bidens.

In contrast, what Trump wanted was to reinstate the corrupt prosecutor who refused to do his job and investigate the corruption.

[Guest]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... fell-apart

To frustrate any potential investigations, Ukraine’s rulers became masters of the offshore world’s network of tax havens. Once money was stolen, it was invested in European and American assets hidden at the end of intricate chains of shell companies, registered through tax havens in the Indian Ocean, Europe and the Caribbean. It is Cyprus, rather than Russia, Germany or America, that dominates the Ukrainian economy: an astonishing 92% of Ukraine’s outward investment flowed into the Mediterranean tax haven in 2014.

The secrecy of these offshore centres allowed the oligarchs around Yanukovich to keep the precise details of their deals hidden from the public – but ordinary Ukrainians knew enough to be angry. If Ukraine’s 2014 revolution was about any one thing, it was about this corruption. Yanukovich and his allies had stolen as much as they could; more than they could ever need. And even the most apolitical citizens could see that infrastructure was rotting, medicines were scarce, schools were falling apart. The armed forces were so demoralised by the degeneration of the homeland they were supposed to defend that when Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea, a Ukrainian admiral defected as soon as Russia asked him to.

In 2010, after Yanukovich won the election, Zlochevsky became natural resources minister. That position gave him oversight of all energy companies operating in Ukraine, including the country’s largest independent gas company, Burisma. The potential for a conflict of interest should have been clear, because Zlochevsky himself controlled Burisma. But there was no public outcry about this, because almost no one in Ukraine knew about it. Zlochevsky owned his businesses via Cyprus, a favoured haven for assets unobtrusively controlled by high-ranking officials in the Yanukovich administration.

On 14 April 2014, the money was frozen at a special court hearing in London requested by the Serious Fraud Office. As described in the later court judgment, the SFO argued that “there were reasonable grounds to believe that the defendant [Zlochevsky] had engaged in criminal conduct in Ukraine and the funds in the BNP account were believed to be the proceeds of such criminal conduct”.

The SFO investigator Richard Gould claimed in the April 2014 court hearing that Zlochevsky’s dual position in Ukraine as both a politician and a businessman gave “rise to a clear inference of a wilful and dishonest exploitation of a direct conflict of interest by a man holding an important public office such as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in him”.

Ukraine was at the time in a state of turmoil. Russia had annexed the peninsula of Crimea, and was aiding pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine’s eastern provinces. Kiev had lost control of Donetsk and Luhansk, two of the country’s most important cities, and protesters’ barricades still dominated the centre of the capital. The country needed a new president and, that May, elected a magnate named Petro Poroshenko. Although he had served as a minister under Yanukovich and was himself a billionaire, Poroshenko pledged to sell his confectionery business, to govern only in the interests of the people, to prosecute the corrupt former insiders and to bring an end to the old way of doing things, including in the prosecutors’ office. For too long, prosecutors had been acting essentially as gangsters in uniform, rather than investigating crimes.

“The investigation began but, no matter how much we pushed the investigators, it was not effective,” Kasko told me. Even when Zlochevsky’s lawyers announced they would contest the freezing of the $23m in a London court, the Ukrainian prosecutors still failed to send the SFO the evidence it needed to maintain the freezing order. “First the British wrote to me, then the Americans, with questions about what was happening with the investigation,” Kasko remembered.

I said I wanted this to be investigated properly, that the Brits be told about it, and they get what they wanted,” recalled Kasko. “He said, ‘If you want, get on with it.’” It was hardly the most enthusiastic of endorsements, but it was enough for Kasko. He forced investigators to work evenings, and weekends. They put together a dossier of evidence that Kasko felt supported the SFO’s argument “that the defendant’s assets were the product of criminal wrongdoing when he held public office”, sent it to the SFO, and announced officially that Zlochevsky was suspected of a criminal offence in Ukraine.

It was only thanks to Kasko that the SFO had received any useful documents from Ukraine at all. “I asked the Brits, ‘What else do we need to do?’” Kasko remembered. “And they said: ‘That’s fine, that’s more than enough to defend the freezing order in court’.”

Their confidence was misplaced. In January 2015, Mr Justice Nicholas Blake, sitting in the Old Bailey, rejected the SFO’s argument. “The case remains a matter of conjecture and suspicion,” he wrote in his judgment. To confiscate assets, prosecutors have to prove that the frozen money related to a specific crime and, he ruled, the SFO had totally failed to do so.

Zlochevsky’s lawyers at Peters & Peters told me that the judge had “ruled unequivocally that there was not reasonable grounds to allege that our client had benefited from any criminal conduct”. Burisma’s lawyers have since repeatedly referred to the ruling as evidence of their client’s vindication, which calls into question the decision of the UK government to use this particular case as an example of its determination to recover assets and return them to Ukraine, when it had been unable to prove that there were sufficient grounds to keep the $23m frozen.

Kasko felt this was bizarre. Everyone in a senior position at the prosecutor’s office must have known he was leading a frenzied investigation into Zlochevsky at that precise time, so how could anyone have signed off on a letter saying that no investigation was going on? The letter appeared to be crucial to the judge’s ruling, which stated that Zlochevsky “was never named as a suspect for embezzlement or indeed any other offence, let alone one related to the exercise of improper influence in the grant of exploration and production licenses”.

According to Kasko, there were really only three possible reasons for why a senior Ukrainian prosecutor would have written a letter for Zlochevsky rather than assisting Kasko. He was either incompetent, corrupt or both. Peters & Peters did not respond to specific questions about the letter (“the allegations implied by your questions … are untrue and entirely without foundation”).

On 8 March 2015, David Sakvarelidze, then Ukraine’s first deputy general prosecutor, appeared on a Ukrainian news programme and made a dramatic accusation – that Ukrainian prosecutors had taken a bribe to help Zlochevsky.

Change could only be won when international lenders forced President Poroshenko to act. It was tough talk from the west that obliged Ukraine’s parliament – long referred to sarcastically as the biggest business club in Europe – to create the anti-corruption bureau and a dedicated anti-corruption prosecution service. And it was only the bluntest of language from US officials that forced the Ukrainian government to fire crooked prosecutors. According to a valedictory interview by the former vice president Joe Biden in the Atlantic, Poroshenko only sacked the lawman blocking Kasko’s reforms because Biden made a direct threat. “Petro, you’re not getting your billion dollars,” Biden said he had told Ukraine’s president. “You can keep the [prosecutor] general. Just understand, we’re not paying if you do.”

[_Smokey]

No! Biden was fighting corruption by encouraging the removal of a corrupt prosecutor who was refusing to do his job of investigating the corruption of his son's boss at Burisma.

Was the prosecutor corrupt because he was investigating Hunter Biden? Or is that just a coincidence?