IMAGE: During their meeting in Kiev on December 4, 2019, Andriy Derkach and Rudolph Giuliani reveal one of the smoking guns in the Biden corruption scandal.
SPECIAL REPORT
21st Century Wire
On September 28, the first hearings on the possible impeachment of President Joe Biden began in the U.S. House of Representatives. Two weeks prior that, announcing the launch of any formal investigation, then House Speaker Kevin McCarthy indicated that lawmakers had already gathered enough information that Biden had in fact lied to the American people when he claimed that he knew nothing about his family’s business dealings overseas.
Despite efforts by the mainstream media to bury and obfuscate this story, the inertia of the scandal seems to be unstoppable. With new evidence emerging every week, we are now witnessing the inescapable downfall of the seemingly omnipotent Biden family political dynasty. Still, any politician pursuing this case accusing the Bidens of high crimes and misdemeanors will invariably encounter obstacles along the way, including partisan attacks from the likes of Democrats on the House Oversight Committee head Jamie Raskin, or in the case of former President Donald Trump, accusations of election interference followed by impeachment charges of his own. Likewise, any journalists and media outlets who have tried to expose the story have been met with ambivalence from their cohort, or worse, shadowbanning and deplatforming by major social media platforms.
The partisan retorts are well-known by now. “They don’t have a shred of evidence against President Biden for an impeachable offense,” exclaimed Raskin, who then offered to hear from several witnesses, one of whom was named American-Ukrainian businessman Lev Parnas.
For those who’ve followed the “Ukrainian track” of this investigation into the activities of Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and the companies Burisma Holdings and Naftogaz of Ukraine, Democrats deferring to the likes of Lev Parnas or Igor Fruman, serves as nothing more than a way to divert attention from the torrent of new evidence of Biden corruption, as well as an attempt to discredit the sources of key information pertaining to this case.
Predictably, the liberal and beltway media snapped-up Raskin’s quote and quickly transformed it into an obligatory partisan soundbite. The deflection also helped to cloud the few journalists who’ve consistently showed evidence of influence peddling, shadow income, and the plethora of corrupt schemes run by the Biden family syndicate, many of which were published several years ago by Ukrainian politician and whistleblower Andriy Derkach, in cooperation with Trump’s personal attorney, former mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani.
Derkach is a former parliamentarian with over some 30 years experience in and around Ukrainian government, who held a number of key positions including in the presidential cabinet, and also at the director level of a state energy sector. Following the election of Petro Poroshenko in 2014, Derkach started taking a more active role in investigating and exposing government and corporate corruption.
A pitched battle is now set over which players will determine the balance of influence in determining the consensus narrative, and verdict, in the Biden corruption story. Will it be serial opportunist and political peddler Parnas, who may have just wanted to make money and did not fully calculate his role in the affair, or will the House of Representatives choose instead to hear from some of the individuals who were directly involved in this story as it unfolded in Ukraine, namely, Andriy Derkach, Oleksandr Dubinsky, Kostyantyn Kulik, or Viktor Shokin. Between them, there is a wellspring of information and knowledge of the Bidens’ illicit offshore activities in Ukraine.
Parnas and Fruman – Biden’s star witnesses
With the Biden Impeachment process already in motion, the stage is now set for another epic political drama in Washington. The Democrats have already begun assembling their cast of characters, and it’s a veritable rogues gallery.
In defense of the Bidens, two people have been elevated by the Democrat political and media establishment, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. Both are businessmen and natives of the former USSR, and were charged with federal election contribution fraud, and for making false statements and obstructing the Federal Election Commission investigation in 2019.
Their names were first presented to the general public by Ukrainian oligarch-corruptor Igor Kolomoisky: “There are two con artists operating in Ukraine who are under investigation in the United States… One seems to be Lev Parnas and the other is Igor Fruman. They are walking around Ukraine here, collecting money from people. They say they are close to Mr. Giuliani, and that they will solve any issue with Mr. Lutsenko (former Prosecutor General of Ukraine).”
IMAGE: Democrats banking on the testimony of Lev Parnas (Source: Reuters)
Parnas’s resumé is certainly colorful one. In 2015, a federal court ordered Parnas to repay more than $350,000 to his friend who had loaned Parnas the amount four years earlier as an investment to make a feature film. Parnas used the loan as part of a $500,000 investment, and had literally lured the investor into the project by organizing a meeting between the potential investor and actor Jack Nicholson at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City. But that money was never returned by Parnas.
The story revealed that Parnas turned out to be nothing more than a common fraudster with large debts, but who managed to parlay funds through various schemes, some of which would eventually be used for generous campaign contributions that bought him a seat at the table of Trump’s inner circle.
In 2020, a US court sentenced Lev Parnas to 20 months in prison for fraud. According to the case file, Parnas, along with a group of associates, used funds for political donations in the expectation of obtaining a license for the retail sale of marijuana.
However, Parnas did experience a reversal of media fortunes after coming out against former allies Trump and Giuliani, and was subsequently feted by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
Today, it is this very fraudster which Congressman Jamie Raskin is calling to be the star witness in Joe Biden’s impeachment hearings. Maybe it’s just desperation on the Democrats’ part, or perhaps it’s just for theatrical value.
If lawmakers like Raskin are genuinely interested with setting the record straight and discovering the truth of the Bidens’ involvement in Ukraine’s Burisma scandal, why not call as a witness Ukrainian politician Andriy Derkach, a man who, together with Rudy Giuliani, has been hot on the trail of the Biden family’s corruption for years?
Andriy Derkach – the one man Biden fears the most
Andriy Derkach started his career in big politics in the mid-90s. At different times he held positions in presidential administrations and the government, as well as managing a large state-owned enterprise, the energy corporation Energoatom, and was involved in parliamentary activities for more than 20 years.
Everything changed after the United States initiated its regime change operation in Ukraine in 2014, and its “Revolution of Dignity”, which resulted in pro-Russian President Yanukovych fleeing the country, and eventually replaced by Ukrainian oligarch, Petro Poroshenko. Poroshenko, who seemed more interested in his own shady business schemes than reforming a state wracked with institutional corruption, immediately outsourced key nodes of governance of the country to proxies of America’s Democratic administration – all managed through the U.S. Embassy in Kiev. Not long after, the new government and coalition began to make a series of unconstitutional decisions and laws at the request of various US-linked international organizations, and old ‘disloyal’ officials were gotten rid of through a process of “lustration”, as the influence of the courts and law enforcement system were gradually eroded by the creation of externally-controlled shadow government bodies – the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), the High Anti-Corruption Court and others.
SEE ALSO: The Derkach Factor – ‘Ground Zero’ for Biden-Burisma Corruption in Ukraine
As the Ukrainian state found itself increasingly under the thumb of United States operatives, the active opposition figures began to emerge, one of whom was Ukrainian politician, Andriy Derkach, who began to fight against this foreign subterfuge and control by Democratic Party top brass. The first open confrontation between Derkach and the Democrats occurred in 2017, when Derkach filed an official application for criminal proceedings on the fact of interference of NABU in the 2016 US presidential elections. As Derkach claimed, in the midst of the campaign, NABU Director Artem Sytnyk had deliberately (at the request of certain representatives of the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine) publicized information about the receipt of money in Ukraine by political consultant and Trump campaign manager, Paul Manafort. The document in question became known as “The Party of Regions’ barn book”. From this incident, it became clear the goal of NABU head Sytnyk was to help Trump’s 2016 opponent, Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton, by knocking out Trump’s chief of staff right at height of a national election cycle. The dodgy document and media hype which entailed led to Manafort being removed from Trump campaign headquarters, followed by a 21 month prison sentence in the US for other unrelated federal charges.
As a result, Ukraine, with its own hands, helped to undermine the US election process, something which couldn’t have been done without the help of agents within the Democrat Party and US government. Derkach sought to expose this and other instances of corruption, but quickly discovered that doing your patriotic duty and publicly standing up for Ukrainian national interests, and trying to prevent a dangerous distortion in Ukraine-US relations, which could be harmful to both countries – had actually placed him in the firing line, literally.
Once his anti-corruption efforts began to receive public notoriety, Derkach began to receive even more insider information about corruption and illegal activities of the government – delivered to him by both journalists and law enforcement officers. Soon after, a press conference was held in October 2019, where Derkach presented new materials that confirmed how NABU was being micro-managed by the US Embassy in Ukraine, and how the two had established backchannels for their political operations. Derkach showed how NABU had “leaked” to the US Embassy confidential data concerning certain criminal cases on a number of Ukrainian officials and MPs.
GRAPHIC: The scheme of influence of top U.S. officials on NABU disclosed by Derkach.
And a month later, in November 2019, a larger scandal broke out. It was here that Andriy Derkach revealed correspondence between the NABU and the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, which clearly showed that the NABU had intervened to sabotage the investigation of Ukrainian businessman Mykola Zlochevsky and his Burisma group of companies. According to Derkach, the materials that were handed to him by investigative journalists had sufficiently outlined NABU’s plot to disrupt and delay the case. The political implications of this scandal became obvious right away. This is where a direct line to the Bidens was established, as Burisma had a financial relationship with the American company Rosemont Seneca, the firm backed by… Hunter Biden.
Alongside Derkach, another investigation was being led by Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who had traveled to Ukraine several times to gather information about a number of scandals, not least of all the plundering of American taxpayers’ money. It was Giuliani who reminded us that during Barack Obama’s tenure as president, “the Audit Chamber in Ukraine revealed the alleged misuse of U.S. funds in the amount of 5.3 billion dollars”. It should be noted this happened under the Obama administration, and the tenure of Vice President Joe Biden who was placed in charge of the Ukraine portfolio. With this convergence of events, Giuliani and Derkach were destined to meet.
They reportedly first met in 2019 during Giuliani’s visit to Kiev. There, Giuliani held a number of meetings and personally met Derkach, as well as former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, and journalist and MP Oleksandr Dubinsky.
According to former Ukrainian diplomat Andrii Telizhenko and the Ukrainian website Strana.ua, “They discussed the gigantic amount of money that had been spent under Obama and President Poroshenko. First, it was the $5 billion in plundered American aid that has been provided to Ukraine since 2014, most of which was absorbed by grant organizations. Separately, they talked about the 7.4 billion dollars withdrawn offshore to the U.S. hedge fund, [Franklin] Templeton fund, which was used to buy bonds of the internal state debt of Ukraine. The fund involves Biden, the Democrats, Yanukovych, and Poroshenko, who in 2017 bought some of Templeton’s shares on the cheap. In other words, they all made money illegally on Ukraine’s [sovereign] state debt, and the US Embassy in Ukraine under the leadership of Yovanovitch, as Lutsenko told Giuliani, blocked the investigation into the $7.4 billion.”
This revelation was explosive, and if exposed, it would surely send shockwaves through the US establishment, reaching the very top echelons of the US political system.
IMAGE: Biden and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Kyiv. November 2014 (Source: Reuters)
‘Think and grow rich’: how Biden got his start in Ukraine
The chart the beginnings of Biden’s corrupt activities in Ukraine, one must go right back to 2014. During the period immediately following the Maidan coup d’etat, the subsequent annexation of Crimea by Russia, and the formation of the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, US President Obama appointed then Vice President Joe Biden to take control of the “Ukrainian issue”. Following Washington’s victorious regime change ‘revolution’, between the years 2014 and 2016, Joe Biden had, by his own admission, visited Ukraine at least “12-13 times”, allowing him sufficient time to scope-out lucrative opportunities and deals which could be leveraged using his political clout.
One such area which attracted Biden’s interest was the energy sector. This led the Biden family into the two biggest corruption schemes involving the activities of the largest state-owned energy company Naftogaz of Ukraine, and Burisma, one of the largest private mining and energy companies.
Naftogaz and the siphoning of Russian energy
Naftohaz of Ukraine was controlled through the direct head of the company, Andriy Kobolev, and Amos Hochstein, a member of the Supervisory Board, a well-known energy specialist, who also happened to be Joe Biden’s personal advisor on energy matters. This is where, under the guise of the ambitious task of “freeing” Ukraine from Russian energy resources, Amos Hochstein led a corrupt scheme know as “reverse gas supplies.” Under this scheme, Ukraine claimed to be providing reverse gas supplies from Europe, but in reality it was the same Russian gas, only the money owed for the supplies was not being paid to Russia, but rather to an array of proxy companies. And it was Andriy Derkach who exposed this scandal, and did the calculations which showed that Kobolev’s team was able to skim $50 from the Ukrainian budget for each 1,000 m3 of gas, which eventually amounted to $1.5 billion. And the money was not deposited in Ukraine, but instead was laundered through a series to offshore companies and accounts. In Ukraine itself, many seemed to be aware on behalf of who such a scheme was organized. “Joe Biden made the reverse from Slovakia in 2014,” said the largest Ukrainian business publication Liga, quoting one of the traders involved in the scheme.
It should be noted that the investigation into the activities of the former head of Naftogaz in Ukraine, Andriy Kobolev, who is accused of corruption, still continues in Ukraine to this day. However, despite the stolen billions, Kobolev’s trial has been been perpetually postponed. Incredibly, after Zelensky’s state visit with Biden in September 2023, Kobolev’s electronic bracelet was promptly removed and his bail amount was reduced. All of this appears to vindicate the investigation done by Andriy Derkach.
Burisma: a cash cow for Ukrainian oligarchs and the Bidens
Burisma is a Ukrainian energy company which flourished during the Yanukovych era. It was owned by the Minister of Ecology, Mykola Zlochevskyy, who just happened to be in charge of issuing permits for the development of gas fields. Given the company’s dubious reputation and the numerous open criminal cases involving financial fraud, in 2014 Zlochevsky tried to make Burisma untouchable from the Ukrainian justice system – by inviting a number of influential foreigners to its supervisory Board. This is why Burisma went with Joe Biden’s son Hunter, despite the fact he had no relevant experience in the energy sector, and apart from his influential father, was better known for his lavish jet-set lifestyle adorned by booze, drugs, and sex parties.
IMAGE: Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma (Photo: Burisma)
Thanks to Joe Biden’s intercession, Zlochevsky’s plan initially paid off. The criminal cases against the company were stopped, accounts seized, and most importantly, the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, who was the main initiator of the cases against Burisma in Ukraine, was removed from his position. Indeed, it was with Shokin, who Giuliani initially communicated in 2019.
It was here that Biden’s ego and hubris seemed to get the best of him when, in January 2018, he publicly described how he had secured the dismissal of Viktor Shokin by blackmailing President Poroshenko with the non-payment of a $1 billion loan from the US government. Only after the painstaking collection of all the data by Derkach and Giuliani, did it become obvious that the only reason for Shokin’s dismissal was Biden’s desperate need to shut down all the cases involving Burisma. And Biden did not just threaten Poroshenko, but flew into Kiev in person in order to threaten him and get an immediate response.
Joe Biden vs Derkach and Giuliani
What seemed like an amusing anecdote from Biden at the beginning of 2018, a year and a half later became a thread that led to a tangled web of international corruption in which a number of key figures of the US Democratic Party are mired.
Meanwhile, Andriy Derkach continued to bring more key evidence into the public eye. One exhibit were statements from Morgan Stanley Bank, which proved that Hunter Biden’s company Rosemont Seneca received more than $4.8 million from Burisma for services unknown, and which were not part of his salary. When challenged on the allegations, Burisma lost both trial and appeal to Derkach, while itself confirming the transfer of funds, disputing only the amount.
In parallel, Rudolph Giuliani began investigating the case on the US side, which helped to elevate the story of Biden family corruption in Ukraine to the forefront of the most discussed political topics in the country.
Later, at the end of the same 2019, Derkach made public brand new allegations by the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office for Burisma boss Mykola Zlochevsky, which revealed that there were other payments to Hunter Biden’s company that amounted to an additional 3.4 million dollars. Moreover, together with the prosecutor Kostyantyn Kulyk, who was expelled from the Prosecutor General’s Office because of the investigation of the Burisma case, Derkach managed to obtain the testimony of witnesses – citizens of Latvia, who among other things transferred funds from Zlochevsky’s personal account to companies associated with Hunter Biden. The Ukrainian investigators also got a hold of the laptop from which the payments were made.
This evidence appears to correlate perfectly with information disclosed in the previously classified FBI document called Form FD-1023, where Zlochevsky reportedly said that he had paid the two Bidens at least $5 million each. What’s more, Zlochevsky admitted that he had paid the Bidens “through so many different bank accounts” that investigators would not be able to “unravel this for at least 10 years,” and that he was thus able to “avoid paying the Big Guy (a reference to Joe Biden) directly.”
The real twist in the story came with Derkach’s publication of audio recordings of Petro Poroshenko’s conversations with Joe Biden and other foreign political leaders.
“The Derkach Tapes” revealed much about Biden’s true interests in Ukraine, with a focus on Ukraine’s largest private banking institution known as “Privat Bank”, which Poroshenko snatched from oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, and was prohibited to fire the above-mentioned Andriy Kobolev, but rejoiced at the statement of the NABU regarding Paul Manafort. More importantly, in the audio recording, the man appearing to be the voice of Petro Poroshenko, who openly states that at Biden’s request, he had asked Prosecutor General Shokin to resign, “despite the absence of any allegations of corruption and data regarding any illegal actions on his part.” From this, we can further confirm Biden’s blackmail and direct interference in the Burisma investigation.
Fast forward, and there appears to be an ongoing effort at the highest levels in Ukraine to completely expunge all of this from the record. One by one, the cases linking Burisma to the Bidens’ corruption have been shut down, and those under indictment seem to have been quietly let go. Yet, despite all the statements from the new Ukrainian Prosecutor General, Ruslan Ryaboshapka, that there is no Burisma case and no Biden case in Ukraine – in May 2020, NABU caught Burisma’s legal director Andriy Kicha red-handed in an attempt to pay an unheard-of $6 million cash bribe to the heads of anti-corruption agencies to close these ‘non-existent’ cases.
Mykola Zlochevsky’s impatience had brought the logic of Prosecutor General’s Office statements into question, and would ultimately force Joe Biden to hastily look for a way out of a situation which threatened unpleasant revelations both for his son (receiving undeclared income, working in a company engaged in money laundering) and for him personally (influence peddling, interference in the affairs of a sovereign state, corruption). The situation for Joe Biden became even more complicated after another press conference by Derkach, where together with former prosecutor Kostyantyn Kulyk, showed that internal documents of the Prosecutor General’s Office recorded the offer of a bribe in the amount of not 5, but 50 million dollars, and not in cash, but through a number of newly created shell companies.
Thus far, the Democratic establishment’s hold over the judicial system of Ukraine has allowed Biden to get away with it. It will be interesting to see if the US House of Representatives are able to learn what fate befell the main defendants in the case of the highest recorded cash bribe in European history, namely, Andriy Kicha, who knew all the secrets of financial relations between Zlochevsky and the Biden family, and who was caught red-handed, before cutting a deal with the investigation and receiving a one year suspended sentence. Eventually, the Zlochevsky case too would be dumped. As the main initiator of the bribe and the person accused of large-scale embezzlement of public funds, Zlochevsky would make a deal with the investigation and get off with a slap on the wrist – paying the equivalent of a $2,000 USD fine. Recently, the fourth and final defendant in the case was released, Mykola Ilyashenko, who received a five year suspended sentence, before being released at large.
Derkach joins forces with Giuliani to expose USAID ‘grant seekers’ embezzlement
Another case in which Andriy Derkach and Rudolf Giuliani actually collaborated on was the issue of stealing international technical assistance through the network of questionable “grant organizations” in Ukraine.
In particular, in February 2020, at the request of Andriy Derkach, the National Police confirmed the signs of a criminal offense and opened proceedings regarding the embezzlement of international technical assistance funds by the founders of the Anti-Corruption Center, Vitaliy Shabunin and Dmytro Sherembey. In total, this represented approximately $143 million in American taxpayers’ funds, allocated by the US government to a myriad of NGOs connected to USAID development schemes.
IMAGE: During “Common Sense” TV program Andriy Derkach and Rudolf Giuliani discussed the plundering of international technical assistance given to Ukraine through USAID, which was then laundered via the U.S. Embassy’s network of local “grant-seekers”.
The Anti-Corruption Action Center has been suspected of possible embezzlement of funds from the United States before, but each time it managed to get away with it. For example, in 2016, a pre-trial investigation revealed that between 2013 and 2016, the US government allocated at least $2 million and $8.5 million dollars to the fund two projects, respectively. One of the recipients of the funds was supposed to be the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, only the money never reached the intended recipient.
As a result, the Pechersk District Court of Kiev decided to seize documents of the Anti-Corruption Action Center. The Prosecutor General’s Office examined contracts, bank accounts and phone records of the fund’s employees, but was forced to close the case. To date, the details of where the funds allocated by the US Government went – remains a mystery. Subsequent questions surrounding this scandal prompted the US government to reconsider financial support to organizations involved in the misuse of grant funds including the Anti-Corruption Action Center (AntAC), UNITER and the International Development Law Organization (IDLO).
Biden backhanders, graft and vice… but Russia is to blame?
After Andriy Derkach’s press conferences in Ukraine, Rudy Giuliani’s media appearances in the US, and the publication of irrefutable evidence of corruption and influence peddling by the Democrat elites leading right to the very top levels of leadership, the Democratic Party machine decided to strike back. Instead of conducting an internal investigation into the allegations against Joe Biden, the Democrats decided to focus on another culprit, Russia.
That’s when Democrat Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut then made the public announcement that Rudy Giuliani is a Russian spy.
Joe Biden – and all of us – SHOULD be furious that media outlets are spreading what is very likely Russian propaganda.
1/ I’ve seen the intel. The mainstreaming of misinformation is Russia’s 2020 goal. Here’s what we know, and why we can’t take it lying down.
— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) October 17, 2020
And suddenly, Andriy Derkach is a Russian spy. And the technician who leaked information about drugs, guns, bribes and cocaine from Hunter Biden’s laptop was also a Russian spy.
It should be noted that even the noted American journalist, Simon Shuster, who today accompanies Volodymyr Zelensky on all of his trips, and before that tried for a long time to conduct his own investigation of Derkach’s activities, published a lengthy article in TIME magazine, where he claims that the level of influence of Russian intelligence services on American political events has been greatly exaggerated.
“A few weeks before Election Day, Giuliani triggered another email scandal, and this time the targets were Biden and his son [we’re talking about documents from Hunter Biden’s laptop, which was left by him in a computer repair shop]. This operation can hardly be called secret. Giuliani talked about it on his YouTube channel, where over whiskey and cigars he questioned his sources about the corruption of the ‘Biden crime family'”, writes Shuster.
“One of those sources was Ukrainian MP Andriy Derkach, a graduate of Russia’s main intelligence academy, against whom the U.S. government imposed sanctions in September…” added Shuster.
It is noteworthy that in this passage Shuster repeats the one detail from Derkach’s life, on which the American media, fully supporting the Democrats, tried to discredit him. It is true that Derkach was a student of the FSB Academy of the Russian Federation, but he himself never hid this fact, and those media outlets accusing him of being a Russian asset never provided any evidence that he was somehow connected with the Russian security services later in his career. Perhaps, due to his education and family connections (Andriy Derkach’s father was the head of the Security Service of Ukraine in 1998-2001), Derkach could have extensive connections with members of the intelligence services of other countries, but no evidence of this has ever been presented.
Elsewhere, journalist Simon Shuster mentioned Derkach, but rather than report properly on the Ukrainian politician’s positions and public works, the conversation instead is diverted to ‘Russian interference’, relying solely on the personal opinions of various and sundry ‘experts’ from the Democrats’ punditry stable, including all of the usual speculation and assumptions.
This episode of “Russian interference” in the US presidential election garnered hardly a response even in Ukraine, despite this talking point being on heavy rotation in the US mainstream media.
A good example is a comment by a well-known expert in Ukraine, director of the Penta Center for Political Research, Volodymyr Fesenko, who believed that “The Derkach Tapes,” as well as other evidence of Biden’s influence on Poroshenko, Burisma and Naftogaz, were an internal affair between Ukraine and the United States, and were not part of any Russian operation:
“I have little faith in the version that this is a Kremlin operation, because during this phone call both presidents look like cynical politicians with double standards… If it was a special operation of the Kremlin, the Russian media would constantly talk about it. So, there is no doubt that it was recorded by us [ie. by someone in Ukraine]…” .
The ambiguity of the position of the current Ukrainian authorities
Another factor that brings great uncertainty to the future of any investigations related to the Biden family is the position of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his inner circle, the head of the Office of the President, Andriy Yermak, and others.
In particular, there is Oleksandr Dubinsky, an MP from the pro-presidential “Servant of the People” party, who took part in a series of press conferences with Andriy Derkach in 2019-2020, where “The Derkach Tapes” and other evidence of Bidens’ corruption were made public.
Also confirmed is the fact that on behalf of Zelensky, Andriy Yermak also cooperated with Giuliani in the investigation of criminal cases concerning the Bidens’ business ventures and partners in Ukraine. More details about this can be found in the interview with presidential advisor Igor Novikov. It was in Novikov’s interview that the leak of audio recordings of the presidents’ conversations was called Ukraine’s “national sport”. The full transcript of the call between Giuliani and Yermak can be found here.
Note that in 2019, the head of Zelensky’s office, Yermak, said in a conversation with Giuliani that he willingly agreed to investigate the Bidens’ corrupt activity. During the conversation, Giuliani asked Yermak if the Ukrainian leader would “just let the investigation move forward.” In response, Yermak promised to launch an investigation into all the facts mentioned in the conversation, saying, “Believe me, we need some months, two months to complete the formation of a new parliament, a new government, new security blocks of our team, and we will completely change and work.” Yermak added, “We will be ready to work and investigate everything you listed.”
And Yermack did follow-up on Giuliani’s requests. According to Dubinsky, an MP close to the president, Yermak demanded the creation of a temporary investigative commission in the Ukrainian parliament to look into the facts presented in “The Derkach Tapes”. However, after Joe Biden’s win in 2020, Zelensky was compelled to move in and rectify the situation.
Biden strikes back
Following Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 US presidential election, Derkach faced real persecution, as the new administration was keen to whitewash any investigations or inquiries into the Biden family’s dealings in Ukraine.
In late 2020, the US Treasury Department imposed economic sanctions against Andriy Derkach for a “planned compiled information campaign.” Derkach’s visa to the United States was canceled, all bank accounts in Ukraine were closed, and all media activity concerning the TV and radio company ERA Media to which he was associated with, came to a grinding halt. In addition to this, President Zelensky signed a decree imposing nationwide personal sanctions on him.
All of Derkach’s social media profiles were blocked (the Twitter blocking is particularly telling, as its new owner, billionaire Elon Musk, recently showed internal documents from the network showing how the previous management under then CEO Jack Dorsey took “extraordinary measures” to cover up the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the Bidens’ connection to Burisma).
The websites Nabuleaks and Democorruption, where Derkach’s team published data from investigative journalists about corruption schemes in Ukraine, were also shut down, and virtually all materials about his press conferences were removed.
It is also reported that in 2021, an assassination attempt was being prepared on Derkach, which, according to him, was organized by the British intelligence agency MI6 in cooperation with the paramilitary Kroll company. In 2022, after the start of the military actions in Ukraine, law enforcers charged Derkach with treason “for undermining relations with the United States,” while the US itself simultaneously charged him with violating sanctions and money laundering, and put him on an international wanted list. Due to the situation in the country and pressure being applied from the top of the US and Ukrainian governments, Derkach had disappeared altogether. Still, there is hope that he still managed to stay alive and flee to safety outside of Ukraine.
Moving forward
While the facts presented by Andriy Derkach were often dismissed as ‘disinformation’ in the US government and media, they were always shown to be accurate in the various official investigative documents. As a result of the work of Derkach and Giuliani, all information about corruption involving American and Ukrainian politicians, businessmen, and “grant-seekers” – moved to the official arena, and have been documented on the public record.
Indeed, it was Derkach and Giuliani who “gave life” to the story about the interference of the US Embassy in Ukraine during the 2016 presidential election through the Democrat-controlled NABU, a story which remained taboo in Ukraine for a long time. The two worked in parallel investigating corruption schemes in Ukraine’s energy sector (the Burisma, and ‘reverse gas supply’ scandals under the wing of Naftogaz – the latter of which is yet to be fully developed in the House Oversight Committee’s investigations).
Derkach and Giuliani managed to show that in response to undeniable evidence in the form of invoices, statements, audit documents – the Democrats had only one response – to deem any accusations or evidence of corruption as “Russian propaganda”, and to try and discredit the sources of such information, including with the help of testimony from highly dubious witnesses, like Lev Parnas.
But the Democratic establishment in the United States and their proxies in Ukraine are not wasting time either. In the US, the Justice Department and its FBI, and in Ukraine, the corrupt Zelensky government, with predictable regularity, will bring criminal cases (albeit unsubstantiated and hastily compiled) against any politicians or journalists who dare to investigate international corruption. In addition to Derkach, the same is true for Rudolph Giuliani, Kostyantyn Kulyk, Oleksandr Dubinsky, Andriy Telizhenko, Gal Luft, and even Donald Trump himself. How the three top congressional investigators, James Comer, Jim Jordan, and Jason Smith, will handle this case remains to be seen. Apparently, the only true solution will be to interrogate those Ukrainian citizens who have reliable knowledge of the aforementioned corruption cases, starting with former Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin – and done in full public view with maximum media coverage.
In this light, the testimonies of Andriy Derkach and Rudolf Giuliani take on special importance. After all, corruption in Burisma, blackmailing the president of a sovereign state to fire the Prosecutor General, setting up fraudulent schemes like reverse gas supplies, or placing pressure on the investigation and the courts in the criminal cases of Andriy Kobolev, Andriy Kicha, Mykola Zlochevsky – all these are stepping stones on the way to the impeachment of the incumbent President of the United States. This would also include the public disclosure of Hunter Biden’s financial documents, in particular, bank statements and credit cards, all of which may show that the Biden family received at least $30 million from foreign persons and entities – in exchange for political decisions made in their favor.
Only then would it become clear who really should be accused of treason – Andriy Derkach, someone who did everything to safeguard the sovereignty of his country and restore good relations between Ukraine and the United States, or the current Commander and Chief in the White House and his family who are mired in international corruption.
The American people deserve to see all the evidence, and then make an informed decision about their country’s political future.
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