timschochet
Footballguy
This really has nothing to do with what I wrote. Are you now saying that you no longer believe the Mueller Report exonerates Trump?
Fantasy Football - Footballguys Forums
Welcome to Our Forums. Once you've registered and logged in, you're primed to talk football, among other topics, with the sharpest and most experienced fantasy players on the internet.
Conspiracy Theories (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter timschochet
- Start date
timschochet
Footballguy
The Commish
Footballguy
apalmer
Footballguy
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
It’s a wee bit more credible considering the Trump campaign communicated about it months before the Steele dossier even became known. It may or may not exist but the campaign sure seemed to think it existed.
Don't Noonan
Footballguy
Sho, let me help you out because you are making false accusations again. Saints asked what the Ukraine theory was with Crowdstrike and I posted a detailed analysis of that theory. I never said I fully believed it or had links. Unlike you, I tend to wait until the facts present themselves before making up my mind on something.
sho nuff
Footballguy
No accusation against have made is false...never has been and that is yet another bogus assertion by you.
You presented those things as fact and ran away once they were questioned.
Detailed analysis...you posted a bunch of false claims.
And you posted the same thing word for word on another board ( as I saw when i searched the text to find out where you may have copied it from).
Care to go back ams answer questions that were posted about what you had said and cote some things as we have been asked by moderation to do?
Don't Noonan
Footballguy
I honestly have no idea what you are trying to say in this post and I read it three times.
sho nuff
Footballguy
Stop...its plenty clear and the questions that have been asked and ignored are clear. This is not honest discussion by you...please stop it.
sho nuff
Footballguy
Can you please answer questions on these claims.Don't Noonan said:
A. Please cite where Crowdstrike was the only one to examine things...I believe this is false. Also, please show where the FBI only received a partial draft of the report and not data copies (along with other agencies who received such copies).
B. Why would the server be in Ukraine...and why is the theory surrounding one server...as if there was not more than one?
C. Please cite this information about download speeds...this has been shown to be false multiple times.
rockaction
Footballguy
I really don't see what this exercise -- and it is constant as a reader -- is attempting to do.
It seems awfully futile, this debate with DN about conspiracy stuff.
It seems awfully futile, this debate with DN about conspiracy stuff.
sho nuff
Footballguy
To show he is here in good faith and not just spreading false stories and propaganda?
It probably is futile to give the benefit of the doubt that he is willing to engage in actual discussion
Ramblin Wreck
Footballguy
So when you don't respond to questions asked of you, it's proof you aren't here for discussion in good faith? Good to know.
The Commish
Footballguy
sho nuff
Footballguy
And that stuff needs to be exposed and refuted.
the other option is he really believes them
mcintyre1
Footballguy
When they're repeated, from multiple different questioners, and are directly related to the truthfulness of your claims? Yeah.
Noonan has pretty clearly shown that he's not interested in actual discussion. In the spirit of Joe's civility plea I tried on this exact same subject just a few days ago. After I pointed out several critical flaws in the "theory," he tried to wriggle out of responsibility for the stuff he spreads by saying he didn't necessarily "agree with" it. A day or two later he's in this thread repeating the same things I challenged him on, with no caveat about whether he believes it or not. He's looking for reactions and doesn't care that the things he says are untrue. I'd pull out that Sarte quote but I don't want to be accused of calling him an anti-semite or something.
sho nuff
Footballguy
Forget it...the guy knows i have him on ignore...knows I wont respond...and complains that I won’t answer his questions.
To compare that to DN engaging in discussion and then ignoring challenge to assertions he has made is just the typical crap and one of many reasons uts not worth trying with that poster
The Commish
Footballguy
It already has been...a billion times now....I think there is basically ZERO value in engaging him anymore. I know I'm trying my best, but last week I had some REALLY boring meetings
ETA: And I meant to
rock on that last one....my bad.
Last edited by a moderator:
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
Commish (or Rock), do you or did you actually understand the Presidents' claim? Do you know what it is?It already has been...a billion times now....I think there is basically ZERO value in engaging him anymore. I know I'm trying my best, but last week I had some REALLY boring meetings
ETA: And I meant to
Everyone got Nixon, right? He had nothing to do with the coverup, end of story. When it was determined he was involved, that was the end of that. - By contrast do you understand what's going on here?
Last edited by a moderator:
The Commish
Footballguy
The President or DN? We were talking about DN in those posts. Not sure what you're asking about regarding the President. Which "claim" of the President's are you referring to?
![[scooter]](/data/avatars/m/22/22287.jpg?1659477690){kind=avatar}
[scooter]
Footballguy
As I understand it, the President's claim is that he has the right to use the power of the Presidency investigate his personal theories of corruption (and to coerce other countries to help him), even if those theories serve only to help him on a personal level, even if the theories are demonstrably and laughably false.
What cracks me up about DN and similar acolytes is that they conveniently ignore the part about the theories being debunked (no matter how honestly SiD tries to engage them). That's how you know that they are either not engaging in a good faith discussion, or that they are unwilling or unable to comprehend the sincere arguments which challenge their worldview. That's their "tell".
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
Lol this is exactly the problem - that is the President's claims. They are, and I am not kidding because it comes straight from the whacko pages:
- Crowdstrike stole the DNC server and is hiding it in Ukraine.
- CIA Director Brennan set up Trump using Mifsud as bait to entrap Papadopoulos and start the spying campaign.
The Commish
Footballguy
oh...yeah, I am aware of the President's claims. I'm not sure DN is or understands what he's repeating. That's why I was asking. It's full on "this is what happens when a person with no knowledge of foreign policy buys in 100% to conspiracy theories they read on the internet" type stuff.
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
- This is a really thick piece, and it' important, and it's really disturbing what is going on in the presidency right now.
But just on this point alone something that is going on is that the White House and the President are being influenced from the ground up, and the effect of that is a massive rebroadcasting of the message from the Presidency of the US.
Last edited by a moderator:
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
@Don't Noonan - I would love to discuss this subject with you sometime thoroughly. Just let me know.
Don't Noonan
Footballguy
Aren't we already discussing it in the impeachment thread? Is there different conspiracy theory besides the Russia one which we have beaten to death?
timschochet
Footballguy
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
I think discussing it here allows fuller discussion without bothering people. I guess my starting point is that Trump and his supporters are pushing out information from people like Firtash, Parnas & Fruman, and their associates, it’s just laundered disinformation.
And the President is represented by the same person representing these oligarch interests. I think it’s also really striking that Firtash has been represented by DiGenova & Toensing, who has also been representing John Solomon.
Last edited by a moderator:
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
- @John Blutarskythere's more info on this in this thread, but the most important thing you should understand was that Shokin was protecting Burisma and suppressing investigation against it. Also Hunter Biden arrived after the events which are at issue occurred.
Last edited by a moderator:
[scooter]
Footballguy
Also, I'd just like to point out that it's really sloppy journalism for USA Today to claim that a Vice President has unilateral authority to withhold aid. This was a diplomatic decision by the Obama administration, with Biden (along with several U.S. diplomats and Republican Congressmen) delivering the message.
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
John Blutarsky
Footballguy
Burisma faced a money-laundering investigation and questions over how it had obtained some of its licenses to drill for natural gas. In spring 2014, the company appointed Hunter Biden and a former Polish president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, to its board. Three years later, Burisma added Cofer Black, a former CIA official and foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, to the board.
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
The licenses were granted in 2013, so Hunter was not even around at the time of those events.
I will post some links if helpful - they're already above in this thread - but the General Prosecutor had already shut down the investigation of Burisma by the time Hunter showed up in April or May of 2014. This was under Shokin, who was the driving force behind protecting Burisma. The GPO continued to send out notices to the UK and within Ukraine that there was no investigation. Sholkin was the one shutting down the investigation, that's a key point to this whole lie. Lutsenko followed suit, though there had been hope for reform when he came in.
I think the Black issue is covered in here I'll see but if you want to provide a link to that I'll be glad to discuss.
Last edited by a moderator:
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
Bluto fyi Moleculo covered that previously.
I think what you have here is Burisma using "respectable" people as window dressing to put forth in front of investors and agencies like the IMF, DOJ and the UK ministries who were pursuing Burisma because of Zlochevsky's misdeeds.
- Black is also on the board of Northwest Biotherapeutics. - He is also in business with one of Trump's biggest contributors and campaign advisors, Erik Prince.
- Alan Apter like Hunter was a private equity investory, with Eaglestone. He's chairman.
- Christina Sofocleous was a corporate lawyer.
- Alexander Kwasniewski was the former President of Poland.
- Devin Archer was the one who made the connection with Zlochevsky originally and brought Hunter Biden in after Archer was already a board member. They of course were with Rosemont which is a private equity investor. They both have already left Burisma's board.
Last edited by a moderator:
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
The Double-Barreled Dream World of Trump and His Enablers
- NYT
By Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch
- NYT
By Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch
They wanted to take down Biden. But they also wanted to absolve Moscow of election meddling.
The Ukraine scandal now unfolding in congressional impeachment hearings has at its core a Shakespearean twist: President Trump, abetted by his paladins of spin, has trapped himself in an alternate universe. To undermine the well-established fact that Russia corrupted the 2016 vote to help him win, Mr. Trump and his allies have tried to build a fiction that pins those crimes on Ukraine.
In so doing, he has confirmed our darkest fears. The president’s bid to solicit foreign help to impugn a domestic political rival in 2019 should wipe away any doubts about his willingness to do the same with Russian help in 2016.
Mr. Trump and his enablers — Rudolph Giuliani foremost among them — have scrambled all year to do two deeds at once. They want to besmirch Joe Biden, without foundation, for supposedly using his office as vice president to protect his son Hunter, who served until recently on the board of a Ukrainian gas company. And they want to reinvent what happened in 2016 so as to switch the blame for the election meddling from Moscow to Kyiv.
Congress is rightly focused on the quid pro quo demands that Mr. Trump was making of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to further his own personal political interests. But the effort to rewrite the history of 2016 is no less insidious.
As the founders of Fusion GPS, the research firm that commissioned the reports by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele that raised some of the earliest warnings of Russia’s actions, we’re willing to clear up some of the nonsense now so ripe on the right.
House Republicans like Representatives Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan seem eager to portray Fusion as co-conspirators with the Ukrainians in some devilish plot to undermine Mr. Trump’s 2016 candidacy. That could not be further from the truth. None of the information in the so-called Steele dossier came from Ukrainian sources. Zero. And we’ve never met Serhiy Leshchenko, the Ukrainian former legislator and journalist who Republicans want to blame for the downfall of Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort.
That said, our investigation of Donald Trump did get a great boost because of Ukraine, just not in the way Republicans imagine. We began looking into Mr. Trump’s business dealings and ties to Russia in the fall of 2015 with funding from Republicans who wanted to stop his political ascent. The Ukraine alarms went off six months later, when candidate Trump brought into his campaign none other than Mr. Manafort, a man with his own tangled history with Russian oligarchs trying to get their way in Ukraine.
It turns out we already knew a great deal about Mr. Manafort’s activities in Ukraine because we worked on several stories about his work for Russian-backed politicians eight years earlier, when we were both still writing for The Wall Street Journal. That reporting threw a spotlight on how Mr. Manafort, while representing clients involved in fierce geopolitical struggles over Ukraine, had neglected to comply with a lobbying law requiring that he register as a foreign agent — the very law, among others, to which he pleaded guilty to violating.
Those articles triggered years of media coverage exposing Mr. Manafort’s questionable lobbying activities and ties to pro Russia oligarchs. In the meantime, we left The Journal and went on to found Fusion GPS, a research and strategic intelligence firm, in 2010.
We turned our focus back to Mr. Manafort in early 2016 and soon found a 19-page legal filing in a federal courthouse in Virginia in which one of his former clients, the Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska, accused Mr. Manafort in scorching detail of making off with tens of millions of dollars that he had promised to invest in Ukraine. The whole thing reeked of fraud and possible money laundering. It was as if Mr. Manafort had boarded the Trump campaign plane with baggage stuffed with figurative explosives. The Virginia filings later surfaced in various articles about Manafort in the national media.
A few months later we stumbled on some Ukrainian media reports noting that documents existed in Kyiv that chronicled the political spending of the pro-Russia ruling party at the time, which had hired Mr. Manafort. We wondered if his name might crop up in those papers. Someone suggested Mr. Leshchenko might be of help in the matter — a fact we stored away. To this day, we have never met him.
The New York Times got to the story first, in August 2016, reporting that a black ledger of illicit payments showed that millions of dollars had gone into the pocket of one Paul Manafort. That story led to Mr. Manafort’s ouster from the campaign, and undoubtedly fueled F.B.I. interest in his activities, though the so-called black ledger was never used in the criminal cases against him.
We’d love to take credit for finding the black ledger, but we didn’t, and any alert reporter following the Ukrainian press would have known to follow the leads that led to it.
That hasn’t stopped Republicans from weaving conspiracy theories about our work in Ukraine. Mr. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer and the main stirrer of the conspiracy pot in Ukraine, cooked up a fresh fabrication just this week, telling Glenn Beck on his TV program that he had “very strong evidence that a lot of the Steele dossier was produced in Ukraine” and that “Glenn Simpson spent a fair amount of time there during the time that the dossier was being written.”
By sheer coincidence, one of us — the aforementioned Mr. Simpson — found himself on a plane from New York to Washington with Mr. Giuliani just hours later, and he couldn’t resist confronting the former New York mayor about his claim after they landed.
“I understand you think I spent a lot of time in Ukraine?” Mr. Simpson inquired.
“You did spend some time in Ukraine,” Mr. Giuliani replied.
“Did I?” Mr. Simpson asked as he waved his phone in front of Mr. Giuliani, signaling that he was recording the encounter.
“What if I told you I have never been to Ukraine in my life?”
“Well,” Mr. Giuliani replied with equanimity, “O.K. I will find out if that’s true or not.”
So, Mr. Giuliani is still investigating the lies he hopes will save a deeply corrupt presidency. That should chill all Americans.
***
Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch are the founders of Fusion GPS and authors of the upcoming book, “Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump.”
The Ukraine scandal now unfolding in congressional impeachment hearings has at its core a Shakespearean twist: President Trump, abetted by his paladins of spin, has trapped himself in an alternate universe. To undermine the well-established fact that Russia corrupted the 2016 vote to help him win, Mr. Trump and his allies have tried to build a fiction that pins those crimes on Ukraine.
In so doing, he has confirmed our darkest fears. The president’s bid to solicit foreign help to impugn a domestic political rival in 2019 should wipe away any doubts about his willingness to do the same with Russian help in 2016.
Mr. Trump and his enablers — Rudolph Giuliani foremost among them — have scrambled all year to do two deeds at once. They want to besmirch Joe Biden, without foundation, for supposedly using his office as vice president to protect his son Hunter, who served until recently on the board of a Ukrainian gas company. And they want to reinvent what happened in 2016 so as to switch the blame for the election meddling from Moscow to Kyiv.
Congress is rightly focused on the quid pro quo demands that Mr. Trump was making of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to further his own personal political interests. But the effort to rewrite the history of 2016 is no less insidious.
As the founders of Fusion GPS, the research firm that commissioned the reports by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele that raised some of the earliest warnings of Russia’s actions, we’re willing to clear up some of the nonsense now so ripe on the right.
House Republicans like Representatives Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan seem eager to portray Fusion as co-conspirators with the Ukrainians in some devilish plot to undermine Mr. Trump’s 2016 candidacy. That could not be further from the truth. None of the information in the so-called Steele dossier came from Ukrainian sources. Zero. And we’ve never met Serhiy Leshchenko, the Ukrainian former legislator and journalist who Republicans want to blame for the downfall of Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort.
That said, our investigation of Donald Trump did get a great boost because of Ukraine, just not in the way Republicans imagine. We began looking into Mr. Trump’s business dealings and ties to Russia in the fall of 2015 with funding from Republicans who wanted to stop his political ascent. The Ukraine alarms went off six months later, when candidate Trump brought into his campaign none other than Mr. Manafort, a man with his own tangled history with Russian oligarchs trying to get their way in Ukraine.
It turns out we already knew a great deal about Mr. Manafort’s activities in Ukraine because we worked on several stories about his work for Russian-backed politicians eight years earlier, when we were both still writing for The Wall Street Journal. That reporting threw a spotlight on how Mr. Manafort, while representing clients involved in fierce geopolitical struggles over Ukraine, had neglected to comply with a lobbying law requiring that he register as a foreign agent — the very law, among others, to which he pleaded guilty to violating.
Those articles triggered years of media coverage exposing Mr. Manafort’s questionable lobbying activities and ties to pro Russia oligarchs. In the meantime, we left The Journal and went on to found Fusion GPS, a research and strategic intelligence firm, in 2010.
We turned our focus back to Mr. Manafort in early 2016 and soon found a 19-page legal filing in a federal courthouse in Virginia in which one of his former clients, the Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska, accused Mr. Manafort in scorching detail of making off with tens of millions of dollars that he had promised to invest in Ukraine. The whole thing reeked of fraud and possible money laundering. It was as if Mr. Manafort had boarded the Trump campaign plane with baggage stuffed with figurative explosives. The Virginia filings later surfaced in various articles about Manafort in the national media.
A few months later we stumbled on some Ukrainian media reports noting that documents existed in Kyiv that chronicled the political spending of the pro-Russia ruling party at the time, which had hired Mr. Manafort. We wondered if his name might crop up in those papers. Someone suggested Mr. Leshchenko might be of help in the matter — a fact we stored away. To this day, we have never met him.
The New York Times got to the story first, in August 2016, reporting that a black ledger of illicit payments showed that millions of dollars had gone into the pocket of one Paul Manafort. That story led to Mr. Manafort’s ouster from the campaign, and undoubtedly fueled F.B.I. interest in his activities, though the so-called black ledger was never used in the criminal cases against him.
We’d love to take credit for finding the black ledger, but we didn’t, and any alert reporter following the Ukrainian press would have known to follow the leads that led to it.
That hasn’t stopped Republicans from weaving conspiracy theories about our work in Ukraine. Mr. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer and the main stirrer of the conspiracy pot in Ukraine, cooked up a fresh fabrication just this week, telling Glenn Beck on his TV program that he had “very strong evidence that a lot of the Steele dossier was produced in Ukraine” and that “Glenn Simpson spent a fair amount of time there during the time that the dossier was being written.”
By sheer coincidence, one of us — the aforementioned Mr. Simpson — found himself on a plane from New York to Washington with Mr. Giuliani just hours later, and he couldn’t resist confronting the former New York mayor about his claim after they landed.
“I understand you think I spent a lot of time in Ukraine?” Mr. Simpson inquired.
“You did spend some time in Ukraine,” Mr. Giuliani replied.
“Did I?” Mr. Simpson asked as he waved his phone in front of Mr. Giuliani, signaling that he was recording the encounter.
“What if I told you I have never been to Ukraine in my life?”
“Well,” Mr. Giuliani replied with equanimity, “O.K. I will find out if that’s true or not.”
So, Mr. Giuliani is still investigating the lies he hopes will save a deeply corrupt presidency. That should chill all Americans.
***
Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch are the founders of Fusion GPS and authors of the upcoming book, “Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump.”
Last edited by a moderator:
Great piece. It is amazing watching Nunes/Jordan make these false claims in front of a national audience.
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
Some more on the Solomon affidavit:
Why Giuliani Singled Out 2 Ukrainian Oligarchs to Help Dig Up Dirt
Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian energy tycoon facing criminal charges in the United States, says he was offered help with his legal problems during a meeting with two Giuliani
VIENNA — They were two Ukrainian oligarchs with American legal problems. One had been indicted on federal bribery charges. The other was embroiled in a vast banking scandal and was reported to be under investigation by the F.B.I.
And they had one more thing in common: Both had been singled out by Rudolph W. Giuliani and pressed to assist in his wide-ranging hunt for information damaging to one of President Trump’s leading political rivals, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
That effort culminated in the July 25 phone call between the American and Ukrainian presidents that has taken Mr. Trump to the brink of impeachment and inexorably brought Mr. Giuliani’s Ukrainian shadow campaign into the light.
In public hearings over the last two weeks, American diplomats and national-security officials have laid out in detail how Mr. Trump, at the instigation and with the help of Mr. Giuliani, conditioned nearly $400 million in direly needed military aid on Ukraine’s announcing investigations into Mr. Biden and his son, as well as a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
But interviews with the two Ukrainian oligarchs — Dmitry Firtash and Ihor Kolomoisky — as well as with several other people with knowledge of Mr. Giuliani’s dealings, point to a new dimension in his exertions on behalf of his client, Mr. Trump. Taken together, they depict a strategy clearly aimed at leveraging information from politically powerful but legally vulnerable foreign citizens.
In the case of Mr. Firtash, an energy tycoon with deep ties to the Kremlin who is facing extradition to the United States on bribery and racketeering charges, one of Mr. Giuliani’s associates has described offering the oligarch help with his Justice Department problems — if Mr. Firtash hired two lawyers who were close to President Trump and were already working with Mr. Giuliani on his dirt-digging mission. Mr. Firtash said the offer was made in late June when he met with Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, both Soviet-born businessmen involved in Mr. Giuliani’s Ukraine pursuit.
Mr. Parnas’s lawyer, Joseph A. Bondy, confirmed that account and added that his client had met with Mr. Firtash at Mr. Giuliani’s direction and encouraged the oligarch to help in the hunt for compromising information “as part of any potential resolution to his extradition matter.”
Mr. Firtash’s relationship to the Trump-allied lawyers — Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova — has led to intense speculation that he is, at least indirectly, helping to finance Mr. Giuliani’s campaign. But until now he has stayed silent, and many of the details of how and why he came to hire the lawyers have remained murky.
In the interview, Mr. Firtash said he had no information about the Bidens and had not financed the search for it. “Without my will and desire,” he said, “I was sucked into this internal U.S. fight.” But to help his legal case, he said, he had paid his new lawyers $1.2 million to date, with a portion set aside as something of a referral fee for Mr. Parnas.
And in late August, Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova did as promised: They went to the Justice Department and pleaded Mr. Firtash’s case with the attorney general, William P. Barr.
In an interview, Mr. Giuliani acknowledged that he had sought information helpful to Mr. Trump from a member of Mr. Firtash’s original legal team. But, Mr. Giuliani said, “the only thing he could give me was what I already had, hearsay.” Asked if he had then directed his associates to meet with Mr. Firtash, Mr. Giuliani initially said, “I don’t think I can comment,” but later said, “I did not tell Parnas to do anything with Firtash.”
He added, though, that there would be nothing improper about seeking information about the Bidens from the oligarchs. “Where do you think you get information about crime?” he said.
But Chuck Rosenberg, a legal expert and a United States attorney under President George W. Bush, said the “solicitation of information, under these circumstances, and to discredit the president’s political opponent, is at best “crass and ethically suspect.”
He added: “And it is even worse if Mr. Giuliani, either directly or through emissaries acting on his behalf, intimated that pending criminal cases can be ‘fixed’ at the Justice Department. The president’s lawyer seems to be trading on the president’s supervisory authority over the Justice Department, and that is deeply disturbing.”
Mr. Bondy, the lawyer for Mr. Parnas — who was arrested with Mr. Fruman last month on campaign finance-related charges and has signaled a willingness to cooperate with impeachment investigators — said in a statement that all of his client’s actions had been directed by Mr. Giuliani.
“Mr. Parnas reasonably believed Giuliani’s directions reflected the interests and wishes of the president, given Parnas having witnessed and in several instances overheard Mr. Giuliani speaking with the president,” the lawyer said. Mr. Parnas, he added, “is remorseful for involving himself and Mr. Firtash in the president’s self-interested political plot.”
A Conduit to Ukraine
By the time Mr. Giuliani turned his attention to Mr. Kolomoisky and Mr. Firtash, he had been working for months to turn up damaging information about Mr. Biden and his son Hunter, who joined the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma while his father was vice president.
Mr. Giuliani spoke with Ukrainian officials like Viktor Shokin, the former prosecutor general who suggested, falsely, that Mr. Biden had had him fired for looking into Burisma, as well as with Mr. Shokin’s successor, Yuriy Lutsenko. And he enlisted Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova, trusted colleagues since their days together in the Reagan Justice Department, to help interview and potentially represent anyone willing to come forward with dirt. Mr. Parnas acted as translator and fixer, crisscrossing the Atlantic with stops at the Manhattan cigar bar that was Mr. Giuliani’s hangout, a strip club in Kyiv and even a Hanukkah reception at the White House.
The campaign seemed to be paying off, with the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, poised to announce the investigations Mr. Giuliani sought, when the political situation changed. On April 21, Mr. Poroshenko was unseated by Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian and political novice, sending Mr. Giuliani scrambling to establish a conduit. Two days later, Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman flew to Tel Aviv to meet with Mr. Kolomoisky, who was seen as Mr. Zelensky’s patron.
Mr. Kolomoisky, a banking and media tycoon who is one of Ukraine’s richest men, is also known for financing mercenary troops battling Russian-supported separatists in eastern Ukraine. Earlier in April, The Daily Beast had reported, citing unnamed sources, that the F.B.I. was investigating him for possible money-laundering in connection with problems at a bank he had owned. He is also entangled in a civil lawsuit in Delaware.
Mr. Giuliani’s assessment, according to Mr. Parnas’s lawyer, was that those legal problems made Mr. Kolomoisky vulnerable to pressure.
But the meeting did not go according to plan. In an interview, Mr. Kolomoisky said the two men came “under the made-up pretext of dealing liquefied natural gas,” but as soon as it became clear that what they really wanted was a meeting between Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Zelensky, he abruptly sent them on their way. The exchange, he said, went like this:
“I say, ‘Did you see a sign on the door that says, ‘Meetings with Zelensky arranged here’?
“They said, ‘No.’
“I said, ‘Well then, you’ve ended up in the wrong place.’”
Mr. Kolomoisky, who has denied wrongdoing in the bank case, said he had not been contacted by the F.B.I.; a bureau spokesman declined to say whether the oligarch was under investigation.
After the Kolomoisky meeting’s unsuccessful end, Mr. Giuliani tweeted about the Daily Beast article and gave an interview to a Ukrainian journalist. Mr. Zelensky, he warned, “must cleanse himself from hangers-on from his past and from criminal oligarchs — Ihor Kolomoisky and others.”
Mr. Kolomoisky offered a warning of his own, predicting in the Ukrainian press that “a big scandal may break out, and not only in Ukraine, but in the United States. That is, it may turn out to be a clear conspiracy against Biden.”
Help to Fight an Extradition
The pair fared better with Mr. Firtash.
For several years, Mr. Firtash’s most visible lawyer had been Lanny Davis, a well-connected Democrat who also represented Mr. Trump’s fixer-turned-antagonist, Michael Cohen. In a television appearance in March, Mr. Giuliani had attacked Mr. Davis for taking money from the oligarch, citing federal prosecutors’ contention that he was tied to a top Russian mobster — a charge Mr. Firtash has denied.
Now, however, Mr. Giuliani wanted Mr. Firtash’s help. After being largely rebuffed by a member of the oligarch’s legal team in early June, he hit upon another approach, according to Mr. Parnas’s lawyer: persuading Mr. Firtash to hire more amenable counsel.
There was a brief discussion about Mr. Giuliani’s taking on that role himself, but Mr. Giuliani said he decided against it. According to Mr. Parnas’s lawyer, that is when Mr. Giuliani charged Mr. Parnas with persuading the oligarch to replace Mr. Davis with Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova. The men secured the June meeting with Mr. Firtash in Vienna after a mutual acquaintance, whom Mr. Firtash declined to name, vouched for them.
“They said, ‘We may help you, we are offering to you good lawyers in D.C. who might represent you and deliver this message to the U.S. D.O.J.,” Mr. Firtash recalled, referring to the Justice Department.
The oligarch had been arrested in Vienna in 2014, at the American authorities’ request, after his indictment on charges of bribing Indian officials for permission to mine titanium for Boeing. Mr. Firtash, who denies the charges, was free on bail but an Austrian court had cleared the way for his extradition to the United States.
In hopes of blocking that order, Mr. Firtash and his Vienna lawyers had filed records showing that a key piece of evidence — a document known as “Exhibit A” that was said to lay out the bribery scheme — had been prepared not by Mr. Firtash’s firm, but by the global consultancy McKinsey & Company. But Mr. Firtash’s legal team had been unable to persuade federal prosecutors to withdraw it. McKinsey has denied recommending “bribery or other illegal acts.”
Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova, the Giuliani emissaries told him, “are in a position to insist to correct the record and call back Exhibit A as evidence,” Mr. Firtash recalled.
He hired the lawyers, he said, on a four-month contract for a singular task — to arrange a meeting with the attorney general and persuade him to withdraw Exhibit A. He said their contract was for $300,000 a month, including Mr. Parnas’s referral fee. A person with direct knowledge of the arrangement said Mr. Parnas’s total share was $200,000; Ms. Toensing declined to discuss the payment but has said previously that it was for case-related translation.
There was one more piece to Mr. Parnas’s play. “Per Giuliani’s instructions,” Mr. Parnas’s lawyer said, his client “informed Mr. Firtash that Toensing and diGenova were interested in collecting information on the Bidens.” (It was the former vice president who had pushed the Ukrainian government to eliminate middleman gas brokers like Mr. Firtash and diversify the country’s supply away from Russia.)
While Mr. Firtash declined to say whether anyone linked to the dirt-digging efforts had asked him for information, he was adamant that he had not provided any. Doing so might have helped Mr. Giuliani, he said, but it would not have helped him with his legal problems.
“I can tell you only one thing,” he said. “I do not have any information, I did not collect any information, I didn’t finance anyone who would collect that information, and it would be a big mistake from my side if I decided to be involved in such a fight.”
At any rate, Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova soon delivered for Mr. Firtash, arranging the meeting with Attorney General Barr. But by the time they met, in mid-August, the ground had shifted: The whistle-blower’s complaint laying out Mr. Trump’s phone call with Mr. Zelensky, and Mr. Giuliani’s activities in Ukraine, had been forwarded to the Justice Department and described in detail to Mr. Barr. What’s more, concerns about intervening in the Firtash case had been raised by some inside the Justice Department, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
The department declined to comment, but Mr. Firtash said the attorney general ultimately told the lawyers to “go back to Chicago,” where the case had initially been brought, and deal with prosecutors there.
Mr. Firtash continues, however, to have faith in Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova’s ability to work the Justice Department angle. Their contract was just extended at least through year’s end.
Documents Leaked
If Mr. Firtash had nothing to offer, Mr. Giuliani still got some results.
After Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova came on board, confidential documents from Mr. Firtash’s case file began to find their way into articles by John Solomon, a conservative reporter whom Mr. Giuliani has acknowledged using to advance his claims about the Bidens. Mr. Solomon is also a client of Ms. Toensing.
One article, citing internal memos circulated among Mr. Firtash’s lawyers, disclosed that the office of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, had offered a deal to Mr. Firtash if he could help with their investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Giuliani, who as a former federal prosecutor was aware that such discussions are hardly unusual, took the story a step further. In an appearance on Fox News, he alleged that the offer to Mr. Firtash amounted to an attempt to suborn perjury, but said the oligarch had refused to “lie to get out of the case” against him.
Then, after the meeting with Mr. Barr, Mr. Solomon posted a sworn affidavit from Mr. Shokin, the former Ukrainian prosecutor, repeating his contention that Mr. Biden had pressed for his firing to short-circuit his investigations.
Mr. Giuliani was soon waving the affidavit around on television, without explaining that it had been taken by a member of Mr. Firtash’s legal team to support his case.
Mr. Firtash said he had not authorized the document’s release and hoped his lawyers had not either. He said the affidavit had been filed confidentially with the Austrian court because it also included the former prosecutor’s statement that Mr. Biden had been instrumental in blocking Mr. Firtash’s return to political life in Ukraine — an assertion that Mr. Firtash believes speaks to the political nature of the case against him.
Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova declined to say whether they had played a role in leaking the documents, but Mark Corallo, a spokesman for their law firm, said that the pair “took the Firtash case for only one reason: They believe that Mr. Firtash is innocent of the charges brought against him.”
When Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman were arrested, they were at Dulles International Airport awaiting a flight to Vienna, where they had arranged to have the Fox News host Sean Hannity interview Mr. Shokin. Mr. Giuliani was planning to join them the next day, he said in an interview.
A bemused Mr. Kolomoisky has watched the events unfold from Ukraine, where he returned after Mr. Zelensky’s victory. Initially he didn’t believe that Mr. Parnas was all that connected, he said, but after Mr. Giuliani started going after him, “I was able to connect A to B.”
He said he had since made peace with Mr. Parnas and had spoken to him several times, including the night before he was detained. In their conversations, he said, Mr. Parnas made no secret that he was helping Mr. Firtash with his legal case. And while Mr. Kolomoisky insisted that neither Mr. Parnas nor Mr. Fruman had mentioned his own legal travails, he added:
“Had they, I would have said: ‘Let’s watch Firtash and train on Firtash. When Firtash comes back here, and everything is O.K., I will be your next client.’”
VIENNA — They were two Ukrainian oligarchs with American legal problems. One had been indicted on federal bribery charges. The other was embroiled in a vast banking scandal and was reported to be under investigation by the F.B.I.
And they had one more thing in common: Both had been singled out by Rudolph W. Giuliani and pressed to assist in his wide-ranging hunt for information damaging to one of President Trump’s leading political rivals, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
That effort culminated in the July 25 phone call between the American and Ukrainian presidents that has taken Mr. Trump to the brink of impeachment and inexorably brought Mr. Giuliani’s Ukrainian shadow campaign into the light.
In public hearings over the last two weeks, American diplomats and national-security officials have laid out in detail how Mr. Trump, at the instigation and with the help of Mr. Giuliani, conditioned nearly $400 million in direly needed military aid on Ukraine’s announcing investigations into Mr. Biden and his son, as well as a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
But interviews with the two Ukrainian oligarchs — Dmitry Firtash and Ihor Kolomoisky — as well as with several other people with knowledge of Mr. Giuliani’s dealings, point to a new dimension in his exertions on behalf of his client, Mr. Trump. Taken together, they depict a strategy clearly aimed at leveraging information from politically powerful but legally vulnerable foreign citizens.
In the case of Mr. Firtash, an energy tycoon with deep ties to the Kremlin who is facing extradition to the United States on bribery and racketeering charges, one of Mr. Giuliani’s associates has described offering the oligarch help with his Justice Department problems — if Mr. Firtash hired two lawyers who were close to President Trump and were already working with Mr. Giuliani on his dirt-digging mission. Mr. Firtash said the offer was made in late June when he met with Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, both Soviet-born businessmen involved in Mr. Giuliani’s Ukraine pursuit.
Mr. Parnas’s lawyer, Joseph A. Bondy, confirmed that account and added that his client had met with Mr. Firtash at Mr. Giuliani’s direction and encouraged the oligarch to help in the hunt for compromising information “as part of any potential resolution to his extradition matter.”
Mr. Firtash’s relationship to the Trump-allied lawyers — Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova — has led to intense speculation that he is, at least indirectly, helping to finance Mr. Giuliani’s campaign. But until now he has stayed silent, and many of the details of how and why he came to hire the lawyers have remained murky.
In the interview, Mr. Firtash said he had no information about the Bidens and had not financed the search for it. “Without my will and desire,” he said, “I was sucked into this internal U.S. fight.” But to help his legal case, he said, he had paid his new lawyers $1.2 million to date, with a portion set aside as something of a referral fee for Mr. Parnas.
And in late August, Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova did as promised: They went to the Justice Department and pleaded Mr. Firtash’s case with the attorney general, William P. Barr.
In an interview, Mr. Giuliani acknowledged that he had sought information helpful to Mr. Trump from a member of Mr. Firtash’s original legal team. But, Mr. Giuliani said, “the only thing he could give me was what I already had, hearsay.” Asked if he had then directed his associates to meet with Mr. Firtash, Mr. Giuliani initially said, “I don’t think I can comment,” but later said, “I did not tell Parnas to do anything with Firtash.”
He added, though, that there would be nothing improper about seeking information about the Bidens from the oligarchs. “Where do you think you get information about crime?” he said.
But Chuck Rosenberg, a legal expert and a United States attorney under President George W. Bush, said the “solicitation of information, under these circumstances, and to discredit the president’s political opponent, is at best “crass and ethically suspect.”
He added: “And it is even worse if Mr. Giuliani, either directly or through emissaries acting on his behalf, intimated that pending criminal cases can be ‘fixed’ at the Justice Department. The president’s lawyer seems to be trading on the president’s supervisory authority over the Justice Department, and that is deeply disturbing.”
Mr. Bondy, the lawyer for Mr. Parnas — who was arrested with Mr. Fruman last month on campaign finance-related charges and has signaled a willingness to cooperate with impeachment investigators — said in a statement that all of his client’s actions had been directed by Mr. Giuliani.
“Mr. Parnas reasonably believed Giuliani’s directions reflected the interests and wishes of the president, given Parnas having witnessed and in several instances overheard Mr. Giuliani speaking with the president,” the lawyer said. Mr. Parnas, he added, “is remorseful for involving himself and Mr. Firtash in the president’s self-interested political plot.”
A Conduit to Ukraine
By the time Mr. Giuliani turned his attention to Mr. Kolomoisky and Mr. Firtash, he had been working for months to turn up damaging information about Mr. Biden and his son Hunter, who joined the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma while his father was vice president.
Mr. Giuliani spoke with Ukrainian officials like Viktor Shokin, the former prosecutor general who suggested, falsely, that Mr. Biden had had him fired for looking into Burisma, as well as with Mr. Shokin’s successor, Yuriy Lutsenko. And he enlisted Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova, trusted colleagues since their days together in the Reagan Justice Department, to help interview and potentially represent anyone willing to come forward with dirt. Mr. Parnas acted as translator and fixer, crisscrossing the Atlantic with stops at the Manhattan cigar bar that was Mr. Giuliani’s hangout, a strip club in Kyiv and even a Hanukkah reception at the White House.
The campaign seemed to be paying off, with the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, poised to announce the investigations Mr. Giuliani sought, when the political situation changed. On April 21, Mr. Poroshenko was unseated by Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian and political novice, sending Mr. Giuliani scrambling to establish a conduit. Two days later, Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman flew to Tel Aviv to meet with Mr. Kolomoisky, who was seen as Mr. Zelensky’s patron.
Mr. Kolomoisky, a banking and media tycoon who is one of Ukraine’s richest men, is also known for financing mercenary troops battling Russian-supported separatists in eastern Ukraine. Earlier in April, The Daily Beast had reported, citing unnamed sources, that the F.B.I. was investigating him for possible money-laundering in connection with problems at a bank he had owned. He is also entangled in a civil lawsuit in Delaware.
Mr. Giuliani’s assessment, according to Mr. Parnas’s lawyer, was that those legal problems made Mr. Kolomoisky vulnerable to pressure.
But the meeting did not go according to plan. In an interview, Mr. Kolomoisky said the two men came “under the made-up pretext of dealing liquefied natural gas,” but as soon as it became clear that what they really wanted was a meeting between Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Zelensky, he abruptly sent them on their way. The exchange, he said, went like this:
“I say, ‘Did you see a sign on the door that says, ‘Meetings with Zelensky arranged here’?
“They said, ‘No.’
“I said, ‘Well then, you’ve ended up in the wrong place.’”
Mr. Kolomoisky, who has denied wrongdoing in the bank case, said he had not been contacted by the F.B.I.; a bureau spokesman declined to say whether the oligarch was under investigation.
After the Kolomoisky meeting’s unsuccessful end, Mr. Giuliani tweeted about the Daily Beast article and gave an interview to a Ukrainian journalist. Mr. Zelensky, he warned, “must cleanse himself from hangers-on from his past and from criminal oligarchs — Ihor Kolomoisky and others.”
Mr. Kolomoisky offered a warning of his own, predicting in the Ukrainian press that “a big scandal may break out, and not only in Ukraine, but in the United States. That is, it may turn out to be a clear conspiracy against Biden.”
Help to Fight an Extradition
The pair fared better with Mr. Firtash.
For several years, Mr. Firtash’s most visible lawyer had been Lanny Davis, a well-connected Democrat who also represented Mr. Trump’s fixer-turned-antagonist, Michael Cohen. In a television appearance in March, Mr. Giuliani had attacked Mr. Davis for taking money from the oligarch, citing federal prosecutors’ contention that he was tied to a top Russian mobster — a charge Mr. Firtash has denied.
Now, however, Mr. Giuliani wanted Mr. Firtash’s help. After being largely rebuffed by a member of the oligarch’s legal team in early June, he hit upon another approach, according to Mr. Parnas’s lawyer: persuading Mr. Firtash to hire more amenable counsel.
There was a brief discussion about Mr. Giuliani’s taking on that role himself, but Mr. Giuliani said he decided against it. According to Mr. Parnas’s lawyer, that is when Mr. Giuliani charged Mr. Parnas with persuading the oligarch to replace Mr. Davis with Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova. The men secured the June meeting with Mr. Firtash in Vienna after a mutual acquaintance, whom Mr. Firtash declined to name, vouched for them.
“They said, ‘We may help you, we are offering to you good lawyers in D.C. who might represent you and deliver this message to the U.S. D.O.J.,” Mr. Firtash recalled, referring to the Justice Department.
The oligarch had been arrested in Vienna in 2014, at the American authorities’ request, after his indictment on charges of bribing Indian officials for permission to mine titanium for Boeing. Mr. Firtash, who denies the charges, was free on bail but an Austrian court had cleared the way for his extradition to the United States.
In hopes of blocking that order, Mr. Firtash and his Vienna lawyers had filed records showing that a key piece of evidence — a document known as “Exhibit A” that was said to lay out the bribery scheme — had been prepared not by Mr. Firtash’s firm, but by the global consultancy McKinsey & Company. But Mr. Firtash’s legal team had been unable to persuade federal prosecutors to withdraw it. McKinsey has denied recommending “bribery or other illegal acts.”
Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova, the Giuliani emissaries told him, “are in a position to insist to correct the record and call back Exhibit A as evidence,” Mr. Firtash recalled.
He hired the lawyers, he said, on a four-month contract for a singular task — to arrange a meeting with the attorney general and persuade him to withdraw Exhibit A. He said their contract was for $300,000 a month, including Mr. Parnas’s referral fee. A person with direct knowledge of the arrangement said Mr. Parnas’s total share was $200,000; Ms. Toensing declined to discuss the payment but has said previously that it was for case-related translation.
There was one more piece to Mr. Parnas’s play. “Per Giuliani’s instructions,” Mr. Parnas’s lawyer said, his client “informed Mr. Firtash that Toensing and diGenova were interested in collecting information on the Bidens.” (It was the former vice president who had pushed the Ukrainian government to eliminate middleman gas brokers like Mr. Firtash and diversify the country’s supply away from Russia.)
While Mr. Firtash declined to say whether anyone linked to the dirt-digging efforts had asked him for information, he was adamant that he had not provided any. Doing so might have helped Mr. Giuliani, he said, but it would not have helped him with his legal problems.
“I can tell you only one thing,” he said. “I do not have any information, I did not collect any information, I didn’t finance anyone who would collect that information, and it would be a big mistake from my side if I decided to be involved in such a fight.”
At any rate, Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova soon delivered for Mr. Firtash, arranging the meeting with Attorney General Barr. But by the time they met, in mid-August, the ground had shifted: The whistle-blower’s complaint laying out Mr. Trump’s phone call with Mr. Zelensky, and Mr. Giuliani’s activities in Ukraine, had been forwarded to the Justice Department and described in detail to Mr. Barr. What’s more, concerns about intervening in the Firtash case had been raised by some inside the Justice Department, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
The department declined to comment, but Mr. Firtash said the attorney general ultimately told the lawyers to “go back to Chicago,” where the case had initially been brought, and deal with prosecutors there.
Mr. Firtash continues, however, to have faith in Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova’s ability to work the Justice Department angle. Their contract was just extended at least through year’s end.
Documents Leaked
If Mr. Firtash had nothing to offer, Mr. Giuliani still got some results.
After Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova came on board, confidential documents from Mr. Firtash’s case file began to find their way into articles by John Solomon, a conservative reporter whom Mr. Giuliani has acknowledged using to advance his claims about the Bidens. Mr. Solomon is also a client of Ms. Toensing.
One article, citing internal memos circulated among Mr. Firtash’s lawyers, disclosed that the office of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, had offered a deal to Mr. Firtash if he could help with their investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Giuliani, who as a former federal prosecutor was aware that such discussions are hardly unusual, took the story a step further. In an appearance on Fox News, he alleged that the offer to Mr. Firtash amounted to an attempt to suborn perjury, but said the oligarch had refused to “lie to get out of the case” against him.
Then, after the meeting with Mr. Barr, Mr. Solomon posted a sworn affidavit from Mr. Shokin, the former Ukrainian prosecutor, repeating his contention that Mr. Biden had pressed for his firing to short-circuit his investigations.
Mr. Giuliani was soon waving the affidavit around on television, without explaining that it had been taken by a member of Mr. Firtash’s legal team to support his case.
Mr. Firtash said he had not authorized the document’s release and hoped his lawyers had not either. He said the affidavit had been filed confidentially with the Austrian court because it also included the former prosecutor’s statement that Mr. Biden had been instrumental in blocking Mr. Firtash’s return to political life in Ukraine — an assertion that Mr. Firtash believes speaks to the political nature of the case against him.
Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova declined to say whether they had played a role in leaking the documents, but Mark Corallo, a spokesman for their law firm, said that the pair “took the Firtash case for only one reason: They believe that Mr. Firtash is innocent of the charges brought against him.”
When Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman were arrested, they were at Dulles International Airport awaiting a flight to Vienna, where they had arranged to have the Fox News host Sean Hannity interview Mr. Shokin. Mr. Giuliani was planning to join them the next day, he said in an interview.
A bemused Mr. Kolomoisky has watched the events unfold from Ukraine, where he returned after Mr. Zelensky’s victory. Initially he didn’t believe that Mr. Parnas was all that connected, he said, but after Mr. Giuliani started going after him, “I was able to connect A to B.”
He said he had since made peace with Mr. Parnas and had spoken to him several times, including the night before he was detained. In their conversations, he said, Mr. Parnas made no secret that he was helping Mr. Firtash with his legal case. And while Mr. Kolomoisky insisted that neither Mr. Parnas nor Mr. Fruman had mentioned his own legal travails, he added:
“Had they, I would have said: ‘Let’s watch Firtash and train on Firtash. When Firtash comes back here, and everything is O.K., I will be your next client.’”
Watch this 60 Minutes segment and then try to entertain how actual members of Congress and Senators can entertain the idea that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in our 2016 elections.
