CHAPTER 1
Insane in Ukraine
I’m going to start in the two places I ended my last book: Ukraine and Washington, DC.
Those are the locations where a group I call the Scandal Manufacturers of America (SMA) sources its best material.
The SMA is the unofficial coalition of crybaby Democrats, holier-than-thou liberal media pundits, and delusional Never-Trumpers who have dedicated themselves to the takedown of the elected president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.
I’ve already devoted two books to documenting and dismantling the SMA’s work. The first, Spygate, revealed how this group manufactured a bogus Russia-collusion story, which, fortunately, failed to stop or discredit the election of Trump. The second, Exonerated, documented the plug-and-play efforts by Clinton operatives and senior law enforcement officials in the FBI and the Department of Justice to remove Trump from office by fabricating and laundering misleading “evidence” of a supposed conspiracy. As the world now knows, special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s mission to uncover that “evidence” was an utter failure. For the record, much of that second book’s assertions about FBI and special investigator chicanery have been proven correct in a report issued by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General Michael Horowitz. That report concluded that applications used to obtain warrants used by the FBI to spy on Trump campaign advisor Carter Page contained seventeen major errors and omissions.
As for the infamous “Steele dossier,” the collection of fabrications, rumors, and lies about the Trump campaign, Horowitz concluded, “the FBI failed to reassess the Steele reporting relied upon in the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] applications, and did not fully advise the [National Security Division] or [Office of Intelligence]. We also found that the FBI did not aggressively seek to obtain certain potentially important information from Steele.”
Undaunted by two elaborate failures, the shameless Scandal Manufacturers of America pivoted to a new chapter in its senseless saga. Just months after the pointless Mueller probe came to an end, they decided to waste thousands of man-hours paralyzing Capitol Hill by launching impeachment proceedings to remove the president. As everyone knows, Ukraine was at the center of that effort.
Or should I say, failed effort?
I’ll get into the absurdity of the impeachment case mounted against the president, but let’s zoom in on Ukraine. Why is this nation so important? Why is it a magnet for trouble? Why should a few sentences from the president of the United States to his counterpart in Kyiv, Volodymyr Zelensky, detonate hand-wringing, sky-is-falling statements about the collapse of our republic?
Trump was doing what presidents do. But here are some quotes from the Ukraine experts trotted out by Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee to expose the so-called heinous behavior of the president. Let’s see if these excerpts fully explain this Eastern European enigma.
The most accurate and honest description of Ukraine that I heard during the hearings didn’t actually come from the hearings. It came from a Seinfeld episode that someone emailed me. You don’t have to be a fan of that particular sitcom to appreciate the prophetic political analysis that aired on January 19, 1995. In the key scene, Kramer, the show’s tall, gangly hipster, is playing the board game Risk on the subway—a funny image in and of itself—and he’s taunting his opponent. “You know what Ukraine is?” he laughs. “It’s a sitting duck. It’s a road-apple.”
At least that is in the ballpark. Ukraine is a lot of things, obviously. It’s a country populated by wonderful, hard-working people who are desperate for honest leadership. Yet, the Ukrainians have been consistently let down by a broken political class eager for power and riches, and lacking in the one trait that could turn the political tide: morality. The experts on the Hill weren’t actually wrong with their passing summaries. But they weren’t right, either. They didn’t tell the whole picture. As we dig deeper and deeper into the story and unravel the corrupt connections surrounding this chaotic country, no description may be more accurate than the one the creatures of the DC swamp should have offered under oath:
That would have been accurate. Maybe not so much right now, when everyone is on their best behavior with the spotlight on Kyiv. But understanding the vast, money-printing, influence-peddling, backstabbing, dog-eat-dog corruption of Ukraine would have helped the world understand why Donald Trump was having the conversation that set off the entire, absurd, impeachment charade.
Ukraine was an influence-peddling paradise. It was vital to Russian interests.
It was vital to American interests.
And that made it vital to anyone with self-interests in generating cash.
By now, Hunter Biden, the son of former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden, is the most famous of these human handout homing devices. But there were many swamp rats—from both sides of the aisle—who swooped into Kyiv to make mega-withdrawals. I’ve documented a bunch of this, but we now know far more about the players and the sinister connections many of them shared.
Let’s start with the man who is really ground zero for all the manufactured Trump scandals: Paul Manafort.
Seriously. I’m not here to defend Manafort. He brought damaging baggage with him to the Trump campaign—serving first as a consultant and then the campaign chairman—and it cast a toxic shadow over the candidate’s entire organization. Collusion hoaxers were all too happy to leverage Manafort’s shady dealings for political gain. In Exonerated, I explained how and why Manafort’s presence raised huge flags for Fusion GPS, the company hired by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to conduct “opposition research”—his links to Putin’s pals, billionaire Oleg Deripaska, and former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych were suspect.
Now Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson has confirmed all this in his own book, which came out two months after my book, noting the very same Wall Street Journal articles that I cited—imagine that!—and revealing he’d been tracking Manafort for years:
Manafort lasted about six months with the Trump campaign. While Simpson and his operatives were scouring for dirt, Democratic National Committee consultant Alexandra Chalupa was also ringing alarm bells, telling anyone she could that Manafort was linked to Ukraine’s personal Putin puppet president Yanukovych and his corrupt administration—which had been overthrown in a popular uprising. But what brought Manafort down was a report in the New York Times about a mysterious black ledger.
“Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau,” the Times reported.
The Ukraine anti-corruption cops were also examining offshore companies that may have been used to funnel cash to Yanukovych’s cronies and hundreds of “murky” transactions, including an “$18 million deal to sell Ukrainian cable television assets to a partnership put together by Mr. Manafort” and his old Russian billionaire client Oleg Deripaska.
The allegations of possible wrong-doing involving Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, combined with a dip in polling numbers for the Trump campaign, forced Manafort to resign just five days after the black ledger report.
Here’s the thing: the initial reports of the black ledger strained credibility from day one. This giant, incriminating piece of evidence initially surfaced out of nowhere, just as Paul Manafort joined Team Trump. Ukrainian Parliament member Sergii Leshchenko said he received twenty-two pages of mysterious financial transactions in his m...
