Vice President Joe Biden sits with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on February 7, 2015, before a bilateral meeting also attended by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Toria Nuland on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]
Andrew C. McCarthy in NRO writes that he has no problem with the principle that the president should not exploit his power over foreign relations for partisan political purposes. McCarthy’s problem, however, is with the double standard.
See the way the game is played: When the Obama administration leans on Ukraine for help in an investigation of political opponents, the Democrats and the media say, “But look how corrupt Paul Manafort was!” When the Trump administration leans on Ukraine for help in an investigation of political opponents, the Democrats and the media say, “Abuse of power — impeach him!”
In 2015, the dependency bond intensified when Viktor Yanukovych ran to Moscow, and Petro Poroshenko, more to the Obama administration’s liking, came to power, explains McCarthy.
(Ukraine) was desperate for American help, financially and security-wise, which is why Vice President Biden was in a position to pressure it into firing the prosecutor who was conducting a corruption investigation of Burisma, the energy company that had appointed Hunter Biden to its board and was lavishly compensating him.
In Ball of Collusion, McCarthy summarizes some of the extensive evidence that in 2016, the Obama administration’s law-enforcement agencies pressured their Ukrainian counterparts to revive a dormant corruption investigation of Paul Manafort
The Plot to Destroy a Presidency
During the . . . early 2016 weeks when [Alexandra] Chalupa [a Ukrainian-American and DNC operative] was tapping her Ukrainian sources and giving Democrats a heads-up about a potential Manafort-Trump alliance, NABU [Ukraine’s anti-corruption] investigators and Ukrainian prosecutors journeyed to Washington. There, the Obama administration arranged for them to huddle with the FBI, the Justice Department, the State Department, and the White House’s National Security Council (agencies that coordinated frequently throughout the collusion caper).
Andrii Telizhenko, a political officer at Ukraine’s embassy in Washington, later told The Hill’s John Solomon that the U.S. officials uniformly stressed “how important it was that all of our anti-corruption efforts be united.” The officials also indicated to their Ukrainian counterparts that they were keen to revive the
investigation of payments by Yanukovych’s ousted Party of Regions government to an American political consultant — i.e., the FBI’s Paul Manafort probe [that was reportedly closed without a recommendation of charges in 2014] . . .
Nazar Kholodnitskiy, Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, told Solomon that soon after the January 2016 Washington meetings, he found that Ukrainian officials were effectively meddling in the American presidential election. Another top Ukrainian lawman, Kostiantyn Kulyk, recalled that after the Kiev contingent’s return home from the United States, there was lots of buzz about helping the Americans with the Party of Regions investigation.
Read more here.
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