Nope, Not Gonna Do It

Real Clear Investigations’ Eric Felten, has obtained a copy of Rudy Giuliani’s notes from interviews he’d conducted in January with former Ukrainian Prosecutors Viktor Shokin and Yuri Lutsenko.

Felten writes that a Ukrainian media outlet, The Babel, has published the notes, and that Giuliani has confirmed their authenticity. He said the notes had been “prepared by George Boyle, a retired NYPD detective,” who serves as the director of investigations at Giuliani’s security firm.

Felten also writes he has not confirmed the “prosecutors’ assertions as presented in the notes. The documents are embedded in the Google-translated article linked to here and can be viewed by scrolling down the page.”

The notes have not been publicly released in the U.S. During an appearance on Hannity last week, Giuliani said he had submitted them to the State Department and had not heard anything back. The State Department’s Inspector General sent them to the FBI. Felten writes that they are now in the hands of congressional committees.

Shokin told Giuliani he had been investigating Burisma Holdings when he was “warned” by then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to stop “as it was not in the interest of Joe and/or Hunter Biden.” Shokin said he had also been warned by then-U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt. (Pyatt was succeeded by the controversial, Obama administration holdover, Marie Yovanovitch, who was fired by the Trump administration in May 2019.)

Following Biden’s now infamous order, Shokin was fired in March 2016.

The notes say Shokin “was called into Mr. Poroshenko’s office and told that the investigation into Burisma and the Managing Director where Hunter Biden is on the board, has caused Joe Biden to hold up one billion dollars in U.S. aid to Ukraine.” According to the notes, Poroshenko told Shokin “he had to be fired as the aid to the Ukraine was being withheld by Joe Biden.”

President Trump rightly believes Biden’s threat to withhold U.S. aid to Ukraine unless Shokin was fired should be investigated. His reference to this incident during a July 25th telephone conversation with current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has sparked the House Democrats’ current impeachment inquiry.

Earlier this week, it was reported that Ukraine had already initiated an investigation in March, four months prior to this phone call. I posted about this here.

It is believed that many officials in Poroshenko’s administration actively interfered during the 2016 U.S. presidential election to damage then-candidate Trump. In December 2018, Director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), Artem Sytnyk, and Serhiy Leshchenko, then the acting Ukrainian Prosecutor General, were found guilty in a Kiev court of revealing what was either the authentic or forged copy of former President Viktor Yanukovych’s “black ledger.” The ledger showed that cash payments of over $12 million had been made to Paul Manafort, whose consulting/lobbying work for Yanukovych had been instrumental in helping him win Ukraine’s 2010 presidential election. When this information was released in August 2016, Manafort was forced to resign from his post as the manager of the Trump campaign and it added credibility to the Democrats’ scheme to portray Trump as an agent of Moscow.

Glenn Beck posted a recording of Sytnyk telling friends he had helped Hillary during the campaign. I posted about that here.

In addition, the dogged efforts of DNC contractor Ukrainian-American Alexandra Chalupa to unearth dirt on Manafort and Trump also amounted to election interference. In January 2017, two Politico writers, Kenneth Vogel and David Stern, published the results of their investigation into the many ways officials of Poroshenko’s government worked to promote Clinton’s victory. Chalupa’s role looms large in that report. This frequently cited report can be viewed here.

Read Giuliani’s notes can be viewed here.