‘There have been rumors out there about things like that, but there was nothing hard—at least nothing that I was aware of…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) One of the witnesses most central to House Democrats’ impeachment effort over a phone call to Ukraine has now been exposed as a fraud.
It has been a tough week for deep-state leftists getting caught in their lies by the evidentiary record.
First, declassified transcripts revealed that Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. repeatedly mislead the public by claiming House Intelligence hearings offered proof of Russian collusion.
Then, Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden was proven to have lied in a Good Morning America interview about his knowledge of the FBI’s perjury trap against Michael Flynn after a declassified unmasking list revealed otherwise.
The latest left-wing victim of the truth is former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who insisted during House testimony that she had but a passing knowledge of the corrupt natural gas company Burisma and its efforts to “rehabilitate” its image.
That included hiring the vice president’s son, Hunter Biden, as well as his business partner, Devon Archer, and paying them millions in consulting fees over a five-year span.
But Yovanovitch downplayed the controversial moves, testifying that ““It just wasn’t a big deal.”
The Senate Homeland Security Committee is now moving forward with an investigation into Hunter Biden’s Burisma role, said its chairman, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., on Wednesday.
A panel leading the probe plans to vote next week on whether to subpoena Democrat-linked consulting firm Blue Star Strategies, which lobbied on Burisma’s behalf with the Obama administration.
Meanwhile, conservative watchdog Citizens United said it obtained more than 160 pages from the State Department as part of a Freedom of Information Act request. They revealed that Yovanovitch had, in fact, engaged in a flurry of activity on Burisma in the fall of 2016, as the U.S. presidential election was underway.
Investigative reporter John Solomon—whose disclosures about the Bidens’ Ukraine scandal were so hard hitting that Schiff subpoenaed his phone records and doxxed him in the House Democrats’ impeachment report—led the way in reporting on the new development for Just the News.
Among the damning revelations:
- Yovanovitch’s top deputy warned her in a September 2016 email that Burisma had hired Blue Star Strategies and that Hunter Biden had been placed on its board. (He began offering his “services” two years prior, in April 2014.)
- Yovanovitch met with a Burisma representative in December 2016—45 days before President Donald Trump took office, which she neglected to mention in her testimony.
- Yovanovitch maintained extensive correspondence about Burisma, including a letter she hand-delivered to one of Burisma’s lawyers and a briefing to her staff in September 2016.
The time frame is significant as evidence indicated that Ukraine’s U.S. embassy was actively working with at least one Democrat staffer, Alexandra Chalupa, and possibly linked to others—including eventual “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella—to smear the Trump campaign and help spread innuendo about Russian collusion.
Yovanovitch, however, claimed also to be unable to recall allegations of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election, made by none other than Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
“Maybe I knew that once and have forgotten, but I’m not familiar with that now,” she testified.
In a fateful July 2019 call, Trump specifically warned newly elected Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy to be wary of Yovanovich due to her alleged engagement in partisan activity.
That may have included issuing a list to the country’s inspector-general about which organizations it was allowed to investigate and prosecute.
Under pressure from Joe Biden, Ukraine had fired its top investigator, Viktor Shokin, in the spring of 2016, allowing its anti-corruption probe of Burisma to go ‘dormant.’
But in her House testimony, Yovanovitch claimed not to have been involved in the Obama administration’s pressure campaign.
“There have been rumors out there about things like that, but there was nothing hard—at least nothing that I was aware of,” she said under oath.
Leftist impeachment hawks nonetheless rallied around the ex-ambassador, throwing her a high-profile pity party after she was removed from her role and later retired from the State Department.
Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him. It is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2019