According to the accounts of other witnesses who have testified in the impeachment inquiry, Yovanovitch was highly respected among her colleagues. But she ran afoul of two powerful people: Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Ukraine’s prosecutor general (under the previous administration) Yuri Lutsenko.
In an apparent effort to win President Trump’s favor, Lutsenko and Giuliani began discussing the possibility that the Ukrainian prosecutor general could launch investigations into Trump’s enemies. He’d investigate Burisma (the Ukrainian natural gas company whose board included Hunter Biden) as well as purported Ukrainian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.
But Yovanovitch got in the way. When Lutsenko asked the US embassy to set up meetings with FBI or Justice Department officials, she objected, saying that’s not the typical way these things are handled. Instead, she encouraged him to meet with the FBI’s legal attaché in Kyiv. “I don’t think he really appreciated it,” she told investigators.
Solomon’s interview made a blockbuster (and false) assertion: Yovanovitch had given Lutsenko a “do-not-prosecute” list that included a founder of an anti-corruption group, Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAc). That group, according to Solomon, was funded by Hungarian-American billionaire (and conservative boogeyman) George Soros.
Solomon wrote that “the implied message to Ukraine’s prosecutors was clear: Don’t target AntAC in the middle of an America presidential election in which Soros was backing Hillary Clinton to succeed another Soros favorite, Barack Obama, Ukrainian officials said.”
But there was no “do-not-prosecute” list, which Lutsenko himself admitted a few weeks later. AntAc was funded by a host of entities, including donations from Ukrainian citizens and the European Union; the United States; the governments of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic; alongside the Open Society Foundations, a Soros-developed grantmaking group. Lutsenko didn’t spend time in prison in retaliation for his efforts against Russia — he was sent to prison for embezzlement and abuse of office, two years before Russia became making incursions into Ukraine.
And in other articles for the Hill, Solomon made more false assertions about perceived enemies of Trump.
And in other articles for the Hill, Solomon made more false assertions about perceived enemies of Trump.
Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in order to shut down an investigation into Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company whose board included Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. Those allegations were turned into a 30-second attack ad for the Trump campaign on Facebook, viewed more than five million times. But former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said that Biden’s demand for Shokin’s firing was not at all improper — and Biden was hardly alone in wanting Shokin, who was reportedly engaged in corrupt behavior, removed.
Solomon further wrote that a so-called black ledger that showed off-the-books payments made to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort by a pro-Russian political party — payments that resulted in Manafort’s resignation from the campaign — was fake. But that ledger is absolutely real.
In summary, Solomon falsely asserted that Democrats worked with Ukrainian officials to help spread falsehoods about Trump campaign officials and quash investigations into Joe Biden’s son, and that Yovanovitch had kept Ukrainian officials who might blow the whistle on the alleged scheme from entering the country. But none of that was true.
Solomon’s work relied heavily on information fed to him by Rudy Giuliani, who orchestrated, in the words of senior State Department official George Kent, a “campaign ... full of lies and incorrect information” aimed at getting rid of Yovanovitch by connecting her to George Soros and a conspiratorial effort to help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 election — a theory that former National Security Council official Fiona Hill told Congress earlier this month seemed based on the falsehood that “George Soros rules the world and, you know, basically controls everything.”
Giuliani sent a host of memos containing misinformation to Solomon. As Jeremy Peters and Kenneth Vogel of the New York Times detailed:
Quote:In an interview, Mr. Giuliani said he turned to Mr. Solomon earlier this year with a cache of information he believed contained damaging details about Mr. Biden, his son, Hunter Biden, and the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. “I really turned my stuff over to John Solomon,” Mr. Giuliani said. “I had no other choice,” he added, asserting that Obama-era officials still “infected” the Justice Department and wouldn’t have diligently investigated the information he had compiled.
“So I said here’s the way to do it — I’m going to give it to the watchdogs of integrity, the fourth estate,” he said.
Quote:about Mr. Biden, his son, Hunter Biden, and the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. “I really turned my stuff over to John Solomon,” Mr. Giuliani said. “I had no other choice,” he added, asserting that Obama-era officials still “infected” the Justice Department and wouldn’t have diligently investigated the information he had compiled.
“So I said here’s the way to do it — I’m going to give it to the watchdogs of integrity, the fourth estate,” he said.
Giuliani’s interest in smearing Yovanovitch centered on her refusal to permit a politically motivated investigation into the Bidens. But Giuliani also worked with two Ukrainian businessmen, Lev Parnas and his partner, Igor Fruman, to spread disinformation about Joe Biden and Yovanovitch, and they had motivations of their own.
As detailed by the New York Times in October, “Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman boasted that they had worked with Mr. Giuliani to force the recall this spring of the American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch,” partly because Parnas believed Yovanovitch was getting in the way of his work in the oil industry. (Both have recently been indicted on campaign finance charges.)
Remember that Solomon interview with Lutsenko, in which Lutsenko said that he had received a “do-not-prosecute” list from the American ambassador? Parnas set up the interview, and according to ProPublica, watched the interview from the control booth.
More concerningly, Solomon was introduced to Parnas by his personal attorneys, Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, who had worked with Giuliani previously and, according to Fox News, were helping the former New York City mayor “to get oppo research on Biden.
It was diGenova who was the source of the smear against Yovanovitch regarding her “anti-Trump” status, saying on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show in March, “The current United States ambassador Marie Yovanovitch has bad mouthed the president of the United States to Ukrainian officials and has told them not to listen or worry about Trump policy because he’s going to be impeached.” More recently, he’s claimed that George Soros controls a majority of the State Department.
When Solomon wrote that piece alleging that Yovanovitch had given Lutsenko a “do-not-prosecute” list, he sent a draft first, to three people: Parnas, diGenova, and Toensing.
As a result of investigations into the validity of Solomon’s work, Solomon’s columns were shifted from “news” to “opinion” in 2018. The editor-in-chief of the Hill announced Monday that his work is now being reviewed, “updated,” and in some cases, corrected by the paper’s staff. And members of Congress have decried his work as having “no veracity whatsoever.”
Seriously A1, you push complete and utter bullshit from sources that are totally unverified and in many cases debunked.
John Solomon is one of them.
You literally have no comprehension between facts and opinions. You pass opinion off as fact and argue that facts are not credible.
I can't count how many times I have now busted your ass for propaganda and lies but it's ridiculous. You strike me as a very gullible old man who believes ANYTHING he reads on the internet as long as it agrees with your own opinions of right and wrong.
But make no mistake, this whole debacle of Ukraine interfered in 2016 is horse shit nonsense coming from Trump's own team to distract you lemmings into thinking they didn't do it and it was all a hoax.
CLEARLY THEY HAVE YOU CONVINCED BUT IT DOESN'T MAKE IT TRUE.
God help us, save us from gullible Trump supporters before they destroy our country.
Yes. John Solomon. Award winning journalist.
Read his words ... look at his evidence.
You like attacking people. Attack his proof.
Durham is coming.
There was no PRINTED list.
There was a list of names given.
Keep watching.
Watch the biden video where he comes out and admits he told them “fire the prosecutor who is investigating Burisma or you lose the aid.
The evidence is clear that is exactly what happened.
Keep watching.
Quote: @SFVikeFan said:
Seriously A1, you push complete and utter bullshit from sources that are totally unverified and in many cases debunked.
John Solomon is one of them.
You literally have no comprehension between facts and opinions. You pass opinion off as fact and argue that facts are not credible.
I can't count how many times I have now busted your ass for propaganda and lies but it's ridiculous. You strike me as a very gullible old man who believes ANYTHING he reads on the internet as long as it agrees with your own opinions of right and wrong.
But make no mistake, this whole debacle of Ukraine interfered in 2016 is horse shit nonsense coming from Trump's own team to distract you lemmings into thinking they didn't do it and it was all a hoax.
CLEARLY THEY HAVE YOU CONVINCED BUT IT DOESN'T MAKE IT TRUE.
God help us, save us from gullible Trump supporters before they destroy our country.
what exactly are Trump supporters doing that is destroying the country? you may disagree with his sources, but what in your opinion is A1 doing that will destroy the country?
(heres a hint) Not a damn thing. A1 is not doing anything that will hurt this country any more than you are responsible for the shit the last president did to hurt the US. Lets try and keep some perspective in the discussion please? its that type of hyperbole that fuels the anger and hatred that is what will ultimately be responsible for destroying our country and boths sides media machines are what is feeding it.
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