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As a former Ukrainian Lawmaker, and former journalist — who was key in the unraveling of Paul Manafort — and now as adviser to President Zelensky, Serhiy Leshchenko knows that which of he speaks:
"I am sure that issue of Biden was forever on the table between Zelensky and Trump," said Leshchenko. As a former lawmaker and adviser to Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky, Leschenko believes it was clear that President Trump wanted Ukraine to investigate his Democratic rivals.
"Of course, he wanted political privileges, favors, for his re-election from Ukraine," he said.
"In return for military aid?" asked correspondent Roxana Saberi.
"I would say yes," Leshchenko replied.
"Do you have any evidence of that?" asked Saberi.
"It was, like, well-known fact in Ukraine," Leshchenko replied.
www.cbsnews.com — Sep 30, 2019 [with Video interview]
Hey Congress, have you ever noticed when Trump talks about “fighting corruption, in Ukraine” — that he never mentions how we have already done that — in the case of Paul Manafort?
Well Leshchenko has — noticed …
FP: Is it a personal victory for you to see Manafort convicted?
Serhiy Leshchenko: Not a personal victory, but it is in the interest of truth and democracy to have such cases investigated. I wish we would have something like this in Ukraine. The American case demonstrated that with a properly working judicial system, we can prosecute corrupt people. Manafort could be the most influential gray cardinal in the Trump administration, but now he is found guilty. And this is an example of how a proper judicial system works. For Ukraine, this is a good case because political consultants helped very corrupt, even criminal, oligarchs come to power. Of course these people siphoned money from the state budget, from the government, from state companies. Since the Ukrainian revolution happened four and a half years ago, nobody was sentenced for crimes conducted by previous governments or by current governments.
FP: Do you think the Manafort prosecution and conviction will have an impact on anti-corruption work in Ukraine?
SL: It will have an impact in the sense of general public opinion because now our society has an example of how it works in a properly constructed judicial system. [...]
foreignpolicy.com — Aug 27, 2018
So the next time Trump says he’s “interested in fighting corruption, in Ukraine” — the very next question should be:
“So you want to get rid of the Oligarchs that Putin has installed there?”
That should shut him up — for about 5 minutes.
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Kind of wraps the whole story up, with a bow, now doesn’t it?
...
Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief
by Andrew E. Kramer, Mike McIntire and Barry Meier, NYTimes — Aug. 14, 2016
[...]
The papers, known in Ukraine as the “black ledger,” are a chicken-scratch of Cyrillic covering about 400 pages taken from books once kept in a third-floor room in the former Party of Regions headquarters on Lipskaya Street in Kiev. The room held two safes stuffed with $100 bills, said Taras V. Chornovil, a former party leader who was also a recipient of the money at times. He said in an interview that he had once received $10,000 in a “wad of cash” for a trip to Europe.
“This was our cash,” he said, adding that he had left the party in part over concerns about off-the-books activity. “They had it on the table, stacks of money, and they had lists of who to pay.”
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau, which obtained the ledger, said in a statement that Mr. Manafort’s name appeared 22 times in the documents over five years, with payments totaling $12.7 million. The purpose of the payments is not clear. Nor is the outcome, since the handwritten entries cannot be cross-referenced against banking records, and the signatures for receipt have not yet been verified.
Manafort {used to} claim innocence. Now he just stews away in prison, hatching out plans for Team Trump to get back at his former and current nemesis, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau in Ukraine.
Only in Trump’s Crimea-merica.
You can’t make this stuff up — but Trump does.
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