On January 11, 2017, Politico ran a post entitled “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire“, which detailed how Kiev officials were scrambling to make amends with president-elect Trump after quietly working to boost Clinton.
Via Politico…
Donald Trump wasn’t the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by officials of a former Soviet bloc country.
Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.
The Ukrainian hate for Trump (and alignment with Clinton) steamed out of the country’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, working with Paul Manafort before being overthrown by the US, EU and neo-nazi groups.
Manafort’s work for Yanukovych caught the attention of a veteran Democratic operative named Alexandra Chalupa, who had worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison during the Clinton administration. Chalupa went on to work as a staffer, then as a consultant, for Democratic National Committee. The DNC paid her $412,000 from 2004 to June 2016, according to Federal Election Commission records, though she also was paid by other clients during that time, including Democratic campaigns and the DNC’s arm for engaging expatriate Democrats around the world.
A daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who maintains strong ties to the Ukrainian-American diaspora and the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, Chalupa, a lawyer by training, in 2014 was doing pro bono work for another client interested in the Ukrainian crisis and began researching Manafort’s role in Yanukovych’s rise, as well as his ties to the pro-Russian oligarchs who funded Yanukovych’s political party.
In an interview this month, Chalupa told Politico she had developed a network of sources in Kiev and Washington, including investigative journalists, government officials and private intelligence operatives. While her consulting work at the DNC this past election cycle centered on mobilizing ethnic communities — including Ukrainian-Americans — she said that, when Trump’s unlikely presidential campaign began surging in late 2015, she began focusing more on the research, and expanded it to include Trump’s ties to Russia, as well.
She occasionally shared her findings with officials from the DNC and Clinton’s campaign, Chalupa said.
She said she shared her concern with Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., Valeriy Chaly, and one of his top aides, Oksana Shulyar, during a March 2016 meeting at the Ukrainian Embassy. According to someone briefed on the meeting, Chaly said that Manafort was very much on his radar, but that he wasn’t particularly concerned about the operative’s ties to Trump since he didn’t believe Trump stood much of a chance of winning the GOP nomination, let alone the presidency.
That was not an uncommon view at the time, and, perhaps as a result, Trump’s ties to Russia — let alone Manafort’s — were not the subject of much attention.
That all started to change just four days after Chalupa’s meeting at the embassy, when it was reported that Trump had in fact hired Manafort, suggesting that Chalupa may have been on to something. She quickly found herself in high demand. The day after Manafort’s hiring was revealed, she briefed the DNC’s communications staff on Manafort, Trump and their ties to Russia, according to an operative familiar with the situation.
A former DNC staffer described the exchange as an “informal conversation,” saying “‘briefing’ makes it sound way too formal,” and adding, “We were not directing or driving her work on this.” Yet, the former DNC staffer and the operative familiar with the situation agreed that with the DNC’s encouragement, Chalupa asked embassy staff to try to arrange an interview in which Poroshenko might discuss Manafort’s ties to Yanukovych.
While the embassy declined that request, officials there became “helpful” in Chalupa’s efforts, she said, explaining that she traded information and leads with them. “If I asked a question, they would provide guidance, or if there was someone I needed to follow up with.” But she stressed, “There were no documents given, nothing like that.”
Chalupa said the embassy also worked directly with reporters researching Trump, Manafort and Russia to point them in the right directions. She added, though, “they were being very protective and not speaking to the press as much as they should have. I think they were being careful because their situation was that they had to be very, very careful because they could not pick sides. It’s a political issue, and they didn’t want to get involved politically because they couldn’t.”
Here is Chalupa giving an interview with what was the state run Ukraine Today TV channel (officially shut down in 2016)…
The Washington Times reports that the White House stated that the real collusion with a foreign power during the campaign was between the Democratic National Committee and Ukraine.
“If you are looking for an example of a campaign coordinating with foreign country or a foreign source, look no further than the DNC which actually coordinated opposition research with the Ukrainian embassy,” said White House principal deputy press secretary Sarah Sanders.
Fending off questions about Donald Trump Jr. meeting with a Russian lawyer during the presidential race, Mrs. Sanders noted at the daily White House press briefing that the DNC’s work with Ukraine was well documented.
DNC operatives worked with officials at the Ukraine embassy in an effort to spread dirt on Donald Trump during the campaign, according to reports.
“This is not an accusation. That is an on-the-record action that they took,” Mrs. Sanders said.
“No one in this room to my knowledge really had a problem with that,” she said.
Fox News’s Sean Hannity exposed the Ukrainian collusion with Hillary Clinton prior to interviewing Donald Trump Jr.
Hannity likewise closes his interview with Donald Trump Jr., by once again citing Ukraine’s collusion with the Hillary Clinton campaign…
Finally, the hypocrisy of the Trump Jr., narrative being played out by the Hillary Clinton liberal left mediqa is not only found in the fact that Ukraine did side with “her” to sabotage Trump during the US elections, but that Ukraine’s US election meddling was not the only time Hillary colluded with shady sources to damage Trump and sabotage US democracy…
Zerohedge notes that ironically that infamous “Trump Dossier,” which appeared back in January (think Golden Showers), was compiled by ex-British intelligence official Chris Steele and was allegedly sourced from several Russia-based contacts, was shared with various members of the Hillary Clinton campaign yet not a single Senate or House committee has launched an investigation to figure out whether Hillary ‘colluded’ with British and/or Russian intelligence to undermine the campaign of Donald Trump…very odd. We’re sure it’s just a simple oversight.
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