Testimony at Impeachment probe validates Solomon reporting on Ukraine

John Solomon:
...
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.
  4. 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.
  • 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.
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There is more.

 The debunkers have been debunked in their attacks on Solomon's reporting.  They were actually part of the anti-Trump cover-up of the corruption in Ukraine involving the Bidens.  There has been a concerted effort to ignore the corruption and focus their attacks on Trump's attempt to get an investigation of the allegations of corruption.

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