by Steven Richards an John Solomon
A Ukrainian who worked with the Democrat-tied consulting firm used by Hunter Biden’s Burisma planned to provide evidence of Biden family corruption to Congress. Before he could, the U.S. embassy stripped his visa, keeping him out of the U.S. He was later sanctioned for allegedly spreading Russian disinformation.
In the shadows of the 2020 election, the U.S. government revoked a Ukrainian witness' visa and prevented him from testifying in the Senate's probe into alleged Biden family corruption on the basis that he might be spreading Russian disinformation even though its own intelligence showed he was an opponent of Russia and rejected Moscow's overtures, bombshell memos released Thursday show.
The documents made public by the White House Government Transparency Task Force are the latest pieces of evidence to chronicle how the FBI, the State Department and other federal bodies sought to suffocate a narrative — later proven true — that Hunter Biden had been working for a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma Holdings that was seeking to leverage Vice President Joe Biden's connections to solve its corruption problems.
Specifically, the memos show that the FBI and State Department rushed to block former Ukraine embassy aide Andrii Telizhenko's arrival in the United States just as he was to be interviewed by Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley in September 2020.
Instead of testifying, the Ukrainian government official once trusted by the Obama administration was sanctioned for being painted as a possible unwitting purveyor of Russian smears against the Biden family.
The agencies argued that Telizhenko was spreading false claims that Hunter Biden's service on Burisma's board of directors had impacted U.S. policy fighting corruption in Ukraine and that Joe Biden had changed U.S. policy when he withheld $1 billion to force the firing of Ukraine's chief prosecutor who was investigating , the memos show.
"Every witness interviewed for [the senators’] investigation testified that Vice President Biden did not alter United States foreign policy to benefit his son Hunter Biden, and that Hunter Biden’s presence on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma had no effect on U.S. foreign policy," alleged a long-secret Treasury Department memo recommending the sanctions against Telizhenko.
In fact, evidence made public in the years after the 2020 election shows that America's top diplomats in Kyiv in fact believed Hunter Biden's presence on the Burisma board had "undercut" U.S. anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine and that Vice President Biden had overruled career officials' recommendations to give Ukraine the loan guarantees and keep the prosecutor in place.
The newly released memos not only show the grounds for claiming Telizhenko spread Russian disinformation may have been erroneous, but also that the officials who would go on to penalize him knew beforehand that the Ukrainian was in fact a vocal opponent of Moscow who had rejected overtures to be recruited by Russian sources.
“In 2014 [...] Andrii ((Telizhenko)) was banned from entering Russia due to his involvement in the 2014 Ukrainian revolution and was listed as a spy by the Russian government,” an Aug. 2020 FBI memo stated. The same memo shows that Russian officials attempted to recruit Telizhenko, but that he rebuffed them.
“In the summer of 2019, Russian officials tried to reach out to Telizhenko via Facebook and in person,” the memo reads. “Telizhenko blocked the Facebook account after realizing it was a Russian account.” It added: “[Redacted] under the directive of Ukrainian politician [redacted] tried to recruit Telizhenko in person, but Telizhenko denied their offer, and was subsequently blocked from attending political sessions and specific news channels.”
You can read the documents below:
Taking the whistle away from a whistle-blower
The new documents are more than a historical footnote in the Biden and Ukraine impeachment scandals. They also raise concerns that the executive branch may have impeded sitting U.S. senators from interviewing a witness key to their 2020 investigation.
Telizhenko first alleged that he was directed by the Ukrainian embassy to work with a local activist in the United States to dig up dirt on ex-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort in 2016.
By 2020, Sens. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, wanted to interview Telizhenko as part of their joint investigation of potential Biden family corruption in Ukraine stemming from Hunter Biden’s work on the Burisma board. Telizhenko offered to bring first-hand evidence he witnessed while working for the Biden-connected consulting firm representing the Ukrainian company.
Telizhenko was set to provide his account of two areas being probed by the committee. The first is Burisma’s attempt to curry favor with the Obama-Biden administration in Washington through the firm Blue Star Strategies, with whom Telizhenko worked. The second is alleged efforts by the Ukrainian embassy to interfere in the 2016 election.
Telizhenko was on the verge of traveling to the United States in September 2020 to participate in an interview when the U.S. embassy in Ukraine suddenly stripped him of his visa. Almost immediately thereafter, allegations appeared that he was spreading Russian disinformation in collaboration with pro-Russia Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach.
“Not true,” Telizhenko told Just the News in an interview Wednesday when asked whether he was affiliated or worked with Derkach. “From my end, I started my [reporting] on Hunter Biden long before Derkach came into the picture,” he added.
Senate investigation explored conflicts of interest in Hunter Biden’s business in both Ukraine and China
According to the final report produced by Johnson and Grassley’s investigation into allegations of Biden family corruption, Telizhenko was set to testify about his work for Blue Star and his “extensive and consistent contact with Obama administration officials and a DNC consultant.”
The senators’ investigation explored whether there were any conflicts of interest related to Hunter Biden’s business abroad in both Ukraine and China while his father served as vice president. The Ukraine allegations specifically centered on whether the younger Biden’s role on Burisma’s board impacted U.S. policy on Ukraine.
The Treasury Department memo recommending sanctions against Telizhenko for allegedly interfering in a U.S. election concluded that the Ukrainian’s claims could not be true because “every witness interviewed for [the senators’] investigation testified that Vice President Biden did not alter United States foreign policy to benefit his son Hunter Biden, and that Hunter Biden’s presence on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma had no effect on U.S. foreign policy.”
The "audible" that changed everything
But, there is now evidence that directly conflicts with that clsim.
The Washington Post, for instance, updated its reporting in September 2023 on how Joe Biden as vice president came to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees in late 2015 to force the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor whose office was investigating Burisma.
Citing documents uncovered by Just the News, The Washington Post’s top fact-checker Glenn Kessler updated his reporting on how Joe Biden as vice president came to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees in late 2015 to force the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor whose office was investigating the Burisma Holdings energy firm that employed Hunter Biden.
Kessler admitted for the first time — years after publication — that Joe Biden may have “called an audible,” or changed the plan, on the firing of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin on his way to Kyiv aboard Air Force Two in December 2015.
The documents showed career officials had earlier recommended that Biden approve the $1 billion in loan guarantees and keep Shokin in place, marking the clearest evidence of a policy change that has emerged since Telizhenko was sanctioned. That's when the "audible" was called, reversing course, the Post suggested.
The smear starts being thrown around FBI in "defensive briefings” to lawmakers
Sen. Johnson had attempted to subpoena Telizhenko to testify in his Senate inquiry earlier that year, but pivoted to requesting documents from the firm for which Telizhenko did work, the Democratic Party-aligned Blue Star Strategies, instead.
The change in tack came after the FBI provided a so-called "defensive briefing” to lawmakers warning that Telizhenko may be tied to Russian friendly figures and part of a disinformation campaign. That briefing halted the lawmakers’ efforts to interview Telizhenko about evidence the Ukrainian wanted to turn over to the committees related to his work at Blue Star.
Telizhenko worked for the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office in Kyiv and then was dispatched to Washington to work in Ukraine’s embassy, where he became a trusted conduit to the Obama-Biden White House and two National Security Council staffers named Eric Ciaramella and Elizabeth Zentos, documents obtained and previously reported by Just the News show.
FBI internally labeled both Grassley and Johnson as “conduits” of Russian disinformation
During the senators’ probe, the FBI had secretly labeled both Grassley and Johnson as “conduits” of Russian disinformation for their investigation.
A previous release by the White House task force of a once-classified FBI document showed the bureau was running a secret operation codenamed “Round River” launched during the 2020 election by a task force of FBI analysts claiming to be fighting “malign foreign influence.” That operation labeled senior administration officials and lawmakers, including Johnson and Grassley, as “conduits” of Russian disinformation for investigating allegations against Hunter Biden, despite the fact that U.S. intelligence agencies had received derogatory evidence about Joe Biden from 14 different informants, Just the News previously reported.
Despite having facts to the contrary, the Intelligence Community ultimately said Telizhenko was, either wittingly or unwittingly, participating in a Russian information operation intended to influence the outcome of the 2020 election because of his alleged connections to Derkach.
One memo, with both author and full title redacted, describes Telizhenko as “a close associate of Kremlin-linked Ukrainian parliamentarian Andriy Derkach.” U.S. intelligence long suspected Derkach of being a spy for Moscow. He was educated at the KGB academy and was later elected to the Ukrainian parliament, where he had a history of backing anti-protest laws during the 2014 Ukrainian revolution.
Derkach ultimately fled to Russia shortly after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. He was welcomed by President Vladimir Putin and was awarded the title of Hero of the Russian Federation at a ceremony in the Kremlin. Later, Derkach was appointed to be a Senator representing the Astrakhan Oblast of Russia.
"Telling the truth about this, I hoped would lead to something good,” Telizhenko says
Telizhenko recounted to Just the News how he was “shocked” when he first learned that the U.S. government suspected he was working on behalf of Russia's interests, especially after he spent years working for the Ukrainian government trying to do good for his country.
"That came to me as a shock when they accused me of that connection [to Russia],” he told Just the News. “I was sanctioned for six years, putting my life into disaster. But, I would’ve done it again. Telling the truth about this, I hoped would lead to something good.”
When previously questioned by Buzzfeed News about the purpose of interviewing Telizhenko despite his alleged pro-Russian associations, Johnson and Grassley defended their intent to assess and analyze the Ukrainian’s evidence. “As with any inquiry, you get answers by asking questions. Those who restrict themselves from reviewing matters associated with ‘people of ill repute’ won’t have much luck uncovering wrongdoing or improving accountability,” the senators said in a joint written statement to the outlet.
In a final report recommending sanctions against Telizhenko for alleged interference in U.S. elections, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) concluded that he “has directly or indirectly engaged in, sponsored, concealed, or otherwise been complicit in foreign interference.” As evidence, the office cited the public reporting in Buzzfeed about Telizhenko’s work to share allegations of Biden corruption and his alleged affiliation with Derkach.
Telizhenko was ultimately sanctioned Jan. 11, 2021, according to a Treasury Department announcement.
The declassified intelligence memos provide little evidence that Telizhenko was willingly spreading Russia’s preferred narratives for Derkach, but instead repeatedly reference the possibility that he was an “unwitting” participant.
In a notice from February 2020, the CIA said “Telizhenko’s collaboration with Ukrainians actively supporting the Kremlin’s preferred narratives suggests he is, at a minimum, unwittingly fueling known Russian government influence programs.” Most of the evidence the CIA used to support this claim remains redacted, but the agency cited Telizhenko’s willingness to participate in a “documentary film” and the fact that Russian media outlets "amplified [his] narratives” as evidence for its claims.
FBI steps in before Telizhenko flies to U.S., knew of his intention to testify
The White House already released declassified emails from the FBI and U.S. State Department staff that show the two driving forces behind the revocation of Telizhenko’s visa were the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine.
“We were just informed of Andrii Telizhenko’s intention to travel to the US. We are putting together an LHM [Letter Head Memorandum] now to request revoking his Visa,” a member of the FITF’s Russia division wrote Sept. 8, 2020.
However, by the time the FBI began preparing its formal memo, Telizhenko’s visa had already been revoked, the emails show. “Actually, we stopped working on it since he was already revoked,” an agent wrote the following day.
The declassified emails show that the order to revoke Telizhenko’s visa came on Sept. 8 from “Embassy Kyiv.”
State Department was worried about Biden "undercutting" U.S. anti-corruption work in region
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent explained the decision to revoke the visa in a later Oct. 20, 2020 email. “Andriy Telizhenko, political operative, ex [Office of the Prosecutor General] and Ukrainian Embassy attache: visa prudentially revoked Sept. 2020 the day before plans to travel to the US to provide manufactured case information out of the Pechersk district,” Kent wrote.
The emails show State Department officials revoked visas for other Ukrainians as well, including the ex-prosecutor Shokin, who lost his position after Joe Biden's infamous "audible."
Ironically, it was Kent who wrote a classified email to his then-boss Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch four years earlier saying that Hunter Biden had harmed U.S. anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine with his work for Burisma, which the State Department deemed to be corrupt.
“The real issue to my mind was that someone in Washington needed to engage VP Biden quietly and say that his son Hunter's presence on the Burisma board undercut the anti-corruption message the VP and we were advancing in Ukraine b/c Ukrainians heard one message from us and then saw another set of behavior with the family association with a known corrupt figure whose company was known for not playing by the rules,” Kent wrote to Yovanovitch on Nov. 22, 2016.
Kent and Yovanovitch were two of the star witnesses when House Democrats impeached President Donald Trump on the grounds that he abused his power by asking Ukraine to investigate the Biden family back in 2019. The Senate eventually acquitted Trump.
In the years since, significant evidence has emerged that has called into question the testimony and evidence used by Democrats during those impeachment proceedings.
Steven Richards an John Solomon
Source: https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/new-docs-reveal-slim-evidence-used-strip-visa-ukrainian
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