Background

In February 2014, Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was discharged from the U.S. Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine use. On April 21-22, 2014, Joe Biden, in his role as overseer of the Obama administration’s policy towards Ukraine, visited that country to urge its government to increase its natural gas production. That same month, British officials who were investigating allegations of money laundering by Burisma Holdings, a large Ukrainian natural gas company, froze a number of London bank accounts containing $23 million that belonged to Burisma owner and president Mykola Zlochevksy.

On May 13, 2014 — just three weeks after Joe Biden’s visit to Ukraine — Hunter Biden was appointed to the Burisma board of directors. That position paid him approximately $83,000 per month, even though he had no background or expertise in either Ukrainian matters or natural gas.

In August 2014, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Vitaly Yarema opened a corruption investigation into Burisma. Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States were partners in this probe.

In February 2015 Yarema was succeeded as Prosecutor General by Viktor Shokin, who continued the Ukrainian investigation into Burisma.

In September 2015, then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, publicly called for an investigation into Burisma president Zlochevsky.

According to journalist John Solomon: “[In] January 2016 … the Obama White House unexpectedly invited Ukraine’s top prosecutors to Washington to discuss fighting corruption in the country. The meeting, promised as training, turned out to be more of a pretext for the Obama administration to pressure Ukraine’s prosecutors to drop an investigation into the Burisma Holdings gas company that employed Hunter Biden and to look for new evidence in a then-dormant criminal case against eventual Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, a GOP lobbyist.”

On February 2, 2016, the home of Burisma owner Zlochevksy was raided by the Ukrainian state prosecutor’s office. Joe Biden subsequently called Ukrainian president Poroshenko at least three times that same month, following the raid.

In March 2016 – while Prosecutor General Shokin was still actively investigating Burisma’s alleged corruption – Vice President Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to the Ukrainian government unless President Poroshenko agreed to fire Shokin immediately. Because the revocation of American aid would have been devastating to Ukraine, President Petro Poroshenko caved to Biden’s threat and fired Shokin on March 29. At the time of Shokin’s termination, he and other Ukrainian prosecutors were in the midst of preparing a request to interview Hunter Biden about his activities and the funds he was receiving from Ukraine.

In a sworn affidavit prepared for a European court, Shokin later testified that he had been told that the reason for his firing was that Joe Biden was troubled by the Burisma investigation. “The truth,” said Shokin, “is that I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors. On several occasions President Poroshenko asked me to have a look at the case against Burisma and [to] consider the possibility of winding down the investigative actions in respect of this company but I refused to close this investigation.”

And here is how Joe Biden himself – in a January 2018 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations – boastfully recollected his own role in getting Shokin fired:

“I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. I had gotten a commitment from [Ukrainian President] Poroshenko and from [Prime Minister] Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor [Shokin]. And they didn’t. So they said they had — they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to — or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, ‘you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president [Obama] said’ — I said, ‘call him’ [Obama]. I said, ‘I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars.’ I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in,’ I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”

Biden claimed that he had pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin not because the prosecutor was investigating the vice president’s son, but rather, because Shokin himself was corrupt and incompetent. But that narrative was debunked by journalist John Solomon, who wrote in September 2019:

“Hundreds of pages of never-released memos and documents — many from inside the American team helping Burisma to stave off its legal troubles — conflict with Biden’s narrative…. For instance, Burisma’s American legal representatives met with Ukrainian officials just days after Biden forced the firing of the country’s chief prosecutor and offered ‘an apology for dissemination of false information by U.S. representatives and public figures’ about the Ukrainian prosecutors, according to the Ukrainian government’s official memo of the meeting. The effort to secure that meeting began the same day the prosecutor’s firing was announced. In addition, Burisma’s American team offered to introduce Ukrainian prosecutors to Obama administration officials to make amends, according to that memo and the American legal team’s internal emails. “The memos raise troubling questions. If the Ukraine prosecutor’s firing involved only his alleged corruption and ineptitude, why did Burisma’s American legal team refer to those allegations as ‘false information’? [And] if the firing had nothing to do with the Burisma case, as Biden has adamantly claimed, why would Burisma’s American lawyers contact the replacement prosecutor within hours of the termination and urgently seek a meeting in Ukraine to discuss the case?”

In May 2020, leaked phone conversations between Biden and former Ukrainian President Poroshenko were made public by Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach, who also claimed to be in possession of proof showing that Burisma Holdings had paid then-Vice President Biden $900,000 in lobbying fees. In one of the leaked conversations — which took place after Ukrainian Prosecutor General Shokin had been fired and replaced with Yuriy Lutsenko — Biden told Poroshenko: “It’s going to be critical for him [Lutsenko] to work quickly to repair the damage that Shokin did. And I’m a man of my word. And now that the new Prosecutor General is in place, we’re ready to move forward to signing that new $1 billion loan guarantee.”

Other Occasions When Democrats Have Tried to Interfere in Ukrainian Politics

In May 2019, CNN reported that Democratic Senators Robert Menendez, Richard Durbin, and Patrick Leahy wrote a letter to Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing dismay over the fact that four investigations which they said were critical to special counsel Robert Mueller’s (failed) probe of alleged collusion between Donald Trump and the Russian government during the 2016 presidential election season, were being closed. In their letter, the three senators implied that their own support for U.S. financial assistance to Ukraine would hinge on Lutsenko’s adherence to their wishes. “We have supported [the] capacity-building process and are disappointed that some in [Kiev] appear to have cast aside these [democratic] principles to avoid the ire of President Trump,” the senators wrote before demanding that Lutsenko “reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this important investigation.”

During a September 2019 meeting in Kiev, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy (Connecticut) told Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, that future aid from the United States – which Murphy described as Ukraine’s “most important asset” – could be jeopardized if Zelensky acquiesced to requests by President Trump’s attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, to investigate past corruption allegations involving Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Such cooperation with Trump and Giuliani, said Murphy, would be viewed as election meddling and thus would be “disastrous for long-term U.S.-Ukraine relations.” “I told Zelensky that he should not insert himself or his government into American politics,” Murphy later said to reporter John Solomon. “I cautioned him that complying with the demands of the President’s campaign representatives to investigate a political rival [Biden] of the President would gravely damage the U.S.-Ukraine relationship.”

Occasions When Democrats Have Pressured Ukraine to Interfere in American Politics

When Vice President Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in March 2016, by no means was that the only time a Democrat in recent years has used his political influence either to interfere in Ukrainian politics, or to facilitate Ukrainian interference in American politics. As John Solomon wrote in The Hill in September 2019:

“Democrats repeatedly have exerted pressure on Ukraine, a key U.S. ally for buffering Russia, to meddle in U.S. politics and elections, … [since] as early as January 2016, when the Obama White House unexpectedly invited Ukraine’s top prosecutors to Washington to discuss fighting corruption in the country. The meeting, promised as training, turned out to be more of a pretext for the Obama administration to pressure Ukraine’s prosecutors to drop an investigation into the Burisma Holdings gas company that employed Hunter Biden and to look for new evidence in a then-dormant criminal case against eventual Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, a GOP lobbyist.”

“Democrats continued to tap Ukraine for Trump dirt throughout the 2016 election…. Nellie Ohr, the wife of senior U.S. Justice Department official Bruce Ohr [who detested presidential candidate Donald Trump], worked in 2016 as a contractor for Fusion GPS, the same Hillary Clinton-funded opposition research firm that hired Christopher Steele, the British spy who wrote the now-debunked dossier linking Trump to Russia collusion. Nellie Ohr testified to Congress that some of the dirt she found on Trump during her 2016 election opposition research came from a Ukrainian parliament member. She also said that she eventually took the information to the FBI through her husband — another way Ukraine got inserted into the 2016 election.”

“Shortly after the Ukrainian prosecutors returned from their Washington meeting, a new round of Democratic pressure was exerted on Ukraine — this time via its embassy in Washington. Valeriy Chaly, the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States at the time, confirmed to me … that, in March 2016, a contractor for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) pressed his embassy to try to find any Russian dirt on Trump and Manafort that might reside in Ukraine’s intelligence files. The DNC contractor also asked Chaly’s team to try to persuade Ukraine’s president at the time, Petro Poroshenko, to make a statement disparaging Manafort when the Ukrainian leader visited the United States during the 2016 election. Chaly said his embassy rebuffed both requests because it recognized they were improper efforts to get a foreign government to try to influence the election against Trump and for Hillary Clinton.”

“Nazar Kholodnytsky, Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, told me that, soon after he returned from the Washington meeting,… 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 [in December 2018] 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.”

In an audio recording from 2016, Artem Sytnyk, Director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, could be heard admitting that he was trying to boost the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton by sabotaging that of Republican Donald Trump. Said Sytnyk in the recording: “Hillary, she is – how shall I put it? She belongs to the cohort of politicians who comprise the hegemony in the U.S. Both in the U.S. and the entire world, right? For us, it’s … sort of … better. For Americans … what Trump is doing is better for them.”

In 2016 as well, Sytnyk released a “black ledger” containing information designed to bring down then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Sytnyk was eventually tried and convicted in Ukraine for interfering in America’s 2016 presidential election.

The key figure who helped the Democratic National Committee (DNC) connect with the Ukrainian government in 2016 was DNC consultant Alexandra Chalupa, who had previously worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison during the Bill Clinton administration. Chalupa in 2016 worked directly with the Ukrainian embassy in the U.S. to portray [Trump campaign adviser Paul] Manafort in a negative light. The embassy, in turn, worked collaboratively with reporters who were researching Trump, Manafort, and Russia. The Ukrainian embassy’s then-political officer, Andrii Telizhenko, candidly stated that the Ukrainians “were coordinating an investigation with the Hillary team on Paul Manafort with Alexandra Chalupa” and that “the embassy worked very closely with” Chalupa.

In a 2016 email to the DNC’s Louise Miranda, Chalupa wrote: “Hey, a lot coming down the pipe. I spoke to a delegation of 68 investigative journalists from Ukraine last night at the Library of Congress, the Open World Society forum. They put me on the program to speak specifically about Paul Manafort. I invited Michael Isikoff, who I’ve been working with for the past few weeks, and connected him to the Ukrainians. More offline tomorrow, since there was a big Trump component you and Lauren need to be aware of that will hit in the next few weeks. Something I’m working on that you should be aware of.”

In January 2017, Politico reported:

“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. 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, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation. The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia.”

In a July 20, 2017 letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) expressed his own concern regarding reports that Ukraine’s political leadership in 2016 had “opposed the candidacy of Donald Trump for president of the United States and worked with a Democratic National Committee consultant [Alexandra Chalupa] to undermine his campaign.” “This consultant,” wrote Grassley in a press release announcing the letter, “allegedly had various meetings with Ukrainian government officials, including embassy staff, to coordinate the dissemination of incriminating information about Trump campaign officials. It appears that this consultant was operating to advance the interests of both the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton campaign, and a foreign government, which would have required registration under FARA [the Foreign Agents Registration Act].”

In his letter to Rosenstein, Grassley, using footnotes to document the sources of the quotes he cited, wrote:

“According to news reports, during the 2016 presidential election, ‘Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump’ and did so by ‘disseminat[ing] documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter…’ Ukrainian officials also reportedly ‘helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.’ At the center of this plan was Alexandra Chalupa, described by reports as a Ukrainian-American operative ‘who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee’ and reportedly met with Ukrainian officials during the presidential election for the express purpose of exposing alleged ties between then-candidate Donald Trump, Paul Manafort, and Russia. Politico also reported on a Financial Times story that quoted a Ukrainian legislator, Serhiy Leschenko, saying that Trump’s candidacy caused ‘Kiev’s wider political leadership to do something they would never have attempted before: intervene, however indirectly, in a U.S. election.’”

“Reporting indicates that the Democratic National Committee encouraged Chalupa to interface with Ukrainian embassy staff to ‘arrange an interview in which Poroshenko [the president of Ukraine] might discuss Manafort’s ties to [Viktor] Yanukovych’, [who served as Ukraine’s president from 2010-14] Chalupa also met with Valeriy Chaly, Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., and Oksana Shulyar, a top aid to the Ukrainian ambassador in March 2016 and shared her alleged concerns about Manafort. Reports state that the purpose of their initial meeting was to ‘organize a June reception at the embassy to promote Ukraine.’ However, another Ukrainian embassy official, Andrii Telizhenko, told Politico that Shulyar instructed him to assist Chalupa with research to connect Trump, Manafort, and the Russians. He reportedly said, ‘[t]hey were coordinating an investigation with the Hillary team on Paul Manafort with Alexandra Chalupa’ and that ‘Oksana [Shulyar] was keeping it all quiet … the embassy worked very closely with’ Chalupa.”

“Chalupa’s actions appear to show that she was simultaneously working on behalf of a foreign government, Ukraine, and on behalf of the DNC and Clinton campaign, in an effort to influence not only the U.S voting population but U.S. government officials. Indeed, Telizhenko recalled that Chalupa told him and Shulyar, ‘[i]f we can get enough information on Paul [Manafort] or Trump’s involvement with Russia, she can get a hearing in Congress by September.’ Later, Chalupa did reportedly meet with staff in the office of Democratic representative Marcy Kaptur to discuss a congressional investigation. Such a public investigation would not only benefit the Hillary Clinton campaign, but it would benefit the Ukrainian government, which, at the time, was working against the Trump campaign….”

“Aside from the apparent evidence of collusion between the DNC, Clinton campaign, and Ukrainian government, Chalupa’s actions implicate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA)…. FARA requires individuals to register with the Justice Department if they act, even through an intermediary, ‘as an agent, representative, employee, or servant’ or ‘in any other capacity’ at the behest of a foreign principal, including a foreign political party, for purposes of engagement with a United States official. The registration applies to anyone who attempts to influence a U.S. government official on behalf of a foreign principal in an effort to ‘formulat[e], adopt, or chang[e] the domestic or foreign policies of the United States.”

When One Impeachment Effort Against President Trump Fails, Try Another One

(Most of the information in this section is derived from Dan Bongino’s 2018 book Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump, and Gregg Jarrett’s 2019 book The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump.)

On April 12, 2016, Marc Elias – a lawyer from Perkins Coie, the international law firm representing the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee – retained the research and strategic intelligence firm Fusion GPS to conduct opposition research on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Fusion GPS, in turn, hired former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to compile a dossier of allegations suggesting that Trump and his campaign had actively colluded with the Russian government to tilt the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. This opposition research/dossier was funded by three major sources: (a) Obama For America (OFA), Barack Obama’s official campaign arm, which paid Perkins Coie nearly $800,000 for “legal services” in 2016; (b) Hillary Clinton’s official campaign organization, Hillary For America, which paid just under $5.1 million to Perkins Coie in 2016 (DB); and (c) the DNC, which paid nearly $5.4 million to Perkins Coie in 2016.

In early July 2016, Christopher Steele met with the FBI. Around that same time – on July 5, 2016 – the Obama administration’s FBI Director, James Comey, publicly announced his recommendation that the DOJ should file no criminal charges relating to the Hillary Clinton email server controversy (wherein Mrs. Clinton had feloniously violated the Espionage Act many times). Almost immediately after Comey’s announcement, the FBI – driven by the anti-Trump animus of top officials at the Bureau and in the Obama administration’s Justice Department – secretly launched a formal counterintelligence investigation examining whether the Russian government had attempted to collude with the Trump campaign to sabotage Mrs. Clinton’s White House bid.

On July 11, 2016, Stefan Halper, who had served as a White House official in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations, began working as a spy/informant implanted by the FBI into the Trump administration. His espionage operation went by the code name of “Crossfire Hurricane.”

FBI agent Peter Strzok, who had played a key role in absolving Mrs. Clinton of criminality vis-a-vis her email scandal, emerged as a major player in the counterintelligence investigation targeting Trump. To justify the investigation, Strzok and the FBI cited evidence that Russia’s military intelligence unit had hacked DNC computers a year earlier, in July 2015. But as the U.S. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) would later declare in its January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment report – composed of data from the NSA, CIA, and FBI – there was absolutely no evidence that Trump’s campaign had ever engaged in any clandestine talks with Russian leadership or agents of the state. That is a vital piece of information, given that The Attorney General’s Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations stipulates that the Bureau may not, under any circumstances, commence an investigation unless it can articulate a reasonable basis for doing so – namely, well-founded knowledge of “a particular crime or threatened crime.” Because such a basis did not exist in this case, writes Greg Jarrett, author of The Russia Hoax, “the probe was unlawful.”

A watershed moment in the probe against Trump occurred on July 29, 2016, when the FBI petitioned the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a FISA warrant granting permission to wiretap the phones of Carter Page, a minor Trump campaign adviser who had previously worked with the CIA dealing with Russians for years during the first term of the Obama administration, and who had made a trip to Moscow to speak at a commencement ceremony for the New Economic School earlier that month (July 2016). In short, the FBI decided to use Page’s past “ties” to Russia – unremarkable as they were – as a pretext to begin spying on Page. The decision to pursue a FISA warrant is a high-level matter, requiring the approval of top members of the FBI, the DOJ, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The scope of the wiretapping for which the FBI sought authorization would extend far beyond Carter Page. This is because of the so-called “two-hop rule” which governs such wiretaps, meaning that under a single warrant targeting Page, any Trump campaign associate with whom Page had communicated via text message or phone call during the brief months of his association with the campaign in 2016, would be fair game, as a direct connection, all the way through the end of the period when the warrant or its subsequent renewals might extend. Moreover, the “second-hop” connections of those initial contacts—meaning everyone with whom those people had communicated—would also be fair game. In other words, it is highly likely that almost everyone, if not everyone, on the Trump campaign staff would be included in the universe of first- and second-order contacts of Carter Page. Still further, the wiretapping would also allow the FBI to get its hands on any of Page’s stored communications (from the past) with those same first- and second-tier contacts.

The June 2016 FISA request was denied by the FISA court, however, on grounds that insufficient cause had been shown.

On August 9, 2016, FBI attorney Lisa Page, with whom Peter Strzok was having an extramarital affair, transmitted a text message asking Strzok: “[Trump’s] never going to become president, right?” Strzok replied: “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.” Six days later, Strzok wrote a text message telling Lisa Page that while “I want to believe … that there’s no way he [Trump] gets elected,” “I’m afraid we can’t take that risk.” To guard against that “unlikely” but not altogether impossible election outcome, Strzok explained, he and his likeminded comrades at the FBI were busy implementing an “insurance policy” by which a Trump victory could either be prevented from occurring at all, or could be subsequently overturned in the event that it did occur. This was obviously a reference to the Steele dossier and, most likely, the Crossfire Hurricane project.

Just a few days after Paul Manafort resigned as Trump’s campaign chairman on August 19, 2016, the FBI initiated a wiretap against Manafort; this wiretap would extend through early 2017. President Obama’s role in the overall “Trump collusion” probe was signaled by a September 2, 2016 text message in which Lisa Page told Peter Strzok that Obama “wants to know everything we’re doing.”

In early September 2016, Christopher Steele told DOJ official Bruce Ohr – whose wife was also working for Fusion GPS along with Steele and was assisting in the anti-Trump research – that he (Steele) was both “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected” and “passionate about him not being president.”

In mid-September 2016, Steele met with his State Department friend Jonathan Winer to discuss the dossier that he (Steele) was still busy compiling. Around that same time, Steele also flew to Rome to meet with and brief the FBI on his progress.

On October 19, 2016, Steele wrote his final report for the dossier, and the FBI authorized payment to him. All told, the FBI made 11 payments to Christopher Steele in 2016. The completed Steele dossier contained numerous allegations of close interactions — including quid pro quo agreements — between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Among its more salacious allegations were claims that: (a) Trump “hated” former president Obama so much that when he stayed in the Presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Moscow, he had commissioned prostitutes to urinate on the bed used by the Obamas during an earlier visit; and (b) Trump’s engagement in a variety of “perverted sexual acts” and “sex parties” over the years, coupled with his past payment of bribes, would make him susceptible to blackmail if he were to win the presidency.

On October 21, 2016, the FBI and DOJ, newly armed with the Steele dossier, which mentioned Carter Page nine times, again petitioned for a FISA warrant authorizing the surveillance of Page’s communications – as well as the communications of everyone within the scope of the “two-hop rule.” In making their case to the FISA court, the FBI and DOJ deceived the FISA judge by inflating the importance and credibility of the dossier; obscuring the true partisan nature of the dossier’s authorship; downplaying the extent to which the dossier’s content was either fabricated or unverifiable; hiding the fact that the FBI itself had assessed the dossier “as only minimally corroborated”; asserting that a Yahoo News story about Carter Page’s Russia ties provided additional justification for the FISA warrant application, without disclosing that the Yahoo story had come from the very same source as the dossier—Christopher Steele; and hiding the fact that the dossier’s production had been funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign, the DNC, and Obama For America. (Sixteen months later, in February 2018, the House Intelligence Committee’s so-called “Nunes Memo” – named after Committee Chairman Devin Nunes – revealed that according to FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, “no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.”)

In December 2019, the Department of Justice’s Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, would issue a devastating report exposing the FBI’s abuse of the FISA application process to obtain warrants to spy on Carter Page and, by extension, the entire Trump campaign. His report laid bare 17 separate “inaccuracies and omissions” that were never brought to the attention of the Office of Intelligence at any point during the filing of any of the four FISA applications. As the Daily Wire reports: “Seven of the inaccuracies and omissions related to the first FISA application, and these errors were carried on the three subsequent applications, along with [ten] additional errors.”

The October 21, 2016 FISA warrant application – which was signed by James Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates – was approved by the FISA court. This warrant would subsequently be renewed successfully three times, at intervals of approximately three months.

On January 6, 2017, James Comey met alone with Donald Trump to brief him on the allegations contained in Steele’s dossier. The dossier was eventually published in full by BuzzFeed.com on January 10.

On January 12, 2017, the FISA warrant against Carter Page received its first 90-day renewal. The renewal application was signed James Comey and Sally Yates.

On February 14, 2017, Comey gave a copy of a memo about his January 6th meeting with President Trump to a friend; he instructed that friend to share the contents of the memo with a reporter. Comey later explained – in testimony given under oath before the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8, 2017 – that he had done this “because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel” to investigate possible Trump collusion with Russia.

On March 2, 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions – caving to Democratic Party outrage over certain past contacts between Sessions and the Russian ambassador to the United States – recused himself from any investigation into charges that Russia may have meddled in the 2016 presidential election. This set the stage for Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein to play a key role in that investigation.

On March 20, 2017, Comey publicly confirmed that the FBI was investigating “the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and … the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”

In early April 2017, a third wiretap warrant against Carter Page was approved by the FISA court. The renewal application was signed by James Comey and Acting Attorney General Dana Boente, the latter of whom had recently replaced Sally Yates.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on May 3, 2017, James Comey stated that the FBI had opened investigations on more than one “U.S. persons” in connection with the bureau’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia in the 2016 election. Comey declined to answer if Trump personally was under investigation.

On May 9, 2017, Trump fired Comey, based in part on the recommendations of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein. Andrew McCabe replaced Comey as acting FBI Director.

On May 17, 2017, Deputy AG Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate any possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election. Both Peter Strzok and Lisa Page immediately joined Mueller’s team of lawyers and investigators.

On June 29, 2017, the FBI renewed its surveillance warrant against Carter Page for the third and final time. Andrew McCabe and Rod Rosenstein sign the renewal application. This renewed warrant would remain in effect through September 2017.

In March 2019 – after nearly two years of painstaking investigation – Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued a 448-page report concluding that there was no evidence that President Trump or any members of his campaign had colluded with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton. In the course of his investigation, which cost American taxpayers more than $40 million, Mueller employed 19 prosecutors (most of whom were hostile to President Trump) along with more than three dozen FBI agents and an analyst. His team issued some 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, and 280 demands for phone and e-mail records. Moreover, the Mueller team interviewed approximately 500 witnesses.

Later in 2019, the Department of Justice’s Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, would issue a devastating report exposing the FBI’s abuse of the FISA application process to obtain warrants to spy on Carter Page and, by extension, the entire Trump campaign. His report laid bare 17 separate “inaccuracies and omissions” that were never brought to the attention of the Office of Intelligence at any point during the filing of any of the four FISA applications. As the Daily Wire reports: “Seven of the inaccuracies and omissions related to the first FISA application, and these errors were carried on the three subsequent applications, along with [ten] additional errors.”

Special counsel Robert Mueller, who had already testified privately before two separate congressional committees — the House Judiciary Committee & the House Intelligence Committee — regarding his probe of President Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential race, testified publicly — before those same two committees — on July 24, 2019. Mueller’s testimony was disastrous for Democrats, as it confirmed quite clearly that his long and costly investigation had not turned up any evidence of wrongdoing by Trump.

Democrats Immediately Pivot to Another “Scandal,” but Not Without Having First Inflicted Enormous Damage on Republicans

At that point, the Democrats turned their attention immediately to another “scandal.” They never apologized for having dragged the president and the American people through the proverbial mud — at enormous financial cost to the taxpayers, and at enormous political cost to the Republican Party. Indeed, the Republicans lost their majority in the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections, in large part because the Democrat base had been whipped into a frenzy by completely fraudulent allegations of Trump-Russia collusion and Trump’s theft of the 2016 election, while many Republican voters were demoralized. Moreover, as the media’s constant rumblings about collusion, impeachment, and massive scandal grew throughout 2017 and 2018, a large number of Republican incumbents in Congress – 3 members of the Senate and 34 members of the House — simply had no stomach for the fight, and they resigned.

“Whistleblower” Allegations, & The Call to Impeach President Trump

The new subject of the Democrats’ ongoing impeachment crusade would be a telephone conversation that occurred on July 25, 2019 — the very day after Robert Mueller’s catastrophic public testimony — between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

On August 12, 2019 — a mere eighteen days after that July 25 phone call had taken place — an unidentified “whistleblower” from the intelligence community filed a complaint in which he expressed his own “urgent concern” regarding the Trump-Zelensky conversation.

According to the new whistleblower, Trump on July 25th had asked Zelensky to look into why Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin had been fired in 2016 as a result of political and financial threats by then-Vice President Joe Biden. Some key excerpts from the whistleblower’s complaint:

“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals [Joe Biden].”

“I was not a direct witness to most of the events described. However, I found my colleagues’ accounts of these events to be credible because, in almost all cases, multiple officials recounted fact patterns that were consistent with one another. In addition, a variety of information consistent with these private accounts has been reported publicly.”

“I am deeply concerned that the actions described below constitute ‘a serious or flagrant problem, abuse, or violation of law or Executive Order’ that ‘does not include differences of opinions concerning public policy matters.’ … I am also concerned that these actions pose risks to U.S. national security and undermine the U.S. Government’s efforts to deter and counter foreign interference in U.S. elections.”

“Early in the morning of 25 July, the President spoke by telephone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky…. Multiple White House officials with direct knowledge of the call informed me that, after an initial exchange of pleasantries, the President used the remainder of the call to advance his personal interests. Namely, he sought to pressure the Ukrainian leader to take actions to help the President’s 2020 reelection bid. According to the White House officials who had direct knowledge of the call, the President pressured Mr. Zelenskyy to, inter alia:

• initiate or continue an investigation into the activities of former Vice President Joseph Biden and his son, Hunter Biden;

• assist in purportedly uncovering that allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election originated in Ukraine, with a specific request that the Ukrainian leader the Ukrainian leader locate and turn over servers used by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and examined by the [Ukrainian-owned] U.S. cyber security firm Crowdstrike, which initially reported that Russian hackers had penetrated the DNC’s networks in 2016; and

• meet or speak with two people the President named explicitly as his personal envoys on these matters, Mr. Giuliani and Attorney General Barr, to whom the President referred multiple times in tandem.”

Critics and opponents of President Trump claimed that the whistleblower’s allegations provided evidence that Trump had sought to pressure Ukraine’s new president, Zelensky, to dig up political dirt on Trump’s rival, Joe Biden, as a precondition to Ukraine receiving nearly $400 million in congressionally approved military aid from the United States. They also asserted that Trump, seeking to extract a political quid-pro-quo from Zelensky, had delayed the issuance of that aid for 55 days, until its release in September 2019.

It Was Obama & Biden, Not Trump, Who Had Denied Vital Aid to Ukraine

Joe Biden claimed that by delaying the issuance of vital military aid to Ukraine, President Trump had “used the power and resources of the United States to pressure a sovereign nation, a partner that is still under direct assault from Russia … to subvert the rule of law.” But in fact, it was the Obama-Biden administration that had refused to give that aid to Ukraine. As the New York Post explains:

“In 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea and began arming separatists in eastern Ukraine with tanks, armored vehicles and rocket launchers, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko came to Washington to plead for weapons to defend his country. In an impassioned address to a joint session of Congress — with Biden sitting directly behind him — Poroshenko said his country appreciated the nonlethal assistance he was getting, but declared ‘one cannot win a war with blankets.’ “The Obama-Biden administration was unmoved. The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that ‘President Barack Obama stuck to his refusal to provide weapons or other lethal military gear to Ukraine.’ Why? “Team Obama feared that lethal aid would provoke Moscow. So what did the administration give him? Instead of rocket-propelled grenades, we provided food rations. As one frustrated former Pentagon official put it at the time, ‘What kind of message does that send anyway?’ … “When Trump took office, he delivered a message of strength. In December 2017, the new administration announced that the United States would send the lethal aid to Ukraine that Poroshenko requested and Obama and Biden refused — the sale of $47 million worth of Javelin antitank missiles. In May 2018, after Ukraine tested its new Javelin missiles, Poroshenko exulted on Twitter ‘Finally this day has come!’ and personally thanked Trump ‘for supporting Ukraine and adopting a decision to provide Javelin antitank missile systems.’”

The Truth About the “Whistleblower” and the Trump-Zelensky Phone Call

As The Federalist website noted: “The formal complaint from an anti-Trump ‘whistleblower’ alleging various crimes by President Donald Trump is riddled with third-hand gossip and outright falsehoods…. The document itself is riddled not with evidence directly viewed by the complainant, but repeated references to what anonymous officials allegedly told the complainant.”

Under traditional whistleblower rules – which required whistleblowers to provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings – this “whistleblower” would not have been able to file his complaint. But sometime between May 2018 and August 2019, the intelligence community had secretly eliminated that rule; now, whistleblower complaints could be filed even by individuals who had only “heard about [wrongdoing] from others.”

When Democrats — claiming that Trump had engaged in a quid-pro-quo discussion wherein he made U.S. aid contingent upon a Ukrainian investigation of Biden — erupted with outrage and vowed to use Trump’s July 25 conversation with Zelensky as a reason to initiate a “formal impeachment inquiry” against the president, Trump declassified and made public a transcript of the conversation, as it had been transcribed by note-takers in the White House Situation Room. Below are the most noteworthy remarks made by both Trump and Zelensky in the course of their dialog:

• TRUMP: “I will say that we [the U.S.] do a lot for Ukraine. We spend a lot of effort and a lot of time. Much more than the European countries are doing and they should be helping you more than they are. Germany does almost nothing for you. All they do is talk and I think it’s something that you should really ask them about. When I was speaking to Angela Merkel she talks Ukraine, but she doesn’t do anything. A lot of the European countries are the same way so I think it’s something you want to look at but the United States has been very very good to Ukraine. I wouldn’t say that it’s reciprocal necessarily because things are happening that are not good but the United States has been very very good to Ukraine.” • TRUMP: “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 [a Ukrainian-owned cybersecurity technology company that helped investigate the Democratic National Committee cyber attacks and connected those attacks to Russian intelligence services] … I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.” • ZELENSKY: “Yes, it is very important for me and everything that you just mentioned earlier…. I guarantee as the President of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly.. That I can assure you.” • TRUMP: Good, because I heard you had a prosecutor [Shokin] who was very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. [Trump attorney Rudolph] Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that. The other thing, 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.” • ZELENSKY: “I wanted to tell you about the prosecutor. First of all, I understand and I’m knowledgeable about the situation. Since we have won the absolute majority in our Parliament, the next prosecutor general will be 100% my person, my candidate, who will be approved, by the parliament and will start as a new prosecutor in September. He or she will look into the situation, specifically to the company that you mentioned in this issue….” • TRUMP: “I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it. I’m sure you will figure it out. I heard the prosecutor was treated very badly and he was a very fair prosecutor, so good luck with everything.”

On September 24, 2019, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that House Democrats would seek, because of what they viewed as the impropriety of President Trump’s July 25 phone call with Zelensky, to open an impeachment inquiry against Trump. House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff would be the lead investigator. (Schiff initially told reporters that he had not spoken directly with the whistleblower prior to the latter’s filing of his August 12 complaint. But the congressman’s claim was subsequently proven false by a New York Times story showing that Schiff actually had known about the whistleblower’s allegations before the complaint was even filed.)

On October 8, 2019, newsman John Solomon reported that a newly unearthed document showed that Ukrainian officials in the NABU — an FBI-like anti-corruption agency in Ukraine — had already opened a new probe into Burisma Holdings, the firm on whose board Hunter Biden had served, five months prior to the July 25, 2019 telephone conversation between Presidents Trump and Zelensky. “The U.S. government had open-source intelligence and was aware as early as February of 2019 [when Petro Poroshenko was still Ukraine’s president] that the Ukrainian government was planning to reopen the Burisma investigation,” said Solomon. “This is long before the president ever imagined having a call with President Zelensky. This is a significant shift in the factual timeline.” This information, Solomon added, had been omitted from the whistleblower’s complaint recently lodged against Trump. Solomon’s revelation was monumentally significant because it meant that Trump’s calls for a Ukrainian investigation of Biden and Burisma would not have changed anything; the investigation had already been active for five months.

On October 10, 2019, it was learned that the whistleblower was a career CIA analyst who had been detailed to the National Security Council at the White House, where he had worked with Joe Biden during the latter’s tenure as vice president.

On October 30, 2019, journalist Paul Sperry published additional information about the whistleblower:

More than two months after the official filed his complaint, pretty much all that’s known publicly about him is that he is a CIA analyst who at one point was detailed to the White House and is now back working at the CIA. But the name of a government official fitting that description — Eric Ciaramella — has been raised privately in impeachment depositions, according to officials with direct knowledge of the proceedings, as well as in at least one open hearing held by a House committee not involved in the impeachment inquiry. Fearing their anonymous witness could be exposed, Democrats this week blocked Republicans from asking more questions about him and intend to redact his name from all deposition transcripts. RealClearInvestigations is disclosing the name because of the public’s interest in learning details of an effort to remove a sitting president from office. Further, the official’s status as a “whistleblower” is complicated by his being a hearsay reporter of accusations against the president, one who has “some indicia of an arguable political bias … in favor of a rival political candidate” — as the Intelligence Community Inspector General phrased it circumspectly in originally fielding his complaint. Federal documents reveal that the 33-year-old Ciaramella, a registered Democrat held over from the Obama White House, previously worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and former CIA Director John Brennan, a vocal critic of Trump who helped initiate the Russia “collusion” investigation of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. Further, Ciaramella left his National Security Council posting in the White House’s West Wing in mid-2017 amid concerns about negative leaks to the media. He has since returned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. “He was accused of working against Trump and leaking against Trump,” said a former NSC official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters. Also, Ciaramella huddled for “guidance” with the staff of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, including former colleagues also held over from the Obama era whom Schiff’s office had recently recruited from the NSC. Schiff is the lead prosecutor in the impeachment inquiry. And Ciaramella worked with a Democratic National Committee operative who dug up dirt on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, inviting her into the White House for meetings, former White House colleagues said. The operative, Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American who supported Hillary Clinton, led an effort to link the Republican campaign to the Russian government. “He knows her. He had her in the White House,” said one former co-worker, who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter. Documents confirm the DNC opposition researcher attended at least one White House meeting with Ciaramella in November 2015. She visited the White House with a number of Ukrainian officials lobbying the Obama administration for aid for Ukraine…. A CIA officer specializing in Russia and Ukraine, Ciaramella was detailed over to the National Security Council from the agency in the summer of 2015, working under Susan Rice, President Obama’s national security adviser. He also worked closely with the former vice president [Biden]. Federal records show that Biden’s office invited Ciaramella to an October 2016 state luncheon the vice president hosted for Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. Other invited guests included Brennan, as well as then-FBI Director James Comey and then-National Intelligence Director James Clapper. Several U.S. officials told RealClearInvestigations that the invitation that was extended to Ciaramella, a relatively low-level GS-13 federal employee, was unusual and signaled he was politically connected inside the Obama White House. Former White House officials said Ciaramella worked on Ukrainian policy issues for Biden in 2015 and 2016, when the vice president was President Obama’s “point man” for Ukraine. A Yale graduate, Ciaramella is said to speak Russian and Ukrainian, as well as Arabic. He had been assigned to the NSC by Brennan. He was held over into the Trump administration, and headed the Ukraine desk at the NSC, eventually transitioning into the West Wing, until June 2017. “He was moved over to the front office” to temporarily fill a vacancy, said a former White House official, where he “saw everything, read everything.” The official added that it soon became clear among NSC staff that Ciaramella opposed the new Republican president’s foreign policies. “My recollection of Eric is that he was very smart and very passionate, particularly about Ukraine and Russia. That was his thing – Ukraine,” he said. “He didn’t exactly hide his passion with respect to what he thought was the right thing to do with Ukraine and Russia, and his views were at odds with the president’s policies.” “So I wouldn’t be surprised if he was the whistleblower,” the official said. In May 2017, Ciaramella went “outside his chain of command,” according to a former NSC co-worker, to send an email alerting another agency that Trump happened to hold a meeting with Russian diplomats in the Oval Office the day after firing Comey, who led the Trump-Russia investigation. The email also noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin had phoned the president a week earlier. Contents of the email appear to have ended up in the media, which reported Trump boasted to the Russian officials about firing Comey, whom he allegedly called “crazy, a real nut job.” In effect, Ciaramella helped generate the “Putin fired Comey” narrative, according to the research dossier making the rounds in Congress, a copy of which was obtained by RealClearInvestigations. Ciaramella allegedly argued that “President Putin suggested that President Trump fire Comey,” the report said. “In the days after Comey’s firing, this presidential action was used to further political and media calls for the standup [sic] of the special counsel to investigate ‘Russia collusion.’”

Following is some key information about one of Ciaramella’s two attorneys, Mark Zaid, senior counsel with the Compass Rose Legal Group:

Just days after President Trump’s January 2017 inauguration, Zaid tweeted: “ # coup has started. First of many steps. # rebellion . # impeachment will follow ultimately.”

has started. First of many steps. . will follow ultimately.” In July 2017, Zaid wrote, “We will get rid of him, and this country is strong enough to survive even him and his supporters…. And 45 years from now we might be recalling stories regarding the impeachment of @ realDonaldTrump . I’ll be old, but will be worth the wait.”

. I’ll be old, but will be worth the wait.” In 2017 as well, Zaid co-founded Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit group that aggressively solicited potential whistleblowers to provide damaging information about the Trump administration.

In December 2018, Zaid tweeted: “I defied the rain to hear my friend @ DavidPriess speak at @ BNBuzz abt his new book ‘How to get rid of a President’.”

speak at abt his new book ‘How to get rid of a President’.” According to TheFederalist.com: “Zaid’s bias against the president has been well-documented. In a podcast [in 2018], Zaid spoke about how he often goes out of his way just to use the term ‘resistance,’ and bragged about having sued every president since 1993. On the same podcast, Zaid also discussed fishing for a client to serve as a plaintiff against Trump in a lawsuit alleging unfair business practices stifling competition by the Trump hotel. The attorney also went on Twitter to call for whistleblowers to come forward when Trump took power, welcoming CIA employees to his law firm ‘to lawfully challenge’ the president, according to Fox News.”

Zaid was also the co-founder and executive director of the James Madison Project, whose advisory board includes John Podesta, who led Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, served as Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton, and founded the Center for American Progress.

Following is some key information about the second of Ciaramella’s two attorneys, Andrew Bakaj:

Bakaj interned for New York Senators Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton in 2001.

He had long been openly hostile toward President Trump, to whom he regularly referred as “President Drumpf.”

In the summer of 2017, Bakaj argued for Trump’s removal from office by means of the 25th Amendment, on grounds that Trump was supposedly “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

On February 15, 2017 — less than a month into Trump’s presidency — Bakaj and the Compass Rose Legal Group each tweeted that they were offering discounted pricing for potential Trump administration informants.

In May 2017, Bakaj exhorted whistleblowers to come forth against Trump, tweeting: “Federal Employees: Your loyalty is to the Constitution, not to an individual.”

In October 2017, Bakaj exhorted then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and then-Defense Secretary James Mattis to help lead a movement to remove Trump from office: “Tillerson and Mattis could pull together a majority of the cabinet and invoke the 25th [Amendment].”

Impeachment Inquiry Against President Trump

Based on the allegations made by “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi launched an impeachment inquiry against President Trump on September 24, 2019, claiming that Trump had abused the power of the presidency. Initial depositions were taken before the House Intelligence, Foreign Affairs, and Oversight committees, which met jointly behind closed doors in the basement of the United States Capitol from October 11 through November 8, 2019. Only members of the three committees (47 Republicans and 57 Democrats) were permitted to attend. Witnesses were questioned by staff lawyers, and committee members were allowed to ask questions, with equal time being given to Republicans and Democrats. These closed-door hearings were then followed by televised public hearings which took place between November 13 and November 21, 2019.

A key matter around which the impeachment effort centered, was the fact that the Trump administration had temporarily delayed the distribution of $391 million in congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine. It was a 55-day delay, from July 18 to September 11, 2019. Trump’s accusers claimed that the delay was due to the president’s effort to pressure Ukraine into investigating Burisma and the Bidens, before the money would be released to Ukraine.

Significant Testimony by Impeachment Inquiry Witnesses and Other Key Figures

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (on whether there had been a quid pro quo with Trump)

At a September 25, 2019 press conference in New York, Zelensky was asked: “Have you felt any pressure from President Trump to investigate Joe Biden and Hunter Biden?” Zelensky replied: ” I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be involved to democratic, open elections — elections of USA. No, you heard that we [Trump and I] had, I think, good phone call. It was normal. We spoke about many things. And I — so I think, and you read it, that nobody pushed — pushed me.”

And in a December 2, 2019 interview with reporters from Time magazine and three of Europe’s leading publications, Zalensky was asked: “When did you first sense that there was a connection between Trump’s decision to block military aid to Ukraine this summer and the two investigations that Trump and his allies were asking for? Can you clarify this issue of the quid pro quo?” Zelensky replied: “Look, I never talked to the President from the position of a quid pro quo.”

Mark Sandy (testifying on why U.S. aid to Ukraine had been delayed, and when the decision to delay that aid had been made)

In a closed-door hearing before the House Intelligence Committee in October 2019, Mark Sandy, an official at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), testified that the OMB had been instructed to withhold aid to Ukraine because President Trump was concerned “about other countries not contributing more to Ukraine.” Sandy made the revelation when he was asked what reason OMB official Michael Duffey had been given by the White House, regarding why the aid to Ukraine was to be delayed.

Below is the exchange where the revelation was made:

Question: At any point in time, from the moment that you walked into the [Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility] to anytime in history, has Mr. Duffey ever provided to you a reason why the President wanted to place a hold on security assistance? Sandy: I recall in early September an email [from Mike Duffey] that attributed the hold to the President’s concern about other counties not contributing money to Ukraine. Question: Was this the first time that you heard that the hold might be about some sort of concern that other countries are not providing sufficient support to Ukraine? Sandy: We had received information requesting — sorry. We had received requests for additional information on what other countries were contributing to Ukraine.

Sandy subsequently went on to state that in early September, Duffey had sent him a number of inquiries about how much money other nations were contributing to Ukraine.

Though CNN reported that the OMB had taken action on withholding the aid to Ukraine on the evening of July 25, just hours after the Trump-Zelenskyy phone call, Republican congressman Lee Zeldin noted: “This is not true. There were multiple actions before July 25th.”

Zeldin’s claim is supported by a September 23, 2019 Washington Post story which said that according to three senior Trump administration officials, President Trump had instructed acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to withhold the aid to Ukraine at least a week prior to the July 25 phone call. “Officials at the Office of Management and Budget relayed Trump’s order to the State Department and the Pentagon during an interagency meeting in mid-July, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations,” the Post reported. “They explained that the president had ‘concerns’ and wanted to analyze whether the money needed to be spent.”

Laura Cooper (testifying on when Ukraine had first become aware of the hold on U.S. aid)

On October 23, 2019, Laura Cooper — the top Pentagon official overseeing U.S. policy towards Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia — testified behind closed doors, focusing mainly on the Trump administration’s decision, against the Pentagon’s recommendation, to withhold nearly $400 million of congressionally approved assistance to Ukraine. In her testimony, Cooper said that during a July 2019 meeting, many in the administration had raised concerns that Trump may have lacked the legal authority to freeze aid after Congress had approved it. “So the comments in the room at the deputies’ level reflected a sense that there was not an understanding of how this could legally play out,” Cooper testified. “And at that meeting, the deputies agreed to look into the legalities and to look at what was possible.” Noting that Ukraine was at war with Russia, Cooper also described Trump’s decision to delay aid as “unusual.” Further, she stated that she had a “very strong inference” that the Ukrainians knew there was a hold on U.S. funding as of August 20, 2019 — 26 days after the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky. This suggests that Ukraine did not know that the U.S. had frozen the aid at the time of the July 25 call, thus undercutting claims of a quid pro quo during the Trump-Zelensky conversation.

George Kent (testifying on: [a] his own concern that Hunter Biden’s presence on Burisma’s board would be seen as a conflict of interest; [b] his opinion that, as a prerequisite for releasing the U.S. aid to Ukraine, President Trump had wanted Ukrainian President Zelensky to publicly announce that there would be an investigation into Burisma and the Bidens; and [c] his belief that an investigation into Burisma corruption was justified)

In a closed-door hearing on October 15, 2019, testimony was given by George Kent, who had served as Deputy Chief of Mission in Kyiv (2015 -18) and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs (September 4, 2018 to present). Kent testified that when Hunter Biden had joined the board of Burisma, he (Kent) had worried that Biden’s position with the gas company would complicate U.S. diplomats’ efforts to help Ukrainian officials understand the importance of avoiding conflicts of interest and the appearance of impropriety: “I raised my concerns that I had heard that Hunter Biden was on the board of a company owned by somebody that the U.S. Government had spent money trying to get tens of millions of dollars back [from], and that could create the perception of a conflict of interest. The message that I recall hearing back was that the vice president’s son Beau was dying of cancer, and that there was no further bandwidth [to] deal with family-related issues at that time… That was the end of that conversation.”

Also in his closed-door testimony, Kent told congressional investigators that, based exclusively on conversations relayed to him by others in the Trump administration who had been in contact with Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union:

He (Kent) was worried that “the U.S. Government chose to move an ambassador” — i.e., former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Maria Yovanovitch — “based, as best she [can] tell, on unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives, at an especially challenging time in our bilateral [relations] with a newly elected Ukrainian President”

“Potus [President of the United States) wanted nothing less than President Zelensky to go to the microphone and say ‘investigations, Biden and Clinton’”

“That was the message. … Zelensky needed to go to a microphone and basically there needed to be three words in the message, and that was the shorthand.”

“Clinton” was “shorthand” for the 2016 presidential election, which, by Kent’s telling, Trump viewed as an election that Ukraine may have interfered with.

In televised testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on November 13, 2019, Kent reiterated his “concern … that there was the possibility of a perception of a conflict of interest” related to Hunter Biden’s presence on the board of Burisma Holdings. “To summarize, we thought the [CEO of Burisma] had stolen money,” Kent said. “We thought a prosecutor had [taken a] bribe to shut the case.” When Minority House Intelligence Committee Counsel Steve Castor asked Kent if he was “in favor of that matter being fully investigated and prosecuted,” Kent replied: “I think, since U.S. taxpayer dollars were wasted, I would love to see the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office find who the corrupt prosecutor was that took the bribe, and how much of it was paid.”

Also in his November 13 testimony, Kent reiterated his perception of a quid pro quo between President Trump and President Zelensky. He had the following exchange with Daniel Goldman, the lead Democratic attorney for the impeachment proceedings:

Goldman: Mr. Kent, that vital military assistance, that was not the only thing that President Trump was withholding from Ukraine. What else was contingent on Ukraine initiating these investigations? Kent: Well, as we’ve talked earlier today, the possibility of a White House meeting was being held contingent to an announcement.

David Hale (testifying on: [a] the propriety of delaying aid to Ukraine; [b] his belief that Trump had not tried to use U.S. aid as leverage for forcing Ukraine to investigate Burisma; and [c] his belief that the Trump-Zelensky phone call was “perfectly normal”)

In closed-door testimony in early November 2019, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs David Hale testified that the U.S. had held up aid to Lebanon at roughly the same time, and in the same manner, as it had delayed aid to Ukraine. “Contrary to Democrats’ claims that the administration singled out Ukraine for the president’s own personal and political reasons,” said Breitbart.com, “Hale seemed to suggest that Trump’s actions were part of a ‘long overdue’ policy of paying closer attention to where foreign aid was going and how it was being spent. Hale, like many other witnesses, also testified that there had been no link between aid to Ukraine and the investigations that Trump had requested.” Hale also testified that he had “no knowledge” of any use of aid as leverage by which to pressure Ukraine to conduct investigations into the Bidens and Burisma, and that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had never discussed any such a strategy with him. Moreover, Hale testified that the transcript of the president’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky seemed “perfectly normal.”

Hunter Biden (conceding that he had exercised “poor judgment” in joining the Burisma board, and that his father’s political connections had “probably” enabled him to secure other high-paying positions as well)

Hunter Biden addressed his work in Ukraine in an October 2019 interview with ABC News’ Amy Robach, where he said: “In retrospect, look, I think that it was poor judgment on my part. Is that I think that it was poor judgment because I don’t believe now, when I look back on it — I know that there was — did nothing wrong at all. However, was it poor judgment to be in the middle of something that is … a swamp in — in — in many ways? Yeah. … I gave a hook to some very unethical people to act in illegal ways to try to do some harm to my father. That’s where I made the mistake. So I take full responsibility for that.”

Hunter Biden also admitted that he “probably” would not have gotten some of the high-paying jobs he enjoyed, if not for the fact that his father was the U.S. vice president. William Taylor (admitting that he had seen no evidence of a quid pro quo between Trump and Zelensky, and that his claims of such an arrangement had been based entirely on hearsay) In a closed-door hearing in October 2019, William Taylor, the charge d’affairs of the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine, told lawmakers that he was not part of the July 25 phone call between the U.S. and Ukrainian presidents, that he had not seen a transcript or readout of it until it was declassified and made public in late September, and that he had never even spoken to President Donald Trump or White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. As The Federalist reports: When asked who exactly he had spoken to about the brouhaha, Taylor confirmed that his only contacts about the matter were with John Bolton, the former national security adviser who was fired by Trump, and three National Security Council officials: Fiona Hill, Alexander Vindman, and Tim Morrison…. Taylor also testified that his knowledge of the phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymr Zelensky wasn’t first-hand knowledge. “And this isn’t firsthand. It’s not secondhand. It’s not thirdhand,” Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-NY, said to Taylor. “But if I understand this correctly, you’re telling us that Tim Morrison told you that Ambassador Sondland told him that the president told Ambassador Sondland that Zelensky would have to open an investigation into Biden?” “That’s correct,” Taylor admitted. Zeldin … hammered Taylor for relying on third-hand information about the state of mind of an elected official to whom he had never spoken. “So do you have any other source that the president’s goal in making this request was anything other than The New York Times?” Zeldin asked. “I have not talked to the president,” Taylor said. “I have no other information from what the president was thinking.” Under questioning from Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, Taylor also testified that the Ukrainian government wasn’t aware U.S. military funding had been temporarily suspended until late August, and then only after the information was leaked to the news media, meaning an alleged quid pro quo would have been impossible. “So, if nobody in the Ukrainian government is aware of a military hold at the time of the Trump-Zelensky call, then, as a matter of law and as a matter of fact, there can be no quid pro quo, based on military aid,” Ratcliffe, a former federal prosecutor, said. “I just want to be real clear that, again, as of July 25th, you have no knowledge of a quid pro quo involving military aid.” “July 25th is a week after the hold was put on the security assistance,” Taylor testified. “And July 25th, they had a conversation between the two presidents, where it was not discussed.” “And to your knowledge, nobody in the Ukrainian government was aware of the hold?” Ratcliffe asked. “That is correct,” Taylor responded. In televised testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on November 13, 2019, Taylor had the following exchange with Republican congressman Jim Jordan: Jim Jordan: [U.S. aid to Ukraine was] held up on July 18th, is that right? Bill Taylor: That’s when I first heard about it. Jim Jordan: Then it’s then it’s released, Ambassador Taylor on September 11th, and we know that from your deposition, in those 55 days that aid is delayed, you met with president Zelensky three times. The first one was July 26th, the day after the famous call now between president Trump and President Zelensky. President Zelensky meets with you, Ambassador Volker and Ambassador Sondland and again according to your deposition and your testimony, there was no linkage of security assistance dollars to investigating Burisma or the Biden’s. Second meeting’s August 27th. Again in this 55 day time frame. Second meeting is August 27th, President Zelensky meets with you and Ambassador Bolton and others and again, there’s no linkage of dollars, security assistant dollars to an investigation of the Bidens. Then of course the third meeting is September 5th. President Zelensky meets with you and Senators Johnson and Murphy, and once again there is no linkage of security assistance dollars to an investigation of Burisma or the Bidens. Three meetings with the president of Ukraine, the new president and no linkage. That’s accurate. Bill Taylor: Mr. Jordan, it’s certainly accurate on the first two meetings because to my knowledge, the Ukrainians were not aware of the hold on assistance until the 29th of August…. The third meeting that you mentioned with the senators, Senator Murphy and Senator Johnson, there was discussion of the security assistance, but- Jim Jordan: No linkage. Bill Taylor: There was not discussion of linkage. Jim Jordan: Three meetings face to face with President Zelensky, no linkage. Yet in your deposition, you said this and you said it again the first hour of the majority. “My clear understanding was security assistance money would not come until President Zelensky committed to pursue the investigation. My clear understanding was they weren’t going to get the money until President Zelensky committed to pursue the investigations.” Now, with all due respect, ambassador, your clear understanding was obviously wrong because it didn’t happen. President Zelensky didn’t announce he was going to investigate Burisma or the Bidens. He didn’t do a press conference and say, “I’m going to investigate the Bidens. We’re going to investigate Burisma. He didn’t tweet about it and you just told the ranking member he didn’t do the CNN interview and announce he’s going to investigate Burisma or the Bidens. So three face to face meetings, it doesn’t come up. No linkage whatsoever. President Zelensky does it announce it before the aid is released on the 11th. And yet you said you have a clear understanding that those two things were going to happen. The money was going to get released, but not until there was an investigation, and that in fact didn’t happen. So what I’m wondering is where’d you get this clear understanding? Bill Taylor: As I testified, Mr. Jordan, this came from Ambassador Sondland. Jim Jordan: Can you hold one second, ambassador? I’m going to bring you a piece of paper from Ambassador Sondland’s statement. And you can take a look at this. Go ahead though. I’m going to let you finish. […] You said ambassador, you got this from Ambassador Sondland. Bill Taylor: That is correct. That Ambassador Sondland also said that he’d talked to President Zelensky and Mr. Yermak, and he told them that although this was not a quid pro quo, if President Zelensky did not clear things up in public, we would be at a stalemate. That was one point. It was also the case- Jim Jordan: Mr. Morrison talked to you, right? Bill Taylor: No, what I was going to say was Ambassador Sondland also told me that he recognized that it was a mistake to have told the Ukrainians that only the meeting with the president in the oval office was held up in order to get these investigations. No, it was not just the meeting, it was also the security assistance. That is everything was. So those two discussions- Jim Jordan: I understand. All right. So again, just to recap, you had three meetings with President Zelensky, no linkage in those three meetings came up. Ambassador Zelensky didn’t announce that he was going to do any investigation of the Bidens or Burisma before the aid was released. He didn’t do a tweet, didn’t do anything on CNN. Didn’t do any of that. President Zelensky, excuse me. Jim Jordan: And then what you have in front of you is an addendum that Mr. Sondland made to his testimony that we got a couple of weeks ago. It says “Declaration of Ambassador Gordon Sondland, I Gordon Sondland do hereby swear and affirm as follows.” I want you to look at point number two,… second sentence. “Ambassador Taylor recalls that Mr. Morrison told Ambassador Taylor that I told Mr. Morrison that I conveyed this message to Mr. Yermak on September 1st, 2019 in connection with Vice President Pence’s visit to Warsaw and a meeting with President Zelensky.” Jim Jordan: This is his clarification. Let me read it one more time. “Ambassador Taylor recalls that Mr. Morrison told Ambassador Taylor that I told Mr. Morrison that I conveyed this message to Mr. Yermak on September 1st, 2019 in connection with Vice President Pence’s visit to Warsaw and a meeting with President Zelensky.” We’ve got six people having four conversations in one sentence and you just told me this is where you got your clear understanding. Even though you had three opportunities with President Zelensky, for him to tell you, “You know what, we’re going to do these investigations to get the aid.” Didn’t tell you three different times. Never makes an announcement, never tweets about it. Never does a CNN interview. Ambassador, you weren’t on the call, were you? You didn’t listen in on President Trump’s call and President Zelensky’s call. Bill Taylor: I did not. Jim Jordan: You never talked with chief of staff Mulvaney. Bill Taylor: I never did. Jim Jordan: You never met the president. Bill Taylor: That’s correct. Jim Jordan: You had three meetings again with Zelensky that didn’t come up. Bill Taylor: And two of those they had never heard about it as far as I know. So there was no reason for it to come up. Jim Jordan: And President Zelensky never made an announcement. This is what I can’t believe. And you’re their star witness. You’re their first witness, but you’re the guy, based on this, based on… I mean, I’ve seen church prayer change that are easier to understand than this. Ambassador Taylor recalls, and Mr. Morrison told. Now again, this is, I hereby swear and affirm from Gordon Sondland. “Ambassador Taylor recalls that Mr. Morrison told Ambassador Taylor that I told Mr. Morrison that I conveyed this message to Mr. Yermak on September 1st 20 … this all happens by the way, this all happens by the way, in Warsaw when Vice President Pence meets with President Zelensky and guess what? They didn’t talk about any linkage either. […] Bill Taylor: As I think I was clear about, I’m not here to take one side or the other or to advocate any particular outcomes. Let me just restate that. Second thing is that my understanding is only coming from people that I talked to. Jim Jordan: We got that. Bill Taylor: We got that, and I think this clarification from Ambassador Sondland was because he said he didn’t remember this in his first deposition. So he wanted to kind of clarify. But I think Mr. Jordan, the way I read this, he remembers it the same way I do. Jim Jordan: And it’s real clear, right? Bill Taylor: It’s very clear to me. […] Jim Jordan: Ambassador Taylor, the gentleman asked if you could be wrong, were you wrong when you said you had a clear understanding that President Zolinsky had to commit to an investigation of Biden’s before the aid got released and the aid got released and he didn’t commit to an investigation? Bill Taylor: Mr., I was not wrong about what I told you, which is what I heard. That’s all I’ve said. I’ve told you what I heard… Jim Jordan: And that’s the point. What you heard did not happen. It didn’t happen. You had three meetings with the guy. He could have told you. He didn’t announce he was going to do an investigation before the aid happen. It’s not just, could it have been wrong? The fact is it was wrong because it didn’t happen. The whole point was you had a clear understanding that aid will not get released unless there’s a commitment. Not maybe, not I think the aid might happen, and it’s my hunch is going to get released. You used clear language, clear understanding and commitment and those two things didn’t happen. So you had to be wrong. Marie Yovanovitch (stating that she had not heard or been involved with the Trump-Zelensky phone call; that her perception of that phone call was based entirely on what she had heard George Kent say about it; that the Obama State Department had been very concerned about the seeming impropriety of Hunter Biden’s presence on Burisma’s board; and that investigators from the U.S., U.K., and Ukraine had been investigating Burisma during the Obama administration, long before Trump became president) On November 15, 2019, Marie Yovanovitch — an American diplomat who served in a variety of State Department posts — testified publicly before the House Intelligence Committee. After having served as Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (2004–2005), U.S. Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan (2005–2008), U.S. Ambassador to Armenia (2008–2011), Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs (2012–2013), and Ambassador to Ukraine (2016–2019), Yovanovitch was recalled from her post by President Trump in May 2019 but continued to work for the State Department thereafter. (Trump was perfectly entitled to terminate Yovanovitch’s tenure as ambassador, because ambassadors serve at the pleasure of the president. Notably, around that same time, Ukraine’s newly-elected President Volodymyr Zelensky told Trump that he, too, had lost confidence in Yovanovitch. Said Zelensky: “It was great that you were the first one who told me that she was a bad ambassador because I agree with you 100%. Her attitude towards me was far from the best as she admired the previous President and she was on his side. She would not accept me as a new President well enough.”) In her November 2019 testimony, Yavonovitch stated that she had not been involved in the July 25th Trump-Zelensky phone call, nor in preparations for the call, nor in deliberations about the delay in U.S. military sales to Ukraine. She also affirmed that she had not spoken to either President Trump or White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney at any time in 2019. Yavonovitch testified that she had first learned about the Trump-Zelensky phone call on September 25th, from Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent: “[W]hat I recall is that he [Kent] said that President Trump had asked President Zelensky whether he could help him out and which I understood to be these investigations. And that President Zelensky had said that he is putting in a new prosecutor general and that he doesn’t control … I mean, this is approximately what he said, that that person is an independent individual.” A key part of Yavonovitch’s testimony came in the following exchange with Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik: Stefanik: Shifting gears to corruption in Ukraine. In your powerful deposition, you described quote, “We have long understood that strong anti-corruption efforts must form an essential part of our policy in Ukraine and now there is a window of opportunity to do that. And so why is this important and why is this important to us? Put simply anti-corruption efforts serve Ukraine’s interest, but they also serve ours as well.” Is that still your testimony? Yovanovitch: Yes. Stefanik: And particularly at the critical time in 2014, after the Ukrainian elections, you testified that the Ukrainian people had made clear in that very election that they were done with corruption, correct? Yovanovitch: Yes. Stefanik: And you also testified that the Ukrainians thought it would be a good idea to set up this architecture of a special investigative office that would be all about the crimes of corruption, correct? Yovanovitch: Yes. Stefanik: And I know this was before you arrived in Ukraine, but you are aware that the first case that the US, UK, and Ukraine investigators worked on was in fact against the owner of Burisma? Yovanovitch: Yes. Stefanik: And that was during the Obama administration? Yovanovitch: Yes. Stefanik: And in your testimony, and you said today, the investigation was never formally closed because quote, “It’s frankly useful to keep that company hanging on a hook. Right?” That’s your quote. Yovanovitch: Yeah. The Ukrainian investigation was never- Stefanik: Partnered with the US and the UK? Yovanovitch: As I understand it. Yeah. Although, because we didn’t see the Ukrainians moving forward on that, we no longer partner with them on that case or in that way. Stefanik: But let’s take a step back. The first time you personally became aware of Burisma was actually when you were being prepared by the Obama State Department for your Senate confirmation hearings. And this was in the form of practice questions and answers. This was your deposition and you testified that in this particular practice Q&A with the Obama State Department it wasn’t just generally about Burisma and corruption, it was specifically about Hunter Biden and Burisma. Is that correct? Yovanovitch: Yes, it is. Stefanik: And the exact quote from your testimony, Ambassador, is quote, “The way the question was phrased in this model Q&A was, ‘What can you tell us about Hunter Biden’s being named to the board of Burisma?’” So for the millions of Americans watching, President Obama’s own State Department was so concerned about potential conflicts of interest from Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma that they raised it themselves while prepping this wonderful ambassador nominee before her confirmation. And yet, our democratic colleagues and the chairman of this committee cry foul when we dare ask that same question that the Obama State Department was so concerned about. But we will continue asking it. And lastly, in my 20 seconds left, I just want to get it on record, in terms of defensive lethal aid, which you were an advocate for, that was not provided by President Obama. It was provided by President Trump? Yovanovitch: That’s correct. Another highly significant exchange occurred between Rep. Chris Stewart and Ms. Yovanocitch: Rep. Stewart: Madam Ambassador, as you sit here before us, very simply and directly, do you have any information regarding the President of the United States accepting any bribes? M. Yovanovitch: No. Rep. Stewart: Do you have any information regarding any criminal activity that the President of the United States has been involved with at all? M. Yovanovitch: No. […] Rep. Stewart: Now, I want to ask you one thing very quickly, and you’ve been asked this again and again, but my question is slightly different. You’ve been asked as you recognize that the President, any president, has the ability to ask his ambassadors to serve at-will. I’m curious, do you think that’s the right policy? M. Yovanovitch: Yeah, I probably think it is. Rep. Stewart: I do as well. It may be imperfect. There may be times when it’s not used perfectly, but I agree with you. It is the right policy. I don’t think that we should change that. Now, I’d like to read from some previous statements, including one of your own as well as others, regarding the appropriateness of investigating corruption in the UK. From Miss Fiona Hill: “So again, the fact that there are investigations into corruption in the energy sector in Ukraine as well as in Russia and many other countries is not a surprise.” From yourself, your previous testimony: “Question, was it the general understanding that Burisma was a company that suffered from allegations of corruption?” Your answer was “Yes.” From Ambassador Sondland: “I just am generally aware that Burisma is considered a potentially corrupt company.” Would you agree then that it’s appropriate to investigate corruption? M. Yovanovitch: I think it’s appropriate if it’s part of our national strategy. What I would say is that we have a process for doing that. It’s called the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty. We have one with Ukraine, and generally it goes from our Department of Justice to the Ministry of Justice in the country of interest. Alexander Vindman (acknowledging that Ukraine had every right to investigate Burisma and Hunter Biden, if it felt that they had been guilty of corruption) Ukrainian-born Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman was reputed to be the White House’s top expert on Ukraine at the National Security Council (NSC). But when testifying privately before the House Intelligence Committee on November 11, 2019, he showed himself to be ignorant of certain basic facts. During one exchange with Democrat congressman Adam Schiff, for instance, Vindman mistakenly stated that the Obama administration had provided lethal military assistance to Ukraine, when in fact, in 2014, then-Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko had begged Obama for weapons to combat Russian forces, only to have his request denied. Vindman’s exchange with Schiff went as follows: Schiff: There was a prior shipment of Javelins to Ukraine, wasn’t there? Vindman: So that was, I believe — I apologize if the timing is incorrect — under the previous administration, there was a — I’m aware of the transfer of a fairly significant number of Javelins, yes. During a separate exchange with Steve Castor, a top investigator from Republican congressman Jim Jordan’s office, Vindman said that while he understood the fact that Burisma was a company with a “problematic history,” he himself had not wanted to know more about the reasons behind Hunter Biden’s presence on its board. He acknowledged, however, that Ukraine certainly had a right to investigate the matter: Castor: Are you aware of any of the investigations [Burisma] has been involved with over the last several years? Vindman: I am aware that Burisma does have questionable business dealings. That’s part of its track record, yes. Castor: Okay. And what questionable business dealings are you aware of? Vindman: I think that’s more of kind of a generalization. I’m just aware that it had questionable business dealings, and they were known for that fact. … the general answer is I think they have had questionable business dealings. Castor: So money laundering, tax evasion, if they were subject to those investigations, that would comport with your understanding of the company? Vindman: That would comport with my understanding of how business is done in Ukraine. Castor: Okay. In 2014, they undertook an initiative to bring in some additional folks for their board. Are you aware of some of the folks they added to their board in 2014? Vindman: The only individual I’m aware of, again, after, you know, as it’s been reported in the press is Mr. Hunter Biden. Castor: Okay. And did you check with any of your authoritative sources in government to learn a little bit more about these issues? Vindman: I did not. Castor: Okay. Even when the narrative started to creep in? Vindman: I did not. I didn’t think it was appropriate. He was a U.S. citizen, and I wasn’t going to ask questions. Frankly, that falls into the law enforcement sphere. I was not going to go and ask about — if there was a question about Burisma, I would — I inquired about it and determined that they had a problematic history, but I did not inquire about a U.S. citizen. Castor: What other inquiries did you make with authoritative sources demanding Burisma? Vindman: I think once I drew my conclusion of the company, I moved on. Castor: Okay. If there was an allegation of wrongdoing by the Burisma board directors, that would be something that the Ukrainians could look into, right? Vindman: I think so. They’re a sovereign state, they can choose to do that, yes. Castor: So if there’s an American that is operating in Ukraine as a businessman and they are accused of wrongdoing, the Ukrainians can investigate that? Vindman: Americans are not immune from criminal activity just because they’re Americans overseas. So, yes, if there’s a criminal activity, they should, yeah. Castor: Okay. And do you have any knowledge as to why Hunter Biden was asked to join the board? Vindman: I do not. Castor: Did you check with any of your authoritative sources whether he was a corporate governance expert or– Vindman: Like I said, I didn’t. He’s an American citizen. Certainly there is domestic political overtones. I did not think that was appropriate for me to start looking into this particular — I drew my conclusions on Burisma and I moved on. Also during his testimony, Vindman reported that Ukrainian Defense Council Oleksandr Danylyuk had offered him the position of Ukrainian Defense Minister three separate times. Federalist co-founder Sean Davis subsequently tweeted: “If Russia had asked Michael Flynn three separate times to be Minister of Defense at the Kremlin, Democrats and media would have immediately held a field trial, summarily convicted Flynn, and offed him for treason. Yet media are pretending this is NBD.” Tim Morrison (testifying that he was not concerned that anything illegal or improper had been discussed during the Trump-Zelensky phone call of July 25, and noting that Vindman’s superiors had expressed concerns about Vindman’s judgment and deceptiveness) In his October 2019 testimony in closed-door hearings, Senior NSC official Timothy Morrison, who was the former boss of Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, testified that he had not been concerned at all that anything illegal or improper had been discussed during the July 25 phone call between Presidents Trump and Zelensky. As the Daily Wire recounts: “Morrison said in his closed-door testimony that he was concerned the July 25 call transcript between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would leak and could have negative ramifications,” CNN reported. “But he also made the point that he saw nothing wrong with the July call.” “I want to be clear, I was not concerned that anything illegal was discussed,” Morrison said. “I feared at the time of the call on July 25th how its disclosure would play in Washington’s political climate. My fears have been realized.”

In his November 2019 testimony in the public impeachment hearings, Morrison stated that Vindman’s bosses had been very much concerned about the manner in which Vindman was carrying out his duties. As the Daily Wire reports:

GOP counsel Steve Castor said, “You had indicated in your deposition that when you took over the [Ukraine] portfolio for Dr. Hill July 15 that you were alerted to potential issues in Colonel Vindman’s judgement?” “Yes,” Morrison responded. “Did she relay anything specifically to you why she thought that?” Castor asked. Morrison responded that the concern apparently came from multiple officials and was an overall general concern about his judgment. “Did any other NSC personnel raise concerns with you about Colonel Vindman?” Castor asked. “Yes,” Morrison responded. Morrison’s lawyer stopped Morrison from giving an in-depth response over the concerns that the other officials had about Vindman. Morrison later confirmed that multiple other officials were concerned that Vindman was potentially leaking sensitive information to the media. Morrison also confirmed that Vindman did not keep him in the loop about all the things that he was doing in the job and that Vindman went behind his back and did not inform him about the concerns that he had about President Donald Trump’s July 25 phone call with the president of Ukraine. “If he had concerns about something about the content of the call, that’s something that I expected that I would have been notified of,” Morrison said. “I also think as a matter of practice, since we both went to the lawyers, we didn’t both need to.” “At any point subsequently, did [Vindman] become frustrated that he felt cut out of some of the Ukraine portfolio?” Castor asked. “Yes,” Morrison responded, adding that Vindman was upset that he was not invited on a trip to Ukraine. Gordon Sondland (testifying that he knew of no evidence indicating that Trump had withheld aid to Ukraine for any reasons related to his own political gain, and that Trump had explicitly told him that he wanted “no quid pro quo” from Zelensky)

In a private deposition before the House Intelligence, Foreign Affairs, and Oversight Committees on October 17, 2019, Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, testified that he had told Bill Taylor, the U.S. Charge d’affaires for Ukraine, that President Trump had sought “nothing” from Ukraine, and that there had been “no quid pro quo” during the president’s July 25 telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

But in a November 20, 2019 House Intelligence Committee hearing, Sondland, who was not part of the July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelenskyy, delivered a mixed message about what President Trump had wanted from Ukraine. As the Daily Signal reports:

In his opening statement, Sondland said he became certain there was a quid pro quo in which Zelenskyy would get a White House meeting with Trump by announcing formal investigations by Ukrainian law enforcement of Burisma—an energy company where former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a board member—and of meddling by Ukraine in the 2016 presidential election in the U.S. One of Trump’s personal lawyers, Giuliani, communicated this point, Sondland testified. “I know that members of this committee 