Boomerang
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Remember the sainted Marie Yovanovich, the former ambassador to Ukraine, who bemoaned how she was recalled after decades of public service? The one who testified before the impeachment hearings. The one who said she knew nothing of Biden and Burisma?
Yeah, her:
During President Trump’s impeachment, former U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch testified to Congress that she knew little beyond an initial briefing and "press reports" about Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian natural gas firm that had hired Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and was dogged by a corruption investigation.
"It just wasn't a big deal," she declared under oath on Oct. 11, 2019.
But newly unearthed State Department memos obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show Yovanovitch's embassy in Kiev, including the ambassador herself, was engaged in several discussions and meetings about Burisma as the gas firm scrambled during the 2016 election and transition to settle a long-running corruption investigation and polish its image before President Trump took office.
The former ambassador, for example, was warned specifically via email from her deputy in September 2016, a full three years before she testified, that Burisma had hired a U.S. company with deep connections to Democrats called “Blue Star Strategies” in order to “rehabilitate the reputation” of the natural gas firm and that it put “Hunter Biden on its board,” according to memos.
In addition, the documents show that Yovanovitch met with a Burisma representative in her office at the U.S. embassy less than 45 days before President Trump took office, which she didn’t mention during her testimony.
The discussions about Burisma inside Yovanovitch’s embassy were so extensive, in fact, that they filled more than 160 pages of emails, memos and correspondence in fall 2016 alone, according to the State Department records obtained under FOIA by the conservative group Citizens United,” Just The News reported...
"These new records clearly don't support Ambassador Yovanovitch's testimony under oath during [Rep. Adam] Schiff's sham impeachment. Her sworn testimony must be investigated and scrutinized just like in the case of General [Michael] Flynn,” he said. “You can't have two sets of rules."
The impeachment hearings last fall, which focused on efforts by Trump and his lawyer Rudy Guiliani to find evidence inside Ukraine on the Bidens and Burisma and to remove Yovanovitch from her job as U.S. ambassador, included testimony from Yovanovitch herself.
During that deposition in October 2019 she made no mention of direct contact with Burisma representatives and instead suggested her knowledge about the company and its legal travails was limited mostly to a briefing she received in preparation for Senate confirmation as ambassador in summer 2016 and subsequent news media reports.
During a nationally televised impeachment hearing a month later in the House, Yovanovitch doubled down on her testimony that Burisma and Hunter Biden weren't on her radar when she took over as ambassador. "It was not a focus of what I was doing in that six-month period," she testified anew.
But the memos show Yovanovitch was informed that the criminal cases were actively being settled in fall 2016 and that Burisma and its founder Mykola Zlochevsky were trying to repair the company’s reputation with the U.S. Embassy.
Why, it's almost as though she lied to Congress.
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More on Marie Yovanovich: The "do not prosecute" list
Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko told Hill.TV's John Solomon in an interview that aired Wednesday that U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch gave him a do not prosecute list during their first meeting.
“Unfortunately, from the first meeting with the U.S. ambassador in Kiev, [Yovanovitch] gave me a list of people whom we should not prosecute,” Lutsenko, who took his post in 2016, told Hill.TV last week.
“My response of that is it is inadmissible. Nobody in this country, neither our president nor our parliament nor our ambassador, will stop me from prosecuting whether there is a crime,” he continued.
The State Department called Lutsenko's claim of receiving a do not prosecute list, "an outright fabrication."
Lee Zelden (R- TX) says there's a real question of perjury
"Because of Zeldin's good questioning, this is what we know," Solomon said. "She testified everything should know about Burisma and Hunter Biden came from a briefing before she went before the Senate to be confirmed and from press reports. Congressman Zeldin kept pressing her that you only know about press reports, she said yeah, that's all I remembered."
"It turns out she had meetings directly with Burisma representatives," Solomon reported. "She received letters, detailed letters from Burisma representatives detailing their efforts to get out from under a criminal investigation before Donald Trump became president. She didn't mention any of those and there's only two good options here, right? One, she falsely testified knowing that she had this context. The second to she didn't review her documents before she testified and it was a proceeding where we were removing the president of the United States possibly. Not a good situation for the hero of the hearings."
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I cannot help but feel there is one big fucking boot that's going to drop at some point.
You could replace The Spar Spangled Banner with The Liberty Bell, and prepare everybody for the inevitable foot from on high...
Link to video -
State Department to release memos detailing illegal social media monitoring of Americans
The State Department has agreed to release memos showing officials in its Kiev embassy illegally monitored 13 Americans' social media accounts during last year's Ukraine scandal, including President Trump's eldest son, Don Jr., and Fox News personalities Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Lou Dobbs, Just the News has learned.
The memos are being turned over to the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act, multiple sources confirmed Tuesday.
The memos will show that the U.S. embassy in Kiev, under then-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, began monitoring the social media accounts of the targets in March 2019 as early stories about the embassy's activities and Joe Biden's son Hunter emerged at The Hill newspaper (written by this reporter) and on Fox News, the sources said. This reporter was one of the 13 individuals on the list targeted, the sources said.
When the embassy sought help from the State Department in Washington to use a contractor called Crowd Tangle to continue the social media monitoring, it was advised the activities were "barred by federal law," an official familiar with the documents told Just the News. The embassy ceased the activities and asked for training about the issue, the official said.
While the released documents will have some information redacted, they will identify the 13 Americans whose accounts were targeted and confirm that some officials were aware of the monitoring, the officials said.
In addition to the Fox hosts, this reporter and the president's son, other figures whose social media were targeted include Trump lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton, radio host and former Trump White House adviser Seb Gorka, One America News personality Jack Posobiec, and Fox News personalities Sara Carter and Dan Bongino, the sources said.
The story doesn't really say why such monitoring was illegal. Social media is public information, and if someone posts, it's for public consumption.
