Last week we wrote about the central role Obama played in establishing the Russiagate Hoax. This week we’re going to take a closer look at why Obama was so involved. What drove him to push a hoax that had been ostensibly put into place by the Clinton campaign?
Many are aware of Biden’s entanglements in Ukraine but most are unaware of Obama’s implicit involvement. For some time now it's been our working theory that Russiagate originated, at least in part, as the result of what Joe Biden was doing in Ukraine - and as a result of Obama’s knowledge of Biden’s actions.
Recall that Biden’s involvement in Ukraine traces back to at least early 2014 when he was pulled into the U.S. overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically-held elections by Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs in the Obama State Department.
In November 2013, Ukraine’s president Yanukovych turned down a U.S.-backed trade deal with the European Union in favor of an emergency bailout from Russia, a decision which was understandable from Ukraine’s perspective but one which Nuland and her state department colleagues found deeply upsetting.
When the European Union pursued a diplomatic route at resolving the impasse by proposing a power sharing agreement, Nuland was quick to veto the idea, telling Pyatt in a leaked phone call, “[expletive] the EU.” During that same call, Nuland discussed her plans for the ouster of Yanukovych and the installation of opposition leader Arseniy Yatsenyuk as prime minister.
Towards the end of their conversation, Nuland noted that Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan had informed her that “you need Biden,” and she concluded by telling Pyatt that “Biden’s willing.”
Biden was effectively appointed as the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine in February 2014. On Feb. 22, 2014, just as Nuland had planned, Yanukovych was removed as president of Ukraine and, three days later, Yatsenyuk, the candidate favored by Nuland, was installed as prime minister.
In other words, the U.S. government had effectively enabled a coup that ousted a democratically elected leader and replaced him with their own candidate. The US-led ouster of Yanukovich also had other internal repercussions, most notably the outbreak of an eight-year civil war between western Ukraine and the Russian-speaking Donbass region of Ukraine.
The idea that any of this could have been done without the direct approval from Obama, is of course, ridiculous.
One of the members of Yanukovych’s government who lost his position in government as a result of the coup was Mykola Zlochevsky, the Oligarch owner of Burisma Energy. He had first served as minister of ecology and natural resources and later as deputy secretary for economic and social security. During his tenure in government, Zlochevsky’s companies, particularly Burisma, reportedly received an unusually large number of permits to extract oil and gas.
In April 2014, UK prosecutors seized $23.5 million in assets owned by Zlochevsky that were held at a London bank, alleging that Zlochevsky had engaged in criminal conduct in Ukraine. It was at this same time that Burisma appointed Biden’s son, Hunter, and his close associate, Devin Archer to its board of directors.
On April 21, 2014, Joe Biden traveled to Ukraine, offering not only his political support, but also $50 million in aid for Ukraine’s shaky new government. During Joe’s Ukraine visit, on April 22, it was announced that Archer had suddenly joined the board of Burisma.
Hunter had also joined Burisma’s board that same month, but curiously Burisma didn’t announce Hunter’s appointment until May 12, 2014—after his father’s visit to Ukraine had concluded.
Many have portrayed Hunter’s involvement as little more than a means for the Biden family to extract hefty board fees from Burisma for association with the Biden name. While there is likely a large amount of truth to this, we also suspect something bigger may have been at play—the effective capture of Ukraine’s natural gas assets.
In a June 23, 2014 proposal from Boies Schiller, the law firm that employed Hunter, Burisma was provided with what Boies Schiller termed a “Strategic Outline for Legal Defense Plan.” Their proposal stated that they wanted to “Insulate Burisma from politically motivated disruptions in operations, including legal challenges to licenses, now and in the future.”
The proposal from Boies Schiller was referring to the natural gas licenses that had been illegally accumulated by Zlochevsky during his time in the Ukrainian government.
As part of this strategy, Boies wanted to “Meet with the U.S. officials in Washington, DC who are leading U.S. policy related to Ukraine to brief them on who Burisma is, its significance to the future of Ukraine, and the Investigation in order to seek their advice and assistance.”
The proposal noted that “we are starting the process of creating an echo-chamber of U.S. officials discussing Burisma between and amongst themselves and encouraging each other to meet with Burisma.” Boies disclosed in their proposal that they had already spoken to a number of congressional members and their staff, including Senator Chris Murphy and his chief of staff.
Amos Hochstein, Obama’s U.S. Special Envoy for International Energy, was also mentioned in the Boies proposal - which focused on establishing a meeting between Hochstein and Burisma’s CFO Vadym Pozharskyi in the coming month of July 2014. It appears that meeting never happened - although Hochstein did meet with Burisma lobbyist David Leiter and Boies law partner Heather King.
Meanwhile, efforts by Hunter continued. In a November 2014 email, Hunter told his long-time money-man Eric Schwerin to "Pls send D Amos' contact info… Amos is 'Acting Special Envoy, Bureau of energy Resources' at State."
What is clear from these documents is that Hunter and Archer were working to bring in high-level political support for Burisma from members of Congress and officials in the Obama administration at a time when it was very clear that Burisma was run by a corrupt Ukrainian Oligarch. And all of that support appeared to be centering around protecting the natural gas assets of Burisma.
We’ve written a number of times on Joe Biden’s efforts to get Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin removed so we won’t rehash that entire story here. But it’s worth noting that it may have been around the sequence of events leading to Shokin’s firing that Obama may have become alarmed.
The level of involvement from Obama officials would only accelerate in 2015 after the Bidens were further pulled into the legal entanglements of Burisma, which was under ongoing investigations into the theft of Ukraine’s natural gas assets.
After receiving a new demand for help in ending the investigations into Burisma from Zlochevsky on November 2, 2015, Hunter immediately reached out to the previously-mentioned Hochstein. Hunter would meet in-person with Hochstein four days later, on November 6, 2015. Hochstein later reluctantly (and evasively) told congressional investigators that Hunter “wanted to know my views on Burisma and Zlochevsky.”
Hochstein, who was Obama’s U.S. Special Envoy for International Energy at the time, privately expressed his concerns about Hunter’s role at Burisma to Joe Biden in October 2015 and again during a flight to Ukraine on December 7, 2015.
We’ve mentioned Hochstein a number of times for a reason. Hochstein had been appointed by Obama to “help Ukraine, and other European countries, find new supplies of natural gas after Russia invaded” Crimea in 2014. Hochstein “also worked on energy issues related to sanctions on Iran and Russia” and “worked closely with officials at the White House's National Security Council and government agencies.”
Hochstein was Obama’s point man on the energy situation in Ukraine. If Hochstein knew everything the Biden’s were doing, so did Obama.
More proof of this comes from a series of meetings between prosecutors from Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and officials from Obama’s National Security Council, the FBI, the State Department, and the DOJ that took place in January 2016. The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington later “confirmed the Obama administration requested the meetings.”
Present at these January 2016 meetings was Andrii Telizhenko, then an employee at the Ukrainian embassy. According to Telizhenko, a recurring theme at these meetings was “how important it was that all of our anti-corruption efforts be united.” Additionally, Telizhenko was told that U.S. officials “had an interest in reviving a closed investigation into payments to U.S. figures from Ukraine’s Russia-backed Party of Regions.”
The focus of US officials was almost certainly Trump’s future Campaign Manager Paul Manafort. We know that “Agents interviewed Manafort in 2014 about whether he received undeclared payments” and “whether he engaged in improper foreign lobbying in Ukraine.”
According to Telizhenko “DOJ officials asked investigators from Ukraine’s NABU if they could help locate new evidence about the Party of Regions’ payments and its dealings with Americans.” Trump’s soon-to-be campaign manager, Paul Manafort, would later be implicated in the Party of Regions payments, leading to his ultimate removal from the Trump Campaign.
In January 2016, right at the time of the NABU’s meeting with Obama’s officials, Alexandra Chalupa, who had been investigating Manafort’s work in Ukraine, informed an unknown senior DNC official that she believed there was a Russian connection with the Trump campaign.
This theme would be picked up by the Clinton campaign and the Intelligence Community in the summer of 2016. Chalupa also told the official to expect Manafort’s involvement in the Trump campaign. How Chalupa knew this in advance has never been fully explained.
NABU was established in October 2014 with assistance from the US government - led by a big push from vice-president Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland. In January 2016, NABU director Artem Sytnyk announced that his bureau was close to signing a Memorandum of cooperation with the FBI and by February 9th, the FBI had had a permanent representative onsite at the NABU offices.
One week after the first FBI representative was installed at NABU, on February 18, 2016 - while Joe Biden was actively pushing for Shokin’s removal - authorities in Latvia flagged a series of ‘suspicious’ financial transactions linked to Hunter Biden, Devon Archer and two other unknown individuals involved with Burisma.
It was later reported that “a series of loan payments totaling about $16.6 million that were routed from companies in Belize and the United Kingdom to Burisma through Ukraine’s PrivatBank between 2012 and 2015.” Latvian officials claimed that a portion of these funds were transferred to Hunter, Devon and the two unnamed individuals - one of whom was a US citizen.
Despite requests for assistance, a Latvian official said his government received no criminal evidence from Ukraine and thus took no further action on the investigation. It seems implausible to us that the FBI, with its active presence within Ukraine’s anti-corruption offices, was not aware of these transactions - along with everything else the Bidens were doing.
From the perspective of Obama and Biden, this situation with Latvian authorities needed to be fully contained before it exploded. Indeed, Shokin later said that it was this information that “made it impossible” to shut down his investigation of Burisma.
Once Biden succeeded in getting Shokin officially fired on March 29, 2016, there was a new focus and a new directive for Biden—finding the proper replacement for Shokin. Despite Shokin's removal, the Burisma investigation was still technically open.
Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko appointed Yuriy Sevruk as Shokin's replacement the same day as Shokin's firing. At this same time, Blue Star (hired by Burisma at Hunter's urging) began vetting Sevruk. It appears that Blue Star decided that Sevruk wasn’t the right person to wrap up all the investigations into Burisma.
We know this because on May 12, 2016, Former Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko was suddenly appointed as Ukraine’s new prosecutor general - replacing Sevruk. The day after Lutsenko was appointed, Biden finally freed up the $1 billion funding to Ukraine that had been originally slated for November 2014 during a call with Poroshenko.
This unexplained delay in funding is important because the Obama White House had been deeply involved in the funding of Ukraine from the very start. It seems totally implausible that Biden could simply delay $1 billion in funding that had been approved by Obama’s White House six months earlier without Obama’s sign off.
On May 27, 2016, there was another call between Biden and Poroshenko (Hunter was inexplicably cc'd on the scheduling email). Three days later, on May 30, 2016, Lutsenko fired Sevruk. There was now an entirely new team at the prosecutor's office.
Not so coincidentally, it was on this same day that groundwork for attacks on the Trump campaign really began. Fusion GPS’s Nellie Ohr, wife of DOJ official Bruce Ohr, sent an email to Bruce and three other DOJ officials disclosing the existence of the Ukraine Black Box that was later used to target Paul Manafort. No one outside of Ukraine knew of the Black Box - or Black Ledger as it was later known.
Once Biden had finally sorted out the prosecutor situation in Ukraine, he needed to make sure his actions stayed hidden from public inquiry. All the more so because any serious investigation might ultimately shift towards Obama. Which made the ascending Trump Campaign a clear and present threat to Obama.
Obama and Biden couldn't afford to have Trump poking around Ukraine as the new president. This helps to explain the sudden targeting of the Trump campaign in late spring 2016—just as Biden put the finishing touches on Shokin’s firing. This also explains the explosion of attacks on Trump once he became president.
As we moved further into Trump’s presidency, it also explains the ferocious response from the DNC when Trump started to ask questions regarding Biden’s actions in Ukraine. If Trump was allowed to continue, he would have discovered all of the Biden misdeeds, Obama’s knowledge of everything, and perhaps other misdeeds from the others among the larger DC Establishment as well.
Everything circles back to Ukraine. And Obama.
