• 

I honor and applaud Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman’s service to his country. He’s a hero. I also respect his decision to testify at the impeachment proceedings. I suspect neither his service nor his testimony was easy.

But I also know the liberties that Lt. Col. Vindman fought on the battlefield to preserve permit for a free and honest debate in America, one that can’t be muted by the color of uniform or the crushing power of the state.

So I want to exercise my right to debate Lt. Col. Vindman about the testimony he gave about me. You see, under oath to Congress, he asserted all the factual elements in my columns at The Hill about Ukraine were false, except maybe my grammar

Here are his exact words:

“I think all the key elements were false,” Vindman testified.

Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y, pressed him about what he meant. “Just so I understand what you mean when you say key elements, are you referring to everything John Solomon stated or just some of it?”

“All the elements that I just laid out for you. The criticisms of corruption were false…. Were there more items in there, frankly, congressman? I don’t recall. I haven’t looked at the article in quite some time, but you know, his grammar might have been right.”

Such testimony has been injurious to my reputation, one earned during 30 years of impactful reporting for news organizations that included The Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Washington Times and The Daily Beast/Newsweek.

And so Lt. Col. Vindman, here are the 28 primary factual elements in my Ukraine columns, complete with attribution and links to sourcing. Please tell me which, if any, was factually wrong.

Fact 1: Hunter Biden was hired in May 2014 by Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural gas company, at a time when his father Joe Biden was Vice President and overseeing US-Ukraine Policy. Here is the announcement. Hunter Biden’s hiring came just a few short weeks after Joe Biden urged Ukraine to expand natural gas production and use Americans to help. You can read his comments to the Ukrainian prime minister here. Hunter Biden’s firm then began receiving monthly payments totaling $166,666. You can see those payments here.

Fact 2: Burisma was under investigation by British authorities for corruption and soon came under investigation by Ukrainian authorities led by Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

Fact 3: Vice President Joe Biden and his office were alerted by a December 2015 New York Times article that Shokin’s office was investigating Burisma and that Hunter Biden’s role at the company was undercutting his father’s anticorruption efforts in Ukraine.

Fact 4: The Biden-Burisma issue created the appearance of a conflict of interest, especially for State Department officials. I especially refer you to State official George Kent’s testimony here. He testified he viewed Burisma as corrupt and the Bidens as creating the perception of a conflict of interest. His concerns both caused him to contact the vice president’s office and to block a project that State’s USAID agency was planning with Burisma in 2016. In addition, Ambassador Yovanovitch testified she, too, saw the Bidens-Burisma connection as creating the appearance of a conflict of interest. You can read her testimony here.

Fact 5: The Obama White House invited Shokin’s prosecutorial team to Washington for meetings in January 2016 to discuss their anticorruption investigations. You can read about that here. Also, here is the official agenda for that meeting in Ukraine and English. I call your attention to the NSC organizer of the meeting.

Fact 6: The Ukraine investigation of Hunter Biden’s employer, Burisma Holdings, escalated in February 2016 when Shokin’s office raided the home of company owner Mykola Zlochevsky and seized his property. Here is the announcement of that court-approved raid.

Fact 7: Shokin was making plans in February 2016 to interview Hunter Biden as part of his investigation. You can read his interview with me here, his sworn deposition to a court here and his interview with ABC News here.

Fact 8: Burisma’s American representatives lobbied the State Department in late February 2016 to help end the corruption allegations against the company, and specifically invoked Hunter Biden’s name as a reason to intervene. You can read State officials’ account of that effort here

Fact 9: Joe Biden boasted in a 2018 videotape that he forced Ukraine’s president to fire Shokin in March 2016 by threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid. You can view his videotape here.

Fact 10: Shokin stated in interviews with me and ABC News that he was told he was fired because Joe Biden was unhappy the Burisma investigation wasn’t shut down. He made that claim anew in this sworn deposition prepared for a court in Europe. You can read that here.

Fact 11:  The day Shokin’s firing was announced in March 2016, Burisma’s legal representatives sought an immediate meeting with his temporary replacement to address the ongoing investigation. You can read the text of their emails here.

Fact 12: Burisma’s legal representatives secured that meeting April 6, 2016 and told Ukrainian prosecutors that “false information” had been spread to justify Shokin’s firing, according to a Ukrainian government memo about the meeting. The representatives also offered to arrange for the remaining Ukrainian prosecutors to meet with U.S  State and Justice officials. You can read the Ukrainian prosecutors’ summary memo of the meeting here and here and the Burisma lawyers’ invite to Washington here.

Fact 13: Burisma officials eventually settled the Ukraine investigations in late 2016 and early 2017, paying a multimillion dollar fine for tax issues. You can read their lawyer’s February 2017 announcement of the end of the investigations here.

Fact 14: In March 2019, Ukraine authorities reopened an investigation against Burisma and Zlochevsky based on new evidence of money laundering. You can read NABU’s February 2019 recommendation to re-open the case here, the March 2019 notice of suspicion by Ukraine prosecutors here and a May 2019 interview here with a Ukrainian senior law enforcement official stating the investigation was ongoing. And here is an announcement this week that the Zlochevsky/Burisma probe has been expanded to include allegations of theft of Ukrainian state funds.  

Fact 15: The Ukraine embassy in Washington issued a statement in April 2019 admitting that a Democratic National Committee contractor named Alexandra Chalupa solicited Ukrainian officials in spring 2016 for dirt on Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort in hopes of staging a congressional hearing close to the 2016 election that would damage Trump’s election chances. You can read the embassy’s statement here and here. Your colleague, Dr. Fiona Hill, confirmed this episode, testifying “Ukraine bet on the wrong horse. They bet on Hillary Clinton winning.” You can read her testimony here.

Fact 16: Chalupa sent an email to top DNC officials in May 2016 acknowledging she was working on the Manafort issue. You can read the email here.

Fact 17: Ukraine’s ambassador to Washington, Valeriy Chaly, wrote an OpEd in The Hill in August 2016 slamming GOP nominee Donald Trump for his policies on Russia despite a Geneva Convention requirement that ambassadors not become embroiled in the internal affairs or elections of their host countries. You can read Ambassador Chaly’s OpEd here and the Geneva Convention rules of conduct for foreign diplomats here. And your colleagues Ambassador Yovanovitch and Dr. Hill both confirmed this, with Dr. Hill testifying this week that Chaly’s OpEd was “probably not the most advisable thing to do.”

Fact 18: A Ukrainian district court ruled in December 2018 that the summer 2016 release of information by Ukrainian Parliamentary member Sergey Leschenko and NABU director Artem Sytnyk about an ongoing investigation of Manafort amounted to an improper interference by Ukraine’s government in the 2016 U.S. election.  You can read the court ruling here. Leschenko and Sytnyk deny the allegations, and have won an appeal to suspend that ruling on a jurisdictional technicality.

Fact 19: George Soros’ Open Society Foundation issued a memo in February 2016 on its strategy for Ukraine, identifying the nonprofit Anti-Corruption Action Centre as the lead for its efforts. You can read the memo here.

Fact 20: The State Department and Soros’ foundation jointly funded the Anti-Corruption Action Centre. You can read about that funding here from the Centre’s own funding records and George Kent’s testimony about it here.

Fact 21: In April 2016, US embassy charge d’affaires George Kent sent a letter to the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office demanding that Ukrainian prosecutors stand down a series of investigations into how Ukrainian nonprofits spent U.S. aid dollars, including the Anti-Corruption Actions Centre. You can read that letter here. Kent testified he signed the letter here.

Fact 22: Then-Ukraine Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said in a televised interview with me that Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch during a 2016 meeting provided the lists of names of Ukrainian nationals and groups she did want to see prosecuted. You can see I accurately quoted him by watching the video here.

Fact 23: Ambassador Yovanovitch and her embassy denied Lutsenko’s claim, calling it a “fabrication.” I reported their reaction here.

Fact 24: Despite the differing accounts of what happened at the Lutsenko-Yovanovitch meeting, a senior U.S. official in an interview arranged by the State Department stated to me in spring 2019 that US officials did pressure Lutsenko’s office on several occasions not to “prosecute, investigate or harass” certain Ukrainian activists, including Parliamentary member Leschenko, journalist Vitali Shabunin, the Anti-Corruption Action Centre and NABU director Sytnyk. You can read that official’s comments here. In addition, George Kent confirmed this same information in his deposition here.

Fact 25: In May 2018, then-House Rules Committee chairman Pete Sessions sent an official congressional letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asking that Yovanovitch be recalled as ambassador to Ukraine. Sessions and State confirmed the official letter, which you can read here.

Fact 26: In fall 2018, Ukrainian prosecutors, using a third party, hired an American lawyer (a former U.S. attorney) to proffer information to the U.S. government about certain activities at the U.S. embassy, involving Burisma and involving the 2016 election, that they believed might have violated U.S. law. You can read their account here. You can also confirm it independently by talking to the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan or the American lawyer representing the Ukrainian prosecutors’ interests.

Fact 27: In May 2016, one of George Soros’ top aides secured a meeting with the top Eurasia policy official in the State Department to discuss Russian bond issues. You can read the State memos on that meeting here.

Fact 28: In June 2016, Soros himself secured a telephonic meeting with Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland to discuss Ukraine policy. You can read the State memos on that meeting here.

Lt. Col. Vindman, if you have information that contradicts any of these 28 factual elements in my columns I ask that you make it publicly available. Your testimony did not.

If you don’t have evidence these 28 facts are wrong, I ask that you correct your testimony because any effort to call factually accurate reporting false only misleads America and chills the free debate our Constitutional framers so cherished to protect.

This summer, ex-FBI agent Peter Strzok filed a lawsuit suggesting his firing was political retribution for having run the bureau’s counterintelligence investigation into the now debunked allegations that Donald Trump and Russia colluded to hijack the 2016 election.

The Justice Department has responded to the lawsuit in a big way, releasing to the court presiding over the civil case Strzok’s official misconduct file that concluded the former FBI supervisor exhibited “a gross lack of professionalism and exceptionally poor judgment.”

It shows the FBI substantiated that Strzok had engaged in dereliction of duty, had committed misconduct through the expression of anti-Trump bias on his official FBI phone and committed security violations by performing official government work on personal email.

The records show one official recommended termination, and another recommended suspension for 60 days without pay. The bureau leadership chose the more severe of the two penalties, terminating Strzok last year.

The dereliction of duty citation involved Strzok’s failure, according to the FBI, to quickly follow up in fall 2016 after the belated discovery of a trove of Hillary Clinton emails on a laptop belonging to former Congressman Anthony Weiner and his wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin.

Strzok was supervising the investigation of whether Clinton’s use of personal email for classified State Department matters created a security risk, and his failure caused an unnecessary delay to evaluate the new evidence just weeks before Election Day, the FBI concluded.

The disciplinary file included testimony from one of Strzok’s colleagues, a fellow agent, about the failure to respond to the discovery of emails. “The crickets I was hearing was making me uncomfortable because something was going to come crashing down,” the agent testified. “….I still to this day don’t understand what the hell went wrong.”

The agent testified he feared “somebody was not acting appropriately, somebody was trying to bury this” discovery of new Clinton email evidence, the files show.

Strzok offered a bevy of excuses for his inaction, including he was busy working the Trump-Russia case at the time. All were rejected. “The investigation reveals that there is no reasonable excuse for the FBI’s delay in following up on this matter,” the disciplinary file concluded.

The FBI also cited Strzok for a violation of security protocols for conducting bureau business on personal email and personal devices, putting his sensitive counterintelligence work at risk of compromise.

“The investigation uncovered numerous occasions in which you used your personal email account,” the final findings concluded.

But the disciplinary letter to Strzok that preceded his firing saved its harshest words for his expression of anti-Trump bias in official government text messages with FBI lawyer Lisa Page while they were having an affair.

The disciplinary file shows the FBI believed Strzok’s political statements on his official government phone while overseeing the Russia collusion and Clinton email probe may have caused the bureau its most lasting damage.

The letter cited pages of the most egregious texts where Strzok and Page railed against Trump and even suggested they would use their powers to have “an insurance policy” or to “stop him” from becoming president.

“Your excessive, repeated and politically charged text messages, while you were assigned as the lead case agent on the FBI’s two biggest and most politically sensitive investigations in decades, demonstrated a gross lack of professionalism and exceptionally poor judgment,” the FBI wrote Strzok.

“Your misconduct cast a pall over the FBI’s Clinton email and Russia investigations and the work of the Special Counsel. The immeasurable harm done to the reputation of the FBI will not be easily overcome,” the letter added.

I have to thank Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee chairman and impeachment maestro. Really, I am grateful.

While the jury is still out on high crimes and misdemeanors, Schiff has managed to produce during the first few weeks of his impeachment hearings a robust body of evidence and testimony that supports all three of the main tenets of my Ukraine columns.

In fact, his witnesses have done more than anyone to affirm the accuracy of my columns and to debunk the false narrative by a dishonest media and their friends inside the federal bureaucracy that my reporting was somehow false conspiracy theories.

The half dozen seminal columns I published for The Hill on Ukraine were already supported by overwhelming documentation (all embedded in the story) and on-the-record interviews captured on video. They made three salient and simple points:

1. Hunter Biden’s hiring by the Ukrainian gas firm Burisma Holdings, while it was under a corruption investigation, posed the appearance of a conflict of interest for his father. That’s because Vice President Joe Biden oversaw US-Ukraine policy and forced the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor overseeing the case.
2. Ukraine officials had an uneasy relationship with our embassy in Kiev because State Department officials exerted pressure on Ukraine prosecutors to drop certain cases against activists, including one group partly funded by George Soros. 
3. There were efforts around Ukraine in 2016 to influence the US election, that included a request from a DNC contractor for dirt on Manafort, an OpEd from Ukraine’s US ambassador slamming Trump and the release of law enforcement evidence by Ukrainian officials that a Ukraine court concluded was an improper interference in the US election.

All three of these points have since been validated by the sworn testimony of Schiff’s witnesses this month, starting with the Bidens.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent testified he believed the Burisma-Bidens dynamic created the appearance of a conflict of interest, and that State officials viewed Burisma as having a corrupt relationship.

Kent testified State’s sentiments were so strong that he personally intervened in 2016 to stop a joint project between one of his department’s agencies and Burisma. When asked why, he answered: “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.”

State officials also testified they tried to raise the issue of an apparent conflict of interest with Biden’s office back in 2015, but were rebuffed.

Former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was asked last week if she shared Kent’s assessment about Joe Biden and Burisma. She answered clearly: “I think that it could raise the appearance of a conflict of interest.”

Federal officials are required to avoid even the appearance of a conflict, something State officials saw with Joe Biden. This obligation doesn’t rely on whether Biden forced the firing of the Ukraine prosecutor for good or bad reasons. The appearance issue existed even before Biden forced the firing,

For weeks, media have claimed my Biden column was a debunked “conspiracy theory” and no one saw anything wrong. Now we know the very people working on Ukraine policy below Joe Biden in the State Department saw the appearance of a conflict, long before I reported it. And they were so concerned about Burisma’s corruption reputation that they took official actions to distance the U.S. from the firm that hired Hunter Biden.

The second point I made in my columns was there was significant evidence that some officials tied to Ukraine tried or did influence the 2016 election. That evidence included:

• an OpEd written by the Ukrainian ambassador to Washington in August 2016 slamming Donald Trump
• the release of sensitive law enforcement information by two Ukrainian government officials against Paul Manafort that forced the Trump campaign chairman to resign in 2016. A Ukrainian court later ruled the two officials’ actions were an improper effort by Ukraine to interference in the 2016 election. That ruling was set aside recently, not on the merits of the interference but on a jurisdictional technicality.
• A solicitation by a Democratic National Committee contractor seeking dirt from the Ukraine embassy on Trump and Manafort in spring 2016. The Ukrainian embassy confirms the solicitation, and says it was rebuffed,.

Schiff’s witnesses confirmed they knew about those issues in 2016 and 2017 but took no formal action. Yovanovitch was among those who said she didn’t raise any alarms, drawing this rebuke from Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.

“In 2016, when we know that the majority of Ukrainian politicians want Clinton to win because it was said by a member of parliament when the ambassador to the United States from Ukraine writes an op-ed criticizing then-Candidate Trump, when Mr. Avakov calls Candidate Trump all kinds of names, nobody goes and talks to them and tells them to knock it off.”

Such inaction on perceived election interference is a fair issue for the American public to consider, which is why I raised it in the first place.

The third point of my columns was that there was long-standing friction between the U.S. embassy in Kiev and Ukraine prosecutors, friction that threatened to set back the fight against corruption in the old Soviet bloc country.

Former Ukraine prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko highlighted this issue in a video-recorded interview with me in March when he claimed Yovanovitch gave him in 2016 a list of names of Ukrainian nationals she did not want to see prosecuted.

Yovanovitch adamantly denied this and I quoted both sides in my original story. Then a Ukrainian news outlet claimed Lutsenko recanted his claims about the list.

That is not true. Both the New York Times and I have interviewed him since, and Lutsenko reaffirms he believes Yovanovitch pressured him not to pursue certain Ukrainian individuals she named during the meeting.

So at best, the issue is a classic he-said, she-said. And I gave both sides their due say in my original stories, like good journalists should do,

But then Schiff’s witnesses, particularly Kent, added to the narrative. They directly acknowledged at least four of the names Lutsenko gave me in the March interview were the subject of a pressure campaign by the U.S. embassy in Kiev. They included:

• a nonprofit Ukrainian group partly funded by George Soros and the US embassy called the AntiCorruption Action Centre.
• a Ukraine parliamentary member named Sergey Leschenko who helped release the Manafort documents
• a senior law enforcement official named Artem Sytnyk, who also helped release the Manafort documents
• a journalist named Vitali Shabunin, who helped found the above-mentioned nonprofit.

Kent acknowledged he signed an April 2016 letter asking Ukrainian prosecutors to stand down an investigation against the anti-corruption group, and his explanations about the pressure the embassy applied on the Shabunin and Sytnyk probes are worth reading.

“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.”

Yovanovitch for her part stood by her denial of the do-not-prosecute list. But even she admitted she was, in her own words, “pushing” the Ukraine prosecutors. “I advocated the U.S. position that the rule of law should prevail and Ukrainian law enforcement, prosecutors and judges should stop wielding their power selectively as a political weapon against their adversaries, and start dealing with all consistently and according to the law.”

In another words, she pushed back on certain investigations, just like Kent had testified.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter whether what transpired was a formal list like Lutsenko claimed or a pressure campaign on specific cases like Kent testified. The issue of public interest is that the situation was dysfunctional: Ukraine prosecutors felt bullied by the embassy, and US officials were unhappy with cases against certain figures.

So the next time you hear my stories were debunked, faulty or wrong (without anyone citing specific facts that were wrong), keep this in mind: Adam Schiff’s witnesses corroborated what I reported.

And that makes the attacks on my columns misleading, unethical and undemocratic. Reporters should be allowed to raise issues of public importance like conflict appearances, election interference and dysfunctional foreign relations without being taken to the woodshed of censorship and false shame.

And public officials like Biden, and Yovanovitch, shouldn’t cry victimization just because a journalist raised a legitimate debate over policy issues.

As the Justice Department’s review into the now-debunked Russia collusion probe becomes more public, one issue likely to dominate debate is whether the FBI treated Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump differently during the 2015-16 presidential election.

Exhibit One in that debate may involve a December 2015 event that has been kept from public view for most of the last three years.

A half dozen sources with direct knowledge tell me that Clinton’s presidential campaign was given a defensive briefing from U.S. intelligence that month about a possible foreign threat.

Government officials have known for months about the briefing but were forbidden from talking about it because it was classified.

But in recent weeks congressional investigators and others were allowed to see a document where a reference to the briefing was left in an unclassified section of the memo.

My sources say the FBI was a participant in the briefing but they cannot tell me which foreign power was raised with Clinton’s team because it remains classified. Several said the threat did not involve Russia, Ukraine or China though.

FBI and Justice Department officials declined comment, and former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta did not respond to phone and email requests for comment.

Whatever country was raised with Clinton’s campaign, the existence of the briefing itself is likely to revive concerns, at least among Republicans, that political bias caused the FBI to treat Trump and Clinton differently during the last presidential election.

While the FBI provided a generic briefing to candidate Trump about foreign threats, the bureau never gave Trump a defensive briefing during the election about its concerns that Russia was trying to compromise some of his campaign aides. Instead, the bureau opened a counterintelligence investigation and secured a secret FISA warrant to spy on some of the campaign’s activities, including former adviser Carter Page.

The fact that the Clinton campaign was given the sort of defensive briefing Trump never received is certain to set off new alarm bells.

Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa., and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., have been pressing recently to force more transparency into the question of defensive briefings for public officials being targeted by foreign powers.

“The Department of Homeland Security has made clear that ‘[a] secure and resilient electoral process is a vital national interest.’ An essential part of that process is ensuring that all candidates for office are treated fairly and are fully and equally prepared to address any potential security and counterintelligence concerns,” the senators wrote in a letter to the FBI. “The apparent absence of any policy, procedure, or practice for conducting defensive briefings undermines that process by risking the appearance of bias or, at worst, causing actual prejudice to a candidate for office.”

Expect defensive briefings to remain an issue well into the 2020 election.