When Clinton became secretary of state in January 2009, her emails were hosted on her first private email server, which was an Apple computer (either an Apple Power Macintosh G4 or G5 tower). In March 2009, the server was replaced by a new one built by Clinton’s computer technician Bryan Pagliano. The old server was repurposed to serve as a personal computer and/or workstation for household staff at Clinton’s Chappaqua, New York, house.

At some unknown point in 2014, the data on this Apple computer is transferred to an Apple iMac computer. The hard drive of the old Apple computer is then discarded. Clinton’s emails from January 2009 until around March 18, 2009, are apparently lost as a result.

On October 14, 2015, Williams & Connolly, the law firm of Clinton’s personal lawyer David Kendall, tells the Justice Department that a review of the iMac was conducted, as requested by the Justice Department, and no emails were found belonging to Clinton from when she was secretary of state. The FBI will not directly examine the iMac. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

(…) Zelensky, accompanied by three other men in similar attire, thrusts, twirls, and even does a headstand in the raunchy get-up. The others are thought to be fellow actors Yevgeniy Koshevoy, Stepan Kazanin and Alexander Pikalov.

The four-piece perform saucy moves in the black-and-white video, not dissimilar to Beyoncé’s smash hit, “Single Ladies,” released in 2009.

The spoof music video appears to have been released in 2014, with a title on a YouTube clip saying, translated to English: “Cossacks Made in Ukraine, a parody of 2014.” (Read more: Newsweek, 3/04/2022)  (Archive)

Clinton attends a meeting with General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt and various business leaders on September 21, 2009. (Credit: public domain)

Clinton gives a private paid speech for General Electric. In it, she says that when she arrived at the State Department as secretary of state, employees “were not mostly permitted to have handheld devices. I mean, so you’re thinking how do we operate in this new environment dominated by technology, globalizing forces? We have to change, and I can’t expect people to change if I don’t try to model it and lead it.”

The comments will be flagged as potentially politically embarrassing by Tony Carrk, Clinton’s research director, due to Clinton’s daily use of a BlackBerry mobile device during the same time period. Although the comment is made in private, Carrk’s January 2016 email mentioning the quote will be made public by WikiLeaks in October 2016. (WikiLeaks, 10/7/2016)

“Non-profit humanitarian agency World Vision United States improperly transacted with the Islamic Relief Agency (ISRA) in 2014 with approval from the Obama administration, sending government funds to an organization that had been sanctioned over its ties to terrorism, according to a new report.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) recently released a report detailing the findings of an investigation his staff began in February 2019 into the relationship between World Vision and ISRA.

The probe found that World Vision was not aware that ISRA had been sanctioned by the U.S. since 2004 after funneling roughly $5 million to Maktab al-Khidamat, the predecessor to Al-Qaeda controlled by Osama Bid Laden.

However, that ignorance was born from insufficient vetting practices, the report said.

“World Vision works to help people in need across the world, and that work is admirable,” Grassley said in a statement. “Though it may not have known that ISRA was on the sanctions list or that it was listed because of its affiliation with terrorism, it should have. Ignorance can’t suffice as an excuse. World Vision’s changes in vetting practices are a good first step, and I look forward to its continued progress.”

The investigation was sparked by a July 2018 National Review article in which Sam Westrop, the director of the Middle East Forum’s Islamist Watch, detailed MEF’s findings that the Obama administration had approved a “$200,000 grant of taxpayer money to ISRA.”

Government officials specifically authorized the release of “at least $115,000” of this grant even after learning that it was a designated terror organization, Westrop wrote.

According to the Senate report, World Vision submitted a grant application to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to carry out its Blue Nile Recovery Program on January 21, 2014. The proposed program sought to provide food security, sanitation equipment, and health services to areas hard-hit by conflict in the Blue Nile region of Sudan.

USAID awarded World Vision a $723,405 grant for the program. The next month, ISRA agreed to provide humanitarian services to parts of the Blue Nile Region for World Vision, according to the report. The two organizations had also collaborated on several projects in 2013 and 2014.” (Read more: Yahoo!News, 12/29/2020)  (Archive)

A similar story:

August 2015 – General Flynn discusses his disagreement with the Obama administration (and Clinton) arming ISIL/ISIS in Syria

Hillary Clinton proudly accepts the 2016 nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, PA.. (Credit: Gage Skidmore/HuffPo)

(…) “In February 2014, Former President Clinton and Hillary Clinton announced their commitment to support the “Voter Expansion Project“, the new DNC initiative announced in the winter of 2013. Beyond a short blurb on NPR, this project and its relevance to the ever-unfolding events of Hillary Clinton’s failed second run for president remains largely unexamined.

The Clintons were central to the Voter Expansion Project, which the DNC officials believed would appeal to their donor base and that, in turn, “would help the Clintons raise money to help extinguish the DNC’s nearly $16 million in debt left from its 2012 effort to re-elect President Obama”. The Clintons pledged to help retire that debt, but as it turns out, they did not. Instead, according to Donna Brazile’s book excerpt published by Politico, they used this debt as an opportunity to exploit campaign financing laws and contractually take over the operations of the DNC in August 2015, a year prior to Hillary becoming the official DNC nominee for President. When Brazile audited the DNC books, she discovered former chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a staunch Clinton loyalist, continued to pay high retainer fees to consultants and firms siphoning money to people and organizations that displayed fealty to the Clintons or their neoliberal ideals.

Seth Rich (Credit: public domain)

What is important to note is the Clintons had their hands on the DNC voter data and likely began to plot Hillary’s state-by-state campaign strategy when they took over the Voter Expansion Project in February 2014. This directly contradicts her version of events that when she inherited the DNC as the nominee in late July 2016, “it was bankrupt, it was on the verge of insolvency, its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong.” And there wouldn’t have been anyone more knowledgeable about DNC data than the Voter Expansion Project’s Data Director, Seth Rich, but he was murdered on July 10, 2016, just two weeks before the DNC convention in Philly. The case still remains unsolved. Although Hillary Clinton continues to blame the condition of the DNC, in part, for her loss, none of this would prevent her from campaigning for Wasserman Schultz’s 2016 reelection bid, even after her forced resignation from the DNC, giving the appearance of “all’s good” crooked cronyism.

(…) “Despite two years of strategizing, hundreds of millions of dollars spent, the overwhelming support of liberal corporate media, and the manipulation of superdelegates, Hillary Clinton still lost to the worst candidate in U.S. history, Donald J. Trump.

When Donna Brazile’s explosive claims came out, Hillary Clinton had been enjoying her time “stumping”, as it were, to reinforce her false narrative of campaign events; all blame pointing outward – to Russia, Bernie, Seth’s data, to the DNC, to misogyny. Truth be told, Hillary Clinton is not a victim as she hopes we’ll believe, but a very wealthy, powerful, privileged woman who went to great lengths to rig the primary against Senator Bernie Sanders and to win the presidency at all costs, even at risk of a Trump presidency.” (Read more: Huffington Post, 11/07/17)

In the spring of 2013, Clinton aide Monica Hanley made a copy of all of Clinton’s emails on a MacBook laptop to make a safe back-up copy of them. Then she apparently forgot to do anything with it for nearly a full year.

The 2013 Apple MacBook Air Laptop (Credit: public domain)

In early 2014, Hanley finds the laptop where it has been stored at her personal residence. She attempts to transfer the archive of Clinton’s emails to Platte River Networks (PRN), the computer company which is managing Clinton’s private server by this time. She works with PRN employee Paul Combetta. After trying unsuccessfully to remotely transfer the emails to him, Hanley ships the laptop to his residence in February 2014. Combetta then transfers Clinton’s emails from the laptop onto Clinton’s private server.

This server already should contain all of Clinton’s old emails. But the server that existed when Hanley made the back-up in the spring of 2013 was replaced in June 2013 by a new server, so it is possible that some emails get transferred at the time didn’t get successfully transferred before.

Combetta transfers all of the Clinton email content to a personal Gmail email address he created. Then he downloads all the emails from the Gmail account to a mailbox on the new Clinton server. He will later tell the FBI that he used the Gmail as a middle step because he had format compatibility issues.

Hanley will later tell the FBI that she recommended that PRN wipe the laptop after the emails were transferred to the server. (“Wiping” means repeatedly overwriting the data so it can never be recovered.) However, Combetta will tell the FBI that once the transfer was done, he deleted the emails from the laptop but didn’t do any wiping. He also deleted the emails uploaded to the Gmail account.

According to the FBI’s final report, Combetta then ships the laptop to a person whose name will later be redacted, but works on Clinton’s staff in some capacity. He ships it through the mail, using United States Postal Service (USPS) or United Parcel Service (UPS). The unnamed Clinton staffer will later tell the FBI that she never received the laptop. She will say that Clinton’s staff was moving offices at the time, and it would have been easy for the package to get lost during the transition period.

According to Combetta’s September 2015 FBI interview, he “shipped the foregoing MacBook back to [redacted], but recalled nothing about the return shipment.” That would presumably mean he shipped it back to Hanley, since she shipped it to him. But in Hanley’s January 2016 interview, she will claim to have asked another woman (whose name is redacted) if they ever received laptop and were told they did not. Thus it would appear Combetta and Hanley will have different accounts of who is sent the laptop.

The laptop is apparently permanently lost. However, some of Clinton’s emails will somehow be recovered from the Gmail account in 2016, even though they were all deleted. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016) (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/23/2016)

(…) “On or shortly before Feb. 4, 2014, Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs in the Obama State Department, had a conversation with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, which was intercepted and leaked.

In the call, Nuland and Pyatt appeared to be discussing the ouster of Yanukovych and the installation of opposition leader Arseniy Yatsenyuk as prime minister.

Nuland favored opposition leader Yatsenyuk over his main rivals Vitali Klitschko and Oleh Tyahnybok, telling Pyatt: “I think Yats is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience. He’s the … what he needs is Klitschko and Tyahnybok on the outside.”

Toward the end of the conversation, then-Vice President Biden was discussed as being willing to help cement the changeover in Ukraine:

Geoffrey Pyatt: “We want to try to get somebody with an international personality to come out here and help to midwife this thing. The other issue is some kind of outreach to Yanukovych, but we probably regroup on that tomorrow as we see how things start to fall into place.”

Victoria Nuland: “So, on that piece Geoff, when I wrote the note [Biden’s national security adviser Jake] Sullivan’s come back to me VFR [direct to me], saying you need Biden, and I said probably tomorrow for an atta-boy and to get the deets [details] to stick. So Biden’s willing.”

Nuland and Pyatt met with Ukrainian opposition leaders Klitschko and Yatsenyuk, along with then-President Yanukovych, just days later on Feb. 7, 2014.

Events then moved swiftly. On Feb. 22, 2014, Yanukovych was removed as president of Ukraine and fled to Russia. On Feb. 27, 2014, Yatsenyuk, the candidate favored by Nuland, was installed as prime minister of Ukraine. Klitschko was left out. Notably, Yatsenyuk would later resign in April 2016 amid corruption accusations. (Read more: The Epoch Times, 4/26/2019)

ON EDIT: On May 26, 2022 , YouTube began removing all copies of this infamous video clip so I’m assuming the one posted here is not going to last much longer. Here is a full copy of the clip that is not on YouTube.

LEAKED 2014 Nuland/Pyatt Phone Call Planning Coup in Ukraine – powered by sovren.media

Full text:
United States versus Mark Turiy/Turi Defense Group. 2014 Federal indictment is a must read to figure out Benghazi.

The weapons provided to alkadian Tobruq, Libya was the remainder of the fast and furious weapons not given to the Mexican cartel.

25% of the weapons were given to the cartel as payment for shipping the remainder of the weapons to be stored in Bulgaria before being delivered to Libya on 12 il-76 aircraft. That delivery occurred March 30th 2011. On the same day Hillary Clinton got an email with Christopher Stevens eulogy and memorial. FYI Warren Christopher was already in the ground for a month when this email was sent so it did not refer to him.

United States versus Mark Turiy/Turi Defense Group. 2014 Federal indictment is a must read to figure out Benghazi.
The weapons provided to alkadian Tobruq, Libya was the remainder of the fast and furious weapons not given to the Mexican cartel.
25% of the weapons were given to…

— The Novice (@Andsing49) February 28, 2024

There are also emails and travel itineraries to look at via https://t.co/CL7QYcesNf as well.https://t.co/p06Lh6NwMihttps://t.co/cb6vFcTLdn

— The Novice (@Andsing49) February 29, 2024

https://t.co/h9LTJUvgag

— The Novice (@Andsing49) February 29, 2024

(Credit: The Daily Beast/Getty Images)

“After a star-studded gala in February 2014, Bill Clinton and his entourage headed to a vegan restaurant in Los Angeles for an intimate dinner with friends.

Producer Steve Bing—Clinton’s friend, major Democratic donor and investor in the restaurant who died by suicide this year—was already there waiting for the former president.

(…) Former Clinton staffers Ben Schwerin, a future Snapchat executive, and then-talent agent Michael Kives were also invited to the swanky soiree.

But two other unlikely guests joined the party that night: British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell—accused of procuring underage girls for sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein—and tech CEO Scott Borgerson, now rumored to be her husband.

(…) According to information obtained by The Daily Beast, Clinton’s advance team secured seating for the invitees and specifically noted Maxwell and someone named “Scott” had RSVP’d for the Thursday gathering.

Multiple sources with knowledge of the situation say aides had squabbled over Maxwell’s invitation beforehand due to her links to Epstein. Even to this day, Clinton insiders continue to point fingers over who should be blamed for Maxwell’s addition to the event.

The sources told The Daily Beast that longtime Clinton gatekeeper Doug Band cut Maxwell out of the president’s network in 2011 before he left Clinton’s employ the following year. (Band flew on Epstein’s private jet, including for Clinton’s 2002 humanitarian trip to Africa, and was listed in Epstein’s Little Black Book.)

Information obtained by The Daily Beast indicates Jon Davidson, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, knew Maxwell was attending the 2014 dinner, which he helped to organize. Davidson did not return messages seeking comment.

“This is an intimate dinner with Clinton in L.A.,” said one source who was disturbed by the decision. “Think of all the people he knows in L.A., and Ghislaine gets to attend.

(…) By the time of the Crossroads dinner, the press had widely reported on Epstein’s abuse of girls at his mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, and lawsuits filed by victims of his trafficking scheme.” (Read more: The Daily Beast, 9/22/2020)  (Archive)

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce head office in Toronto, Ontario (Credit: public domain)

(…)”Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and TD Bank—two of the Keystone XL pipeline’s largest investors—fully or partially bankrolled eight Hillary Clinton speeches that “put more than $1.6 million in the Democratic candidate’s pocket,”

(…) “Clinton’s first swing through Canada started on March 5, 2014, with a speech that cost the Vancouver Board of Trade $275,500. While Clinton’s financial disclosure form reported the board as the payer, an invite to the event also lists “presenting sponsors” as TD Bank and Vancouver City Savings Credit Union. Following her speech, Clinton participated in a question-and-answer session hosted by TD Bank Deputy Chairman Frank McKenna.

Frank McKenna (Credit: Wikipedia)

The next day in Calgary, Clinton gave another speech reportedly paid for by tinePublic at a cost of $225,500. McKenna also came along to interview her after the speech. Martin confirmed that TD Bank also sponsored this speech.

In June, Clinton gave a speech in Toronto for a price of $150,000. The primary sponsor was TD Bank, according to an invite. Other sponsors included the Canadian Club of Toronto, Blakes Lawyers, KPMG and the Real Estate Investment Network. For the third time, McKenna interviewed Clinton after the speech.

Clinton went west to the city of Edmonton on June 18 to give another tinePublic-paid speech for a $100,000 price. The chief sponsor of this speech, according to the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce, was CIBC. Victor Dodig, then senior executive vice president at CIBC, interviewed Clinton on stage after her remarks.

On Oct. 6, 2014, Clinton traveled up north again to speak at a meeting hosted by the liberal think tank Canada 2020. CIBC, which is also a funder of Canada 2020, was the primary sponsor of this $215,500 speech, according to a Canada 2020 web page for the event. Lesser sponsors included Air Canada, the Canadian Real Estate Association, Johnson & Johnson, Ernst & Young, Stampede Group and Telus. Again, Dodig, by then promoted to president and CEO, handled the Q&A session.

Over a span of two days in January, Clinton gave three more speeches — one directly paid for by CIBC and two paid by tinePublic, but sponsored by CIBC. On Jan. 21, she spoke in Winnipeg for $262,000 and then Saskatoon for $262,500. The next day she spoke at that CIBC event in Whistler for $150,000 — the only speech directly reported on her financial disclosure form as having been paid for by a Canadian bank. Dodig pitched questions to Clinton after each of these three speeches.

CIBC and TD Bank both have large energy portfolios and have pushed for the U.S. government to approve final construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would link the Canadian oil sands in Alberta through the middle of the United States to Texas and the Gulf of Mexico.” (Read more: Huffington Post, 5/31/2015)

Ukraine Gold

(…)  “…one place where any serious probe can start is with a story we wrote in March 2014, when citing a local media report, we shone light on a mysterious operation in which a substantial portion of Ukraine’s gold reserves were loaded onboard an unmarked plane, and flown to the US, just weeks after the February 2014 revolution. From the source, March 7, 2014:

Tonight, around at 2:00 am, an unregistered transport plane took off took off from Boryspil airport.

According to Boryspil staff, prior to the plane’s appearance, four trucks and two cargo minibuses arrived at the airport all with their license plates missing. Fifteen people in black uniforms, masks and body armor stepped out, some armed with machine guns. These people loaded the plane with more than forty heavy boxes.

After this, several mysterious men arrived and also entered the plane. The loading was carried out in a hurry. After unloading, the plateless cars immediately left the runway, and the plane took off on an emergency basis.

Airport officials who saw this mysterious “special operation” immediately notified the administration of the airport, which however strongly advised them “not to meddle in other people’s business.”

Later, the editors were called by one of the senior officials of the former Ministry of Income and Fees, who reported that, according to him, tonight on the orders of one of the “new leaders” of Ukraine, all the gold reserves of the Ukraine were taken to the United States.

Needless to say, there was no official confirmation of any of this taking place, and in fact, our report in which we mused if the “price of Ukraine’s liberation” was the handover of Ukraine’s gold to the Fed at a time when Germany was actively seeking to repatriate its own physical gold located at the bedrock of the NY Fed, led to the usual mainstream media mockery.

But then everything changed in November 2014, when in an interview on Ukraine TV, none other than the then-head of the Ukraine Central Bank, Valeriya Gontareva (who became head of the Ukraine central bank in June 2014 when she replaced Stepan Kubiv and also presided over the nationalization of Kolomoiski’s PrivateBank in December 2016), made the stunning admission that “in the vaults of the central bank there is almost no gold left. There is a small amount of gold bullion left, but it’s just 1% of reserves.”

As Ukraina reported at the time, this stunning revelation means that not only has Ukraine been quietly depleting its gold throughout the year, but that the latest official number, according to which Ukraine gold was 8 times greater than the reported 1%, was fabricated, and that the real number is about 90% lower.

According to official statistics the NBU, the amount of gold in the vaults should be eight times more than is actually in stock. At the beginning of this month, the volume of gold was about $ 1 billion, or 8% of the total gold reserves. Now this is just one percent.

Assuming Gonaterva’s admission was true, it would imply that the official reserve data at the Central Bank was clearly fabricated, prompting questions about just how long ago the actual gold “displacement” took place. Could it have been during a cold night in March when “more than 40 heavy boxes” full of gold were loaded up on the plane and flown off to an unknown destination in the US?

To help out in this puzzle, we got some additional information from Rusila, which in Nov 2014 reported that “Ukraine’s gold reserves disappeared.”

According to recent data, the value of Ukraine gold should be $988.7 million. That is the value of gold proportion of gold in gold reserves is 8%. If you believe Gontareva, it turns out there is a mere $123.6 million in gold remaining. The figure is fantastic, considering that the amount of gold at the end of February (when the new authorities have already taken key positions) was $1.8 billion or 12% of the reserves.

In other words, since the beginning of the year gold reserves dropped almost 16 times. Gold stock in February were approximately 21 tons of gold, the presence of which was once proudly reported by Sergei Arbuzov, who led the NBU in 2010-2012. So what happened to 20.8 tons of gold?

Explaining the dramatic reduction in the context of the hryvnia devaluation through gold sales is impossible. After all, 92% of the reserves of the National Bank is in the form of a foreign currency that is much easier to use to maintain hryvnia levels and cover current liabilities. Besides since March the international price of gold has plummeted. Selling gold under such circumstances is a crime. In fact it would be more expedient to increase gold reserves through currency conversion in precious metals.

But apparently the result is not due to someone’s negligence or carelessness. The gold reserve has been actively carted out of the country, as a result of the very vague economic and political prospects of Ukraine. Something similar happened to the gold reserves of the USSR – when the Gorbachev elite realized that perestroika is leading the country to the abyss, gold simply disappeared in an unknown direction.

Oddly enough there was no official gold reduction just prior to the time when Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland was planning Yanukovich’s ouster, and as shown above, quite the contrary: Ukraine’s gold pile was increasing with every passing year… until it collapsed in early 2014. It is a little odder that it was during the period when Ukraine was “supported” by its western allies that several billion dollars worth of physical gold – the people’s gold – just “vaporized.”

Which brings us to the $1.8 billion question: what happened to Ukraine’s gold, because if the now-former central banker’s story is accurate, that’s roughly the amount of gold that quietly left the country just days after the US-backed presidential coup. And, it is also roughly how much taxpayer-funded Ukraine aid, procured by Joe Biden while his son was working at Burisma, is now missing.

At this point, there are certainly many pressing questions but one stands out: was the real “quid pro quo” not one of Trump holding up payments to Kiev in exchange for a probe of Biden – which after reading all of the above is more than warranted – but if the quo, namely US support for regime change in Ukraine and almost two billion in now missing taxpayer funds which ended up in an oligarch’s bank and mysteriously “vaporized” but not before said oligarch hired the son of the US vice president, wasn’t the quid to some 40 tons of Ukraine leaving forever to an unknown destination in the US.

We hope that Trump’s second term will provide ample time and opportunity to answer this critical question, and just to set off investigators on the right track, we believe that any investigation should begin with the former central bank head, Gontareva, who he also fled to London where she now lives in self-appointed exile and where she now “fears for her life” after one of her homes near Kiev was badly damaged in an arson attack and was also injured in August when she was knocked down by a car in London. Failing that, one can always check the flight manifests and the cargo contents of all planes that left Ukraine and arrived in the US on March 7, 2014, with a cargo consisting of billions of dollars in gold…” (Read more: Zero Hedge, 2/08/2020)  (Archive)

“Ukrainian government and commercial interests are lobbying the US Government to support a stealth sanction against VSMPO-AVISMA, the Russian supplier of titanium to Boeing and other US aerospace companies. Instead of VSMPO, the Ukrainians are seeking US government financing for the establishment of new high-grade titanium production lines at Zaporizhye Titanium and Magnesium Combine (ZTMC), and expansion of Ukrainian titanium exports to the US.

U.S. Department of Commerce (Credit: public domain)

This week, a confidential message from the US Department of Commerce revealed that “in recent meetings with U.S. Department of Commerce officials, the GOU [Government of Ukraine] expressed that it would like to have U.S. companies involved in the development of the titanium resources in Ukraine. The Commerce Department is, of course, very interested in encouraging the involvement of all U.S. companies in all relevant sectors given such an opportunity, and we are inviting input from industry regarding this topic.”

(…) The US Department of Justice indictment of Dmitry Firtash for alleged bribery in the titanium trade, unsealed at the time of his arrest in Vienna on March 12, 2014, followed by moves announced last week by the Kiev government to strip Firtash of his Ukrainian titanium production assets, are a coincidence, according to US sources.

The investment required to replace Firtash and substitute Ukrainian titanium sponge for VSMPO in the US market has been estimated at more than $110 million for new metal production facilities and up to $2.5 billion for expansion of both downstream production and upstream titanium mining in Ukraine. The asset confiscation plan initiated by US prosecutors against Firtash has been estimated to total $500 million. The value of VSMPO’s direct exports to the US in 2013 was $380.2 million, 24% of its sales revenue for the year.

With this much at stake in forcing the Russians out of the titanium market, industry and government sources in the US have been leaking to the local press that they suspect Boeing and other US consumers of Russian titanium of anticipating the US-Ukrainian scheme by secretly accelerating deliveries to the US and stockpiling the Russian metal there.

(…) On September 15, the Kremlin advisor for economic policy, Victor Belousov, warned publicly that if the US and EU kept escalating sanctions aimed at damaging the Russian economy, a counter-sanction order might follow from Moscow to halt deliveries of titanium to the US and Europe.

There has been no official acknowledgement or press report that while this war of words was going on, the Ukrainian government was making a concerted effort to win US commitments for their scheme for an alternative flow of Ukrainian titanium to the US. The effort has been confirmed by sources in Washington and Kiev.

Independent industry sources in the UK say they have not heard of the Ukrainian scheme. They also doubt its feasibility. An October 2013 study by Philip Dewhurst and Pedro Palma of the Roskill Consulting Group suggests that at present Ukraine lacks the production capacity to increase output of titanium sponge or substitute for Russian titanium in the US market. After three past years of rising production worldwide, they also noted that there is now a surplus of titanium in relation to demand, and little incentive for investors to pay to build new Ukrainian production lines.

Dewhurst of Roskill says: “I can’t imagine the US has any great interest in Ukrainian sponge production. There are several [other] reliable sources of high grade sponge. Current Ukrainian sponge is regarded as too low grade for aerospace use and little unwrought titanium (1,359 tonnes in 2013 – 7.7% of the total) is imported into the USA.”

ZTMC, the sole Ukrainian producer of sponge, is located in the Zaporozhye region of eastern Ukraine. Since December 2012 ZTMC (below left) has been controlled by Firtash (centre), who won a privatization administered by the former President Victor Yanukovich (right). Here’s the company’s announcement. The company website reports that as part of his privatization agreement with Yanukovich, Firtash promised to invest in building 40,000 tonnes of additional sponge capacity. By the time of Yanukovich’s downfall, and Firtash’s arrest in March, he had not made good on the promise.

The US indictment alleges that Firtash and five accomplices conspired to bribe Indian state and federal government officials to agree to a mining and refining venture in Andhra Pradesh state. The alleged corruption began in April 2006. In February 2007 Boeing signed a memorandum of understanding with Firtash to buy the titanium from the Indian project; Boeing was to be the biggest of the off-takers in what Firtash estimated to be $500 million in annual sales. Altogether, US prosecutors claim that $18.6 million in bribes were paid, starting in April of 2006 and concluding four years later, in July of 2010.

It took the American investigators another two years before a grand jury issued its charges, based in part on what Boeing admitted about its part in the Firtash plan. That was in January 2012. In the Justice Department press release of April 2, 2014, it is claimed that the federal court in Chicago took eighteen months before issuing a secret indictment in June 2013. Another ten months were to pass before the indictment was unsealed, and the US prosecutors asked their Austrian counterparts to pick Firtash up on an extradition warrant. The Justice Department press release quotes the FBI agent in charge of the Firtash case as saying: “This case is another example of the FBI’s willingness to aggressively investigate corrupt conduct around the globe.” The evidence of the paperwork reveals that even if the FBI agents had been aggressive, there had been an unusual delay in pursuing Firtash.

The acting assistant attorney-general on the case in Washington, David O’Neil, claimed: “the charges against six foreign nationals announced today send the unmistakable message that we will root out and attack foreign bribery and bring to justice those who improperly influence foreign officials, wherever we find them.” Wherever wasn’t the word for it, for the Ukraine had been off limits while Yanukovich was in power. London, where Firtash met British intelligence and Foreign Office officials on February 24, after Yanukovich had been deposed, was also off limits for the US agents.

The American aggressiveness on the subject of titanium has found its echo in Ukraine. In mid-July, Igor Kolomoisky, the governor of Dniepropetrovsk, began a public campaign for the government in Kiev to renationalize Firtash’s assets, including ZTMC. Kolomoisky alleged that the privatization process had been rigged illegally and that members of Yanukovich’s family had been hidden beneficiaries.

Last week, the Ministry of Economy in Kiev launched a legal process to recover control of two mining complexes, Irshansky in Zhitomyr region and Volnogorskiy in Dniepropetrovsk. Without their ore concentrates to refine, Ukrainian industry sources say it is only a matter of time before ZTMC stops operating, or else Firtash’s control is removed. “The government has started to build a new titanium vertical,” reported a Ukrainian publication last Sunday.

Ukrainian officials had discussed the plan of renationalization of Firtash’s titanium mine and refining assets in advance. The European Union trade office and the Office of Materials Industries at the Commerce Department in Washington then sent U.S. titanium industry executives a note, saying the Ukrainian Government had “terminated the lease contract for two titanium mining and enrichment plants in the Zhytomyr and Dnipropetrovsk regions of Ukraine. They are now state-owned mining assets. In recent meetings with U.S. Department of Commerce officials, the GOU expressed that it would like to have U.S. companies involved in the development of the titanium resources in Ukraine. The Commerce Department is, of course, very interested in encouraging the involvement of all U.S. companies in all relevant sectors given such an opportunity, and we are inviting input from industry regarding this topic.” (Read more: John Helmer, 9/17/2014)  (Archive)

(Republished in part with permission)

“Two years after leaving office, Joe Biden couldn’t resist the temptation last year to brag to an audience of foreign policy specialists about the time as vice president that he strong-armed Ukraine into firing its top prosecutor.

In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recalled telling Poroshenko.

“Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations event, insisting that President Obama was in on the threat.

Interviews with a half-dozen senior Ukrainian officials confirm Biden’s account, though they claim the pressure was applied over several months in late 2015 and early 2016, not just six hours of one dramatic day. Whatever the case, Poroshenko and Ukraine’s parliament obliged by ending Shokin’s tenure as prosecutor. Shokin was facing steep criticism in Ukraine, and among some U.S. officials, for not bringing enough corruption prosecutions when he was fired.

But Ukrainian officials tell me there was one crucial piece of information that Biden must have known but didn’t mention to his audience: The prosecutor he got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Biden’s younger son, Hunter, as a board member [in April 2014].

U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden’s American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts — usually more than $166,000 a month — from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia.

Joe Biden’s last visit to Kiev, January 17, 2017. (Credit: Genya Savilov/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)

The general prosecutor’s official file for the Burisma probe — shared with me by senior Ukrainian officials — shows prosecutors identified Hunter Biden, business partner Devon Archer and their firm, Rosemont Seneca, as potential recipients of money.

Shokin told me in written answers to questions that, before he was fired as general prosecutor, he had made “specific plans” for the investigation that “included interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.”

He added: “I would like to emphasize the fact that presumption of innocence is a principle in Ukraine” and that he couldn’t describe the evidence further.” (Read more: The Hill, 4/01/2019)

Mykola Zlochevsky (Credit: Energy Security For the Future)

“In the spring of 2014, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office opened an investigation at the behest of the UK prosecutors office, which was investigating money laundering allegations against Zlochevsky and had just frozen $23.5 million in assets allegedly belonging to him in early April 2014. Shokin, who wasn’t appointed as general prosecutor until February 2015, wasn’t yet involved in the case.

Ukrainian prosecutors refused to provide the UK with needed documents, and in January 2015, a British court ordered the assets unfrozen. This action was pointedly called out in a speech by Pyatt, who stated, “In the case of former Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky, the UK authorities had seized $23 million in illicit assets that belonged to the Ukrainian people.”

Instead of receiving cooperation from Ukrainian prosecutors, they “sent letters to Zlochevsky’s attorneys attesting that there was no case against him. As a result, the money was freed by the UK court, and shortly thereafter the money was moved to Cyprus.”

Viktor Shokin (Credit: public domain)

On Feb. 10, 2015, Shokin was appointed prosecutor general of Ukraine, and he picked up the investigation into Burisma, which reportedly continued until his formal resignation in February 2016.

Around the same time that Zlochevsky’s assets were being frozen in the UK, Burisma appointed Hunter Biden to its board on April 18, 2014. Hunter’s compensation had never been disclosed by Burisma, which is a private company, but Ryan Toohey, a Burisma spokesman, told The New York Times that Biden’s compensation was “not out of the ordinary” for similar board positions.

However, according to The Hill’s reporting, Hunter Biden’s firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners, was receiving regular payments—“usually more than $166,000 a month”—from Burisma. The payments ran from the spring of 2014 through the fall of 2015 and reportedly totaled more than $3 million.

The Hill article included a written answer from Shokin, who told Solomon that his investigation into Burisma had included plans for “interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.”

Yuriy Lutsenko (Credit: Reuters)

According to Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, following Shokin’s forced dismissal, the Burisma investigation was transferred to Sytnyk’s NABU, which then reportedly closed the investigation sometime in 2016.

The Kyiv Post on March 27 published an editorial written by three members of the Anti-Corruption Action Center in Kyiv that disputed Lutsenko’s interview with The Hill. They claim that two cases relating to Burisma are still being investigated by NABU:

“Two cases regarding the extraction of licenses by Zlochevsky’s companies and embezzlement of public funds at the ministry’s procurements during Zlochevsky’s Ministerial tenure remain active and are investigated by NABU.”

They also claim that “none of the criminal proceedings against Burisma were closed by NABU.” They acknowledged that the case concerning illegal issuance of licenses to extract natural resources were transferred to NABU in December 2015, but claim that SAP missed procedural deadlines for a lawsuit on canceling those licenses.

The politics within Ukraine are extremely complicated, and corruption is endemic, often leading to conflicting accounts of events. (Read more: The Epoch Times, 4/26/2019)

The State Department misplaced and lost some $6 billion due to the improper filing of contracts during the past six years, mainly during the tenure of former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, according to a newly released Inspector General report.

The $6 billion in unaccounted funds poses a “significant financial risk and demonstrates a lack of internal control over the Department’s contract actions,” according to the report.

The alert, originally sent on March 20 and just released this week, warns that the missing contracting funds “could expose the department to substantial financial losses.”

The report centered on State Department contracts worth “more than $6 billion in which contract files were incomplete or could not be located at all,” according to the alert.

“The failure to maintain contract files adequately creates significant financial risk and demonstrates a lack of internal control over the Department’s contract actions,” the alert states.

The situation “creates conditions conducive to fraud, as corrupt individuals may attempt to conceal evidence of illicit behavior by omitting key documents from the contract file,” the report concluded.

The State Department’s inability to properly file its paperwork is causing most of the losses, according to the report.

The IG “found repeated examples of poor contract file administration” over the years, the report said.

Contracts related to the U.S. war in Iraq, for instance, could not be produced in 33 out of 115 instances, according to the report.” (Read more: Washington Times, 4/04/2014)  (Archive)

“In the weeks before he landed a deal with a Ukrainian gas company in 2014, Hunter Biden strategized with his business partner on how to leverage an upcoming official trip to Kiev by his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to clinch the lucrative arrangement, according to emails obtained a year ago by the FBI.

The communications reviewed by Just the News show that the younger Biden referred to his father as “my guy” and took credit for “adding value” because the vice president made comments to Ukrainian leaders about natural gas production that might benefit his new client.

The memos also show how Hunter Biden pressed to get Burisma Holdings to sign some sort of consulting deal with him and his business partner Devon Archer before the U.S. vice president visited Ukraine on April 21-22, 2014.

“The contract should begin now — not after the upcoming visit of my guy,” Hunter Biden wrote Archer in a detailed strategy email on April 13, 2014, a week before his father’s high-profile visit.

The memo shows Hunter Biden already knew he was going to be appointed to Burisma’s board along with Archer in mid-April 2014 — a month before it was announced — and that he also wanted Burisma to pay an additional consulting fee to him or his law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, referred to in the emails as “BSF.”

The deal with Burisma “should include a retainer in the range of 25k p/m w/ additional fees where appropriate for more in depth work to go to BSF for our protection,” Hunter Biden wrote. “Complete separate from our respective deals re board participation.” (Read more: Just the News, 12/23/2020)  (Archive)

(Credit: New York Post)

“Hunter Biden discussed leveraging his connection to his father in a bid to boost his pay from a Ukrainian natural gas company, according to an email he sent around the time he joined the firm’s corporate board.

In a lengthy memo to his then-business partner, Devon Archer, who already sat on the Burisma board, Biden repeatedly mentioned “my guy” while apparently referring to then-Vice President Joe Biden.

Under President Barack Obama, the elder Biden was the point person for US policy toward Ukraine, and he held a press conference there with Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk on April 22, 2014.

Hunter Biden’s email to Archer is dated a little more than a week earlier.

“The announcement of my guys [sic] upcoming travels should be characterized as part of our advice and thinking- but what he will say and do is out of our hands,” Hunter Biden wrote on April 13, 2014.

“In other words it could be a really good thing or it could end up creating too great an expectation. We need to temper expectations regarding that visit.”

The email, labeled from Robert Biden — Hunter’s first name — is among a trove of messages, documents, photos and videos purportedly recovered from a MacBook Pro laptop that a Delaware computer shop owner told The Post was brought in for repair in April 2019 and never picked up. (Read more: New York Post, 10/14/2020)  (Archive)

“Previously unseen e-mails on Hunter Biden’s “Hard Drive from Hell” point to never-before-seen evidence of involvement by Joe Biden in his son’s lucrative business dealings in Ukraine with natural gas conglomerate Burisma Holdings, The National Pulse can exclusively reveal.

In a previously unreported email reviewed by The National Pulse, Rosemont Seneca Partners employee Joan K. Peugh advises Hunter Biden – who is addressed by his given name, Robert – that he is scheduled for a White House meeting on April 16th, 2014.

Prior to today, it was known that Devon Archer had attended the meeting in the West Wing, and corporate media outlets excused the matter as an “art project” discussion. Today, that version of events ends.

Just days after this meeting, then Vice President Joe Biden visited Ukraine, and both Hunter and Archer would start receiving whopping checks from energy company Burisma, an industry in which they had zero experience.

Hunter Biden recently admitted the previously dismissed “hard drive from hell” actually “could” be his.

The line item of the e-mail, itself dated April 15th 2014, reads: “1115AM- Meet Devon and Luke @ Peet’s Coffee and head to WH (Jamie Lyons is ####### if anything comes up).”

Lyons, at the time, was an assistant to Joe Biden’s chief of staff Steve Richetti, which indicates attention by the Vice President himself into the visit of the two soon-to-be Burisma board members.

Significantly, this April 16th meeting occurred only five days before Joe Biden took his second vice presidential trip to Ukraine to deliver a substantial package of assistance to Ukraine, including energy security, some of which directly benefitted the company – Burisma – which would simultaneously start fattening his son’s wallet.” (Read more: The National Pulse, 4/07/2021)  (Archive)

(…) In April, Biden would get personally involved, as would his son, Hunter. On April 18, 2014, Hunter Biden was appointed to the board of directors for Burisma–one of the largest natural gas companies in Ukraine.

VP Joe Biden addresses the Ukrainian parliament, April 22, 2014. (Credit: The Associated Press)

Four days later, on April 22, 2014, Vice President Biden traveled to Ukraine, offering his political support and $50 million in aid for Yatsenyuk’s shaky new government. Poroshenko, a billionaire politician, was elected as president of Ukraine on May 25, 2014.

Biden became close to both men and helped Ukraine obtain a four-year, $17.5 billion IMF package in March 2015.

In October 2016, Foreign Policy wrote a lengthy article, “What Will Ukraine Do Without Uncle Joe,” which described Biden’s role in the removal of Ukraine’s general prosecutor, Victor Shokin. Shokin, the choice of Poroshenko, was portrayed as fumbling a major corruption case and “hindering an investigation into two high-ranking state prosecutors arrested on corruption charges.”

The United States pushed for Shokin’s removal, and Biden led the effort by personally threatening to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees. In an interview with The Atlantic, Biden recalled telling Poroshenko: “Petro, you’re not getting your billion dollars. It’s OK, you can keep the [prosecutor] general. Just understand—we’re not paying if you do.” Shokin was removed by Poroshenko shortly thereafter, in early 2016.

But according to reporting by The Hill, at the time of his firing, Shokin had been investigating Burisma. Shokin’s investigation into Burisma had previously been disclosed in June 2017, by Front News International.

Burisma is owned by Nikolai Zlochevsky (also known as Mykola Zlochevsky), the former minister of ecology for Ukraine. According to Front News, Zlochevsky issued a “special permit for the extraction of a third of the gas produced in Ukraine” to his own company, Burisma.

According to the Ukrainian nonprofit Anti Corruption Action Center, Zlochevsky owns 38 permits held by 14 different companies—with Burisma accounting for the majority with 33 of the permits. Zlochevsky left Ukraine after Yanukovych fled to Russia during the Ukrainian Revolution known as Euromaidan.” (Read more: The Epoch Times, 4/26/2019)

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. told members of Ukraine’s parliament that the United States was ready to support them in securing a unified Ukraine but warned against the “cancer of corruption.” 

WikiLeaks email from Hillary’s campaign saying “It’s out there.”

Tony Podesta lobbied #UraniumOne when Clinton was Secretary of State. pic.twitter.com/8UHOZHYVG0

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) October 30, 2017

The Daily Caller article  linked and highlighted above:

Chalk it up to a small world or to a tangled web, but Uranium One, the Russian-owned uranium mining company at the center of a recent scandal involving the Clintons and a close Canadian business partner, has lobbied the State Department through a firm co-founded by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign chairman.

Senate records show that The Podesta Group has lobbied the State Department on behalf of Uranium One — once in 2012, when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, and once in 2015.

Uranium One paid The Podesta Group $40,000 to lobby the State Department, the Senate, the National Park Service and the National Security Council for “international mining projects,” according to a July 20, 2012 filing.

(Credit: Open Secrets)

 

Clinton left the State Department on Feb. 1, 2013.

And according to a disclosure filed April 20, Uranium One spent $20,000 lobbying the Senate and State Department on the same issue.

The Podesta Group was founded in 1988 by brothers Tony and John Podesta. Tony Podesta now heads the group while John Podesta, who has not worked for the family business for years but has been involved in plenty of other projects, leads Hillary Clinton toward a Democratic nomination.

Uranium One is significant because it fell under the corporate control of Rosatom, Russia’s atomic energy agency, through a series of transactions approved by Hillary Clinton’s State Department. Rosatom’s acquisition of Uranium One effectively gave Russia control of 20 percent of uranium in the U.S.

How all of that came to pass has fostered questions about how the Clintons operate their charity, the Clinton Foundation.

The Uranium One story starts in 2005 when Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra and several business partners came to own a small mining company called UrAsia Energy.

Clinton flew with Giustra in September 2005 on a private jet to Kazakhstan. There, the mining tycoon negotiated with that nation’s mining agency, Kazataprom, for rights to three mines. After Clinton appeared publicly in support of Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who had just allegedly won an election with more than 90 percent of the vote, the mining deal was approved.

Months later, Giustra donated $31 million to the Clinton Foundation with a pledge of $100 million more.

In 2007, UrAsia Energy, with its access to Kazakhstan’s lucrative mines, merged with South Africa’s Uranium One in a $3.5 billion deal.

Giustra sold his stake in the company soon after, pocketing a tidy profit. But other investors and executives with close ties to Giustra maintained their interests and donated millions more to the Clinton group.

As money was flowing to the Clinton Foundation, the State Department, which came under the control of Hillary Clinton in January 2009, approved a series of transactions that allowed Russia’s Rosatom to buy up shares in Uranium One. By June 2009, Rosatom had a 51 percent stake in the company.

With that majority hold, the Russian energy company effectively gained control of 20 percent of the uranium in the U.S.

Rosatom has since taken complete control of Uranium One. And while there is little risk that the metal being pulled out of U.S. soil poses a direct threat to U.S. national security, it does give Russian President Vladimir Putin control of a major source of energy amid cooling diplomatic relations.

Though Uranium One’s corporate progression has the appearance of pay-for-play, the Clintons and Giustra have denied doing anything wrong. In his capacity as Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta has gone on the offensive, dismissing the notion that the Clintons have done anything illegal or unethical as a conspiracy theory.

But as evidence of just how complex the Clinton Foundation’s activities are, the website Vox.com published an exhaustive list of 181 Clinton Foundation donors who also lobbied the State Department during Hillary Clinton’s tenure there.

Uranium One is not on the list. Neither is Giustra. Nor is Ian Telfer, one of Giustra’s Canadian associates who is the former chairman of Uranium One. He donated $2.35 million through his Fernwood Foundation to the Canadian wing of the Clinton Foundation, which is set up as a partnership with Giustra.

After it was revealed that the Clinton Foundation had not disclosed some of its foreign donations — such as Telfer’s — the organization announced it would be refiling some of its tax forms. (The Daily Caller, 4/29/2015)

Igor Kolomoisky (Credit: public domain)

“The Ukrainian revolution has been very bad for business in the country. But for Igor Kolomoisky’s Privatbank there has been compensation of almost a billion dollars in state funds: publicly, rival Ukrainian commercial banks call that favouritism; privately, Ukrainian business as usual.

Privatbank is Ukraine’s largest commercial bank. Since the replacement of the Ukrainian Government in February, and the start of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) financial aid programme in April, Privatbank has been the largest beneficiary of what the IMF and the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance are calling Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) to the country’s banks. Published measurements of Privatbank’s share of ELA range from 36% to more than 40% of the additional financing which has flowed out of Ukrainian state funds into the commercial banks. Just how much Kolomoisky benefits, along with related companies to which Privatbank lends much of its loan book, is one of the control operations being performed this week, as the IMF’s Ukraine mission starts its first inspection since the IMF transferred $3.2 billion to the National Bank of Ukraine on May 7.

This is the first tranche of the $17.1 billion committed to Kiev by the IMF. The next tranche of $1.4 billion, according to the IMF’s published schedule, is due to be paid on July 25. The complete inspection and payment schedule looks like this:

The IMF mission leader in Kiev this week is Nikolay Gueorguiev. Two weeks ago, he indicated that he will be discussing with his counterparts at the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) and the Ministry of Finance what reports the IMF expects to gather by next month on stress testing of the condition of Privatbank and the fourteen other major domestic banks, which are the IMF’s priority targets. The technical criteria, selection of independent auditors, and the deadlines for reporting stress test results Gueorguiev says he is hoping to finalize in Kiev by the weekend. For Gueorguiev’s remarks, read this.

According to Gerry Rice (right), the spokesman for the IMF’s managing director, Christine Lagarde (left), there’s no telling how much of the IMF payments will be transferred to the Ukrainian banks. “Those funds,” said Rice, “are not assigned to specific budget line items, but the package ensures, or tries to ensure that the government can stabilize the public finances, and remain current on all its payment obligations…On the question of the disbursement, as you probably know, our disbursements are made for budget support, and then we review the budget support on a fairly rigorous basis and assessment in the context of the reviews of the program. In this case, as you know, it’s bimonthly reviews, so at that time we will be looking at how expenditures are being used, and how the budgetary support indicators are being tracked, the budget deficit indicators and so on.”

In its package of agreements and technical understandings with the Ukrainian government, the IMF defined the bank bailout programme ELA as “ an emergency liquidity assistance (ELA) facility that lends at a high penalty rate against nonstandard collateral (corporate and household loans) at a 65–75 percent haircut.” — page 8. To keep tabs, the IMF is requiring the central bank (NBU) to “provide the IMF, on a two weekly basis, with daily data on the total financing (including refinancing) issued by the NBU to commercial banks, broken down by types of instrument, original maturity of the financing, interest rate as well as transactions to absorb liquidity from the banking system.”

The IMF has also ordered the Ministry of Finance to “provide, no later than 15 days after the end of each month, monthly data on the budgetary costs associated with the recapitalization of banks and SOEs. This cost includes the upfront impact on the cash deficit of the general government of the recapitalization of banks and SOEs as well as the costs associated with the payment of interests.”

Because the technical terminology used by the IMF, NBU, Finance Ministry, and the English-language markets can be imprecise and slip from one balance-sheet line item to another in translation, the NBU was asked to confirm what volume of NBU financing for the Ukrainian commercial banks has been provided for February, March, April, May, and the first two weeks of June? Also, what value has been received by Privatbank and its associates?

The National Bank of Ukraine (Credit: Wikipedia)

The NBU issued a wordy answer. “In accordance with Article 7 of the Law of Ukraine ‘On the National Bank of Ukraine’, the National Bank of Ukraine acts as lender of last resort for banks and arranges a refinancing system to support liquidity in the event of unforeseen factors that may affect the activities of the bank, and if they have exhausted other options, refinancing. At present, the policy of the National Bank of Ukraine is aimed at ensuring transparency and equal conditions of access to refinancing instruments for the various banks”.

On the other hand, the NBU said it refuses to disclose what liquidity assistance it has been paying to Privatbank because “information on banks or customers, collected during banking supervision, is a bank secret.”

Because the IMF rule requires it, the Finance Ministry was asked what its record-keeping shows of how the ELA cash is being spent. The ministry responded that it’s up to the NBU to answer.

The headquarters of Privatbank, Dnipro, Ukraine in 2010. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Public reporting by the NBU for the January-May period indicates that a total of UAH 104.8 billion (about $8 billion) in public funds, including part of the May payment from the IMF, has been given to the Ukrainian banks under ELA to support their liquidity. The handouts started to accelerate when Stepan Kubiv was appointed by the new government to be governor of the NBU on February 24. Before he arrived, the NBU had been spending an average of UAH15.4 billion on ELA per month. After Kubiv took over, the average monthly outlay jumped to UAH 24.7 billion; that’s a growth rate of 62%. Kubiv’s career record in doing things like that before, and what IMF officials knew of it, can be followed in this report of June 6.

(…) An international bank source has applied what he believes to be standard stress tests to Privatbank’s published 2013 accounts. He calculates that in 2015 “Privatbank would fall below capital adequacy levels which markets and regulators consider necessary. In 2016 it would be insolvent.” These forecasts, the source said, are warranted by the bank’s “large exposures to other entities of its owners. It has significant industry concentrations in Oil & Gas and Steel, likely due to the bank’s owners’ interests in these industries. Both factors have historically been associated with high levels of losses in stressed conditions.”

The source also concludes that because of Privatbank’s importance in the Ukrainian bank sector, the “risks of contagion and the direct effects to the Ukrainian economy from one of its largest lenders collapsing, it is likely that public assistance of Privatbank would be required in a stress.” (Read much more: John Helmer, 6/24/2014)

(Credit: John Helmer)

“When Igor Kolomoisky (lead image, centre) financed anti-Russian units operating with the Ukrainian Army in the Ukrainian civil war, he was a staunch ally of Petro Poroshenko’s government in Kiev and the Obama Administration’s chief Ukraine policymakers, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (left) and her Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, Victoria Nuland (right).

They in turn dominated the voting on the board of directors of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), led by managing director Christine Lagarde. Following the US regime change which installed Poroshenko’s regime in the spring of 2014, the IMF voted massive loans for the Ukraine to replace the Russian financing on which the regime of Victor Yanukovich had depended.  More than a third of the fresh IMF money was paid out by the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU), the state’s central bank, into PrivatBank controlled by Kolomoisky and his partner, Gennady Bogolyubov.

At the time, investigations of Kolomoisky’s business and banking practices, and the special relationship he cultivated with the NBU, reported he was stealing the money through a pyramid of front companies lending each other the IMF cash which was not intended to be repaid. Clinton, Nuland, Lagarde and the IMF staff and board of directors ignored the evidence, as they continued to top up Kolomoisky’s pyramid. Criminal investigations by the US Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were also reported at the time; they were neutralized by their superiors.

A new Delaware state court filing a month ago, triggering new US media reports, appears to signal a shift in US Government policy towards Kolomoisky. Or else, as some Ukrainian policy experts believe, it is a move by US officials to put pressure on the new Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, whom Kolomoisky supported in his successful election campaign to replace Poroshenko.

In the new court papers, front company names and the count and value of US transactions between them,  which PrivatBank has dug out of its own bank records,  is published for the first time. But the scheme itself is not new. It was fully exposed in 2014-2015 in this archive.  Nor is it news, as subsequent US media reports claim, that the FBI is investigating Kolomoisky and his US associates for criminal racketeering. The FBI investigation was first reported here.

(Credit: Steve Bell, August 28, 2014)

What is missing is an explanation of why it has taken so long for the PrivatBank case against Kolomoisky to surface in the US courts and in the US press. Also missing is a list of the accomplices and co-conspirators in the scheme. These include officials of the IMF,  the US and Canadian Governments who knowingly directed billions of dollars into the NBU,  from which, as they knew full well at the time, the money went out to Kolomoisky’s PrivatBank, the largest single Ukrainian recipient of the international cash. At the top of the list of accomplices, immediately subordinate to Clinton, Nuland and Lagarde, are David Lipton, the US deputy managing director  at the IMF, and the head of the IMF in Ukraine until 2017, Jerome Vacher.

The plaintiff in the Delaware Court of Chancery is PrivatBank; it is represented by the Quinn Emanuel law firm of New York and Washington, DC.

In addition to Kolomoisky and Gennady Bogolyubov, his business partner and co-shareholder in the bank, three other individuals are named as defendants – Mordechai Korf, Chaim Schochet, and Uriel Laber. They are based in the US where they have run the US trading, production, management and investment companies which Privat now alleges were on the receiving end of the embezzlement from the bank and the onward money-laundering chain.

The story of Kolomoisky, Korf and Schochet was first reported in April 2015 here.

Left to right: Mordechai Korf; Chaim Schochet, Korf’s brother-in-law; and Uriel Laber.  Because Korf, Schochet and Laber all live in Miami, the local newspaper has investigated some of their other schemes; here’s an investigation of the environmental damage of their manganese mine in Georgia. A catch-up investigation was reported by the Kyiv Post in May 2019.

The central allegation of the new court case is: “From at least 2006 through December 2016, the UBOs  [Ultimate Beneficial Owners – Kolomoisky, Bogolyubov] were the majority and controlling stockholders of PrivatBank, one of Ukraine’s largest privately-held commercial banks. During that time period, the UBOs used PrivatBank as their own personal piggy bank—ultimately stealing billions of dollars from PrivatBank and using United States entities to launder hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of PrivatBank’s misappropriated loan proceeds into the United States to enrich themselves and their co-conspirators.”

Gennady Bogolyubov (l) and Igor Kolomoisky (Credit: public domain)

The racket – called the Optima schemes in the court papers after the names of several of the Delaware-registered companies used as fronts for moving the money into US assets – was this: “Through the Optima Schemes, the UBOs [Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov] exploited their positions of power and trust at PrivatBank to cause PrivatBank to issue hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of illegitimate, inadequately-secured loans to corporate entities also owned and/or controlled by the UBOs and/or their affiliates (the “Optima Scheme Loans”). To facilitate and fraudulently conceal the Optima Schemes from discovery, the UBOs created and utilized a secretive business unit within PrivatBank’s operations (the “Shadow Bank”) to fund the fraudulent loans and launder those loan proceeds through a sophisticated money laundering process.”

“The stated purpose for each loan involved in the Optima Schemes was typically for financing the activities of the ostensible corporate borrower. The Optima Scheme Loans, however, were sham arrangements and the proceeds were not in fact used for that purpose. Instead, sometimes within minutes of being disbursed, the loan proceeds were cycled through dozens of UBO-controlled or affiliated bank accounts at PrivatBank’s Cyprus branch (“PrivatBank Cyprus”) before being disbursed to one of multiple Delaware limited liability companies or corporations (or other United States-based entities), all of which were [controlled by the UBOs].”

“In effect, the UBOs utilized a Ponzi-type scheme: old loans issued by PrivatBank would be ‘repaid’ (along with the accrued interest) with new loans issued by PrivatBank, and those new loans issued by PrivatBank would then be repaid with a new round of loans. The UBOs and their co-conspirators continuously carried out this process to conceal their frauds. Thus, proceeds from new PrivatBank loans were used to give the appearance that the initial PrivatBank loans (along with the accrued interest) were repaid by the borrower when in fact there was no actual repayment.”

“The proceeds from the new PrivatBank Ukraine loans were then laundered through various accounts at PrivatBank Cyprus to disguise the origin of the funds (i.e., a new loan from PrivatBank), and then used to purport to pay down the initial loans plus accrued interest. On paper, this appeared to be a repayment, but in reality, it was a sham and fraud, as PrivatBank was repaying itself and increasing its outstanding liabilities in the process. This process was carried out over and over again, over a period of many years, giving the appearance that PrivatBank’s corporate loan book was performing when, in fact, new loans were being continually issued to new UBO-controlled parties to ‘pay down’ the prior, existing loans. As a result, the size of the ‘hole’ in PrivatBank’s corporate loan book grew and grew, with each iteration of a loan plus interest being ‘repaid’ through the issuance of a new loan, which accrued interest itself before being ‘repaid’ through the issuance of yet a further new loan.

(…) Most of the fresh evidence presented in Privatbank’s court papers has been gathered from Cyprus. There, according to the bank’s case, 41 front companies were used to move money. “Even though the Laundering Entities had billions of dollars moving in and out of their accounts, in reality, the entities had no business, assets, operations, or employees and were shell entities deployed for money laundering purposes.”

When the money was moved to the US,  it was then spent on real estate – four commercial buildings in Cleveland, Ohio;  two in Dallas, Texas;  one in Harvard, Illinois – together with six ferro-alloy and steel production and trading companies operating in several US states.  The court papers report the value of the real estate at acquisition at just over $287.5 million; the value of the metals companies, $468.7 million.

In addition, there were miscellaneous financial transfers with no clear end-purpose or investment target. “Based on information analyzed to date, Defendants laundered approximately $622.8 million worth of fraudulently obtained loan proceeds into the Optima Conspirators, including $188.1 million to Optima Group, $162.3 million to Optima Ventures, $153.7 million to Optima Acquisitions, $103 million to Optima International, $9 million to Warren Steel Holdings, and $6.7 million to Felman Trading. PrivatBank received no consideration in exchange for these transfers and the loans associated with the transfers were not repaid in full.”

Grand total, $1,379 million.

(…) Lawyers for the defendants are not commenting on the Delaware allegations. It can be anticipated that Kolomoisky will argue the Privatbank loans weren’t shams, and that they were repaid to the bank.  Kolomoisky has already won counter claims against PrivatBank in courts in London and Kyiv; he is now negotiating with the Kiev government to recover a 25% stake in the bank. “We have always said that we are open to negotiations. We believe that we are the injured party, that we have been robbed,” Kolomoisky has told Reuters. “Kolomoisky calculates he is due a 25 percent stake in the bank because of the capital he had put into it. Give us then our 25 percent and keep 75, we will have a joint-stock company. There will be a 25 percent participation and 75 percent by the state, as one of the options.”

Reuters also reports the Ukrainian central bank and the IMF believe Privat “was used as a vehicle for fraud and money-laundering while Kolomoisky owned it, and said the government was forced to inject $5.6 billion of taxpayers’ money into the lender to shore up its finances.” For more detail, click to read this.

The work on the transactions detailed in the Delaware court papers was commissioned by PrivatBank and the NBU from Kroll, a due diligence firm as well known for white-washing the affairs of its clients as for investigating fraud. Kroll’s report was then leaked to Graham Stack. In his report, published on April 19, Stack concludes: “The money was moved through a PrivatBank subsidiary in Cyprus. The arrangement helped hide the fact that cash was disappearing because the National Bank of Ukraine treated the Cyprus branch of PrivatBank the same as it would domestic branches. This designation meant officials never detected that cash transferred to Cyprus was leaving Ukraine. Meanwhile, Cypriot regulators either failed to detect that the various bank transfers totalling $5.5 billion were backed by bogus contracts, or didn’t take the necessary action to stop them.”

The IMF’s staff head for Ukraine, Nikolai Gueorguiev,  claimed that in March 2015 he had ordered “a new wave of  bank diagnostics” to monitor related-party lending, liquidity and capital adequacy at PrivatBank; he was dissembling.

Graham Stack (Credit: public domain)

Stack (right) also reports Kolomoisky’s response to the Delaware case: “‘I categorically deny the allegations made by the National Bank of Ukraine,’ Kolomoisky said, adding that regulators had all the access they needed to monitor his bank’s activities. He painted the authorities’ nationalization of his lending business as an asset grab. ‘Management of the [Ukrainian central bank] had as its main purpose not the support of the country’s largest bank, but its nationalization and the expropriation of the assets provided as security, together with the persecution and pressuring of the former shareholders,’ Kolomoisky said.”

Stack is an independent researcher and reporter of Ukrainian business and politics. Anders Aslund is an employee of Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch with bank, media and steel interests who has long been a rival of Kolomoisky’s. Aslund, a former Swedish government official, has worked for US think-tanks funded by Pinchuk. Aslund is now at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC. The council lists Pinchuk’s foundation as having giving it up to $500,000 in financing for research, including Aslund’s pay.  The US State Department, the British Foreign Office, and George Soros’s foundations are also listed as large donors.

[Anders] Aslund (left) reported on the charges on June 4. Aslund claims to be reading about the stealing scheme for the first time. “The money trail is surprisingly simple. To begin with, the ultimate beneficiary owners collect retail deposits in Ukraine by offering good conditions and service. The money then flows to their subsidiary, PrivatBank Cyprus. In Cyprus, they benefit from the services of two local law firms. Untypically, the ultimate beneficiary owners did not take the precaution to establish multiple layers of shell companies in Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands, and Cayman Islands, as is common among Russians with seriously dirty money. Instead, they operated with three US individuals in Miami, who helped them to set up a large number of anonymous LLCs in the United States, mainly in Delaware, but also in Florida, New Jersey, and Oregon.”

Aslund expresses surprise that among Kolomoisy’s investments there were US ferro-alloy and steel plants and traders. “More remarkable is that Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov, according to the suit, purchased several ferroalloy companies in the United States, Felman Production Inc., in West Virginia; Felman Trading Inc. and Georgian Manganese, LLC; Warren Steel Holdings in Warren, Ohio; Steel Rolling Holdings Inc., Gibraltar, Michigan; CC Metals and Alloys, LLC, in Kentucky; Michigan Seamless Tubes, Michigan. These appear to be medium-sized companies in small places. Real people worked in these enterprises. Why didn’t anybody raise questions about the dubious owners?” (Read much more: John Helmer, 6/30/2019)  (Archive)

(Republished in part, with permission)

Robyn Gritz (Credit: public domain)

“The FBI launched a criminal probe against former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn two years after the retired Army general roiled the bureau’s leadership by intervening on behalf of a decorated counterterrorism agent who accused now-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe and other top officials of sexual discrimination, according to documents and interviews.

Flynn’s intervention on behalf of Supervisory Special Agent Robyn Gritz was highly unusual, and included a letter in 2014 on his official Pentagon stationary, a public interview in 2015 supporting Gritz’s case and an offer to testify on her behalf. His offer put him as a hostile witness in a case against McCabe, who was soaring through the bureau’s leadership ranks.

The FBI sought to block Flynn’s support for the agent, asking a federal administrative law judge in May 2014 to keep Flynn and others from becoming a witness in her Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) case, memos obtained by Circa show. Two years later, the FBI opened its inquiry of Flynn.

The EEOC case, which is still pending, was serious enough to require McCabe to submit to a sworn statement to investigators, the documents show.

The deputy director’s testimony provided some of the strongest evidence in the case of possible retaliation, because he admitted the FBI opened an internal investigation into Gritz’s personal conduct after learning the agent “had filed or intended to file” a sex discrimination complaint against her supervisors. (Read more: Circa, 6/27/2017)

Google Chrome translation:

(…) “The investigation has reason to believe that, using the political and economic levers of influence already on the new Ukrainian government and manipulating the issue of providing Ukraine with financial assistance, Joe Biden actively promoted the closure of criminal cases against Zlochevsky and other representatives of Burisma Group.

Joe Biden and Nikolai Zlochevsky (Credit Forum Daily/Ukraine)

In addition, for several years he managed to actually block the activity of Ukraine’s law enforcement agencies in restoring state-owned assets appropriated by private individuals as a result of criminal activities, including other representatives of the Yanukovych regime. How can you not remember the lists of innocent persons that the US ambassador to Ukraine, according to Yury Lutsenko, passed to him?

In the course of these efforts and with the assistance of the American side in May 2014, Vitaly Kasko (a partner and one of the leaders of the law firm Arzinger) was appointed Deputy Prosecutor General of Ukraine. By his direct intervention, the investigation suggests that criminal cases initiated by the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine (GPU) in 2014 – 2015 against those who appropriated state assets were frozen, and it was impossible to write off funds stored in Burisma Group’s arrested accounts.

These cases include:

– 7 of May 2014 of the GPU opened a criminal case No. 42014000000000375 on the fact of tax evasion by officials of LLC ESCO-Pivnich, LLC Pari, LLC First Ukrainian Oil and Gas Company, Research and Production Company. OOO Zond, OOO Infoks (all companies are part of the Burisma Group holding).

– 5 on August 2014, criminal case No. 42014000000000805 was opened on suspicion of Zlochevsky of committing a criminal offense under 3, article 368-2, of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (acquisition of property rights by a person in a particularly responsible position and authorized to perform state functions). In particular, he was accused of receiving improper income in the amount of 35 million dollars while serving as deputy secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine from December 2013 of the year to January 2014 of the year. 10 January 2015, Zlochevsky was put on the national wanted list.

In the second half of 2014, as part of an ongoing investigation, the British Anti-Fraud Authority arrested the accounts of Brociti Investments LTD (part of the Burisma Group), which held 23,5 million dollars (recall, a little earlier, in April 2014 of the year, on the board of the Burisma Group John Biden’s son entered, Hunter). Wherein The Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine did not timely provide the information requested by this British agency, which could confirm the illegal origin of funds, and Zlochevsky’s lawyers provided the court with false information about the legal origin of the arrested funds. This data was confirmed in his testimony by an accomplice of Zlochevsky and his lawyer, who participated in the falsification of documents. Due to the lack of evidence in January 2015, the London court overturned the arrest of these accounts. “Frozen” funds were immediately transferred to offshore accounts in Cyprus.

Vitaly Kasko (Credit: public domain)

It should be noted that the draft request to the United Kingdom for the provision of international legal assistance and the continuation of the arrest of Brociti Investments LTD funds was waiting for Kasko to sign with December 31 2014. But he used his public office to delay the sending of this request, citing the need for its consideration and improvement. As a result, the final version of the document was sent to the British side only on January 21 2015 of the year, after a London court decided to cancel the arrest of accounts.

The former US ambassador to Ukraine, Jeffrey Payette [sic], commenting on this situation, called for an investigation into the “misconduct” of prosecutors who delayed providing data, but did not mention in a single word about the connection of the son of the US Vice President writes NYT.

In addition, in March 2015, in order to remove the issue of returning state ownership of Ukraine from the jurisdiction of Ukrainian law enforcement agencies, the American side initiated the creation of an interdepartmental working group to coordinate the return to Ukraine of assets illegally obtained by former Ukrainian high-ranking officials. This group was led by Kasko. The only result of the group’s activity was the draft law “On the National Agency of Ukraine for the Identification and Management of Assets Assigned by Persons as a Result of Corruption and Other Crimes”. This document received a positive assessment of the US Department of Justice, but caused a lot of critical comments from the European Commission and Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine committees.

Despite strong criticism, this bill was passed by Parliament in November 2015. The law was signed by the President of Ukraine 9 December 2015 of the year, immediately after Joe Biden’s visit to Kiev (07-08 December 2015), which may indicate American pressure on the Ukrainian authorities.

Thus, the processes of collecting proceeds from crime were put under the control of representatives of the US State Department due to organizational and legal measures and were blocked for 2,5, which gave Zlochevsky and his foreign partners time to settle all issues with the Ukrainian authorities outside the court.

Law enforcement authorities of Ukraine under the influence of the United States

Another way to prevent the investigation of the criminal activities of former representatives of the Yanukovych regime was the creation of new law enforcement agencies to combat corruption, which are fully controlled by the American side – the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office.

In particular, the law on NABU was adopted a month before Joe Biden’s planned visit to Kiev, after which 20 million US dollars were allocated to Ukraine exclusively for anti-corruption reforms in the field of law enforcement. In addition, during negotiations with the Ukrainian government, the US Vice President assured that the Obama administration would consider allocating credit guarantees to Ukraine worth 1 billion US dollars in 2015 in the event that the creation of anti-corruption bodies was successfully completed under the conditions set by Washington.

Joe Biden also actively intervened in the process of appointing heads of established anti-corruption bodies. In particular, with the help of 16 on April 2015 of the year, Artem Sytnik, managing partner of Legal Guarantees, was appointed director of NABU. According to the information available, the main argument in favor of Sytnik was his consent to active cooperation with US government and law enforcement agencies.

In September 2017, the Prosecutor General of Ukraine Yuriy Lutsenko accused NABU of illegally tapping 140 of Ukrainian officials from various branches of government. 24 January 2018, MP Borislav Rosenblatt, filed a lawsuit with the district administrative court of the city of Kiev with a request to invalidate Sytnik’s actions involving the involvement of FBI officers in intelligence operations in Ukraine without first concluding a relevant bilateral agreement. In addition, Sytnik was accused of initiating a criminal case against Alexander Onishchenko with the goal of removing companies under his control from the Ukrainian gas market in favor of Burisma Group.

Statements by his authorized persons, made in December 2017, about the possible termination of financial support for Ukraine by the United States in the event of Sytnik’s dismissal testify to Joe Biden’s interest in preserving Sytnik’s position as director of NABU.

After the creation of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office in September 2015, Joe Biden, US Ambassador to Ukraine Jeffrey Payette [sic] and the leadership of the Ukrainian office of Transparency International openly lobbied Kasko’s appointment as head of this department, including by exerting pressure on members of the selection committee through non-governmental organizations and the media information. However, on November 30, 2015, the Prosecutor General of Ukraine Viktor Shokin appointed Nazar Kholodnitsky to the post of his deputy and head of the specialized anti-corruption prosecutor’s office.

At the same time, Shokin organized and personally supervised the investigation into the facts of the corrupt activities of Zlochevsky and Joe Biden in Ukraine.

This caused Joe Biden’s sharp discontent and during his visit to Kiev 7-8 December 2015, the US Vice President in the ultimatum form demanded that the President of Ukraine dismiss Shokin, threatening to refuse to provide Ukraine credit guarantees in the amount of 1 billion dollars.

As a result, this pressure led to the resignation of Shokin in April 2016 of the year, which unblocked the processes of Ukraine receiving American financial assistance. 3 June 2016, the US government and Ukraine signed an agreement on the provision of loan guarantees in the amount of 1 billion dollars.

Moreover, Joe Biden actively used the capabilities of the Ukrainian law enforcement agencies he controls to fight his political opponents in the United States. In particular, it was NABU and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office that conducted a special information operation aimed at discrediting the head of Trump’s campaign headquarters Paul Manafort.

In the fall of 2016, in connection with the upcoming US presidential elections, and also because of his possible resignation, Joe Biden initiated activities aimed at ending the criminal prosecution of Zlochevsky and Burisma Holding Limited, since the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine achieved new arrests of the company’s assets.

First, Biden again tried to use the need of Ukraine for financial assistance. Thus, during his meeting with the President of Ukraine in the framework of the UN General Assembly (21.09.2016, New York), Biden said that the United States was ready to allocate another billion guarantees to 1. However, this proposal did not interest Kiev, since it was within the purview of the new administration of the US President, who was to be elected in less than two months.

As a result, an agreement was reached with Zlochevsky: they decided to stop criminal prosecution against him in exchange for transferring to the state budget of Ukraine part of the holding’s profit in the form of accrued additional taxes over the past years in the amount of UAH 180 million, which amounted to only a small amount of income received by the holding company in the result of criminal activity.” (Read more: Forum Daily, 3/26/3029)

Kendra Barkoff as press secretary to VP Joe Biden  (Credit: Twitter)

“Then-second son Hunter Biden coached then-Vice President Joe Biden’s press secretary on how to respond to media questions about him joining the board of Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings, emails reviewed by The Post show.

The May 13, 2014, exchanges between Hunter and Kendra Barkoff, which have not been previously reported, form the basis of a complaint sent to the Justice Department on Friday alleging that the Biden scion, now 53, violated federal law by failing to register as a foreign agent.

“In advising the Office of the Vice President how to respond to press inquiries about his appointment, Hunter Biden ‘represent[ed] the interests of [a] foreign principal before any agency or official of the Government of the United States,’” America First Legal Foundation general counsel Gene Hamilton wrote to the assistant attorney general for national security, Matthew Olsen, quoting the relevant statute.

Burisma announced Hunter Biden’s appointment to its board of directors on May 12, 2014. The following day, according to the complaint, Barkoff sent Hunter an email saying: “Thanks for talking to me. [L]et me know who I should refer folks to.”

“What exactly are they asking?” Hunter responded. “For the time being I’d just refer them to my office. FYI I joined the board of Burisma Holdings Ltd. (Burisma.com) an independent/private natural gas producer in Ukraine along with the former president of Poland. I think the press release is on their website.”

Barkoff then forwarded Hunter an email from Max Seddon, then a foreign correspondent at BuzzFeed News.

“Russian state media is loving this press release, supposedly from a Cypriot-held Ukrainian natural gas company, claiming that the Vice President’s son has joined its board of directors,” Seddon wrote, addressing then-National Security Council spokesperson Laura Lucas Magnuson, who had forwarded it to Barkoff.

“The news seems rather odd on its face and, if true, would present a fairly glaring conflict of interest given the VP’s role on Ukraine policy – particularly since the company is controlled by Nikolai Zlochevsky, who was energy minister and deputy NSC chief under [former pro-Moscow Ukrainian President Viktor] Yanukovych,” the reporter added. “Is this true? What exactly is going on here?”

“Interesting,” Hunter wrote back. “Burisma is completely independent of the Ukrainian government with an independent board of directors. [Zlochevsky] served as Minister of Ecology and resigned in 2010. I joined the board as legal adviser and Burisma also engaged the law firm I am of counsel to Boies Schiller Flexner on matters pertaining to corporate governance, transparency, and expansion. Alana Apter former head of Morgan Stanley Europe is chairman of the board.”

In addition to forwarding Seddon’s questions, Barkoff told Hunter: “Let me know who in your office” to refer media to.

“Eric‐ he’s cc’d here,” Hunter answered, referring to one of his business partners, Eric Schwerin — who chimed in: “Kendra, I am around the next few days if you need me.”

“If anything beyond referring questions to my office is required from you or counsel you can contact Heather King at Boise Schiller,” Hunter directed Barkoff, who later sent him the statement her office was putting out to the press. (Read more: New York Post, 3/03/2023)  (Archive)

Hunter Biden (Credit: Burisma Holdings)

R. Hunter Biden will be in charge of the Holdings’ legal unit and will provide support for the Company among international organizations. On his new appointment, he commented: “Burisma’s track record of innovations and industry leadership in the field of natural gas means that it can be a strong driver of a strong economy in Ukraine. As a new member of the Board, I believe that my assistance in consulting the Company on matters of transparency, corporate governance and responsibility, international expansion and other priorities will contribute to the economy and benefit the people of Ukraine.”

The Chairman of the Board of Directors of Burisma Holdings, Mr. Alan Apter, noted: “The company’s strategy is aimed at the strongest concentration of professional staff and the introduction of best corporate practices, and we’re delighted that Mr. Biden is joining us to help us achieve these goals.”

R. Hunter Biden is a counsel to Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, a national law firm based in New York, USA, which served in cases including “Bush vs. Gore”, and “U.S. vs. Microsoft”. He is one of the co-founders and a managing partner of the investment advisory company Rosemont Seneca Partners, as well as chairman of the board of Rosemont Seneca Advisors. He is an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University’s Masters Program in the School of Foreign Service.

Mr. Biden has experience in public service and foreign policy. He is a director for the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, The Center for National Policy, and the Chairman’s Advisory Board for the National Democratic Institute. Having served as a Senior Vice President at MBNA bank, former U.S. President Bill Clinton appointed him an Executive Director of E-Commerce Policy Coordination under Secretary of Commerce William Daley. Mr. Biden served as the Honorary Co-Chair of the 2008 Obama-Biden Inaugural Committee.

Mr. Biden is a member of the bar in the State of Connecticut, and the District of Columbia, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Court of Federal Claims. He received a Bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

R. Hunter Biden is also a well-known public figure. He is chairman of the Board of the World Food Programme U.S.A., together with the world’s largest humanitarian organization, theUnited Nations World Food Programme. In this capacity he offers assistance to the poor in developing countries, fighting hunger and poverty, and helping to provide food and education to 300 million malnourished children around the world.

Company Background:
Burisma Holdings is a privately-owned oil and gas company with assets in Ukraine and operating in the energy market since 2002. To date, the company holds a portfolio with permits to develop fields in the Dnieper-Donets, the Carpathian and the Azov-Kuban basins. In 2013, the daily gas production grew steadily and at year-end amounted to 11.6 thousand BOE (barrels of oil equivalent – incl. gas, condensate and crude oil), or 1.8 million m3 of natural gas. The company sells these volumes in the domestic market through traders, as well as directly to final consumers. (Burisma Holdings, 5/13/2014)

In May 2014 during a Q & A with GQ, Glenn Greenwald is asked the following question about the upcoming 2016 election, following with his reply:

How do you feel about the early presidential jockeying?

“Hillary is banal, corrupted, drained of vibrancy and passion. I mean, she’s been around forever, the Clinton circle. She’s a fucking hawk and like a neocon, practically. She’s surrounded by all these sleazy money types who are just corrupting everything everywhere. But she’s going to be the first female president, and women in America are going to be completely invested in her candidacy. Opposition to her is going to be depicted as misogynistic, like opposition to Obama has been depicted as racist. It’s going to be this completely symbolic messaging that’s going to overshadow the fact that she’ll do nothing but continue everything in pursuit of her own power. They’ll probably have a gay person after Hillary who’s just going to do the same thing.

I hope this happens so badly, because I think it’ll be so instructive in that regard. It’ll prove the point. Americans love to mock the idea of monarchy, and yet we have our own de facto monarchy. I think what these leaks did is, they demonstrated that there really is this government that just is the kind of permanent government that doesn’t get affected by election choices and that isn’t in any way accountable to any sort of democratic transparency and just creates its own world off on its own.” (GQ, 5/14/2014)

Later, in November 2014, Greenwald writes about Hillary’s forthcoming run for the Presidency. Here are some excerpts from the Intercept:

It’s easy to strike a pose of cynicism when contemplating Hillary Clinton’s inevitable (and terribly imminent) presidential campaign. As a drearily soulless, principle-free, power-hungry veteran of DC’s game of thrones, she’s about as banal of an American politician as it gets. One of the few unique aspects to her, perhaps the only one, is how the genuinely inspiring gender milestone of her election will (following the Obama model) be exploited to obscure her primary role as guardian of the status quo.

But one shouldn’t be so jaded. There is genuine and intense excitement over the prospect of (another) Clinton presidency. Many significant American factions regard her elevation to the Oval Office as an opportunity for rejuvenation, as a stirring symbol of hope and change, as the vehicle for vital policy advances. Those increasingly inspired factions include:

Wall Street

Down on Wall Street they don’t believe (Clinton’s populist rhetoric) for a minute. While the finance industry does genuinely hate Warren, the big bankers love Clinton, and by and large they badly want her to be president. Many of the rich and powerful in the financial industry—among them, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman, Tom Nides, a powerful vice chairman at Morgan Stanley, and the heads of JPMorganChase and Bank of America—consider Clinton a pragmatic problem-solver not prone to populist rhetoric. To them, she’s someone who gets the idea that we all benefit if Wall Street and American business thrive. What about her forays into fiery rhetoric? They dismiss it quickly as political maneuvers. None of them think she really means her populism. (Read more: The Intercept, 11/14/2014)

In October 2016, candidate Donald Trump was of the same opinion:

Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), and Hunter Biden, a member of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition (USGLC) Board, attend the USGLC awards dinner at the Grand Hyatt Washington on December 12, 2017, where Biden, along with Reps. Kay Granger (R-Texas) and Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.), were honored for their long-standing commitment to America’s global leadership through strong U.S. development and diplomacy programs. (Credit: U. S. Global Leadership Coalition)

“Hunter Biden was on the board of a trade coalition that lobbied the Obama administration in 2014 on foreign assistance to Ukraine and appears to have set up a State Department meeting for the group’s president.

Biden’s links to the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition (USGLC) and its affiliate, the Center for U.S. Global Leadership, have gone largely unreported in the coverage of his various business dealings, which have caused a headache for his father as he runs for president.

(…) USGLC, which lobbies and advocates for increased spending in the State Department’s International Affairs Budget, added a series of Ukraine-related bills to its lobbying portfolio at around the same time, lobbying disclosures show.

Biden’s private equity firm, Rosemont Seneca, was by far the smallest company of any of the directors on USGLC or the Center for U.S. Global Leadership.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 2/17/2020)  (Archive)

“Judicial Watch and The Daily Caller News Foundation today released 146 pages of State Department documents revealing that former British spy and dossier author Christopher Steele had an extensive and close working relationship dating back to May of 2014 with high-ranking Obama State Department officials.

Daniel Fried (Credit: The Atlantic Council)

The documents obtained by Judicial Watch in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit show that, from May 2014 to November 2015, Steele filed dozens of reports with his close associate at State, Special Coordinator for Libya Jonathan Winer, who would then pass them to Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. The reports focused mainly on the Russia-Ukraine crisis and U.S. sanctions on Russia.

The documents show that Steele’s work was also distributed to State Department Coordinator for Sanctions Policy Daniel Fried and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Paul Jones, whose focus in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs was on Russia and Ukraine policy.

The documents are Orbis Business Intelligence reports that Steele provided to the State Department. Steele, a former MI6 spy, co-founded Orbis in 2009.

Paul Jones with Clinton during her visit to Malaysia in November 2010. (Credit: Wikipedia)

An early Steele report was passed by Winer to Nuland on May 19, 2014. It discusses Russia-Ukraine policy. Winer writes: “Toria, another piece that is not in my lane but which I wished to pass on to you. My friend Chris Steele (Orbis Intelligence, former MI-6 Russia expert), provided me the enclosed memo yesterday, describing a recent conversation (redacted) on Russian Ukraine policy. As I was provided it from a person in private sector, I am treating it as low side.”

In a November 20, 2014 email exchange, Winer offers to introduce Principle Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Paul Jones to Steele while Steele was to be in town, and he provides Jones and Nuland with three Steele reports, discussing: “Ukraine looking towards [redacted]”; “Ukraine economy shrinking due to loss of East [redacted]”; and “President Putin’s current priorities [redacted]”. Winer writes to Jones: Paul, if you are still free, does 3 pm work to meet with Chris Steele? I would pick him up downstairs, get him to your office, and sit in. Will be sending you another Orbis report regardless in a few minutes, it just arrived but I haven’t had chance to open it and manicure it yet.”

(Read more: Judicial Watch, 9/19/2019)

Last week Republican House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer wrote to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) requesting unredacted copies of all Joe’s vice presidential communications using pseudonyms, including ‘Robert Peters, Robin Ware, and JRB Ware’.

(…) Joe and Hunter appeared to use the then-VP’s secret email to discuss government business in another incident in June 2014.

Hunter used his Rosemont Seneca consultancy email address to write to his father on June 23, 2014 about the employment of then-deputy White House counsel John McGrail.

‘Before you fill position pls talk to me — J. McGrail very much wants to serve as detail fr treasury,’ Hunter wrote.

‘Re Johnny call me right away Dad,’ Joe wrote back from the email robinware456@gmail.com.

McGrail was promoted to VP’s counsel the following year, then got his desired move to the Treasury as Senior Counsel in January 2017. He is currently Counselor to the Under Secretary for Domestic Finance at the department, according to his LinkedIn account.

Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson have been asking for unredacted records from NARA regarding Joe’s alias emails since 2021. (Read more: Daily Mail, 8/23/2023)  (Archive)

The committee reaches an agreement with the State Department “regarding the production of records.” This will be mentioned in a September 2016 FBI report in the context of Clinton’s emails. However, further details are not known. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

A captured shot of Combetta’s ‘stonetear’ GMail account with picture included. (Credit: public domain)

A Reddit user by the name of “stonetear” makes a Reddit post that will later cause controversy. Overwhelming evidence will emerge that “stonetear” is Paul Combetta, one of two Platte River Networks (PRN) employees actively managing Clinton’s private server at the time. The post reads:

“Hello all — I may be facing a very interesting situation where I need to strip out a VIP’s (VERY VIP) email address from a bunch of archived email that I have both in a live Exchange mailbox, as well as a PST file. Basically, they don’t want the VIP’s email address exposed to anyone, and want to be able to either strip out or replace the email address in the to/from fields in all of the emails we want to send out. I am not sure if something like this is possible with PowerShell, or exporting all of the emails to MSG and doing find/replaces with a batch processing program of some sort. Does anyone have experience with something like this, and/or suggestions on how this might be accomplished?”

This July 24, 2014 Reddit post contained a request for advice about “stripping out” the email address of a “VERY VIP” email account. (Credit: Reddit)

A response captured in the Reddit chat warning Combetta that what he wants to do could result in “major legal issues.” (Credit: Reddit)

The post in made in a sub-forum frequented by other people who manage servers. One poster comments: “There is no supported way to do what you’re asking. You can only delete emails after they’re stored in the database. You can’t change them. If there was a feature in Exchange that allowed this, it would result in major legal issues. There may be ways to hack a solution, but I’m not aware of any.”

Despite this warning, “stonetear” replies, “As a .pst file or exported MSG files, this could be done though, yes? The issue is that these emails involve the private email address of someone you’d recognize and we’re trying to replace it with a placeholder as to not expose it.” (Reddit, 9/19/2016)

The post occurs one day after the House Benghazi Committee reached an agreement with the State Department on the production of records relating to Clinton’s communications. It also came one day after Combetta sent some of Clinton’s emails to Clinton’s lawyers so they could begin sorting them.

After Combetta is discovered to have authored the post in September 2016, Fortune Magazine will comment, “it’s not clear if there is anything illegal about the Reddit request. But the optics sure don’t look good, and strongly suggest that Combetta turned to social media for advice about how to tamper with government records that should been preserved.” (Fortune, 9/21/2016)

Heather Samuelson (Credit: public domain)

Samuelson’s task is to sort all the emails from Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state into those deemed work-related and those deemed personal. She appears to have no security clearance and no special skills or experience for such a task.

In late July 2014, Platte River Networks (PRN), the company managing Clinton’s private server, emails some of Clinton’s emails to the laptops of Samuelson and Cheryl Mills, another Clinton lawyer (and her former chief of staff). PRN sends Samuelson and Mills the rest of Clinton’s emails in late September 2014. In 2016, Samuelson will tell the FBI that the sorting review takes several months and is completed just prior to December 5, 2014, when copies of the work-related emails are given to the State Department.

According to Samuelson’s 2016 FBI interview, she does the sorting on her laptop. She puts the work-related emails she finds into a computer folder. She first adds all emails sent to or from Clinton’s email account with .gov and .mil email addresses. Then she searches the remaining emails for the names of senior leaders in the State Department, as well as members of Congress, foreign leaders, or other official contacts.

Finally, she conducts a keyword search of terms such as “Afghanistan,” “Libya,” and “Benghazi.” Samuelson will claim that she reviews the “to,” “from,” and “subject” fields of every email; but she doesn’t read the content of every individual email. In some instances, she decides a if an email is work or personal by only reviewing the “to,” “from,” and “subject’ fields.

After Samuelson finishes her sorting, she prints all of the emails to be given to the State Department using a printer in Mills’ office. Then Mills and Kendall subsequently reviews emails that Samuelson printed. Any hard copy of an email Mills and Kendall deem not to be work-related is shredded, and the digital copy of the email is removed from the computer folder Samuelson created of all of the work-related emails.

Mills will later tell the FBI that, she only reviewed emails where Samuelson requested her guidance. There is no sign in the FBI’s final report that Kendall was interviewed about this matter.

With the sorting process completed, Samuelson creates a .pst file containing all of the work-related emails, and also makes sure that all work-related emails are printed to give to the State Department. The .pst file is given to Kendall on a USB thumb drive. On August 6, 2015, Kendall will give this thumb drive to the FBI, with consent from Clinton.

This account appears to be based mostly or entirely on the accounts of Samuelson and Mills. An FBI report will note: “The FBI was unable to obtain a complete list of keywords or named officials searched from Samuelson, Mills, or Clinton’s other attorneys due to an assertion of [attorney-client] privilege. ”

The 30,068 emails deemed work-related are given to the State Department, while the 31,830 deemed personal will later be deleted. The FBI will eventually find over 17,000 of the deleted emails, and thousands of them will be determined work-related after all. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

In Clinton’s July 2016 FBI interview, she will claim that she had no role whatsoever in the sorting process, other than telling her lawyers to do it.

An internal investigation by the C.I.A. has found that its officers penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing its damning report on the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program.

The report by the agency’s inspector general also found that C.I.A. officers read the emails of the Senate investigators and sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department based on false information, according to a summary of findings made public on Thursday. According to one official with knowledge of the report’s conclusions, the investigation also discovered that the officers created a false online identity to gain access on more than one occasion to computers used by the committee staff.

The inspector general’s account of how the C.I.A. secretly monitored a congressional committee charged with supervising its activities touched off angry criticism from members of the Senate and amounted to vindication for Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the committee’s Democratic chairwoman, who excoriated the C.I.A. in March when the agency’s monitoring of committee investigators became public.

A statement issued Thursday morning by a C.I.A. spokesman said that John O. Brennan, the agency’s director, had apologized to Ms. Feinstein and the committee’s ranking Republican, Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, and would set up an internal accountability board to review the issue. The statement said that the board, which will be led by a former Democratic senator, Evan Bayh of Indiana, could recommend “potential disciplinary measures” and “steps to address systemic issues.” (Read more: The New York Times, 7/31/2014)  (Archive)

John Podesta and Hillary Clinton in 2007. (Credit: Flickr)

Clinton forwards an email to her future campaign chair John Podesta. It is not clear where the forwarded email comes from, especially considering that Clinton is a private citizen at the time, since the sender’s name is not included. But it discusses nine detailed points on how to deal with the ISIS Islamist movement in Iraq and Syria. The forwarded email starts with the sentence: “Note: Sources include Western intelligence, US intelligence and sources in the region.”

Podesta replies with some brief commentary on the email.

Then Clinton emails him back, writing, “Agree but there may be opportunities as the Iraqi piece improves. Also, any idea whose fighters attacked Islamist positions in Tripoli, Libya? Worth analyzing for future purposes.”

Podesta then replies, “Yes and interesting but not for this channel.” (WikiLeaks, 11/3/2016)

The email chain will be released by WikiLeaks in November 2016. Thus, it is unknown what parts of the chain might be deemed classified by the US government.

Clinton speaks at the Nexenta OpenSDx Summit, August 28, 2014. (Credit: Noah Berger / The Associated Press)

Clinton gives a private paid speech for Nexenta Systems, a computer software company. In it, she says, “Let’s face it, our government is woefully, woefully behind in all of its policies that affect the use of technology. When I got to the State Department, it was still against the rules to let most — or let all foreign service officers have access to a BlackBerry.”

The comments will be flagged as potentially politically embarrassing by Tony Carrk, Clinton’s research director, due to Clinton’s daily use of a BlackBerry during the same time period. Although the comment is made in private, Carrk’s January 2016 email mentioning the quote will be made public by WikiLeaks in October 2016. (WikiLeaks, 10/7/2016)

Class leader Hillary Rodham of Wellesley College talking about student protests which she supported in her commencement speech. (Credit: Lee Balterman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

“Previously unpublished correspondence between Hillary Clinton and the late left-wing organizer Saul Alinsky reveals new details about her relationship with the controversial Chicago activist and shed light on her early ideological development.

Clinton met with Alinsky several times in 1968 while writing a Wellesley college thesis about his theory of community organizing.

Clinton’s relationship with Alinsky, and her support for his philosophy, continued for several years after she entered Yale law school in 1969, two letters obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show.

The letters obtained by the Free Beacon are part of the archives for the Industrial Areas Foundation, a training center for community organizers founded by Alinsky, which are housed at the University of Texas at Austin.

The letters also suggest that Alinsky, who died in 1972, had a deeper influence on Clinton’s early political views than previously known.” (Read more: The Washington Free Beacon, 9/21/2014)  (Archive)

The Hillary Letters by Washington Free Beacon on Scribd

In late July 2014, the State Department informally requested Clinton to provide all her work-related emails from when she was secretary of state. Cheryl Mills, one of Clinton’s lawyers (as well as her former chief of staff), then had Platte River Networks (PRN), the company managing Clinton’s private server, send her and Clinton lawyer Heather Samuelson copies of all of Clinton’s emails that were sent to or received from anyone with a .gov email address.

According to a later FBI report, in late September 2014, Mills and Samuelson then ask an unnamed PRN employee to send them all of Clinton’s emails from her tenure as secretary of state, including emails sent to or received from non-.gov email addresses. Mills and Samuelson will later tell the FBI that “this follow-up request was made to ensure their review captured all of the relevant.” The PRN employee does so. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Although the name of the PRN employee is unknown, the only two employees actively managing Clinton’s server at the time are Paul Combetta and Bill Thornton. Combetta sent the earrlier batch of emails in late July 2014.

The email details how campaign operatives discussed manipulating journalists over her paid speeches to Wall Street banks and was sent on November 20, 2015. (Credit: llP/Flickr)

“Hillary Clinton did a paid speech for Deutsche Bank in 2014 that was written by a speechwriter so she had something to show if people ever asked what she said “behind closed doors for two years to all those fat cats.”

The email sent on November 20, 2015, comes from hacked emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, which were published by WikiLeaks.

“In October 2014, HRC did a paid speech in NYC for Deutsche Bank,” speechwriter Dan Schwerin recalled. “I wrote her a long riff about economic fairness and how the financial industry has lost its way, precisely for the purpose of having something we could show people if ever asked what she was saying behind closed doors for two years to all those fat cats.”

“It’s definitely not as tough or pointed as we would write it now, but it’s much more than most people would assume she was saying in paid speeches.”

Schwerin proposed giving a full transcript of the speech to a reporter so a story would be published that would help her with her image as a pro-Wall Street politician.

“Perhaps, at some point there will be value in sharing this with a reporter and getting a story written. Upside would be that when people say she’s too close to Wall Street and has taken too much money from bankers, we can point to evidence that she wasn’t afraid to speak truth to power. Downside would be that we could then be pushed to release transcripts from all her paid speeches, which would be less helpful (although probably not disastrous).”

“In the end, I’m not sure this is worth doing, but wanted to flag it so you know it’s out there,” he wrote.

Scwherin floated this idea because the campaign believed Clinton needed “more arrows” in their “quiver on Wall Street.” (Read more: Common Dreams, 10/14/16)

“Just a few months after Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company landed a deal with an Obama administration renewable energy program that had been championed by one of his father’s key vice-presidential advisers, newly released State Department memos show.

The Memorandum of Understanding between Burisma and USAID’s Municipal Energy Reform Project in Ukraine (MERP) was signed in October 2014, according to a copy of the agreement obtained by Just the News under the Freedom of Information Act.

At that time, Burisma was under very public investigations by both the British government and the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office and considered by the State Department to suffer from corruption issues.

And the Burisma official who signed the MOU, Andrii Kicha, was publicly identified in British court documents in 2014 as someone whose conduct was questioned during the probe. More recently, Kicha was detained in Ukraine in what law enforcement authorities there said was a failed attempt to deliver a $6 million bribe to prosecutors designed to end continuing investigations of the controversial gas company.

(…) A senior State Department official, speaking only on condition of anonymity, said officials do not have much current documentation to show how Burisma landed the 2014 deal with USAID, the department’s foreign aid arm, but they believe it wasn’t fully vetted by the department. Instead, the official said, it appeared the MOU was approved by USAID’s contractor managing the program.

The official added that State recently received inquiries from U.S. Senate investigators examining the Bidens’ dealings in Ukraine.

“This is clearly a matter of interest in their investigation, but right now it looks like Burisma signed the deal with our contractor, and our embassy didn’t even know much about it until 2016,” the official said, declining to provide more information.” (Much more: Just the News, 6/26/2020)  (Archive) (DoSMERPBurismaMOU.pdf)

(…) “Following the successful overthrow of Yanukovych, Joe Biden had a direct hand in the formation of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), as he personally “pushed for the creation of an independent anti-corruption bureau to combat graft,” according to an Oct. 30, 2016, article by Foreign Policy.

NABU was formally established in October 2014 in response to pressure from not only the U.S. State Department and Biden, but also by the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission.

FBI instructors train NABU special forces in SWAT tactics in July 2016. (Credit: public domain)

Despite the international push, the fledgling anti-corruption unit took more than a year to actually become a functioning unit. During this time, NABU officials began establishing a relationship with the FBI. In early 2016, NABU Director Sytnyk announced that his bureau was very close to signing a memorandum of cooperation with the FBI and by February 2016, the FBI had a permanent representative onsite at the NABU offices.

On June 5, 2016, Sytnyk met with U.S. Ambassador Pyatt to discuss a more formalized relationship with the FBI and, on June 30, 2016, NABU and the FBI entered into a memorandum of understanding that allowed for an FBI office onsite at NABU offices to focus on international money laundering cases. The relationship was renewed for an additional two years in June 2017.

NABU has repeatedly refused to make the memorandum of understanding with the FBI public and went to court in 2018 to prevent its release. After receiving an unfavorable opinion from the Kyiv District Administrative Court, NABU appealed the ruling, which was overturned in its favor by the Sixth Administrative Court of Appeal.

Sytnyk, along with parliamentarian Leshchenko, became the subject of an investigation in Ukraine and in December 2018, a Kyiv court ruled that both men “acted illegally when they revealed that Manafort’s surname and signature were found in the so-called black ledger of ousted President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions,” the Kyiv Post reported on Dec. 12, 2018.

The court noted the material was part of a pre-trial investigation and its release “led to interference in the electoral processes of the United States in 2016 and harmed the interests of Ukraine as a state.”

Leshchenko had publicly adopted a strong anti-Trump stance, telling the Financial Times in August 2016 that “a Trump presidency would change the pro-Ukrainian agenda in American foreign policy” and that it was “important to show not only the corruption aspect but that he is [a] pro-Russian candidate who can break the geopolitical balance in the world.” Leschenko noted that the majority of Ukrainian politicians were “on Hillary Clinton’s side.”

In December 2017, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Lutsenko accused Sytnyk of allowing the FBI to conduct illegal operations in Ukraine, claiming that the “U.S. law enforcers were allegedly invited without the permission required and in breach of the necessary procedures.” Lutsenko continued by asking, “Who actually let the foreign special service act in Ukraine?”

Taras Chornovil, a Ukrainian political analyst, also questioned the FBI’s activities, writing that “some kind of undercover operations are being conducted in Ukraine with direct participation (or even under control) of the FBI. This means the FBI operatives could have access to classified data or confidential information.”

Lutsenko called for an audit of NABU, claiming to “possess information of interest to the auditors” and was pushing for Sytnyk’s resignation, along with that of Nazar Kholodnitskiy, the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAP). According to reporting by Euromaidan Press, Lutsenko’s efforts failed “thanks to the reaction from Ukraine’s American partners.”

Michael Carpenter, an adviser to Joe Biden, personally issued a public warning to Lutsenko and others pushing for Sytnyk’s removal, stating, “If the Rada votes to dismiss the head of the Anticorruption Committee and the head of the NABU, I will recommend cutting all U.S. government assistance to #Ukraine, including security assistance.”

Sytnyk remains in his position as NABU’s director.” (Read more: The Epoch Times, 4/26/2019)

Cheryl Mills after testifying privately to the House Benghazi Committee while Representatives Elijah Cummings and Trey Gowdy stand behind her, on September 3, 2015. (Credit Stephen Crowley / The New York Times)

On September 3, 2015, Clinton’s former chief of staff Cheryl Mills will testify under oath in front of the House Benghazi Committee. After being asked about her role in sorting and deleting Clinton’s emails, Mills says that “after the letter came” from the State Department on October 28, 2014 asking for Clinton’s work-related emails, “Secretary Clinton asked [Clinton’s personal lawyer] David Kendall and myself to oversee a process to ensure that any records that could be potentially work-related were provided to the department.”

Mills is asked if she or Kendall were in physical possession of the server at the time.

She replies, “No. … [T]hat server, as I understand it, doesn’t contain any of her records. So we asked Platte River to give us a .pst [computer file] of all of her emails during the tenure where she was there, which they did. And we used that .pst to first search for and set aside all of the state.gov records, then to actually do a name search of all of the officials in the department so that we could ensure that all the senior officials that she would likely be corresponding with got looked at and searched for by name, and then a review of every sender and recipient so that you knew, if there was a misspelling or something that was inaccurate, that you would also have that review done, as well. And then that created the body of, I think, about 30,000 emails that ended up being ones that were potentially work-related, and not, obviously, completely, but it was the best that we could do, meaning obviously there were some personal records that are turned over, and the department has advised the Secretary of that.”

Mills further explains that she and Kendall “oversaw the process. The person who actually undertook it is a woman who worked for me.” This woman is another lawyer, Heather Samuelson, who Mills admits doesn’t have any specialized training or skills with the Federal Records Act or identifying official records.

Then Mills is asked what happened to the “universe of the .pst file” after the work-emails had been sorted out.

She replies: “So the potential set of federal records, we created a thumb drive that David Kendall kept at his office. And then the records themselves, that would have been the universe that they sent, Platte River took back. […] So they just removed it. So it ended up being on system, and they just removed it. And I don’t know what is the technological way they do it, because it’s a way you have to access it, and then they make it so you can’t access it anymore.” (House Benghazi Committee, 10/21/2015)

Paul Combetta is the Platte River Networks (PRN) employee doing most of the active managing of Clinton’s private server. In a September 2015 FBI interview, he will claim that a person working for the Clinton family company Clinton Executive Service Corp. (CESC) whose name is later redacted contacts him around December 2014 and tells him that Clinton and her aide Huma Abedin are getting new email accounts on a different server not administered by PRN. Indeed, other sources indicate that in December 2014, Clinton and Abedin get new email accounts on a server with the hrcoffice.com domain name.

As part of this change, Combetta copies Clinton’s email from her hrod17@clintonemail.com email address to her new hrcoffice.com address. Clinton began using the hrod17@clintonemail.com address in late March 2013, shortly after her tenure as secretary of state ended. Combetta will claim that nobody told him “to transfer any archived email to the new server.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/23/2016)

However, Clinton’s earlier emails could have been transferred to her new email address around the time it was created in late March 2013, in which case they too would get copied to the hrcoffice.com server. But the FBI will never search this server to see if any of Clinton’s emails from her tenure as secretary of state can be recovered from it.

“Leaked documents from the Ukrainian General Prosecutors office show Hunter Biden, Christopher Heinz and Devon Archer were in possession of a slush fund valued at $3.5 million that was derived from money transfers from Burisma Holdings between 2014 and 2015.

According to the Department of Financial Monitoring (Counter-intelligence) of Latvia, the following sums of money were obtained from Busima Holding Limited (Cyprus) which is open at AS PrivatBank in Latvia:

This describes the money transfer of $14,655,982 and $366,015 EUR from “Wirelogic Technology AS”, and $1,964,375 from “Digitex Organization LLP”. Further, part of the sums described above were transferred to Alan Apter, Alexander Kwasniewski, Devon Archer and Hunter Biden.

BURISMA HOLDINGS LIMITED, during a period from November 18th 2014 to November 16th 2015 transacted 45 money transfers through MORGAN STANLEY SMITH BARNEY LLC in the sum of $3.5M dollars. The recipient of the money transfer is Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC.

Leaked transaction and bank records indicate an influx of large payments from Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings Limited to Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC, in what appears to be monthly payments of $83,333.33.

“Why was a foreign company, that was being investigated by the Ukrainian General Prosecutor’s office for corruption, suddenly retain & solicit high profile US persons affiliated with the government and pay them such large sums of money?” (Read more: The Federalist Papers, 11/14/2019) (Archive)

Christopher Steele (l) and Jonathan Winer (Credit: public domain)

“Judicial Watch today released 43 pages of documents from the U.S. Department of State revealing that State Department “Special Coordinator for Libya” Jonathan Winer played a key role in facilitating dossier author Christopher Steele’s access to other top government officials, prominent international business executives. Mr. Winer was even approached by a movie producer about making a movie about the Russiagate targeting of President Trump.

In an email on December 11, 2014, Winer places pressure on his colleague, Nina Miller to assist Steele by getting “O Reports” [likely Orbis] to Toria [Victoria] Nuland and Paul Jones ASAP.” Nuland at the time was the State Department Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs; Jones the European and Eurasian Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary.

From: Winer, Jonathan

Sent: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 17:41:32 +0000

To: Miller, Nina A

Subject: Please get “O Reports” to Toria Nuland and Paul Jones ASAP – they are time [sp]

I know you have other burdens, but this one needs to get done if you can as soon as possible.

In a series of emails on November 20, 2014, Winer openly acts as a liaison for Steele, attempting to set up meetings for “Chris” and referencing “Three Orbis Reports” in the subject line of the email. This meeting was scheduled to be with Marialuisa Fotheringham, office manager to the principal deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of European and Eurasian affairs and, again, Paul W. Jones.

In a series of emails on November 20, 2014, Winer negotiates a time with Ariuna Namsrai, APCO Worldwide’s senior director and managing director for Russia, CIS and Central Asia for her to meet Christopher Steele at “lunch or dinner.” APCO bills itself as one of the world’s leading advisory and advocacy communications consultancies.

In a series of emails on January 13-14, 2015, with the subject line “Morocco immediate need,” Winer introduces Steele to Marc Ginsberg, former Ambassador to Morocco under Bill Clinton, former APCO Worldwide Senior Vice President and Managing Director and former CEO of One Voice Movement Foundation.

Winer writes to Ginsberg: “Marc, Chris Steele is a friend of mine who has a very, very high­ end business intelligence service based in London. He formerly worked for the UK government.”

Ginsberg replies to Winer: “I spoke to Chris… complicated!”

(…) On July 13, 2015, while trying to schedule a dinner in London with Steele, Winer discloses to Steele from an unsecure BlackBerry that he is scheduled to have a Secure Video Teleconference Call [SVTC] with “higher ranked people than I am at the NSC.” Steele later confirms their dinner appointment, and says, “I shall wait for you on the park bench in the main square facing the front of the embassy building.”

In an email exchange on November 20, 2014, Winer attempts to introduce Steele to Nelson Cunningham, President of McLarty Associates, an international consulting firm co-founded by former Clinton White House Counselor Thomas ‘Mack’ McLarty. In the email to Nelson, Winer describes Steele as “An old friend of mine,” and “a former senior British intelligence officer focusing on former Soviet Union with a number of US and European private sector clients these days…”

In an email on January 12, 2017, Hollywood producer Eric Hamburg forwards an article about the Steele dossier to Winer, asking him if he would be interested in working on a movie about it.

Hamburg writes: “Dear Jonathan, I have been meaning to write to you, and just came across this article which mentions your name… Let’s do a movie about this!

I was wondering if you have decided what your next position will be after leaving government. I’d like to keep in touch and get together next time I’m in Washington. I’m currently working on a mini-series about Watergate for ABC with John Dean.”

(…) In February 2018, Winer wrote an op-ed claiming anti-Trump dossier author Christopher Steele and Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal approached him with separate dossiers. Winer wrote: “In the summer of 2016, Steele told me that he had learned of disturbing information regarding possible ties between Donald Trump, his campaign and senior Russian officials.” Also, “While talking about that hacking, Blumenthal and I discussed Steele’s reports. He showed me notes gathered by a journalist I did not know …”

(Read more: Judicial Watch, 6/10/2019)

“FBI agents opened an investigation in late 2014 into a foreign power’s effort to curry influence with Hillary Clinton’s prospective presidential campaign through donations, but the bureau’s leadership slow-walked a surveillance warrant and instead arranged for the candidate to get a defensive briefing, newly declassified memos show.

A clipping from an email that reveals the FBI’s early struggles to obtain a FISA warrant to investigate possible foreign influence peddling and the upcoming Clinton campaign. (Pg 14 – Clinton FBI Debriefing, 1/21/2021)

FBI agents became so frustrated that they were being stonewalled from securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to investigate the foreign money plot that they even escalated to then-FBI Director James Comey, according to the memos declassified by President Trump on Tuesday night and obtained by Just the News.

“The FISA application has remained in limbo for the last four months, even though subsequent investigative activity by [redacted] provided additional probable cause for the FISA application,” an FBI employee wrote Comey in an April 14, 2015 email in which he expressed concern he was “overstepping” his chain of command by raising his concerns.

That email stated the FBI field office leading the probe was “still uncertain as to why the application has not been sent to DOJ for final approval although several reasons have been put forth by CD [Criminal Division], most recently that the decision to put the application on hold originated ‘on the seventh floor.'”

The seventh floor of the FBI headquarters is where the FBI director and his team have their offices and is a common reference among field agents to the FBI’s management team.

Comey wrote back to the agent, “Don’t know anything about this but will get smarter.”

You can read the memos here:
ClintonDefensiveBriefing.pdf

The memos don’t offer any further evidence that a FISA warrant was ever approved. Instead, they show that FBI leadership ultimately decided to give Clinton’s team a defensive briefing in October 2015 as her presidential campaign geared up. The briefing was given to her legal team led by David Kendall and Katherine Turner, the memos show.

“Kendall and Turner were advised the FBI was providing them with this briefing for awareness and so Ms. Clinton could take appropriate action to protect herself,” a summary memo stated. “They were also told the FBI was seeking their assistance to identify other appropriate recipients of the brief, if any.” (Read more: JusttheNews, 1/21/2021)  (Archive)

On October 28, 2014, the State Department formally asked Clinton for copies of all her work-related emails, after asking informally for several months. Three lawyers working for Clinton, Cheryl Mills, David Kendall, and Heather Samuelson, then sorted Clinton’s emails into those they deemed work-related or personal.

Paul Combetta (Credit: Facebook)

According to a later FBI report, “on or around December 2014 or January 2015, Mills and Samuelson requested that [Platte River Networks (PRN) employee Paul Combetta] remove from their laptops all of the emails from the July and September 2014 exports. [Combetta] used a program called BleachBit to delete the email-related files so they could not be recovered.” PRN is the computer company managing Clinton’s emails at the time.

The FBI report will explain, “BleachBit is open source software that allows users to ‘shred’ files, clear Internet history, delete system and temporary files and wipe free space on a hard drive. Free space is the area of the hard drive that can contain data that has been deleted. BleachBit’s ‘shred files’ function claims to securely erase files by overwriting data to make the data unrecoverable.”

ScreenConnect Logo (Credit: public domain)

Combetta then remotely connects to the laptops of Mills and Samuelson using the computer program ScreenConnect to complete the deletions. Clinton’s emails are being stored in a .pst file. Combetta will later tell the FBI “that an unknown Clinton staff member told him s/he did not want the .pst file after the export and wanted it removed from the [Clinton server]” as well.

The Clinton emails are deleted from the laptops of Mills and Samuelson around this time. But another copy of all the emails exist on the server. Combetta will delete those emails as well, in late March 2015. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Since early 2009, Clinton and her aide Huma Abedin have had private email accounts on the clintonemail.com domain, which is hosted on Clinton’s private email server.

Chelsea Clinton and Huma Abedin chat while on the campaign trail in 2008. Huma also appears to be holding two flip phones and a BlackBerry. (Credit: Reuters)

According to a September 2016 FBI report, the new domain hrcoffice.com is created in December 2014. In a later FBI interview, Abedin stated the clintonemail.com system was “going away,” and after the initiation of the new domain, she didn’t have access to her clintonemail.com account anymore. Presumably the same is true for Clinton (and the few others who had email accounts on the domain, such as Chelsea Clinton).

The FBI report will indicate the hrcoffice.com domain is hosted on different equipment, which presumably means a different server. But the clintonemail.com server will continue to run until October 2015, when it will be confiscated by the FBI.

As part of the transfer process, Platte River Networks employee Paul Combetta copies all of Clinton’s emails from her current account on the clintonemail.com server to her new acccount on the hrcoffice.com server.

In Clinton’s July 2016 FBI interview, the FBI will summarize Clinton as saying: “Clinton transitioned to an email address on the hrcoffice.com domain because she had a small number of personal staff, but no physical office or common email domain. To address these issues, she moved to a common email domain and physical office space. After this move, Clinton did not recall any further access to clintonemail.com.”

The switch comes about one month after the State Department formally asked Clinton for all of her work-related emails from her secretary of state tenure, when she used her clintonemail.com account. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Gowdy shakes hands with Clinton after she testifies before the House Select Committee on Benghazi on October 22, 2015. (Credit: CNN)

Representative Trey Gowdy (R) sends a letter to Clinton’s personal lawyer David Kendall on behalf of the House Benghazi Committee, which he chairs. In the letter, he cites over a dozen examples of emails from Clinton’s private clintonemail.com email address relating to the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack that have been recently uncovered. He suggests there are probably many more relevant emails still to be discovered. He also notes evidence that Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin has a clintonemail.com email address.

The letter concludes with a formal request for all emails relevant to the Benghazi attack from Clinton’s clintonemail.com address from January 1, 2011 to December 31, 2012, to be turned over by December 31, 2014. (US Department of State, 2/4/2016)

Clinton will give the State Department over 30,000 emails just three days later, but these will not yet be available to the House Benghazi Committee. The committee will not get the Benghazi-related emails until February 13, 2015, and they will be sent from the State Department, not from Clinton’s lawyer.

An unnamed State Department official who worked in the Office of Information Programs and Services (IPS) will be interviewed by the FBI on August 17, 2015.

She says that, “Initially, IPS officials were told there were 14 bankers boxes of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails at Clinton’s Friendship Heights office” near Washington, DC. But “on or about December 5, 2014, IPS personnel picked up only 12 bankers boxes of Clinton’s emails from Williams & Connolly,” which contains the office of David Kendall, Clinton’s personal lawyer. The State Department officials involved were not sure if the boxes “were consolidated or what could have happened to the two other boxes.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/23/2016) December 5, 2014 is the day Clinton gives 55,000 pages containing 30,000 of her work-related emails to the State Department.

Although it’s unclear if any emails actually got lost, Fox News will publish an article about this on October 6, 2016, not long after the FBI interview of the official is made public. (Fox News, 10/6/2016) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will then mention the lost boxes in a presidential debate against Clinton three days later.

In 2016, Clinton’s former chief of staff Cheryl Mills will be interviewed by the FBI. Mills will claim that in December 2014, Clinton decided she no longer needed access to any of her emails older than 60 days. This comes shortly after the State Department formally asked Clinton for all of her work-related emails, on October 28, 2014. This decision has to take place before an email discussing it on December 11, 2014, written Paul Combetta, the Platte River Networks (PRN) employee managing Clinton’s private server.

Paul Combetta (Credit: Facebook)

Even so, Mills will claim she instructed Combetta to modify the email retention policy on Clinton’s clintonemail.com email account to reflect this change. (PRN is managing Clinton’s private server at the time.) This means that the 31,830 Clinton emails that Mills and Clinton’s other lawyers David Kendall and Heather Samuelson recently decided were not work-related will be deleted after 60 days.

However, Combetta will later say in an FBI interview that he forgot to make the changes to Clinton’s clintonemail.com account and didn’t make them until late March 2015.

Clinton will also later be interviewed by the FBI. She will claim that after her staff sent her work-related emails to the State Department on December 5, 2014, “she was asked what she wanted to do with her remaining personal emails. Clinton instructed her staff she no longer needed the emails. Clinton stated she never deleted, nor did she instruct anyone to delete, her emails to avoid complying with FOIA [Freedom of Information Act], State [Department], or FBI requests for information.”

However, Clinton saying her personal emails were no longer needed, then having Mills tell PRN to have them delete them after 60 days, will result in all of Clinton’s emails that her lawyers deemed personal getting permanently deleted. The FBI will later recover some of the emails through other means and discover that thousands actually were work-related. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

On December 10, 2014, “stonetear” asks for advice from Reddit users on how to implement a 60-day email “purge” policy. This will later be revealed to be an alias for Paul Combetta, a Platte River Networks (PRN) employee actively managing Clinton’s private server at the time.

He writes: “Hello. I have a client who wants to push out a 60 day email retention policy for certain users. However, they also want these users to have a ‘Save Folder’ in their Exchange folder list where the users can drop items that they want to hang onto longer than the 60 day window.
All email in any other folder in the mailbox should purge anything older than 60 days (should not apply to calendar or contact items of course). How would I go about this? Some combination of retention and managed folder policy?”

Combetta as ‘stonetear’ asking Reddit users for help. (Credit: Reddit)

Cheryl Mills (Credit: Andrew Harrer / Getty Images)

In 2016, Clinton’s former chief of staff Cheryl Mills will be interviewed by the FBI. Mills will claim that in December 2014, Clinton decided she no longer needed access to any of her personal emails, and they could be deleted after 60 days. This comes shortly after the State Department formally asked Clinton for all of her work-related emails, on October 28, 2014.

According to a later FBI report based on a February 2016 interview with Combetta, Combetta communicates with Mills and/or Clinton lawyer Heather Samuelson by email on December 10 and 12, 2014, as well as by phone on December 9 and 10,  2014. In these communications, they tell Combetta they want the last 60 days of the emails of Clinton and Clinton aide Huma Abedin moved to new accounts. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/23/2016)

However, as can be seen from Combetta’s Reddit post, it appears Mills wanted Combetta to figure out how to keep some of the emails “longer than the 60 day window,” in contradiction to the later claim in Combetta’s interview, as well as Clinton’s later claim that all of her over 31,000 personal emails were unwanted and should be permanently deleted.

Paul Combetta (Credit: CSpan)

Paul Combetta is a Platte River Networks (PRN) employee who helps manage Clinton’s private server. In his February 18, 2016 FBI interview, his second, he will be asked about some communications from December 2014. An FBI summary of the interview published in September 2016 will state: “December 11, 2014 with the subject line ‘RE: 2 items for IT support,’ and a December 12, 2014 work ticket referencing email retention changes and archive/email cleanup, [Combetta] stated his reference in the email to ‘…the Hillary cover-up operation …’ was probably due to the recently requested change to a 60 day email retention policy and the comment was a joke. He did not recall the prior retention policy.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/23/2016)

Nothing more has been publicly released about this. However, it has been reported that Clinton decided in  December 2014 to change the email retention policy on her private server to 60 days, effectively permanently wiping all her emails from her tenure as secretary of state. Combetta is the one given this job, but he will not do it until late March 2015, under mysterious and controversial circumstances.

Note that the FBI summary will merely report Combetta’s claim that “Hillary cover-up operation” comment was a joke and doesn’t give an opinion if that is true or not.