The Secretary of Swagger’s weekend is off to a terrible, horrible, no good very bad start!
BREAKING: State Department releases Ukraine documents to American Oversight
Documents show links between Pompeo, Giuliani, Oval Officehttps://t.co/CjJflQYQqp
— American Oversight (@weareoversight) November 23, 2019
Documents are also available here: https://t.co/SyiHfRjYIU
— American Oversight (@weareoversight) November 23, 2019
Here’s the 100 page pdf with all State Department records that were released under the FOIA order earlier today.
State-Department-Records-of-Giuliani-and-Ukraine
I’m not sure that even the Koch funding network is going to be able to salvage Secretary Pompeo’s political future.
It’s going to be a busy news weekend, so remember to stay hydrated!
Open thread!
Chetan Murthy
“stay hydrated” rofl! youtube.com/watch?v=kd3eL4C8nCw
Yarrow
Real shame about your plans to run for Senate, Mike.
Sebastian
And so have Ranking Member Devin Nunes’!
Adam L Silverman
@Sebastian: One would think, but he’s pretty dumb, so…
Mary G
#ETTD and it couldn’t be happening to a more deserving fellow.
American Oversight’s website got so many requests it crashed.
Mary G
Mnemosyne
I have a feeling that his staff is too scared of him to call him and he’ll get blindsided tomorrow morning.
At least, that’s what I Hope happens. ?
CaseyL
I looked through the documents, and do not see anything except some emails that mention Guiliani and Parnas having meetings with Pompeo.
What I do see are extensive documents outlining allegations against Burisma, and Hunter and Joe Biden. I know that the Obama Administration put a lot of pressure on Ukraine to fire the prosecutor looking into Burisma, but the documents in the FOIA file make it look as though the demand, and the threat to withhold aid, are due to the State Prosecutor filing charges against Hunter Biden. There is no mention of the Prosecutor himself being corrupt.
Now, this was a file prepared at the behest of the State Department, presumably for the benefit of Giuliani’s ratfucking.
But unless someone can provide documentation proving that, or forcefully rebutting the documents produced as a result of the FOIA request, these documents present a case that fits what the Trump Administration has been saying.
Can someone tell me whether there are other documents that show the ones in the pdf are presenting a highly distorted history?
trollhattan
UCLA murderating Clemson in NCAA women’s soccer tournament. Left Coast represent.
Sebastian
@Adam L Silverman:
Yes, that’s what I meant. Tick Tock!
lgerard
I wouldn’t get too excited about the uncorroborated testimony of Lev Parnas. His history of associations with shady stock brokerage boiler rooms and gold bullion bucket shops, along with a series of liens and evictions makes him a pretty easy witness to impeach.
My first thought when his lawyer surfaced with these claims was that he was trolling for someone with deeper pockets to put up some defense dollars, but that hasn’t happened yet. Parnas has evidently figured out that he is now a fall guy, further proof of the old adage that con men are themselves the easiest marks
tobie
@CaseyL: You’re not the only one who’s noticed this. Part of the tranche is the file that Giuliani et al prepared to try to implicate Biden in a scandal. I came across this tweet.
Mike J
Sailing tomorrow. We’re on a three week break before our next race, and then over a month until the next. In the summer I race three times a week, this once a month thing is killing me. Tomorrow is going out with the crew and trying to get faster in the new boat.
Mary G
@CaseyL:
I found this McClatchy explainer helpful. It seems that the timing is quite suspicious and that Pompeo knew Marie Yovanovitch was being smeared and was perhaps behind her ouster at Rudy’s requests.
Mary G
@lgerard:
My theory is that his lawyer knows that Oliver North’s convictions were vacated because of his Congressional testimony before his criminal trial, and would like to use this again.
MisterForkbeard
@lgerard: Parnas does say he has documentation, which would help his credibility in this case. I guess we’ll see
lgerard
@tobie:
That is definitely what it is. It is a summary of an interview of Shokin and one of Lutsenko by Rudy, one of his partners George Boyle along with Parnas as interpreter in Rudy’s NYC office
CaseyL
@tobie:
@Mary G:
OK, but where did the allegations in the documents against Biden come from? The former prosecutor is stating (according to the FOIA docs) that he was fired for investigating Burisma/Biden. We’ve been told he was fired for being himself corrupt.
I’m assuming the tranche is misinformation, but it would be good to know where it originated, and if there is a similar documentary trail detailing the former prosecutor’s corruption. I know that the US wasn’t the only country that wanted him gone, but why? Had there been investigations into his corruption? Did he open cases against Burisma/Biden in retaliation for being nailed?
ETA: The pdf has a pretty detailed timeline. Let me say it plainly: It looks bad, and there had better be just as detailed a counterargument.
Kent
So what’s really going on.
Is this a deliberate disinformation campaign release orchestrated by Trump folks.
Or is this some state department employees deep inside Foggy Bottom who no longer have any fucks to give?
I don’t have time to read through the whole document stack and wouldn’t know what to look for if I did. But I have lived in a Federal bureaucracy for a decade of my life and I do know that documents are really really difficult to “disappear”. All these agencies have daily server backups and pretty much any sort of official document goes through a lot of desks and gets cc’d to a lot of people who will then have it saved permanently in their email accounts. The government has LONG established procedures designed to meticulously document decisions mostly because government lawyers have long demanded it to CYA against lawsuits. I worked in Alaskan fisheries management and even really simply regulatory actions like adjusting a boundary line of a fishing zone or chasing a fishing season start date would generate a month of review through over a dozen different offices and desks. And paperwork would get passed back and forth between different offices electronically so more records. So digital footprints are everywhere. And I promise you the political appointees Trump has placed in government have no idea how to really cover their tracks.
And I know from lawsuits and FOIA exercises I’ve been involved in, that the tech folks are REALLY good at finding documents on servers with all the sophisticated search and recovery tools they now have available.
Would really like to be a fly in the wall in the State Department records and FOIA department during this process.
Mary G
@CaseyL:
I am too overloaded to do more than read it superficially. I have declared a weekend off from Infrastructure Centuries.
Cathie from Canada
Why did some random interviews of the Ukrainians at Guiliani’s office which smear the Bidens (and, BYW, John Kerry’s son’s roommate) end up in State Department files anyway? Fox News is going to be all over these documents as “proof” of the Biden accusations.
burnspbesq
Damn.
A Friday night news dump for the ages.
mrmoshpotato
@Mary G:
But the emails! ?
lgerard
@Cathie from Canada:
This was the “package” that Rudy sent over to Pompeo that was disclosed at the onset of the impeachment hearings, as well as the source material for the Soloman articles. Some of the details were retracted (by Lutsenko), others discredited by the Ukrainians.
Manxome Bromide
@Cathie from Canada: Why wouldn’t they? Isn’t one of the revelations here that Pompeo and thus the State Department was intimately involved with it?
As for the counterargument, I’d go with the simple “this is the statement of part of the conspiracy theory Fiona Hill’s testimony debunked.” Just because it was made public later doesn’t make it superceding.
CaseyL
@lgerard:
Ah. This isn’t a collection of interviews from multiple sources, but spun-from-whole-cloth by the Ratfucking Squad.
Thanks!
patrick II
I just saw Dane Loesch doing an add for SuperBeets health drink which will make you feel better almost immediately.Evidently, the NRA isn’t paying what it used to.
Jay
@Mary G:
ollie got limited immunity for his testimony, which the Court later ruled was open ended enough, that none of his testimony, or leads off his testimony, could be used against him in a Court of Law.
something that hopefully the House and Senate have learned from.
lgerard
@CaseyL:
Important to remember
Shokin = Firtash
Mandalay
A few thoughts from wading through that cesspool of nonsense….
There is no way that statement is true. It’s either completely fabricated, or Lutsenko was lying for reasons I don’t understand. It actually sounds like something Trump would make up.
Either this is radioactive bullshit, or it’s a really sloppy misrepresentation (Hunter vs. Joe) of an allegation made in the meeting.
lgerard
@Mandalay:
Remember, Parnas is “interpreting” here.
Mandalay
@lgerard: Right, but I’m hoping Parnas ends up testifying that he was the interpreter and carefully took notes, but a shit load of stuff was modified and inserted after he handed his notes over.
TS (the original)
How can documents be released via freedom of information yet not released to congress – should congress put in freedom of information requests rather than subpoenas? I do not understand this at all.
Mandalay
@TS (the original):
Perhaps because Trump or Pompeo explicitly ordered that nothing be handed over to Congress, but forgot to state that FOIA requests should also be ignored?
HumboldtBlue
Is the abdication of a whole flock of solid GOP players the canary?
Where the fuck is Paul Ryan? They were either Russia-bought or knew who was and that’s one of the reasons we see retirements.
Nunes thought he was smart and stood with Trump.
Chetan Murthy
@TS (the original): Based on the various mumblings I’ve seen, it appears that the FOIA requests went to different people, than the subpoenas. That makes sense, right? I mean subpoenas would go to big-boy GrOPer lawyers, where FOIA requests, apparently, went to down-on-their-luck civil-servant clerks.
lgerard
@TS (the original):
They sued and got a court order to fulfill the FOI request
TS (the original)
@Chetan Murthy: thanks, sounds likely
@lgerard:
And trump & co didn’t realise so didn’t appeal the court order? So it seems Schiff should just start issuing foi requests and forget about the usual way that congress used to get information.
John Revolta
@HumboldtBlue: Paul Ryan moved back to DC a couple of months
ago and has been doing…………..something. Haven’t heard anything about him but I’m sure we will. Perhaps in time for next
year’s election?
lgerard
@TS (the original):
Probably made the calculation that appealing to the Supreme Court would look worse then just releasing it on a Friday night.
Plus Fox droids can now claim that Rudy’s fabrications “came from the State Department”
Martin
@Cathie from Canada: So, this is Rudes disinformation effort. We knew he was doing this, but we didn’t know that he was doing it with knowledge of the State Dept. The contacts between Rudes and Pompeo make it harder to argue that Rudes and Lev and Igor were rogue actors.
Trump and State were trying to argue that Yovanovitch was fired as some generic act. This ties Pompeo into things – not just the disinformation packet but also the flurry of calls between Rudes and Pompeo right before she was fired.
Part of this effort is to bring Rudes in as a formal extension of US policy, which brings his bad acts as well as those of his lackeys. That Lev is now also tied back directly to Nunes expands this out to being a larger conspiracy.
Martin
@TS (the original): Willing to bet that State being as big as they are have entirely different teams to handle FOIA requests from Congressional ones. They have a process to routinely handle FOIA requests, which they probably do without running all the way up to Trump, but Congressional subpoenas are immediately politicized.
Not saying it’s good or right, but I can imagine an internal structure that would cause this, particularly in a poorly managed agency.
Martin
That’s all conspiracy theory stuff from John Solomon, Rudes imagination, and Russian propaganda.
Given that there are Ukrainians volunteering to debunk this stuff, in addition to every career professional in the state department as well as our intelligence agencies, it shouldn’t be hard for Schiff to show that this is a scheme to enlist a foreign government to pursue false allegations against a US citizen, which should be a crime.
Hob
You’re talking about Shokin? Yes, there is a large amount of widely known evidence that Viktor Shokin was very, very, very dirty. Wikipedia has a reasonable summary. If you haven’t followed any news related to Ukraine until very recently then I can see how this might seem like some new, worrisome angle… but for anyone who had heard of him before, it’s completely laughable that the Trumpers are trying to rehabilitate him. It’s pure desperate bullshit, aimed only at Trump loyalists who can be counted on to never learn any facts. It’s also not new; those “interview notes” are from January of this year, and they are from Giuliani’s crew, not State Department findings of any kind.
Hob
(Not sure if my comments are being delayed or just discarded, but I’ll try one more:)
It’s certainly possible that Pompeo or someone is trying to put out disinformation by releasing this stuff, but if so, it’s being done with all the skill and finesse you would expect from Lord Dampnut’s outfit.
I mean, if I wanted to take a bunch of bullshit that Rudy Giuliani and John Solomon wrote up, and get people to think it is important official breaking news from the State Department… I might consider not putting Giuliani’s and Solomon’s names all over it, let alone Parnas and Fruman. What this looks like to me is evidence that Giuliani was sending the State Department a whole lot of bullshit, and they were being required to read it and file it. That is not normal, and it does not make the operation look any less hinky. Giuliani doesn’t work for the government and has no legitimate role in diplomacy regarding Ukraine or anywhere else, and he’s providing literally nothing to back up this shit other than “I interviewed this famous criminal and he said that he is in fact not a criminal.”
It’s like if you requested your personal FBI file, and stuffed in the middle of it were a bunch of transcripts of Glenn Beck saying the Freemasons control the Oscars. That would not be evidence in favor of the Freemason Oscars theory; it would be evidence that something really weird has been going on at the FBI.
Suzy
@CaseyL: I have the same concerns as you. Pages and pages of accusations, that thousands of people will read.
Debunking this, explaining the difference with Trump, takes a huge effort. An effort that the media, in my opinion, won’t be very good at.
I seriously think that Mr. Biden will need a war room totally dedicated to his defense in the public opinion. And to the defense of his son (Hunter’s actions are distorted too in those documents).
Mr. Biden is faced with a totally unusual situation: he’s fighting simultaneously in a very crowded primary and in a general election against the whole republican party. On top of that, it has become personal: many of his past republican colleagues in the Senate, people who he worked with for years (!!), are going to try to destroy him.
I’ve always thought that despite his talking about “reaching the other side” he’s pretty realistic about the political game. But this is on another level. People who know him well, people who were in accord with his actions in Ukraine, will now try to smear him as corrupt. And paint his son as the most corrupt man who has ever walked on the planet. This is beyond the pale. It is worse that what they did to Hillary.
Mr. Biden was impatient and lost his cool when attacked, twice, during a recent campaign event. Accumulated tension I’m sure of it. I have empathy for him. I think his soul is pretty shaken after witnessing, and experiencing, the ugliness of this week. I hope he rebounds. He is a good man, who has suffered a lot. The most admirable thing about him is that despite his cruel losses, he’s always kept going, and has been able to stay open to others.
But boy, this is going to be tough…
prostratedragon
Played, as it were, by Vienna’s own, with Mr. Barenboim:
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@TS (the original): More like@Martin:
Even more so when the boss is a loathed control freak. Likely they e-mailed Trump and Pompera about this who told to the people involved to go f themselves and stop bothering them.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Suzy: Actually, this is to be expected. Conservatives have conclusions, look for supporting evidence, even if they half to pull it out of their own south end.
Anyway, 2020 is going to be about Trump, not the challenger. I am sure Trump will try running as an outsider but it’s going to be about how the public feels about Trump.
low-tech cyclist
@Suzy:
Personally, this is one more reason why I just don’t think Biden should be the nominee.
Even if this hadn’t been the subject of Trump’s extortion scheme, these favors between rich people on the one hand, and politically well-connected but less-than-rich people on the other, are fundamentally corrupting. Even if the level of corruption is far less than Trumpian corruption, it’s still true.
The only reason Hunter Biden was on this board, pulling down some sweet money, was that he was the Vice-President’s son. If you’re Joe Biden, how does it affect your politics and policies when rich people do favors like this for you?
And it’s right there in these documents: when Hunter Biden had concerns about Ukraine prosecuting Burisma, he had breakfast with the freakin’ Deputy Secretary of State to talk about those concerns. Like the song in Hamilton goes,
It must be nice, it must be nice
to have Washington on your side
A rich person does Joe Biden a favor, and the rich person’s concerns get heard at the highest levels of the Obama Administration, while your concerns or mine get addressed by some entry-level schlub.
The people running our government have no more hours in the day than the rest of us, and the more they talk to rich people about their concerns, the more they see the world from the perspective of those rich people, rather than from the perspective of the rest of us. It doesn’t take a quid pro quo for things to still get fucked up.
I don’t want a Democratic Party that is perpetually only proposing incremental measures that don’t register very strongly with actual voters, because they’re being too sensitive to the concerns of rich donors. And this stuff with Hunter Biden is like that, only taken to another level.
Baud
@low-tech cyclist: I do not want Biden as the nominee, but I am not going to hold his son’s actions against him.
Shalimar
@CaseyL: I haven’t read Rudy’s “evidence” yet, but the past reporting on this said the fired prosecutor is lying, Burisma was tied to pro-Russian oligarchs he was corruptly protecting, and his sham investigation into them had already been closed the year before he was fired.
Shalimar
@patrick II: The Russians are surreptitiously paying Dana in borscht.
Alan Barney
The entire Republican Party is awash with laundered Russian money. Millions and millions of Russian Oligarch dollars laundered through the NRA and sundry PAC’s pumped into Republican decision making. Moscow Mitch? $$$ Millions. Leningrad Linsey? $$$2.5 million at last count. Rubio Rubio? Just under $$$1 million of corrupting laundered Russian money. Will this be revealed during a Senate Impeachment Trial? That’s what all Republicans fear.