The Russiagate affair began with documents released by groups funded by billionaire activist George Soros, it now emerges. Now it is clear that under Barack Obama, the U.S. Embassy in Kiev worked closely with Soros-related groups to compile opposition research on the Trump campaign.

Guest post by Collin McMahon

Several U.S. media outlets have reported on the Ukrainian origins of the Russiagate hoax, including Epoch Times, The Hill and Gateway Pundit. The Epoch Times reported on April 10, 2019, that the charges against ex-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort originated with Ukrainian Representative Serhiy Leshenko and Artem Sytnyk, director of Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), who revealed documents on kickbacks to Manafort during the Presidency of pro-Russian president Victor Yanukovych.

Serhiy Leshenko (pictured above) presented these ‘Black Ledger’ documents to the public on March 21, 2017 in the Soros-funded Ukraine Crisis Media Center, linking Manafort to illegal kickbacks totaling $12.7 million and even seeking to blame him for the deaths of protestors on Maidan Square 2014. The Ukrainian “anti-corruption” investigators even went so far as to hack the phones and text messages of Paul Manafort‘s daughters.

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The Ukraine Crisis Media Center was founded in March 2014 by the Ukraine government and George Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation to give reporting on the Ukraine conflict the ‘correct’ spin. Soros has founded media lobby groups all over the world modeled on Media Matters for American, which he founded with John Podesta after the Lewinsky scandal nearly brought down Bill Clinton.

Leshenko provided this info to Clinton campaign staffer Alexandra Chalupa, as Epoch Times reports, who then passed this info on to Yahoo News reporter Michael Isikoff. Isikoff broke the story on Yahoo on Aug. 18, 2016, one of the first public mentions of purported “collusion with Russia” by the Trump team. Manafort had to step down as Trump’s campaign manager the next day.

Chalupa also passed the Black Ledger info on to Glenn Simpson at Fusion GPS, who passed them on to staffer Nellie Ohr. Ohr passed the info on to her husband Bruce Ohr, Epoch Times reports. On May 30, 2016, Nellie Ohr sent an email to Bruce Ohr and Justice Department staffers under the subject line “Reported Trove of Documents on Ukrainian Party of Regions’ ‘Black Cashbox.’”

Alexandra Chalupa with her attorney Michael Avenatti

Documentation regarding the Party of Regions’ Black Ledger “has now seemingly found its way to NABU, the Ukrainian National Anti-Corruption Bureau,” the e-mail stated, citing the source for the Black Ledger documents as former First Deputy Head of the Security Service of Ukraine Viktor Trepak.

Bruce Ohr then used this Soros-derived info to begin the Justice Department surveillance of the Trump campaign code-named “Crossfire Hurricane”.

George Soros had invested billions in Ukraine before the conflict broke out 2014, and was one of the primary players in the conflict with his nemesis Vladimir Putin. “With his Open Society Foundations, Soros was not only instrumental in helping bring down the government in Kiev, he also stands to make a sizeable profit out of Ukraine, especially thanks to his close ties to the new Poroshenko government. In January of this year, he met privately several times with the Ukrainian leadership,” neopresse wrote in 2015.

On April 28, 2016, Chalupa and Isikoff appeared on a panel to discuss their research on Manafort with 68 Ukrainian journalists in a program called the Open World Leadership Center, sponsored by the Library of Congress, which is closely connected to the Soros Foundations.

NABU and the Obama government were working closely with Soros NGO Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC) in Ukraine, as John Solomon reports on The Hill. When Ukrainian prosecutors investigated AntAC over a missing $4.4 million in U.S. funding, they were told to stand down by Obama officials.

When the new prosecutor general Yuri Lutsenko went to meet Obama Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, he says he was stunned when the ambassador “gave me a list of people whom we should not prosecute.”

“It turns out AntAC was co-funded by the Obama administration and liberal mega-donor George Soros. And it was collaborating with the FBI agents investigating then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s business activities with pro-Russian figures in Ukraine”, Solomon writes.

“The implied message to Ukraine’s prosecutors was clear: Don’t target AntAC in the middle of an America presidential election in which Soros was backing Hillary Clinton to succeed another Soros favorite, Barack Obama, Ukrainian officials said.”

According to donor disclosure records, AntAC received 59 percent of its nearly $1.7 million budget since 2012 from U.S. budgets tied to State and Justice, Solomon reports, or $1 million, and nearly $290,000 from Soros’s International Renaissance Foundation.

Ukrainian law enforcement officials have tried to share their information on collusion between Obama officials, the Clinton campaign, Soros NGOs and Ukrainian government with the Justice Department, so far unsuccessfully, Solomon writes. Deputy Head of the Prosecutor General’s International Legal Cooperation Department Kostiantyn Kulyk told Solomon: “We were supposed to share this information during a working trip to the United States… 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.”

“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 the NABU and the U.S. Embassy“, Solomon writes. “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 him.

U.S.-Ukraine corruption and collusion goes all the way up to the Obama White House, as Solomon reports. “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.-Ukraine relations for the Obama administration. Biden’s son served on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company, Burisma Holdings.” Records show that 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, according to Peter Schweizer in “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends”.