Ukrainian to US prosecutors: Why Don’t You Want our Evidence on Democrats?

Kulyk confirmed Ukraine is investigating that alleged incident: “We have evidence and witnesses stating that Joe Biden applied pressure on Ukrainian law enforcement to stop the investigation.”

Ukrainians officials have gone public in recent days with their frustrations after months of trying to deliver the evidence quietly to the Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) fizzled. Unable to secure visas from the U.S. Embassy, some Ukrainian law enforcement officials sought backdoor channels, Kulyk said.

One of those avenues involved reaching out last fall to a former federal prosecutor from the George W. Bush years, according to interviews. He delivered a written summary of some of the Ukrainian allegations to the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, along with an offer to connect U.S. investigators with individuals purporting to have the evidence. There was no response or follow-up, according to multiple people directly familiar with the effort.

More recently, President Trump’s private attorney Rudy Giuliani – former mayor and former U.S. attorney in New York City – learned about some of the allegations while, on behalf of the Trump legal team, he looked into Ukrainian involvement in the 2016 election.

Since then, Lutsenko and others have talked with other American lawyers about helping to file U.S. legal action to recover money they believe was wrongly taken from their country.

“It’s like no one at DOJ is listening. There is some compelling evidence that should at least be looked at, evaluated, but the door seems shut at both State and Justice,” said an American who has been contacted for help and briefed on the evidence.

State Department officials declined to address whether they denied or slow-walked visas for Ukrainian officials. “Visa records are confidential under U.S. law; therefore, we cannot discuss the details of individual visa cases,” a department spokesperson said.

Ukraine’s evidence, if true, would mark the first documented allegation of Democrats receiving assistance from a foreign power in their efforts to help Clinton win the 2016 election.

“It looks like there is some evidence emerging that there could have been a proxy war between Russia and Ukraine to secure their preferred American president during the 2016 race,” said a former top intelligence official who now advises the Trump administration on intelligence policy.

There is public-source information, in Ukraine and in the United States, that gives credence to some of what Ukrainian prosecutors allege.

A court in Ukraine formally concluded that law enforcement officials there illegally tried to intervene in the 2016 U.S. election by leaking documents of Manafort’s business dealings after he was named Trump’s campaign chairman. And a Ukrainian parliamentarian released a purported tape recording of a top Ukrainian law enforcement official bragging that he was responsible for the leak and was trying to help Clinton win.

Lutsenko told Hill.TV in an interview aired last week that he has opened a criminal investigation into those allegations.

Nellie Ohr, wife of a senior Justice official and a researcher for the Fusion GPS opposition research firm, testified to Congress last year that some of Fusion GPS’s research on Trump-Russia ties came from a Ukrainian parliamentarian. The Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign paid Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Trump.

Although Ohr acknowledged the Ukrainian source, lawmakers did not press her to be more specific.

And Politico reported in 2017 on evidence of Ukraine’s U.S. embassy helping the Clinton campaign to discredit Trump. “A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia,” the newspaper reported.

Separately, the conservative nonprofit Citizens United last month filed a lawsuit seeking to force the State Department to disclose all information it possesses about Hunter Biden and his business partners involved with Ukraine-based Burisma Holdings.

If Ukrainian prosecutors can augment their allegations with real evidence, there could be a true case of collusion worth investigating.

The only question is why the U.S. government so far hasn’t taken interest – and whether Attorney General Barr will change that.

Story cited here.

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