For weeks now, Democratic members of Congress, career State Department and National Security Council experts and their allies in the media suggest questions about Joe Biden and a Ukrainian gas company and Ukraine meddling in the 2016 election were nothing more than debunked conspiracy theories.

In reality, the facts on both these issues are clearly substantiated. And as I pointed out last week, many of the witnesses that House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff called during the impeachment proceedings confirmed concerns about both.

Here is a detailed timeline of key events in the Ukraine scandal, complete with the corroborating evidence. You make your own judgement as to what happened.

February 2014.

Vice President Joe Biden named by President Obama to be U.S. point man on Ukrainian crisis after Euromaidan Revolution of Dignity leads to ouster of Viktor Yanukovych as Ukrainian president.

February 21, 2014

George Soros’ Open Society Foundation publishes anticorruption strategy for Ukraine identifying the Anti-Corruption Action Centre, a nonprofit that Soros’ foundation and the U.S. State Department jointly fund, as the leading edge of the foundation’s strategy for Ukraine.

Validation: https://www.scribd.com/document/403223726/Open-Society-2014-Memo

March 2014

New Ukrainian elections set for May 2014 and Petro Poroshenko emerges as top Western-friendly candidate for president.

April 13, 2014:

Devon Archer, the business partner of Hunter Biden, son of the VP, and Christopher Heinz, stepson of Secretary of State John Kerry, is named an independent director of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings.

Validation:  https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27403003

April 15, 2014:

Burisma Holdings makes two payments to the Morgan Stanley account of Devon Archer’s and Hunter Biden’s firm Rosemont Seneca Bohai in the amounts of $83,333.33 and $29,424.82, according to financial records obtained by Ukrainian authorities and the FBI.

Validation: Burisma Holdings financial records obtained by Ukraine Prosecutor General’s Office. https://www.scribd.com/document/436048670/Burisma-Holdings-Accounting-Ledger

                   FBI records obtained from Rosemont Seneca Bohai: https://www.scribd.com/document/404001731/Rosemont-Seneca-Partners-Court-File

April 15, 2014:

Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s partner in Rosemont Seneca Bohai and Burisma Holdings, checks into White House for meeting with Vice President Joe Biden, according to the Secret Service’s official WAVES entry logs for the Obama White House.

April 22, 2014:

VP Joe Biden meets with Ukraine Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and urges Ukraine to ramp up energy production to free itself from its Russian natural gas dependence. Biden boasts that “an American team is currently in the region working with Ukraine and its neighbors to increase Ukraine’s short-term energy supply.” Yatsenyuk welcomes help from American “investors” in modernizing natural gas supply lines in Ukraine.

Validation: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/04/22/remarks-press-vice-president-joe-biden-and-ukrainian-prime-minister-arse

April 24, 2014:

Joe Biden meets with candidate Poroshenko.

Validation: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/04/petro-poroshenko-interview-ukrainian-presidential-candidate-discusses-putin-the-west-and-ukraine.html

April 28, 2014:

Britain’s Serious Fraud Office freezes $23 million in assets kept in London by Burisma Holdings and its founder, Mykola Zlochevsky, on grounds it was fraudulently transferred from Ukraine. Zlochevsky and Burisma deny wrongdoing.

Validation: https://www.sfo.gov.uk/cases/ukraine-money-laundering-investigation/

May 13, 2014

Hunter Biden announced as a board member for Ukraine’s largest natural gas company Burisma Holdings, which is run by Mykola Zlochevsky, a former Cabinet official for ousted president Victor Yanukovych.

Validation:  https://www.cnbc.com/2014/05/13/bidens-son-joins-ukraine-gas-companys-board-of-directors.html

https://burisma-group.com/hunter-biden-joins-the-team-of-burisma-holdings/

May 13, 2014

Christopher Heinz, business partner to Devon Archer and Hunter Biden and stepson to John Kerry, sends email to Secretary of State’s top aides distancing himself from Archer, Biden appointments to Burisma Holdings board, according to FOIA released to Citizens United.

Validation: https://www.scribd.com/document/433436789/CU-v-State-FOIA-Doc-Ukraine

May 15, 2014

Burisma Holdings makes two equal $83,333.33 payments totaling $166,666.66 to the Morgan Stanley account of Hunter Biden’s and Devon Archer’s firm Rosemont Seneca Bohai, according to the company’s official ledger and Rosemont Seneca Bohais bank records obtained by the FBI. Similar payments are made every month for more than a year.

Validation: Burisma Holdings financial records released by Ukraine Prosecutor General’s Office: https://www.scribd.com/document/436048670/Burisma-Holdings-Accounting-Ledger

Rosemont Seneca records seized by FBI: https://www.scribd.com/document/404001731/Rosemont-Seneca-Partners-Court-File

May 20, 2014

David Leiter, former chief of staff to John Kerry, hired as a lobbyist for Burisma Holdings, Senate lobbying records show. The firm is paid $90,000 in 2014 to lobby Congress and the State Department.

Validation: https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/client_reports.php?id=F212407&year=2014

May 25, 2014

Poroshenko wins the Ukraine presidential election

July 5, 2014:

Burisma Holdings pays $250,000 retainer to Boies Schiller law firm where board member Hunter Biden also works.

Validation: Burisma Holdings financial records released by Ukraine Prosecutor General’s Office: https://www.scribd.com/document/436048670/Burisma-Holdings-Accounting-Ledger

Aug. 20, 2014

Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin’s office opens criminal investigation of Burisma Holdings and Mykola Zlochevsky for alleged corrupt award of gas exploration permits and eventual looting of company, according to Ukrainian prosecutor general’s case file. 

Sept. 16, 2014

Burisma Holdings makes $33,039.77 payment to Boies Schiller law firm, according to company records.

Validation: Burisma Holdings accounting ledger obtained by Ukraine Prosecutor General’s Office  https://www.scribd.com/document/436048670/Burisma-Holdings-Accounting-Ledger

December 16, 2014

Former deputy national security adviser Tony Blinken, a longtime Joe Biden adviser, confirmed by Senate as Deputy Secretary of State under John Kerry.

Jan. 18, 2015:

Prosecutor General’s office in Ukraine declares Burisma Holdings founder Mykola Zlochevsky a fugitive “wanted in Ukraine.”

Validation: https://www.kyivpost.com/article/content/reform-watch/prosecutors-put-zlochevsky-multimillionaire-ex-ecology-minister-on-wanted-list-377719.html

Jan. 29, 2015:

British Serious Fraud Office announces it is closing down investigation into Burisma and Zlochevsky for insufficient evidence.

Validation: https://www.sfo.gov.uk/cases/ukraine-money-laundering-investigation/

March 18, 2015

VP Biden has phone call with President Poroshenko.

Validation: https://ua.usembassy.gov/readout-vice-presidents-call-ukrainian-president-petro-poroshenko-6/

March 30, 2015:

George Soros announces plans to invest $1 billion in Ukrainian energy and technology sectors.

Validation: https://money.cnn.com/2015/03/30/investing/ukraine-soros-billion-russia/index.html

April 15, 2015

VP Joe Biden speaks in Ukraine, praising the decision to appoint a new head of the NABU, the new Ukrainian law enforcement investigative arm set up by United States.

March 22, 2015:

Hunter Biden emails his father’s longtime trusted aide, Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken, with the following message: “Have a few minutes next week to grab a cup of coffee? I know you are impossibly busy, but would like to get your advice on a couple of things, Best, Hunter.”

Blinken responds the same day with an “absolutely” and added, “Look forward to seeing you.”

The records indicate the two men were scheduled to meet the afternoon of May 27, 2015.

Validation: https://www.scribd.com/document/436054889/Hunter-Biden-Blinken-May-2015-Contacts

June 11, 2015

Burisma Holdings makes $20,000 donation to the Delaware Community Foundation in the name of Beau Biden, the vice president’s oldest son who died of cancer, according to the company’s financial records released by Ukraine prosecutor general’s office.

Validation: https://www.scribd.com/document/436048670/Burisma-Holdings-Accounting-Ledger

June 12, 2015

VP Biden calls President Poroshenko.

Validation: https://ua.usembassy.gov/readout-vice-presidents-call-ukrainian-president-petro-poroshenko-8/

July 15, 2015

VP Biden and Commerce Secretary Pritzker attend first ever US-Ukraine Chamber of Business meeting.

Validation: https://www.uschamber.com/first-annual-us-ukraine-business-forum

July 22, 2015:

Hunter Biden meets with Deputy Secretary Tony Blinken for lunch at State Department, according to State Department memos.

Validation: https://www.scribd.com/document/433389212/Biden-Blinken-Meeting

July 24, 2015:

VP Biden calls President Poroshenko, raises concerns about anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine.

Validation: https://ua.usembassy.gov/readout-vice-presidents-call-ukrainian-president-petro-poroshenko-10/

Aug. 16, 2015

Devon Archer throws a $10,000 a plate fund-raiser in New York for the Seed Global Health charity founded by Secretary of State Kerry’s daughter, Dr. Vanessa Kerry, according to official invite.

Validation: https://www.scribd.com/document/432522987/Devon-Archer-Fundraiser-Vanessa-Kerry

Aug. 28, 2015

VP Biden calls President Poroshenko

Validation:  https://ua.usembassy.gov/readout-vice-presidents-call-ukrainian-president-petro-poroshenko-082815/

Sept. 25, 2015:

U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt gives speech imploring Ukrainian prosecutors to do more to bring Burisma’s Zlochevsky to justice.

Validation: https://www.rferl.org/a/us-ambassador-upbraids-ukraine-over-corruption-efforts/27271294.html

Sept. 29, 2015

VP Biden meets with President Poroshenko in Ukraine.

Validation: https://ua.usembassy.gov/readout-vice-president-bidens-meeting-ukrainian-president-petro-poroshenko/

Nov. 5, 2015

VP Biden calls President Poroshenko.

Validation: https://ua.usembassy.gov/readout-vice-president-bidens-call-ukrainian-president-petro-poroshenko-110515/

Nov. 18, 2015

Burisma Holdings makes $60,000 payment to the American legal, lobbying and communications firm Blue Star Strategies for consulting work, according to company’s official ledger.

Validation: https://www.scribd.com/document/436048670/Burisma-Holdings-Accounting-Ledger

Dec. 7, 2015

VP Biden meets with President Poroshenko and demands the president make “hard decisions” to eliminate “the cancer of corruption” in his country.

Validation: https://ua.usembassy.gov/remarks-vice-president-joe-biden-ukrainian-president-petro-poroshenko-bilateral-meeting/

Dec. 8, 2015

The New York Times publishes article stating Prosecutor General Shokin’s office is investigating Burisma Holdings and its founder Zlochecvsky, and that Hunter Biden’s participation on Burisma board is undercutting Joe Biden’s anticorruption message in Ukraine. VP Biden office quoted in story.

Validation: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/world/europe/corruption-ukraine-joe-biden-son-hunter-biden-ties.html

Jan. 21-24, 2016:

Obama White House invites leaders of Ukraine’s general prosecutor office to Washington for a hastily arranged set of meetings to discuss anticorruption cases, including Burisma and Party of Regions case involving Paul Manafort..

Validation: https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/440730-how-the-obama-white-house-engaged-ukraine-to-give-russia-collusion

Feb. 4, 2016

Ukraine general prosecutor’s office under the direction of Viktor Shokin announces the seizure of assets from Burisma Holdings founder Mykola Zlochevsky under a continuing criminal investigation. The seizure occurred on Feb. 2, 2016, according to the announcement.

Validation: https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/322395.html

Feb. 4, 2016

Burisma board member Hunter Biden sends a Twitter notification to Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken, a longtime adviser to Joe Biden, indicating he is following Blinken on Twitter.

Validation: https://www.scribd.com/document/433389211/HunterBidenFollowBlinkenTwitter

Feb. 11, 18, 19, 2016

VP Biden holds series of phone calls with President Poroshenko to check on status of pending items from their December 2015 meeting.

Validation: https://ua.usembassy.gov/readout-vice-president-bidens-calls-prime-minister-arseniy-yatsenyuk-president-petro-poroshenko-ukraine-021916/

Feb. 24-March 1, 2016:

An American representative for Burisma Holdings, Karen Tramontano of Blue Star Strategies, seeks meeting with Undersecretary of State Catherine A. Novelli to discuss ending the corruption allegations against the Ukrainian gas firm.  Hunter Biden’s name was specifically invoked by the Burisma representative as a reason the State Department should help. “Per our conversation, Karen Tramontano of Blue Star Strategies requested a meeting to discuss with U/S Novelli USG remarks alleging Burisma (Ukrainian energy company) of corruption.”

Validation: https://www.scribd.com/document/433389210/Bluestar-Novelli-Contacts

March 2, 2016:

Devon Archer, a business partner of Hunter Biden and fellow American board member on Burisma Holdings, secures meeting with Secretary of State John Kerry, State Department memos say.

Validation: https://www.scribd.com/document/433389208/Archer-Meeting-Kerry

March 15, 2016

Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland demands Ukraine “appoint and confirm a new, clean Prosecutor General, who is committed to rebuilding the integrity of the PGO, and investigate, indict and successfully prosecute corruption and asset recovery cases – including locking up dirty personnel in the PGO itself.”

Validation: https://ua.usembassy.gov/ukrainian-reforms-two-years-maidan-revolution-russian-invasion/

March 22, 2016

VP Joe Biden engages in phone call from Washington DC with Ukrainian president Poroshenko about U.S. loan guarantees. It is believed in this call that Biden renews his demands that the president fire Prosecutor General Shokin, who is overseeing the Burisma prosecution, or risk losing the next $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees.

Validation: https://ua.usembassy.gov/readout-vice-president-bidens-call-president-petro-poroshenko-ukraine-032216/

March 29, 2016

Ukraine parliament fires Prosecutor General Shokin at urging of President Poroshenko.

Validation: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/30/world/europe/political-stability-in-the-balance-as-ukraine-ousts-top-prosecutor.html

March 29, 2016:

John Buretta, an American lawyer hired by Burisma Holdings, seeks to contact the Acting Prosecutor General Sevruk seeking a meeting about the Burisma investigation just hours after his boss, Prosecutor General Shokin, was fired under pressure from VP Joe Biden, according to email Buretta’s legal team sent the Ukraine embassy in Washington.

Validation: https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/463307-solomon-these-once-secret-memos-cast-doubt-on-joe-bidens-ukraine-story

March 30, 2016:

Burisma Holdings’ U.S. legal team seeks help of Ukrainian embassy official Andrii Telizhenko in Washington seeking urgent meeting with new Acting Prosecutor General of Ukraine, according to legal team’s email to embassy.

Validation: https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/463307-solomon-these-once-secret-memos-cast-doubt-on-joe-bidens-ukraine-story

March 31, 2016

VP Joe Biden arrives in Ukraine and announces $1 billion in loan guarantees, ending threat to withhold aid and force Ukraine into debt default, and also delivers $239 million more in promised aid.

Validation: https://ua.usembassy.gov/readout-vice-president-bidens-meeting-president-petro-poroshenko-ukraine-033116/

April 4, 2016:

George Kent, a senior US official at the American embassy in Ukraine, writes a letter asking Ukrainian general prosecutor’s office to stand down their investigation of the Soros-funded group the Anti-Corruption Action Centre.

Validation: https://www.scribd.com/document/402559592/Embassy2GPLetter4-4-16

April 6, 2016

Burisma Holdings’ U.S. legal team of John Buretta, Sally Painter and Karen Tramontano meets with Ukraine’s Acting Prosecutor General Sevruk to seek resolution of Burisma criminal investigation. American lawyers apologize for “false information” spread by U.S. government to force the firing of Shokin and offer Prosecutor General’s office an olive branch of arranging a meeting in Washington to clear the air.

Validation: Official Prosecutor General’s memo of meeting: https://www.scribd.com/document/427618143/Ukraine-PGO-Memo-Untranslated

                   English translation: https://www.scribd.com/document/427616178/Ukraine-PGO-Memo-Translation

April 14, 2016

VP Biden calls President Poroshenko and “stressed the urgency of putting in place a new Prosecutor General who would bolster the agency’s anti-corruption efforts.

Validation: https://ua.usembassy.gov/readout-vice-president-bidens-call-president-petro-poroshenko-ukraine-041416/

May 4, 2016:

DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa writes email to bosses at party headquarters derailing her work to get dirt on Trump and Manafort from Ukraine.

Validation: https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/3962

May 12, 2016

Yurii Lutsenko named the new Prosecutor General of Ukraine, taking over investigations that include Burisma Holdings. VP Joe Biden later praises Lutsenko as a “solid guy” during 2018 speech at Atlantic Counsel.

Validation: : https://www.cfr.org/event/foreign-affairs-issue-launch-former-vice-president-joe-biden

May 25, 2016:

Senior George Soros adviser provides private briefing to Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland about Russian bond market, according to official State Department memo of briefing.

Validation: https://www.scribd.com/document/421082234/SorosNulandRussia-Bond-Market

May 27, 2016

VP Biden holds phone call with President Poroshenko.

Validation: https://ua.usembassy.gov/readout-vice-president-bidens-call-president-petro-poroshenko-ukraine-052716/

June 1, 2016:

George Soros seeks and receives a telephonic meeting with Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland to discuss Ukraine, according to the official State Department record of call

Validation: https://www.scribd.com/document/421081817/SorosNulandJune1-2016-Contacts-Ukraine

Aug. 4, 2016:

Ukraine’s ambassador to Washington, Valeriy Chaly, takes extraordinary step of writing an OpEd in The Hill intervening in the US presidential election, slamming Trump’s policies and comments on Russia.

Validation: https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/international/290411-ukraines-ambassador-trumps-comments-send-wrong-message-to

Aug. 12, 2016

Phone call between VP Biden and President Poroshenko

Sept. 20, 2016

VP Biden meets President Poroshenko on sidelines of UN meeting. Confirms $1 billion in loan guarantees has been made.

Validation: https://ua.usembassy.gov/readout-vice-president-bidens-meeting-president-petro-poroshenko-ukraine/

Nov. 8, 2016

Donald Trump wins election to become 45^th president of United States, ending eight years of Democratic control of the White House.

Dec. 15, 2016

VP Biden holds phone call with Ukraine president and prime minister, praises work of NABU.

Validation: https://ua.usembassy.gov/readout-vice-president-bidens-calls-president-ukraine-petro-poroshenko-prime-minister-ukraine-volodymyr-groysman/

Jan. 11, 2017:

Politico reports possible effort by DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa to seek Russia dirt on Trump and Manafort from Ukraine embassy in Washington during 2016 election.

Validation: https://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/ukraine-sabotage-trump-backfire-233446

Jan. 17-18, 2017

Biden makes final appearance in Ukraine with President Poroshenko.

Validation: https://ua.usembassy.gov/remarks-vice-president-joe-biden-joint-press-availability-ukrainian-president-petro-poroshenko/

February 1, 2017:

John Buretta, the American lawyer for Burisma Holdings, gives interview in Kiev confirming there were criminal cases open in 2016 in Ukraine but all have been settled, the last with a penalty for tax violations.

Validation: https://www.kyivpost.com/business-wire/john-buretta-us-important-close-casesagainst-burisma-nikolayzlochevskyiin-legally-sound-manner.html

Jan. 25, 2018

Former VP Biden boasts at Council of Foreign Relations events in Washington that he strong-armed Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko into firing Prosecutor General Shokin, using loan guarantees as leverage. He also calls Shokin’s replacement, Yuriy Lutsenko, “solid.”

Validation: https://www.cfr.org/event/foreign-affairs-issue-launch-former-vice-president-joe-biden

May 9, 2018

House Rules Committee chairman Pete Sessions writes letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo demanding removal of US Ambassador to Kiev Marie Yovanovitch.

Validation: https://www.scribd.com/document/402558867/Sessions-Pompeo-correspondence-2018

December 12, 2018:

Ukrainian court rules that the efforts by Ukrainian parliamentary member Sergey Leschenko and NABU chief Artem Sytnyk to publicize the Manafort black ledger documents in 2016 were an improper foreign intervention in the American presidential election.

Validation: https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/publication-of-manafort-payments-violated-law-interfered-in-us-election-kyiv-court-rules.html

Feb. 10, 2019

NABU revives dormant Burisma case, drafting a notice of suspicion against founder Mykola Zlochevsky and asking the special anticorruption prosecutor of Ukraine to bring Zlochevsky in for questioning.

Validation: https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/nabu-prepares-draft-notice-of-suspicion-on-episode-involving-ex-minister-zlochevsky.html

March 28, 2019

Ukraine General Prosecutor’s office under the authority of Deputy Prosecutor General Kulyk announces it has opened a new money laundering investigation against Burisma founder Zlochevsky.

Validation: https://www.scribd.com/document/429942801/March282019NoticeofSuspicionZolchevskyBurisma

May 2, 2019:

Ukraine embassy in Washington issues statement confirming that in spring 2016 the DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa sought the embassy’s help seeking dirt on Donald Trump and Paul Manafort and asking for Ukraine’s president to meet with an investigative reporter working on the issue.

Validation: https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/441892-ukrainian-embassy-confirms-dnc-contractor-solicited-trump-dirt-in-2016

Text of statement: https://www.scribd.com/document/432699412/Ukraine-Chaly-Statement-on-Chalupa-042519

May 16, 2019:

Artem Sytnyk, head of Ukraine’s National Anticorruption Bureau (NABU), confirms investigations remain open against Burisma and its founder Zlochevsky.

Validation: https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/sytnyk-nabu-has-not-closed-cases-related-to-zlochevsky.html

The former British spy Christopher Steele and his now infamous Russia collusion dossier became a powerful reminder that the FBI often relies on confidential human sources, or informants, to make cases. And investigations are only as good as the information fed to agents.

It turns out, according to a stinging new report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, that the FBI has done a poor job over the last decade vetting informants for their credibility and reliability and documenting “red flags” when warranted.

Horowitz rebuked the bureau in a report released this week for failing to follow Justice Department procedures in vetting informants and allowing for a lengthy backlog of required validation reports about the reliability and credibility of long-term confidential human sources (CHS).

The internal watchdog found “significant weaknesses,” including inadequate resources dedicated inside the FBI to vet informants, artificial limits on long-term reviews that did not consider the full five years of work of an informant and a poorly designed electronic records system.

“These factors increased the likelihood that the FBI has not adequately mitigated the risks associated with long-term CHSs, including the risks posed by overly familiar and non-objective handling agents and CHS relationships,” Horowitz warned.

The most troubling revelation in the report, however, may be that some of the FBI analysts used to vet informants complained they were “discouraged from documenting conclusions and recommendations” about an informant’s credibility or reliability.

One analyst, for instance, reported being told not to document a request to polygraph a suspect informant. And multiple FBI officials admitted efforts to keep the validation reports of informants void of derogatory information because FBI “field office do not want negative information documented” that could aid defense lawyers or stop informants from becoming government witnesses at trial.

Such behavior “may have increased the likelihood that red flags or anomalies were omitted” about long-term informants, the 63-page report warned. Such concerns were widely held.

For instance, one member of a joint Justice Department-FBI committee known as the HSRC that approved long-term informants’ service reported being “deeply concerned that the limited scope of the long-term validation review may potentially be omitting important information or critical red flags.”

The report also included one very important piece on the FBI’s reliance on informants: it showed the bureau spends an average of about $42 million a year on them.

This IG report did not mention Steele, arguably the FBI’s most famous informant of recent years.

But Horowitz is expected to release a massive report next month on possible failures and abuses by the FBI in the Russia collusion investigation, including efforts to use Steele’s dossier to help secure a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to surveil a former Trump campaign adviser.

The FBI’s reliance on Steele has raised significant public concerns, including that he was being paid to do his work to find dirt on Trump by the opposition research firm for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, had expressed a bias against Trump and had been leaking to the news media while working for the FBI. His source relationship was ended because of the latter concern.

In addition, an FBI spreadsheet created to validate Steele’s allegations against Trump found most of the information in the dossier to be unconfirmed, debunked or simply open source information found on the Internet, sources have told me.

The latest IG report shows the Steele episode may ultimately be viewed as part of a larger systemic issue with the FBI’s handling of one of its most important investigative resources: confidential human sources or informants.

The next big witness for the House Democrats’ impeachment hearings is Marie Yovanovitch, the former American ambassador to Ukraine who was recalled last spring at President Trump’s insistence.

It is unclear what firsthand knowledge she will offer about the core allegation of this impeachment: that Trump delayed foreign aid assistance to Ukraine in hopes of getting an investigation of Joe Biden and Democrats started.

Nonetheless, she did deal with the Ukrainians going back to the summer of 2016 and likely will be an important fact witness.   

After nearly two years of reporting on Ukraine issues, here are 15 questions I think could be most illuminating to every day Americans if the ambassador answered them.

1. Ambassador Yovanovitch, at any time while you served in Ukraine did any officials in Kiev ever express concern to you that President Trump might be withholding foreign aid assistance to get political investigations started? Did President Trump ever ask you as America’s top representative in Kiev to pressure Ukrainians to start an investigation about Burisma Holdings or the Bidens?
2. What was the Ukrainians’ perception of President Trump after he allowed lethal aid to go to Ukraine in 2018?
3.  In the spring and summer of 2019, did you ever become aware of any U.S. intelligence or U.S. treasury concerns raised about incoming Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and his affiliation or proximity to certain oligarchs? Did any of those concerns involve what the IMF might do if a certain oligarch who supported Zelensky returned to power and regained influence over Ukraine’s national bank?
4. Back in May 2018, then-House Rules Committee chairman Pete Sessions wrote a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggesting you might have made comments unflattering or unsupportive of the president and should be recalled. Setting aside that Sessions is a Republican and might even have donors interested in Ukraine policy, were you ever questioned about his concerns? At any time have you or your embassy staff made comments that could be viewed as unsupportive or critical of President Trump and his policies?
5. John Solomon reported at The Hill and your colleagues have since confirmed in testimony that the State Department helped fund a nonprofit called the Anti-Corruption Action Centre of Ukraine that also was funded by George Soros’ main charity. That nonprofit, also known as AnTac, was identified in a 2014 Soros foundation strategy document as critical to reshaping Ukraine to Mr. Soros’ vision. Can you explain what role your embassy played in funding this group and why State funds would flow to it? And did any one consider the perception of mingling tax dollars with those donated by Soros, a liberal ideologue who spent millions in 2016 trying to elect Hillary Clinton and defeat Donald Trump?
6. In March 2019, Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko gave an on-the-record, videotaped interview to The Hill alleging that during a 2016 meeting you discussed a list of names of Ukrainian nationals and groups you did not want to see Ukrainian prosecutors target. Your supporters have since suggested he recanted that story. Did you or your staff ever do anything to confirm he had recanted or changed his story, such as talk to him, or did you just rely on press reports?
7. Now that both the New York Times and The Hill have confirmed that Lutsenko stands by his account and has not recanted, how do you respond to his concerns? And setting aide the use of the word “list,” is it possible that during that 2016 meeting with Mr. Lutsenko you discussed the names of certain Ukrainians you did not want to see prosecuted, investigated or harassed?
8. Your colleagues, in particular Mr. George Kent, have confirmed to the House Intelligence Committee that the U.S. embassy in Kiev did, in fact, exert pressure on the Ukrainian prosecutors office not to prosecute certain Ukrainian activists and officials. These efforts included a letter Mr. Kent signed urging Ukrainian prosecutors to back off an investigation of the aforementioned group AnTac as well as engaged in conversations about certain Ukrainians like Parliamentary member Sergey Leschenko, journalist Vitali Shabunin and NABU director Artem Sytnyk. Why was the US. Embassy involved in exerting such pressure and did any of these actions run afoul of the Geneva Convention’s requirement that foreign diplomats avoid becoming involved in the internal affairs of their host country?
9. On March 5 of this year, you gave a speech in which you called for the replacement of Ukraine’s top anti-corruption prosecutor. That speech occurred in the middle of the Ukrainian presidential election and obviously raised concerns among some Ukrainians of internal interference prohibited by the Geneva Convention. In fact, one of your bosses, Under Secretary David Hale, got questioned about those concerns when he arrived in country a few days later. Why did you think it was appropriate to give advice to Ukrainians on an internal personnel matter and did you consider then or now the potential concerns your comments might raise about meddling in the Ukrainian election or the country’s internal affairs?
10. If the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States suddenly urged us to fire Attorney General Bill Bar or our FBI director, would you think that was appropriate?
11. At any time since December 2015, did you or your embassy ever have any contact with Vice President Joe Biden, his office or his son Hunter Biden concerning Burisma Holdings or an investigation into its owner Mykola Zlochevsky?
12. At any time since you were appointed ambassador to Ukraine, did you or your embassy have any contact with the following Burisma figures: Hunter Biden, Devon Archer, lawyer John Buretta, Blue Star strategies representatives Sally Painter and Karen Tramontano, or former Ukrainian embassy official Andrii Telizhenko?
13. John Solomon obtained documents showing Burisma representatives were pressuring the State Department in February 2016 to help end the corruption allegations against the company and were invoking Hunter Biden’s name as part of their effort. Did you ever subsequently learn of these contacts and did any one at State — including but not limited to Secretary Kerry, Undersecretary Novelli, Deputy Secretary Blinken or Assistant Secretary Nuland — ever raise Burisma with you?
14. What was your embassy’s assessment of the corruption allegations around Burisma and why the company may have hired Hunter Biden as a board member in 2014?
15. In spring 2019 your embassy reportedly began monitoring briefly the social media communications of certain people viewed as supportive of President Trump and gathering analytics about them. Who were those people? Why was this done? Why did it stop? And did anyone in the State Department chain of command ever suggest targeting Americans with State resources might be improper or illegal?

The first time I ever heard the name of U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was in early March of this year. It did not come from a Ukrainian or an ally of President Trump. It came from a career diplomat I was interviewing on background on a different story.

The diplomat, as I recall, suggested that Yovanovitch had just caused a commotion in Ukraine a few weeks before that country’s presidential election by calling for the firing of one of the prosecutors aligned with the incumbent president.

The diplomat related that a more senior State official, David Hale, was about  to travel to Ukraine and was prepping to be confronted about Yovanovitch’s comments. I remember the diplomat joking something to the effect of, “we always say that the Geneva Convention is optional for our Kiev staff.”

The Geneva Convention is the UN-backed pact enacted during the Cold War that governs the conduct of foreign diplomats in host countries and protects them against retribution. But it strictly mandates that foreign diplomats “have a duty not to interfere in the internal affairs of that State” that hosts them. You can read the convention’s rules here. 

I dutifully checked out my source’s story. And sure as day, Yovanovitch did give a speech on March 5, 2019 calling for Ukraine’s special anticorruption prosecutor to be removed. You can read that here.

And the Ukraine media was abuzz that she had done so. And yes, Under Secretary of State Hale, got peppered with questions upon arriving in Kiev, specifically about whether Yovanovitch’s comments violated the international rule that foreign diplomats avoid becoming involved in the internal affairs and elections of their host country.

Hale dutifully defended Yovanovitch with these careful words. “Well, Ambassador Yovanovitch represents the President of the United States here in Ukraine, and America stands behind her statements.  And I don’t see any value in my own elaboration on what they may or may not have meant. They meant what she said.” You can read his comments here.

Up to that point, I had focused months of reporting on Ukraine on the U.S. government’s relationship with a Ukraine nonprofit called the AntiCorruption Action Centre, which was jointly funded by liberal megadonor George Soros’ charity and the State Department. I even sent a list of questions to that nonprofit all the way back in October 2018. It never answered.

Given that Soros spent millions trying to elect Hillary Clinton and defeat Donald Trump in 2016, I thought it was a legitimate public policy question to ask whether a State Department that is supposed to be politically neutral should be in joint business with a partisan figure’s nonprofit entity.

State officials confirmed that Soros’ foundation and the U.S. embassy jointly funded the AntiCorruption Action Centre, and that Soros’ vocal role in Ukraine as an anticorruption voice afforded him unique access to the State Department, including in 2016 to the top official on Ukraine policy, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. (That access was confirmed in documents later released under FOIA to Citizens United.)

Soros’ representatives separately confirmed to me that the Anti-Corruption Action Centre was the leading tip of the spear for a strategy Team Soros devised in 2014 to fight corruption in Ukraine and that might open the door for his possible business investment of $1 billion. You can read the Ukraine strategy document here and Soros’ plan to invest $1 billion in Ukraine here.

After being tipped to the current Yovanovitch furor in Ukraine, I was alerted to an earlier controversy involving the same U.S. ambassador.  It turns out a senior member of Congress had in spring 2018 wrote a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo alleging the ambassador had made anti-Trump comments and suggesting she be recalled. I confirmed the incident with House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions and got a copy of his letter, which you can read here. Yovanovitch denies any such disloyalty to Trump.

Nonetheless, I had a career diplomat and a Republican lawmaker raising similar concerns. So I turned back to the sources I had developed starting in 2018 on Ukraine and began to dig further.

I learned that Ukrainian officials, particularly the country’s prosecutors, viewed Yovanovitch as the embodiment of an activist U.S. embassy in Kiev that ruffled feathers by meddling in internal law enforcement cases inside the country.

My sources told me specifically that the U.S. embassy had pressured the Ukraine prosecutors in 2016 to drop or avoid pursuing several cases, including one involving the Soros-backed AntiCorruption Action Centre and two cases involving Ukraine officials who criticized Donald Trump and his campaign manager Paul Manafort.

To back up their story, my sources provided me a letter then-embassy official George Kent wrote proving it happened. State officials authenticated the letter. And Kent recently acknowledged in this testimony he signed that letter. You can read the letter here.

With the help of a Ukrainian American intermediary and the Ukraine general prosecutor’s press office, I then secured an interview in mid-March 2016 with Ukraine’s then top prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko. In the interview that was videotaped and released for the whole world to see, Lutsenko alleged that in his first meeting in 2016 with Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador conveyed the names of several Ukrainians she did not want to see investigated and prosecuted. He called it, colloquially, a “do not prosecute list.”

The State Department denied such as list, calling it a fantasy, and I quoted that fair comment in my original stories. But before I published, I held the Lutsenko interview for a few days to do more reporting. State arranged for me to talk to a senior official about the Lutsenko-embassy relationship.

I provided the names that Lutsenko claimed had been cited by the embassy. That senior official said he couldn’t speak to what transpired in the specific meeting between Yovanovitch and Lutsenko. But that official then provided me this surprising confirmation: “I can confirm to you that at least some of those names are names that U.S. embassy Kiev raised with the General Prosecutor because we were concerned about retribution and unfair treatment of Ukrainians viewed as favorable to the United States.”

In other words, State was confirming its own embassy had engaged in pressure on Ukrainian prosecutors to drop certain law enforcement cases, just as Lutsenko and other Ukrainian officials had alleged.

When I asked that State official whether this was kosher with the Geneva Convention’s prohibition on internal interference, he answered: “Kiev in recent years has been a bit more activist and autonomous than other embassies.”

More recently, George Kent, the embassy’s charge d’affaires in 2016 and now a deputy assistant secretary of state, confirmed in impeachment testimony that he personally signed the April 2016 letter demanding Ukraine drop the case against the Anti-Corruption Action Centre.

He also testified he was aware of pressure the U.S. embassy also applied on Ukraine prosecutors to drop investigations against a journalist named Vitali Shabunin, a parliamentary member named Sergey Leschenko and a senior law enforcement official named Artem Sytnyk.

Shabunin helped for the AntiCorruption Action Centre that Soros funded, and Leschenko and Sytnyk were criticized by a Ukrainian court for interfering in the 2016 US election by improperly releasing or publicizing secret evidence in an ongoing case against Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

It’s worth letting Kent’s testimony speak for itself. “As a matter of conversation that U.S officials had with Ukrainian officials in sharing our concern about the direction of governance and the approach, harassment of civil society activists, including Mr. Shabunin, was one of the issues we raised,” Kent testified.

As for Sytnyk, the head of the NABU anticorruption police, Kent addded: “We warned both Lutsenko and others that efforts to destroy NABU as an organization, including opening up investigations of Sytnyk, threatened to unravel a key component of our anti-corruption cooperation.”

As the story of the U.S. embassy’s pressure spread, a new controversy erupted. A Ukrainian news outlet claimed Lutsenko recanted his claim about the “do-not-prosecute” list. I called Lutsenko and he denied recanting or even changing his story. He gave me this very detailed response standing by his statements.

But American officials and news media eager to discredit my reporting piled on, many quoting the Ukrainian outlet without ever contacting Lutsenko to see if it was true. One of the American outlets that did contact Lutsenko, the New York Times, belatedly disclosed today that Lutsenko told it, like he told me, that he stood by his allegation that the ambassador had provided him names of people and groups she did not want to be targeted by prosecutors. You can read that here.

It is neither a conspiracy theory nor a debunked or retracted story. U.S. embassy officials DID apply pressure to try to stop Ukrainian prosecutors from pursuing certain cases.

The U.S. diplomats saw no problem in their actions, believing that it served the American interest in combating Ukrainian corruption. The Ukrainians viewed it far differently as an improper intervention in the internal affairs of their country that was forbidden by the Geneva Convention.

That controversy is neither contrived, nor trivial, and it predated any reporting that I conducted. And it remains an issue that will need to be resolved if the Ukraine and U.S. are to have a more fruitful alliance moving forward.

A State Department official who served in the U.S. embassy in Kiev told Congress that the Obama administration tried in 2016 to partner with the Ukrainian gas firm that employed Hunter Biden but the project was blocked over corruption concerns.

George Kent, the former charge d’affair at the Kiev embassy, said in testimony released Thursday that the State Department’s main foreign aid agency, known as USAID, planned to co-sponsor a clean energy project with Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas firm that employed Hunter Biden as a board member.

At the time of the proposed project, Burisma was under investigation in Ukraine for alleged corruption. Those cases were settled in late 2016 and early 2017. Burisma contested allegations of corruption but paid a penalty for tax issues.

Kent testified he personally intervened in mid-2016 to stop USAID’s joint project with Burisma because American officials believed the corruption allegations against the gas firm raised concern.

“There apparently was an effort for Burisma to help cosponsor, I guess, a contest that USAID was sponsoring related to clean energy. And when I heard about it I asked USAID to stop that sponsorship,” Kent told lawmakers.

When asked why he intervened, he answered: “”Because Burisma had a poor reputation in the business, and I didn’t think it was appropriate for the U.S. Government to be co-sponsoring something with a company that had a bad reputation.”

Kent’s testimony confirms earlier text messages I reported on in September. Those text messages show that Devon Archer — Hunter Biden’s business associate and fellow board member on Burisma — boasted to an American lawyer in December 2015 that the pair was seeking to do a project with USAID.

At the time of the text, the New York Times had just reported that Burisma was under investigation in Ukraine and that the probe and Hunter Biden’s role in the company was undercutting Vice President Joe Biden’s efforts to root out corruption in Ukraine.

Archer’s text to the lawyer suggested he was working on a strategy to counter the “new wave of scrutiny” about Burisma caused by the Times’ story. He stated that he had just met at the State to discuss a new “USAID project the embassy is announcing with us” and that it was “perfect for us to move forward now with momentum.”

Kent’s stoppage of the USAID project adds to a growing body of evidence that Burisma and its corruption issues were causing heartburn inside the State Department during the end of Joe Biden’s tenure as Vice President.

Another State official has reportedly testified he tried to warn Biden’s office that the Burisma matter posed a conflict of interest but was turned away by the vice president’s aides.

And internal State memos I obtained this week under FOIA show Hunter Biden and Archer had multiple contacts with Secretary of State John Kerry and Deputy Secretary Tony Blinken in 2015-16, and that Burisma’s own American legal team was lobbying State to help eliminate the corruption allegations against it in Ukraine.

Hunter Biden’s name was specifically invoked as a reason why State officials should assist, the memos show. A month after Burisma’s contact with State, Joe Biden leveraged the threat of withholding U.S. foreign aid to force Ukraine to fire its chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who at the time was overseeing the Burisma probe.

Joe Biden says he forced the firing because he believed Shokin was ineffective, but Shokin says he was told he was fired because the American ice president was unhappy the prosecutor would not drop the Burisma probe.

Also on Thursday, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis., asked the State Department to provide them all documents about Hunter Biden’s and Burisma’s contacts by end of this month.

It follows calls earlier in the week by Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C,, that there is enough concern about the Burisma case to now warrant an official Senate investigation.

Kent’s newly released testimony also confirmed several other elements of my earlier reporting about Ukraine, including that the U.S. embassy exerted pressure on Ukrainian prosecutors not to pursue certain investigations.

Kent, now a deputy assistant secretary, disputed allegations that former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko made in a Hill.TV interview I conducted last March that former U.S. ambassador Marie Yovanovitch gave a formal list of names she did not want to see prosecuted by Ukrainian authorities.

Kent’s denial was identical to the one I published from State when I first aired the Lutsenko interview.

But he confirmed that the U.S. embassy did, in fact, on several occasions exert pressure on Lutsenko’s office about people and groups that the American government did not want to see pursued for investigation or prosecution or harassment.

For instance, Kent acknowledged signing an April 2016 letter that asked the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office to stand down an investigation of several nonprofits that had received U.S. aid, including the AntiCorruption Action Centre of Ukraine, or AnTac.

Kent also confirmed my reporting that AnTac was jointly funded by the State Department and one of liberal megadonor George Soros’ foundations.

Kent also acknowledged the embassy pressured Ukrainian prosecutors about backing off investigations into a top law enforcement official named Artem Sytnyk and a former journalist named Vitali Shabunin.

“As a matter of conversation that U.S officials had with Ukrainian officials in sharing our concern about the direction of governance and the approach, harassment of civil society activists, including Mr. Shabunin, was one of the issues we raised,” Kent testified.

As for Sytnyk, the head of the NABU anticorruption police, Kent stated: “We warned both Lutsenko and others that efforts to destroy NABU as an organization, including opening up investigations of Sytnyk, threatened to unravel a key component of our anti-corruption cooperation.”

AnTac, Shabunin and Sytnyk were all names that Lutsenko told me had been the subject of U.S. pressure on his office.

So after weeks of Democrats and their media allies suggesting it was a “conspiracy theory” that the U.S. embassy had pressured Ukrainian authorities not to pursue certain investigations, Kent confirmed it.

Of course I knew it was true all along because before I ever aired Lutsenko’s interview, I interviewed a senior State official who confirmed the embassy had engaged in such pressure. Now it’s time for the rest of the media to catch up.

Last month Donald Trump reset the strategic landscape in the Middle East, withdrawing U.S. troops from a lengthy war in Syria while managing to eliminate ISIS’s top leader.

The killing of the most wanted terrorist in the world, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, came within a few weeks of Trump’s brokering a deal with Turkey that ended months of dead end negotiations on a so-called “safe zone.”

Those events have significantly advanced U.S. interests in the Middle East, a chess play ripped from the pages of Ronald Reagan’s peace-through-strength manual. They also could open the door to several regional deals that return refugees home and enhance stability in the region — including a new, more comprehensive, and tougher nuclear deal with Iran.

But you would have a hard time getting the whole picture from news coverage, which has been preoccupied with the U.S. “sellout” of the Kurds and how Trump’s statement on Baghdadi compared with Obama’s on Osama Bin Laden. Or the differences in the White House photos.

To appreciate the opportunity that has opened up for America in the Middle East, one must first examine the facts and correct the misleading narrative.

Trump did not “sell out” the Syrian Kurds, who have been fantastic partners in the fight against ISIS, and will continue to be. The U.S. never had a formal treaty with the Kurds. Neither President Obama nor Trump ever committed to protect the Kurds against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan or Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad. And Congress never approved a formal alliance. 

That’s a fact that gets omitted by the neo-conservative policymakers and military industrial complex cheerleaders who have dominated the airwaves the last few weeks.

Second, our partnership with the Syrian Kurds has not been a one-way street: U.S. troops helped the Kurds beat back ISIS from their towns and villages. Even with the US troop withdrawal, cooperation between America and the Kurds continues, as the successful Al Baghdadi raid demonstrated.  And the Syrian Kurds, no fools at all, always kept a line to Damascus, which left them able to cut their own deal after Trump withdrew troops. 

Third, Turkey is a formal ally of the United States, bound to us by the essential military alliance known as NATO. In fairness, Turkey is a troublesome ally for sure, and one with whom we disagree about the Syrian Kurds. And there is compelling evidence Turkey has not complied with recent ceasefires.

It might be for both sides to ask how U.S. interests are served by sanctioning Turkey, and keeping troops in Syria, because we disagree with Erdogan about the Kurds. But where ever that debate ends, the United States chose to be bound to Turkey in ways it was never to the Kurds.    

With those facts in mind, let’s examine the opportunities on the horizon.

Trump currently appears to be testing Russia’s and Turkey’s commitment to degrade and defeat ISIS and other terrorist groups remaining in Syria, while maintaining the new but fragile peace deal with the Kurds. 

There are still more than 10,000 jihadists in northwest Syria, where Al Baghdadi was hiding.  If Vladimir Putin and Erdogan want to risk their blood and treasure to take them out, that could save America lives and money. Why not put Turkey, Russia and Iraq to the test in battling the rest of the terrorists?

With the territorial defeat of the ‘caliphate’ and the killing of Baghdadi, ISIS and other terrorists in Syria are now orphans.  Former backers of various jihadi factions in the Gulf and elsewhere aren’t getting behind these armed thugs any longer.  The money is drying up, and the terrorist dead enders are increasingly isolated in the northwest city of Idlib, which is facing an imminent day of reckoning with Syrian and Russian forces.

If Putin and Erdogan fail to defeat these ISIS and Al Qaeda leftovers, Trump still holds the option to re-deploy U.S. troops, positioned nearby in Iraq and elsewhere to finish the job.

The U.S. can also stop Erdogan if he is tempted to usurp some of those battle-tested jihadists for his own sectarian agenda, as some fear.

Second, Trump is watching closely whether Putin delivers a peace deal between Syria and Turkey.  This is happening, and barely covered in the press.  If Turkey and Syria bury the hatchet, the 3.6 million Syrian refugees in Turkey could eventually return to their original homes —  while letting Russia foot the bill for needed security.  This step, while not a done deal, would be monumental toward ending the war, and should be welcomed by the international community.  

Third, many in the U.S. government and outside may see this dynamic as an unacceptable concession to Assad, Iran, and Putin.  But the Trump administration quietly has grabbed some powerful leverage by having U.S. troops secure the lucrative but tattered Syrian oil fields. 

Syrian oil will only increase in value for future negotiations with Putin.  It assures that Assad, and Iran, will continue to be boxed in by U.S. power until there is a Syrian political process that resolves Assad’s future and Iran’s use of Syrian space to threaten Israel.

Fourth, with all these moves Trump has sparked Syria’s neighbors and other regional states to work out their own issues rather than wait for U.S. intervention.  Not all of these countries are ones we like, such as Iran and Syria. But the regional shuttles are flying, and Trump set them in motion.

One such deal occurred this week when the Saudi’s brokered a peace deal between Yemen’s official government and rebels fighting in the civil war in that country. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hailed the deal on Twitter.

Fifth, Trump can continue to count on support from Israel, whose regular bombing of Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria also provides a needed stick.  The U.S. doesn’t just have the armed Kurdish groups as an asset in Syria, we have Israel, America’s closest regional ally, as our partner too.

Sixth, an even bigger prize looms on the horizon: a better nuclear deal with Iran. This goal is important to Israel, as well as our partners in the region and around the world, and it has gained new urgency with Tehran’s announcement this week it has new advanced centrifuges to accelerate uranium enrichment.

There are other reasons why now is the time to move on Iran.  The economic sanctions that Trump imposed on Tehran are having a devastating impact; the IMF projects Iran’s economic growth will contract by a stunning 9.5% this year.  

Likewise, events in the region, especially in Lebanon, where a secular, anti-Iran trend is taking hold, opens the door to more comprehensive peace, which could address Israel’s concerns about the missile and terrorist threat from Hezbollah. 

A carrot and stick approach that gets at the core issue, disarming Hezbollah and supporting reform minded technocratic leaders, would be best to settle Israel’s security needs long-term.  Trump has the rare window to seize the moment with a big deal rather than interim steps like conditioning aid to the Lebanese Armed Forces

Nearby, a new government in Jerusalem,  perhaps absent the hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu, may be more willing to engage in a fresh approach to Iran.  No one doubts Trump’s commitment to Israel.  This was not the case with the previous administration, and a key reason why the Iran nuclear deal and its peace plans ultimately failed.

Trump and Israel also have allies willing to help bring Iran to the negotiating table.  A weakened Iran is still a proud country, but Putin, who also keeps in contact with Israel, can help. If Russia shows good faith on the Turkey-Syrian front, it could earn that seat at the table with Americans, Europeans, Israelis and Iranians.  

French President Emmanuel Macron is already working the back channels, fashioning a credit lifeline of $15 billion for Iran — if it will engage in a better nuclear deal, help end Yemen’s civil war, and support regional and maritime security in the Persian Gulf. 

Those are a lot of “ifs” … but none much different than when Reagan boldly dared Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. Few could imagine in June 1987 the Soviet collapse would so soon follow. But it did.  

Time will tell if the Trump chess game can yield similar historic dividends in the Middle East and open the door to shrinking America’s war swollen budget deficits.  

So far, Trump has maneuvered the complicated pieces —  Russia, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran – into a place where peace and security may be closer than ever.  

Now he needs a team that embraces his bold approach to end endless conflict in the Middle East, rather than undercut it with leaks and tired thinking.   

Such a journey begins by eliminating the false narratives that are obscuring the potential breakthroughs in the region.

Back in the summer of 2007, a well-respected FBI executive marched up to Capitol Hill to assure members of Congress that the bureau had reformed and modernized its management of human sources, more commonly known as informants.

“Both the Attorney General and the Director have made clear their expectations that the FBI’s Confidential Human Source Program must rise to the challenge of our current mission, integrate fully with the broader intelligence community, and set a standard for integrity and quality,” Assistant Director for Intelligence Wayne M. Murphy testified.

Appearing then before subcommittee led by now-House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler, Murphy laid out an impressive set of new rules governing how the FBI would vet, share and utilize human sources, including a new manual for managing informants and new training.

“The validation process will ensure every FBI source is subjected to a level of validation and provides the capability to evaluate sources in a broader national context and make decisions accordingly,” Murphy told the lawmakers.

A dozen years later, those reforms and the FBI’s adherence to them are coming under renewed scrutiny after one of the bureau’s most infamous cases, the Russia collusion investigation, relied on an overtly partisan informant with only “minimally” valuable intelligence to secure a warrant to spy on the Trump presidential campaign at the end of the 2016 election.

Multiple sources confirm the Justice Department inspector general is putting the finishing touches on an investigative report raising concerns about the FBI’s maintenance of human source validation reports, its vetting of sources and its handling of red flags about informants.

The review, expected to be released as early as this month, does not focus specifically on the work of British intelligence operative Christopher Steele, whose Hillary Clinton-funded dossier formed the cornerstone evidence the FBI used to justify securing an October 2016 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant targeting ex-Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

The warrant, renewed three times, allowed the bureau to gather intelligence for nearly a year on the Trump campaign, transition and early administration in search of evidence they might be colluding with Russia to hijack the 2016 election or American foreign policy.

No such evidence was found, and only months after the probe began did the public learn that Steele had been terminated as a source early in the investigation for leaking and his dossier funded by Trump’s rivals at the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee. Despite those warnings, Steele’s evidence continued to be represented as credible to the courts.

While Steele’s not the focus, the IG report is expected to lay out missteps, failures and a lack of adherence to the very reforms Murphy laid out for the bureau’s modern day informant network.

A source familiar with the preliminary findings says the IG appears to have identified a pattern of FBI agents ignoring red flags raised about sources during the course of investigations or from other intelligence agencies.

In addition, there is some concern that human source validation reports were incomplete or outdated, the source said.

Preliminary IG findings often go through revisions before the publication of a final report, as the FBI and DOJ react to conclusions. But if the final report does confirm the failure to adhere to red flags and vetting procedures, it is certain to lead to new oversight in Congress, possibly by Nadler’s committee or the Senate Judiciary Committee led by Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

And the missed warning signs about Steele may ultimately be viewed and understood in a broader context of FBI’s systemic failures to react to red flags about informants.

Reporting I did earlier this year exposed how the FBI was alerted on Oct. 13, 2016  — eight days before Steele’s dossier was used to support the first FISA warrant — that the FBI informant had traveled to the State Department to brief a senior official named Kathleen Kavalec about his investigative work on Trump.

During the course of his meeting, Steele divulged he had an Election Day deadline to get his information out, was working with the FBI and also was talking to major news media. He also provided evidence of a widely debunked conspiracy theory that Trump and Putin were communicating via a secret server inside Russia’s Alfa Bank.

The State Department alerted the FBI to the contact. And separately, a senior Justice Department official named Bruce Ohr warned that Steele appeared to be “desperate” to defeat Trump in the election and likely was working in some capacity with Clinton’s campaigns.

Despite those red flags, the FBI proceeded to use Steele and his work to support the FISA warrant on Oct. 21, 2016, even telling the judges the bureau had no derogatory information about his reliability or credibility as an informant.

More recently, congressional sources were briefed in a non-classified setting and told the United States possesses information that British intelligence offered a caution about Steele and his reliance on so-called sub-sources as early as 2015, according to an eyewitness to that briefing.

Such information, if corroborated and made public, could further change the narrative about the Russia case and the FBI’s larger use of human sources.

Earlier this year, the DOJ released a highly redacted version of Steele’s own source validation report from his time working as an informant in the Russia probe. The report appears to have been completed well after Steele was deactivated on Nov. 1, 2016 for leaking to the news media because it lists database checks made in February 2017.

But the report makes clear the FBI only had “medium” confidence that Steele had furthered their investigation and that his intelligence was only “minimally corroborated.”

That’s not a foundation, many experts see in retrospect, upon which the FBI should have built one of its most sensitive counterintelligence cases in the last decade.

In recent interviews, Joe Biden has distanced himself from his son’s work at a Ukrainian gas company that was under investigation during the Obama years, with the former vice president  suggesting he didn’t even know Hunter Biden served on the board of Burisma Holdings.

There is plenty of evidence that conflicts with the former vice president’s account, including Hunter Biden’s own story that he discussed the company once with his famous father.

There also was a December 2015 New York Times story that raised the question of whether Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma posed a conflict of interest for the vice president, especially when Joe Biden was leading the fight against Ukrainian corruption while Hunter Biden’s firm was under investigation by Ukrainian prosecutors.

But whatever the Biden family recollections, the Obama State Department clearly saw the Burisma Holdings investigation in the midst of the 2016 presidential election as a Joe Biden issue.

Memos newly released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Southeastern Legal Foundation on my behalf detail how State officials in June 2016 worked to prepare the new U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, to handle a question about “Burisma and Hunter Biden.”

In multiple drafts of a question-and-answer memo prepared for Yovanovitch’s Senate confirmation hearing, the department’s Ukraine experts urged the incoming ambassador to stick to a simple answer.

“Do you have any comment on Hunter Biden, the Vice President’s son, serving on the board of Burisma, a major Ukrainian Gas Company?,” the draft Q&A asked.

The recommended answer for Yovanovitch: “For questions on Hunter Biden’s role in Burisma, I would refer you to Vice President Biden’s office.”

The Q&A is consistent with other information flowing out of State. As I reported yesterday, when a Burisma representative contacted State in February 2016 to ask for the department’s help in quashing the corruption allegations, Hunter Biden’s role on the company’s board was prominently cited.

And a senior State Department official who testified recently in the impeachment proceedings reportedly told lawmakers he tried to warn the vice president’s office that Burisma posed a conflict for Joe Biden but was turned aside.

There are no laws that would have prevented Hunter Biden from joining Burisma, even as his father oversaw Ukraine policy for the President Obama.

And the corruption investigations launched in 2014 by British and Ukraine authorities involving Burisma and its owner Mykola Zlocvhevsky involved activities that pre-dated Hunter Biden’s arrival on the board. They were settled in late 2016 and early 2017.

Some of Biden’s media defenders have falsely suggested the investigations were dormant. They were not.

The real public interest question involves Joe Biden. Federal ethics rules require government officials to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest, and ethics experts I talked with say the vice president should have recused himself from issues affecting Burisma.

That became poignantly public when Biden leveraged the threat of canceling $1 billion in U.S. aid in March 2016 to get Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who just happened to oversee the Burisma probe. A month before the firing, Shokin escalated the corruption probe against Burisma by seizing the company owner’s property and assets.

Shokin says he was making plans to interview Hunter Biden and insists he was fired because he refused to stand down on the Burisma probe. Joe Biden insists he prompted Shokin’s firing because he believed the prosecutor was ineffective.

There are more memos and documents to be released in the coming months under the FOIA lawsuit I filed with the Southeastern Legal Foundation that may shine light on what actually happened.

But one thing is already clear: long before President Trump or his attorney Rudy Giuliani began investigating Ukrainian issues, career State officials already saw Burisma as an issue for Joe Biden.

Hunter Biden and his Ukrainian gas firm colleagues had multiple contacts with the Obama State Department during the 2016 election cycle, including one just a month before Vice President Joe Biden forced Ukraine to fire the prosecutor investigating his son’s company for corruption, newly released memos show.

During that February 2016 contact, a U.S. representative for Burisma Holdings sought a meeting with Undersecretary of State Catherine A. Novelli to discuss ending the corruption allegations against the Ukrainian firm where Hunter Biden worked as a board member, according to memos obtained under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. (I filed that suit this summer with the help of the public interest law firm the Southeastern Legal Foundation.)

Just three weeks before Burisma’s overture to State, Ukrainian authorities raided the home of the oligarch who owned the gas firm and employed Hunter Biden, a signal the long-running corruption probe was escalating in the middle of the U.S. presidential election.

Hunter Biden’s name, in fact, was specifically invoked by the Burisma representative as a reason the State Department should help, according to a series of email exchanges among U.S. officials trying to arrange the meeting. The subject line for the email exchanges read simply “Burisma.”

“Per our conversation, Karen Tramontano of Blue Star Strategies requested a meeting to discuss with U/S Novelli USG remarks alleging Burisma (Ukrainian energy company) of corruption,” a Feb. 24, 2016, email between State officials read. “She noted that two high profile U.S. citizens are affiliated with the company (including Hunter Biden as a board member).

“Tramontano would like to talk with U/S Novelli about getting a better understanding of how the U.S. came to the determination that the company is corrupt,” the email added. “According to Tramontano there is no evidence of corruption, has been no hearing or process, and evidence to the contrary has not been considered.”

At the time, Novelli was the most senior official overseeing international energy issues for State. The undersecretary position, of which there are several, is the third-highest-ranking job at State, behind the secretary and deputy secretary. And Tramontano was a lawyer working for Blue Star Strategies, a Washington firm that was hired by Burisma to help end a long-running corruption investigation against the gas firm in Ukraine.

Tramontano and another Blue Star official, Sally Painter, both alumni of Bill Clinton’s administration, worked with New York-based criminal defense attorney John Buretta to settle the Ukraine cases in late 2016 and 2017. I wrote about their efforts previously here. 

Burisma Holdings records obtained by Ukrainian prosecutors state the gas firm made a $60,000 payment to Blue Star in November 2015.

The emails show Tramontano was scheduled to meet Novelli on March 1, 2016, and that State Department officials were scrambling to get answers ahead of time from the U.S. embassy in Kiev.

The records don’t show whether the meeting actually took place. The FOIA lawsuit is ongoing and State officials are slated to produce additional records in the months ahead.

But the records do indicate that Hunter Biden’s fellow American board member at Burisma,  Devon Archer, secured a meeting on March 2, 2016 with Secretary of State John Kerry. In addition to serving on the Burisma board, Archer and Hunter Biden were partners at an American firm known as Rosemont Seneca.

“Devon Archer coming to see S today at 3pm – need someone to meet/greet him at C Street,” an email from Kerry’s office manager reads. “S” is a shorthand frequently used in State emails to describe the Secretary of State. The memos don’t state the reason for the meeting.

Tramontano, a lawyer for Hunter Biden, Archer and Joe Biden’s campaign did not return messages seeking comment on Monday.

In an interview with ABC News last month, Hunter Biden said he believed he had done “nothing wrong at all” while working with Burisma but “was it poor judgment to be in the middle of something that is…a swamp in — in — in many ways? Yeah.”

Whatever the subject of the Archer-Kerry meeting, its existence is certain to spark interest. That’s because Secretary Kerry’s stepson, Christopher Heinz, had been a business partner with both Archer and Hunter Biden at the Rosemont Seneca investment firm in the United States.

Heinz, however, chose not to participate in the Burisma dealings. In fact, he wrote an email to his stepfather’s top aides in May 2014, pointedly distancing himself from the decision by Hunter Biden and Devon Archer to join Burisma’s board.

Heinz’s spokesman recently told The Washington Post that Heinz ended his relationship with Archer and Hunter Biden partly over the Burisma matter. “The lack of judgment in this matter was a major catalyst for Mr. Heinz ending his business relationships with Mr. Archer and Mr. Biden,” Heinz spokesman Chris Bastardi told the newspaper

A person who assisted Blue Star and Buretta in settling the Burisma matters in Ukraine told me in an interview that the late February 2016 overture to State was prompted by a dramatic series of events in Ukraine that included when that country’s top prosecutor escalated a two-year probe into Burisma and its founder, the oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky.

Zlochevsky’s gas firm hired Hunter Biden and Archer as board members for Burisma Holdings in spring 2014, around the time that British officials opened corruption investigations into Zlochevsky’s gas firm for actions dating to 2010 before Hunter Biden and Archer joined the firm. Ukraine officials opened their own corruption probe in August 2014.

A firm called Rosemont Seneca Bohai began receiving monthly payments totaling more than $166,000 from Burisma Holdings in May 2014, bank records show. The records show Devon Archer was listed as a custodian for the Rosemont Seneca Bohai firm and that Hunter Biden received payments from it. You can read those bank records here.

In September 2015, then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt gave a speech imploring Ukrainian prosecutors to do more to bring Zlochevsky to justice, according to published reports at the time.

By early 2016 the Ukrainian investigation had advanced enough that then-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin authorized a court-ordered seizure of Zlochevsky’s home and other valuables, including a luxury car. That seizure occurred on Feb. 2, 2016, according to published reports in Ukraine.

The same day that the Zlochevsky seizure was announced in Ukraine, Hunter Biden used his Twitter account to start following Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken, a longtime national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden who was promoted to the No. 2 job at State under Secretary John Kerry.

The Feb. 4, 2016 Twitter notification from Hunter Biden to Blinken was captured by State email servers and turned over to me as part of the FOIA release.

Within a few weeks of Tramontano’s overture to Novelli and of Archer’s overture to Kerry, Vice President Joe Biden took a stunning action, one that has enveloped his 2020 campaign for president in controversy.

By his own admission in a 2018 speech, Joe Biden used the threat of withholding $1 billion in U.S. aid to strong-arm Ukraine into firing Shokin, a prosecutor that he and his office knew was investigating Burisma.

Biden has said he forced Shokin’s firing because he and Western allies believed the prosecutor wasn’t aggressive enough in fighting corruption.

Shokin disputes that account, telling both me and ABC News that he was fired specifically because he would not stand down from investigating Burisma. In fact, Shokin alleges, he was making plans to interview Hunter Biden about his Burisma work and payments when he got the axe.

Ukraine prosecutors have said they do not believe the Bidens did anything wrong under Ukraine law. But some of the country’s prosecutors made an effort in 2018 to get information about Burisma to the U.S. Justice Department because they believed American prosecutors might be interested in some activities under U.S. law. You can read about that effort here.

Some experts and officials have been quoted in reports saying Joe Biden’s actions created the appearance of a conflict of interest, something all U.S. government officials are supposed to avoid. The questions about conflicts were previously raised in a 2015 article by the New York Times and the 2018 book Secret Empires by author Peter Schweizer.

The new evidence of contacts between Burisma, Hunter Biden and Archer at State are certain to add a new layer of intrigue to the debate. Those contacts span back to at least spring 2015, the new memos show.

On May 22, 2015, Hunter Biden emailed his father’s longtime trusted aide, Blinken, with the following message: “Have a few minutes next week to grab a cup of coffee? I know you are impossibly busy, but would like to get your advice on a couple of things, Best, Hunter.”

Blinken responded the same day with an “absolutely” and added, “Look forward to seeing you.”

The records indicate the two men were scheduled to meet the afternoon of May 27, 2015.

The State Department records also indicate Hunter Biden met Blinken in person for lunch on July 22, 2015, when State officials gave the name of a person to meet to help him enter the building. “He has the VIP pin and can escort you upstairs for your lunch with Tony,” the email said.

The emails don’t indicate whether the meeting had to do with Burisma or one of Hunter Biden’s other interests.

But they clearly show that Hunter Biden, his business partner and Burisma’s legal team were able to secure contacts inside the State Department, including to one of his father’s most trusted aides, to Secretary Kerry and to the agency’s top energy official.

The question now is: Did any of those contacts prompt further action or have anything to do with Joe Biden’s conduct in Ukraine in March 2016 when he forced Shokin’s firing?

There is a long way to go in the impeachment process, and there are some very important issues still to be resolved. But as the process marches on, a growing number of myths and falsehoods are being spread by partisans and their allies in the news media.

The early pattern of misinformation about Ukraine, Joe Biden and election interference mirrors closely the tactics used in late 2016 and early 2017 to build the false and now-debunked narrative that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin colluded to hijack the 2016 election.

Facts do matter. And they prove to be stubborn evidence, even in the midst of a political firestorm. So here are the facts (complete with links to the original materials) debunking some of the bigger fables in the Ukraine scandal.

Myth: There is no evidence the Democratic National Committee sought Ukraine’s assistance during the 2016 election.

The Facts: The Ukrainian embassy in Washington confirmed to me this past April that a Democratic National Committee contractor named Alexandra Chalupa did, in fact, solicit dirt on Donald Trump and Paul Manafort during the spring of 2016 in hopes of spurring a pre-election congressional hearing into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. The embassy also stated Chalupa tried to get Ukraine’s president at the time, Petro Poroshenko, to do an interview on Manafort with an American investigative reporter working on the issue. The embassy said it turned down both requests.

You can read the Ukraine embassy’s statement here. The statement essentially confirmed a January 2017 investigative article in Politico that first raised concerns about Chalupa’s contacts with the embassy.

Chalupa’s activities involving Ukraine were further detailed in a May 2016 email published by WikiLeaks in which she reported to DNC officials on her efforts to dig up dirt on Manafort and Trump. You can read that email here.  Myth: There is no evidence that Ukrainian government officials tried to influence the American presidential election in 2016.

The Facts: There are two documented episodes involving Ukrainian government officials’ efforts to influence the 2016 American presidential election. The first occurred in Ukraine, where a court last December ruled that a Parliamentary member and a senior Ukrainian law enforcement official improperly tried to influence the U.S. election by releasing financial records in spring and summer 2016 from an investigation into Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s lobbying activities. The publicity from the release of the so-called Black Ledger documents forced Manafort to resign. You can read that ruling here.  While that court ruling since has been set aside on a jurisdiction technicality, the facts of the released information are not in dispute.

The second episode occurred on U.S. soil back in August 2016 when Ukraine’s then-ambassador to Washington, Valeriy Chaly, took the extraordinary step of writing an OpEd in The Hill criticizing GOP nominee Donald Trump and his views on Russia just three months before Election Day. You can read that OpEd here.

Chaly later told me through his spokeswoman that he wasn’t writing the OpEd for political purposes but rather to address his country’s geopolitical interests. But his article, nonetheless, was viewed by many in career diplomatic circles as running contrary to the Geneva Convention’s rules barring diplomats from becoming embroiled in the host country’s political affairs. And it clearly adds to the public perception that Ukraine’s government at the time preferred Hillary Clinton over Trump in the 2016 election.

Myth: The allegation that Joe Biden tried to fire the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his son Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian gas firm employer has been debunked, and there is no evidence the ex-vice president did anything improper.

The Facts: Joe Biden is captured on  videotape bragging about his effort to strong-arm Ukraine’s president into firing Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. Biden told a foreign policy group in early 2018 that he used the threat of withholding $1 billion in U.S. aid to Kiev to successfully force Shokin’s firing. You can watch Biden’s statement here.

It also is not in dispute that at the time he forced the firing, the vice president’s office knew Shokin was investigating Burisma Holdings, the company where Hunter Biden worked as a board member and consultant. Team Biden was alerted to the investigation in a December 2015 New York Times article. You can read that article here.

The unresolved question is what motivated Joe Biden to seek Shokin’s ouster. Biden says he took the action solely because the U.S. and Western allies believed Shokin was ineffective in fighting corruption. Shokin told me, ABC News and others that he was fired because Joe Biden was unhappy that the Burisma investigation was not shut down. He made similar statements in an affidavit prepared to be filed in an European court. You can read that affidavit here.

In the end, though, whether Joe Biden had good or bad intentions in getting Shokin fired is somewhat irrelevant to the question of the vice president’s ethical obligation.

U.S. ethics rules require all government officials to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest in taking official actions. Ethics experts I talked with say Biden should have recused himself from the Shokin matter once he learned about the Burisma investigation to avoid the appearance issue.

And a senior U.S. diplomat was quoted in testimony reported by The Washington Post earlier this month that he tried to raise warnings with Biden’s VP office in 2015 that Hunter Biden’s role at the Ukrainian firm raised the potential issue of conflicts of interest.

Myth: Ukraine’s investigation into Burisma Holdings was no longer active when Joe Biden forced Shokin’s firing in March 2016.

The Facts: This is one of the most egregiously false statements spread by the media. Ukraine’s official case file for Burisma Holdings, provided to me by prosecutors, shows there were two active investigations into the gas firm and its founder Mykola Zlochevsky in early 2016, one involving corruption allegations and the other involving unpaid taxes.

In fact, Shokin told me in an interview he was making plans to interview Burisma board members, including Hunter Biden, at the time he was fired. And it was publicly reported that in February 2016, a month before Shokin was fired, that Ukrainian prosecutors raided one of Zlochevsky’s homes and seized expensive items like a luxury car as part of the corruption probe. You can read a contemporaneous news report about the seizure here.

Burisma’s own legal activities also clearly show the investigations were active at the time Shokin was fired. Internal emails I obtained from the American legal team representing Burisma show that on March 29, 2016 – the very day Shokin was fired – Burisma lawyer John Buretta was seeking a meeting with Shokin’s temporary replacement in hopes of settling the open cases.

In May 2016 when new Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko was appointed, Buretta then sent a letter to the new prosecutor seeking to resolve the investigations of Burisma  and Zlochevsky. You can read that letter here.

Buretta eventually gave a February 2017 interview to the Kiev Post in which he divulged that the corruption probe was resolved in fall 2016 and the tax case by early January 2017.  You can read Buretta’s interview here.

In another words, the Burisma investigations were active at the time Vice President Biden forced Shokin’s firing, and any suggestion to the contrary is pure misinformation.

Myth: There is no evidence Vice President Joe Biden did anything to encourage Burisma’s hiring of his son Hunter.

The Facts: This is another area where the public facts cry out for more investigation and raise a question in some minds about another appearance of a conflict of interest.

Hunter Biden’s business partner, Devon Archer, was appointed to Burisma’s board in mid-April 2014 and the firm Rosemont Seneca Bohai — jointly owned by Hunter Biden and Devon Archer — received its first payments from the Ukrainian gas company on April 15, 2014, according to the company’s ledgers. That very same day as the first Burisma payment, Devon Archer met with Joe Biden at the White House, according to White House visitor logs. It is not known what the two discussed.

A week later, Joe Biden traveled to Ukraine and met with then-Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. During that meeting, the American vice president urged Ukraine to ramp up energy production to free itself from its Russian natural gas dependence. Biden even boasted that “an American team is currently in the region working with Ukraine and its neighbors to increase Ukraine’s short-term energy supply.” Yatsenyuk welcomed the help from American “investors” in modernizing natural gas supply lines in Ukraine. You can read the Biden-Yatsenyuk transcript here.

Less than three weeks later, Burisma added Hunter Biden to its board to join Archer. To some, the sequence of events creates the appearance that Joe Biden’s pressure to increase Ukrainian gas supply and to urge Kiev to rely on Americans might have led Burisma to hire his son. More investigation needs to be done to determine exactly what happened. And until that occurs, the appearance issue will likely linger over this episode.

Myth: Hunter Biden’s firm only received $50,000 a month for his work as a board member and consultant for Burisma Holdings.

The Facts: This figure frequently cited by Biden defenders and the media significantly understates what Burisma was paying Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca Bohai firm for his and Devon Archer’s services. Bank records obtained by the FBI in an unrelated case show that between May 2014 and the end of 2015, Hunter Biden’s and Archer’s firm received monthly consulting payments totaling $166,666, or three times the amount cited by the media. In some months, there was even more money than that paid. You can review those bank records here.

The monthly payments figures are confirmed by the accounting ledger that Burisma turned over to Ukrainian prosecutors. That ledger, which you can read here, also shows that in spring and summer of 2014 Burisma paid more than $283,000 to the American law firm of Boies Schiller, where Hunter Biden also worked as an attorney.

Myth: President Trump was trying to force Ukraine to reopen a probe into Burisma Holdings and its founder Mykola Zlochevsky when he talked to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in July of this year.

The Facts: Trump could not have forced the Ukrainians into opening a new Burisma investigation in July because the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s office had already done so on March 28, 2019, or three months before the call.

The prosecutors filed this notice of suspicion in Ukraine announcing the re-opening of the investigation. The revival of the case was even widely reported in the Ukrainian press, something U.S. intelligence and diplomats who are now testifying to Congress behind closed doors should have known. Here’s an example of one such Ukrainian media report at the time.

Myth: Former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko retracted or recanted his claim that U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch in 2016 identified people and entities she did not what to see prosecuted in Ukraine.

The Facts: In a March interview with me at Hill.TV captured on videotape, Lutsenko stated that during his first meeting with Yovanovitch in summer 2016, the American diplomat rattled off a list of names of Ukrainian individuals and entities she did not want to see investigated or prosecuted. Lutsenko called it a “do not prosecute” list. You can watch that video here. The State Department disputed his characterization as a fabrication, which Hill.TV reported in its original report.

A few weeks later, a Ukrainian news outlet claimed it interviewed Lutsenko and he backed off his assertion about the list. Several American outlets have since picked up that same language.

There is just one problem. I re-interviewed Lutsenko after the Ukrainian report suggesting he recanted. He adamantly denied recanting, retracting or changing his story, and said the Ukrainian newspaper simply misunderstood that the list of names were conveyed orally during the meeting and not in writing, just like he said in the original Hill.TV interview.

Here is Lutsenko’s full explanation to me back last spring: “At no time since our interview have I ever retracted the statement I made about the U.S. ambassador providing me a list of names of people and organizations she did not want my office to prosecute. Shortly after my televised interview with your news organization I was asked by a Ukraine reporter if I had a copy of the letter that Ambassador Yovanovitch provided me with the names of those she did not want prosecuted. The reporter misunderstood how the names were transmitted to me. I explained to the reporter that the Ambassador did not hand me a written list but rather provided the list of names orally over the course of a meeting.” Lutsenko reaffirmed he stood by his statements again in September.

It is important to note Lutsenko’s story was also backed up by State Department officials and contemporaneous memos before his interview was ever aired. For instance, a senior U.S. official I interviewed for the Lutsenko story reviewed the list of names that Lutsenko recalled being on the so-called do-not-prosecute list.

That official stated during the interview: ““I can confirm to you that at least some of those names are names that U.S. embassy Kiev raised with the Prosecutor General’s office because we were concerned about retribution and unfair treatment of Ukrainians viewed as favorable to the United States.”

Separately, both U.S. and Ukrainian official confirmed to me a letter written by then-U.S. embassy official George Kent in April 2016 in which U.S. officials pointedly (and in writing) demanded that Ukrainian prosecutors stand down an investigation into several Ukrainian nonprofit groups suspected of misspending U.S. foreign aid. The letter even named one of the groups, the AntiCorruption Action Centre, a nonprofit funded jointly by the State Department and liberal megadonor George Soros.

“We are gravely concerned about this investigation, for which we see no basis,” Kent wrote the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office in April 2016. You can read the letter here. 

So even without Lutsenko’s claim, there is substantial evidence that the U.S. embassy in Kiev applied pressure on Ukrainian prosecutors not to pursue certain investigations in 2016.   

Myth: The narratives about Biden, the U.S. embassy and Ukrainian election interference are conspiracy theories invented by Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, to impact the 2020 election.

The Facts: Giuliani began investigating matters in Ukraine in late fall 2018 as a personal lawyer to the president. But months before his quest began, Ukrainian prosecutors believed they possessed evidence about Burisma, the Bidens and 2016 election interference that might interest the U.S. Justice Department. It is the same evidence that came to light this spring and summer and that is now a focus of the impeachment proceedings.

Originally, one of Ukraine’s senior prosecutors tried to secure a visa to come to the United States to deliver that evidence. But when the U.S. embassy in Kiev did not fulfill his travel request, the group of Ukrainian prosecutors used an intermediary to hire a former U.S. attorney in America to reach out to the U.S. attorney office in New York and try to arrange a transfer of the evidence. The Ukrainian prosecutors’ story about making the overture to the DOJ was independently verified by the American lawyer they hired.

So the activities and allegation now at the heart of impeachment actually pre-date Giuliani starting work on Ukraine. You can read the prosecutors’ account of their 2018 effort to get this information to Americans here.