U.S. Attorney General William Barr listens to concerns raised about public safety in rural Alaska during at a roundtable discussion at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium on Wednesday, May 29, 2019, in Anchorage, Alaska. Barr did not take questions from reporters in his first public appearance after former special prosecutor Robert Mueller spoke to reporters after resigning at the completion of his report into Russian interference into the 2016 election. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen)

In March, I wrote a post in which I asked, “What is the connection between James Clapper, Victor Pinchuk, and the chief technology officer of CrowdStrike, which was the only company the DNC allowed to access their server?” This post jumped into my head the moment I saw a Breitbart article reporting that one of Adam Schiff’s staffers had met with diplomat William Taylor on a trip to Ukraine which was organized by The Atlantic Council. I had written:

Ukrainian billionaire and longtime contributor to the Clinton Foundation Victor Pinchuk, was doing his best to promote a Clinton victory. Pinchuk serves on the International Advisory Board of a Washington-based think tank called the Atlantic Council. This group is “connected to Ukrainian interests through its “Ukraine in Europe Initiative,” which is designed to galvanize international support for an independent Ukraine within secure borders whose people will determine their own future.”

Also serving on the International Advisory Board of the Atlantic Council is James Clapper, who served as Obama’s Director of National Intelligence.

Funnily enough, [Dan] Bongino discovered that the Chief Technology Officer of “the only company that investigated the hacking of the DNC’s servers and quickly determined it was the Russians, is a nonresident senior fellow in cybersecurity” at the Atlantic Council. His name is Dmitri Alperovitch.

Please keep this in mind as you read this post.

The Atlantic Council is a super liberal think-tank which receives much of its funding from Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian natural gas company where Hunter Biden had served as a board member.

Breitbart’s Aaron Klein obtained a copy of travel documents which showed that, twelve days after the “whistleblower” submitted his complaint to the Intelligence Community Inspector General, one of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s staffers, Thomas Eager, held a meeting with acting U.S. ambassador (or Charge d’Affaires) to Ukraine William Taylor. The two were on a trip to Ukraine which had been organized by The Atlantic Council. It was “billed as a bipartisan Ukraine Study Trip in which ten Congressional staffers participated.”

Eager is a member of The Atlantic Council and Taylor has a “close relationship” with the organization as well.

Klein writes that Schiff’s office has refused to respond to any of Breitbart’s questions or comment requests. Specifically, Breitbart had asked, “While in Ukraine, did Mr. Eager speak to Mr. Taylor about the issue of reports about any representatives of President Trump looking into alleged Biden corruption in Ukraine?”

The trip took place between August 24 and August 31. The “whistleblower” filed his complaint on August 12. Last week, we learned that Schiff had lied when he told MSNBC on September 17, “We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower. We would like to.” Via the New York Times, we found out that one of Schiff’s staffers had been approached by the whistleblower before he filed his complaint and shared this information with Schiff.

Following is one of the text message exchanges between Taylor and U.S. ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland. It shows Taylor’s obvious bias against President Trump, so naturally Schiff has made him a key witness in his impeachment inquiry over Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Taylor is scheduled to provide a deposition next week.

NBC News’ reported that Taylor will be “represented during the deposition by attorney John Bellinger, a prominent “Never Trump” Republican who served in the George W. Bush administration.”

Here is one of the exchanges. (Via NPR)

On September 9th, Taylor wrote: “I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.”

Sondland responds: “Bill, I believe you are incorrect about President Trump’s intentions. The President has been crystal clear no quid pro quo’s of any kind.”

Sondland adds, “I suggest we stop the back and forth by text.”)

To give you an idea of how deeply involved, and therefore how “anti-Trump” Taylor is, I am including the details from Klein’s article. He does go into the weeds, but it explains how interconnected, almost incestuous, all of these players are. I recommend at least a quick scan of his findings.

When we see how extensive the network’s tentacles go, we begin to understand how they were able to carry out their plot against President Trump and to avoid detection for so long. All of the actors cover for and facilitate each other. We also realize that Ukraine has been the common denominator for a large part of the conspiracy to take down the Trump administration.

Former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, whose prepared opening statement to the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry team was leaked to the press last week, said she was recalled based on “unfounded and false claims.” I found a major lie in her testimony. She had written, “As Mr. Lutsenko, the former Ukrainian Prosecutor General has recently acknowledged, the notion that I created or disseminated a “do not prosecute” list is completely false—a story that Mr. Lutsenko, himself, has since retracted.” The reality is that Lutsenko has done no such thing. I posted about this here. And you can bet this was not her only lie. She is likely up to her eyeballs in wrongdoing.

The left has perpetrated such a major fraud which has involved so many, I don’t see how it could not leave a paper trail. The bigger an operation becomes, the more difficult it is to contain. Each additional participant adds to the risk of exposure. And in an operation as vast and far-reaching as this one, someone is going to slip up.

I have confidence that Attorney General William Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham have already found or will find the evidence necessary to blow this giant ambush of the U.S. President wide open.

Details: VIA Breitbart

Taylor and The Atlantic Council

Taylor has authored numerous analysis pieces published by the Atlantic Council.

In March, three months before he became Trump’s ambassador to Ukraine, the Atlantic Council featured an oped co-authored by Taylor in which the diplomat argued Ukraine “has further to travel toward its self-proclaimed European goal” of reformation.

In 2017, Taylor wrote a piece for the Council about a Ukrainian parliament vote on health care reform.

In November 2011, the Atlantic Council hosted Taylor as the featured speaker at a discussion event when he was appointed that year as Special Coordinator for Middle East Transitions at the State Department.

When he deployed to Ukraine as Trump’s ambassador in June, the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC), which has co-hosted events with the Atlantic Council, authored a piece in the Kyiv Post welcoming him.

Taylor for the last nine years served as a senior adviser to the USUBC.

The USUBC’s piece noted that the “USUBC has worked closely with Ambassador Taylor for many years,” touting his role as the business group’s senior adviser.

On June 26, just nine days after arriving in Ukraine as ambassador, the USUBC already hosted Taylor for a roundtable discussion about his new position.

Vadym Pozharskyi, adviser to the board of directors at Burisma Holdings, was also previously hosted as a USUBC featured speaker.

A USUBC senior adviser is David J. Kramer, a long-time adviser to late Senator John McCain, who served at the McCain Institute for International Leadership as senior director for human rights and democracy. Kramer played a central role in disseminating the anti-Trump dossier.

In the USUBC piece welcoming Taylor to Ukraine, Kramer himself commented about Taylor’s ambassador position.

“He’s a great choice for now,” Kramer gushed.

Geysha Gonzalez is the sponsoring Atlantic Council officer listed on the Congressional disclosure form for Schiff staffer Eager’s trip to Ukraine. She is deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

Gonzalez is also one of eleven members of the rapid response team for the Ukrainian Election Task Force, which says it is working to expose “foreign interference in Ukraine’s democracy.”

Another member of the team is Kramer.

Kramer revealed in testimony that he held a meeting about the anti-Trump dossier with a reporter from BuzzFeed News, who he says snapped photos of the controversial document without Kramer’s permission when he left the room to go to the bathroom. That meeting was held at the McCain Institute office in Washington, Kramer stated.

BuzzFeed infamously published the Christopher Steele dossier on January 10, 2017, setting off a firestorm of news media coverage about the document.

The Washington Post reported last February that Kramer received the dossier directly from Fusion GPS after McCain expressed interest in it.

In a deposition taken on December 13, 2017, and posted online earlier this year, Kramer revealed that he met with two Obama administration officials to inquire about whether the anti-Trump dossier was being taken seriously.

In one case, Kramer said that he personally provided a copy of the dossier to Obama National Security Council official Celeste Wallander.

In the deposition, Kramer said that McCain specifically asked him in early December 2016 to meet about the dossier with Wallander and Victoria Nuland, a senior official in John Kerry’s State Department.

Schiff signed form

Schiff’s signature appears on the required post-travel disclosure form filed with the House Committee on Ethics documenting the visit to Ukraine. The form signed by Schiff says that Eager’s trip to Ukraine was paid for by the “Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.”

The form bearing Schiff’s signature (above) describes the visit thusly:

Series of meetings and visits with gov’t officials, party officials, civil society and private sector reps in Ukraine to learn about ongoing political and military issues, including conflict in the East.

The costs for Eager’s visit listed on the form are $2202.91 for transportation, $985.50 for lodging, and $630.15 for meal expenses.

Speaking to Breitbart News, Gonzalez confirmed that Eager started his one-year fellowship with the organization in January and that Eager is still a fellow.

Gonzalez said the pre-planned trip was part of the fellowship program, which also includes a full year of round tables and other educational events. She said it was not within her portfolio to comment on issues of funding from Burisma or other donors.

Burisma and Atlantic Council

Besides funding the Atlantic Council, Burisma also routinely partners with the think tank.

Only four months ago, the company co-hosted the Council’s second Annual Kharkiv Security Conference.

Burisma further co-hosted a U.S.-Ukraine Business Council event with the Council last year in Washington, DC. David Kramer of the dossier episode is a senior adviser to the Business Council.

Burisma and the Atlantic Council also signed a cooperative agreement to develop transatlantic programs with Burisma’s financial support, reportedly to focus “on European and international energy security.”

Burisma advertises that it committed itself to “15 key principles of rule of law and economic policy in Ukraine developed by the Atlantic Council.”

Common funding themes

Besides Burisma funding, the Atlantic Council is also financed by billionaire activist George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, Google, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc., and the U.S. State Department.

Google, Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Fund, and an agency of the State Department each also finance a self-described investigative journalism organization repeatedly referenced as a source of information in the so-called “whistleblower’s” complaint alleging Trump was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country” in the 2020 presidential race.

The charges in the July 22 report referenced in the “whistleblower’s” document and released by the Google and Soros-funded organization, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), seem to be the public precursors for a lot of the so-called “whistleblower’s” own claims, as Breitbart News documented.

One key section of the so-called “whistleblower’s” document claims that “multiple U.S. officials told me that Mr. Giuliani had reportedly privately reached out to a variety of other Zelensky advisers, including Chief of Staff Andriy Bohdan and Acting Chairman of the Security Service of Ukraine Ivan Bakanov.”

This was allegedly to follow up on Trump’s call with Zelensky in order to discuss the “cases” mentioned in that call, according to the so-called “whistleblower’s” narrative. The complainer was clearly referencing Trump’s request for Ukraine to investigate the Biden corruption allegations.

Even though the statement was written in first person – “multiple U.S. officials told me” – it contains a footnote referencing a report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

That footnote reads:

In a report published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) on 22 July, two associates of Mr. Giuliani reportedly traveled to Kyiv in May 2019 and met with Mr. Bakanov and another close Zelensky adviser, Mr. Serhiy Shefir.

The so-called “whistleblower’s” account goes on to rely upon that same OCCRP report on three more occasions. It does so to:

Write that Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko “also stated that he wished to communicate directly with Attorney General Barr on these matters.”

Document that Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani “had spoken in late 2018 to former Prosecutor General Shokin, in a Skype call arranged by two associates of Mr. Giuliani.”

Bolster the charge that, “I also learned from a U.S. official that ‘associates’ of Mr. Giuliani were trying to make contact with the incoming Zelenskyy team.” The so-called “whistleblower” then relates in another footnote, “I do not know whether these associates of Mr. Giuliani were the same individuals named in the 22 July report by OCCRP, referenced above.”

The OCCRP report repeatedly referenced is actually a “joint investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and BuzzFeed News, based on interviews and court and business records in the United States and Ukraine.”

BuzzFeed infamously also first published the full anti-Trump dossier alleging unsubstantiated collusion between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia. The dossier was paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and was produced by the Fusion GPS opposition dirt outfit.

The OCCRP and BuzzFeed “joint investigation” resulted in both OCCRP and BuzzFeed publishing similar lengthy pieces on July 22 claiming that Giuliani was attempting to use connections to have Ukraine investigate Trump’s political rivals.

The so-called “whistleblower’s” document, however, only mentions the largely unknown OCCRP and does not reference BuzzFeed, which has faced scrutiny over its reporting on the Russia collusion claims.