BY JOHN SOLOMON | The Hill
Photo: Former Vice President Joe Biden and Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Ukrainian law enforcement officials believe they have
evidence of wrongdoing by American Democrats and their allies in Kiev, ranging
from 2016 election interference to obstructing criminal probes. But, they say,
they’ve been thwarted in trying to get the Trump Justice Department to act.
Photo: Deputy head of the Prosecutor General’s International Legal Cooperation Department Kostiantyn Kulyk
Kostiantyn Kulyk, deputy head of the Prosecutor General’s
International Legal Cooperation Department, told me he and other senior law
enforcement officials tried unsuccessfully since last year to get visas from
the U.S. embassy in Kiev to deliver their evidence to Washington.
“We were supposed to share this information during a
working trip to the United States,” Kulyk told me in a wide-ranging interview. “However,
the (U.S.) ambassador blocked us from obtaining a visa. She didn’t explicitly
deny our visa, but also didn’t give it to us.”
One focus of Ukrainian investigators, Kulyk said, has
been money spirited unlawfully out of Ukraine and moved to the United States by
businessmen friendly to the prior, pro-Russia regime of Viktor Yanukovych.
Ukrainian businessmen “authorized payments for lobbying
efforts directed at the U.S. government,” he told me. “In addition, these
payments were made from funds that were acquired during the money-laundering operation.
We have information that a U.S. company was involved in these payments.” That
company is tied to one or more prominent Democrats, Ukrainian officials insist.
In another instance, he said, Ukrainian authorities
gathered evidence that money paid to an American Democrat allegedly was
hidden by Ukraine’s National
Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) during the 2016 election under pressure
from U.S. officials. “In the course of this investigation, we found that
there was a situation during which influence was exerted on the NABU, so
that the name of (the American) would not be mentioned,” he said.
Ukraine is infamous for corruption and disinformation
operations; its police agencies fight over what is considered evidence of
wrongdoing. Kulyk and his bosses even have political fights over who should and
shouldn’t be prosecuted. Consequently, allegations emanating from Kiev usually
are taken with a grain a salt.
But many of the allegations shared with me by more than a
half-dozen senior Ukrainian officials are supported by evidence that emerged in
recent U.S. court filings and intelligence reports. The Ukrainians told me
their evidence includes:
- Sworn
statements from two Ukrainian officials admitting that their agency tried
to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election in
favor of Hillary
Clinton. The effort included leaking an alleged ledger showing
payments to then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort;
- Contacts
between Democratic figures in Washington and Ukrainian officials that
involved passing along dirt on Donald Trump;
- Financial
records showing a Ukrainian natural gas company routed more than $3 million to American accounts
tied to Hunter Biden, younger son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, who managed
U.S.-Ukrainian relations for the Obama administration. Biden’s son served
on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company, Burisma Holdings;
- Records
that Vice President Biden pressured Ukrainian officials in March 2016 to
fire the prosecutor who oversaw an investigation of
Burisma Holdings and who planned to interview Hunter Biden about the
financial transfers;
- Correspondence
showing members of the State Department and U.S. embassy in Kiev
interfered or applied pressure in criminal cases on Ukrainian soil;
- Disbursements
of as much as $7 billion in Ukrainian funds that prosecutors believe may
have been misappropriated or taken out of the country, including to the
United States.
Ukrainian officials say they don’t want to hand the
evidence to FBI agents working in Ukraine because they believe the bureau has a
close relationship with NABU and the U.S. embassy. “It is no secret in
Ukrainian political circles that the NABU was created with American help and
tried to exert influence during the U.S. presidential election,” Kulyk told me.
Kulyk’s boss, Prosecutor General Yuriy
Lutsenko, told me he has enough evidence — particularly involving Biden, his
family and money spirited out of Ukraine — to warrant a meeting with U.S.
Attorney General William
Barr. “I’m looking forward to meeting with the attorney general of the
United States in order to start and facilitate our joint investigation
regarding the appropriation of another $7 billion in U.S. dollars with
Ukrainian legal origin,” Lutsenko said.
I wrote last week that Biden, in 2016, pressured
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin,
who was investigating Burisma.
Kulyk confirmed Ukraine is investigating that alleged
incident: “We have evidence and witnesses stating that Joe Biden applied
pressure on Ukrainian law enforcement to stop the investigation.”
Ukrainians officials have gone public in recent days with
their frustrations, after months of trying to deliver the evidence quietly to
the Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) fizzled.
Unable to secure visas from
the U.S. embassy, some Ukrainian law enforcement officials sought backdoor
channels, Kulyk said.
One of those avenues involved reaching out last fall to a
former federal prosecutor from the George W. Bush years, according to
interviews. He delivered a written summary of some of the Ukrainian allegations
to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, along with an offer to
connect U.S. investigators with individuals purporting to have the evidence.
There
was no response or follow-up, according to multiple people directly familiar
with the effort.
More recently, President Trump’s private
attorney Rudy Giuliani — former mayor and former U.S. attorney in New York City
— learned about some of the allegations while, on behalf of the Trump legal
team, he looked into Ukrainian involvement in the 2016 election.
Since then, Lutsenko and others have talked with other
American lawyers about helping to file U.S. legal action to recover money they
believe was wrongly taken from their country.
“It’s like no one at DOJ is listening. There
is some compelling evidence that should at least be looked at, evaluated, but
the door seems shut at both State and Justice,” said an American who has been
contacted for help and briefed on the evidence.
State Department officials declined to
address whether they denied or slow-walked visas for Ukrainian officials.
“Visa records are confidential under U.S. law; therefore, we cannot discuss the
details of individual visa cases,” a department spokesperson said.
Ukraine’s evidence, if true, would mark the
first documented allegation of Democrats receiving assistance from a foreign
power in their efforts to help Clinton win the 2016 election.
“It looks like there is some evidence emerging that there
could have been a proxy war between Russia and Ukraine to secure their
preferred American president during the 2016 race,” said a former top
intelligence official who now advises the Trump administration on intelligence
policy.
There is public-source information, in Ukraine and in the
United States, that gives credence to some of what Ukrainian prosecutors
allege.
A court in Ukraine formally concluded that
law enforcement officials there illegally tried to intervene in the 2016 U.S.
election by leaking documents of Manafort’s business dealings after he was
named Trump’s campaign chairman. And a Ukrainian
parliamentarian released a purported tape recording of a top Ukrainian law
enforcement official bragging that he was responsible for the leak and was
trying to help Clinton win.
Lutsenko told Hill.TV in an interview aired last week that he
has opened a criminal investigation into those allegations.
Nellie Ohr, wife of a senior Justice official and a
researcher for the Fusion GPS opposition-research firm, testified to Congress
last year that some of Fusion GPS’s research on Trump-Russia ties came from a Ukrainian parliamentarian.
The Democratic Party
and the Clinton campaign paid Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Trump.
Although Ohr acknowledged the Ukrainian source, lawmakers
did not press her to be more specific.
And Politico reported in 2017 on evidence of Ukraine’s U.S. embassy
helping the Clinton campaign to discredit Trump. “A Ukrainian-American
operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top
officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties
between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia,” the newspaper
reported.
Separately, the conservative nonprofit Citizens United
last month filed a lawsuit seeking to force the State Department to disclose
all information it possesses about Hunter Biden and his business partners
involved with Ukraine-based Burisma Holdings.
If Ukrainian prosecutors can augment their allegations
with real evidence, there could be a true case of collusion worth
investigating.
The only question is why the U.S. government
so far hasn’t taken interest — and whether Attorney General Barr will change
that.
John Solomon is an award-winning
investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI
intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse
of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of
political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive
vice president for video at The Hill.
