Politicians treated war-torn Ukraine as a corrupt ‘sandbox’ to play in during Obama administration…
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) With President Donald Trump’s first formal impeachment attempt now in hindsight, Trump’s allies in the conservative media are turning the focus to the corrupt ties of the investigators themselves—notably House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the impeachment ringleader in both the House probe and the Senate trial.
Speculation on partisan House Democrats’ motives in pushing the shaky impeachment case have included theorizing that they were appeasing the demands of big-money donors and that they were seeking to cover up improprieties of their own in Ukraine.
A story that first ran in the Gateway Pundit in September exposed the missing link: Igor Pasternak, who is CEO and chief engineer for Worldwide Aeros Corp. The California-based company specializes in helium airships, similar to zeppelins.
But according to Snopes.com, Pasternak also “provided some military hardware to Ukrainian military troops who were fighting Russian forces in Donbas.”
That included working with the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense to produce a modified version of the M4 and M16 rifles, according to ClashDaily.
Despite the fact that the left-wing “fact-checking” site found nit-picking ways to qualify the reporting from the Gateway Pundit and others, including Fox News host Laura Ingraham, such as noting that Pasternak, who was raised in Soviet Ukraine, was not “born” there, the site also was obliged to admit that Pasternak hosted a July 2013 fundraiser for Schiff at his home in Washington, DC. The event was titled “A Taste of Ukraine.”
A year later, the country overthrew its Russia-friendly government in a violent revolution, but the administrations that followed seemed to do little to stem the culture of corruption, simply supplanting its Kremlin schmoozing by sucking up, instead, to the Obama White House.
As blogger Rich Swier noted, that effectively turned Ukraine into a “sandbox” for privileged politicians and their families to speculate and invest in.
Most notably, it paved the way for Hunter Biden, the son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, to involve himself in a series of lobbying ventures in Ukraine, including his “consulting” work as a board member of the Burisma natural gas company.
When Ukraine’s then-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin raided several sites associated with Burisma and its CEO in 2016, Burisma pressured the U.S. State Department to call him off. Shortly thereafter, Joe Biden demanded that Shokin be fired by threatening to withhold a billion-dollar loan, and the Burisma investigation went dormant.
Pasternak appears to have hedged his bets in his political giving, with names including former GOP House Speaker John Boehner, California GOP Rep. Ed Royce and former Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, 2016 presidential candidate Jeb Bush, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham among those on his lengthy donor list.
But by and large, the bulk of his donations have gone to influential left-wing PACs and campaign funds.
According to political blogger Yaacov Apelbaum, who used facial recognition software to visually link Pasternak with his many ties in the U.S. and Ukrainian governments, the intrigue goes much deeper.
Apelbaum’s investigation links the Schiff patron with players like leftist mega-donor George Soros and Alexandra Chalupa, a Democratic National Committee staffer and Ukrainian activist who oversaw a 2016 anti-Trump smear campaign.
The research, which is fully sourced, helps, if nothing else, to refute the routine “without evidence” deflections that many in the media have used to discredit the claims against Trump’s partisan adversaries.
It does not fully expose the driving forces behind partisan impeachment leaders like Schiff and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., but it raises enough questions to cast aspersions on their supposedly wholesome intentions and to warrant deeper investigation into their motives.