John Solomon, a very reputable journalist and columnist for The Hill website, has been digging into Ukraine’s interference in the 2016 general election in the United States. Specifically, Solomon has been looking at allegations by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) that the Ukraine government provided Hillary Clinton’s campaign with information about Paul Manafort’s business dealings in Ukraine. Information about Manafort’s Ukraine deals was relevant in the 2016 US presidential election because of Manafort’s known association with then Republican nominee Donald J. Trump.
In my OpenCdA post on April 7, 2019, I linked to Solomon’s article headlined Ukrainian to US prosecutors: Why don’t you want our evidence on Democrats? That article raised an allegation supported by documentary evidence that US Department of Justice prosecutors only wanted evidence against Paul Manafort. The same authorities rejected receiving information connecting Hunter Biden, son of then-Vice President and now announced 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden, to a money laundering scheme. Solomon’s article said:
Financial records showing a Ukrainian natural gas company routed more than $3 million to American accounts tied to Hunter Biden, younger son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, who managed U.S.-Ukraine relations for the Obama administration. Biden’s son served on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company, Burisma Holdings.
On April 25, 2019, Solomon published another related article on The Hill website. Its headline is How the Obama White House engaged Ukraine to give Russia collusion narrative an early boost. This latest article adds more details about the evidence and supporting the assertions that (1) Ukraine provided information about Manafort to the USDoJ with the specific intent of helping Hillary Clinton win the 2016 presidential election, and (2) that Vice President Joe Biden intervened with the Ukraine government in March 2016 to get Ukraine’s Chief Prosecutor fired. That Chief Prosecutor had sought to interview Hunter Biden about the money he was receiving from inside the Ukraine while he was sitting on the board of Burisma Holdings.
Ukraine officials are seeking a meeting with Attorney General Bill Barr to provide him with the evidence they have about Ukraine interference in the 2016 US presidential election and about payments made to 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, by the Ukrainian government.
This set of facts makes even more important the reports of the DoJ Inspector General and the investigation supposedly being conducted by US Attorney John Huber. Whereas the Mueller non-investigation investigation was intentionally limited to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, the IG and Huber investigations have a much broader scope of investigation into criminal conduct by US officials before, during, and after the 2016 election.