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Re: fuagf post# 329339

Friday, 10/18/2019 10:07:39 PM

Friday, October 18, 2019 10:07:39 PM

Post# of 468430
The Ukrainian Prosecutor Behind the Dossier Targeting Hunter Biden

"Rudy gets conspiracy - that Dems colluded with Ukrainians in 2016, and that
Biden pressured Ukraine to get off Hunter's back - dirt from a corrupt Ukrainian.
"

A search suggests this may be Kulyk's introduction here.

Kostiantyn H. Kulyk has been indicted himself on corruption charges and has a reputation for using investigations as political weapons.


The Ukrainian prosecutor Kostiantyn H. Kulyk in March. His dossier on Hunter Biden helped set off the political firestorm that has led to
the House impeachment inquiry. Volodymyr Hontar/Unian

By Andrew E. Kramer and Michael Schwirtz

Published Oct. 15, 2019
Updated Oct. 16, 2019

KIEV, Ukraine — When the Ukrainian prosecutor Kostiantyn H. Kulyk compiled a seven-page dossier in English that accused the son of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. of corruption, he helped set off a political firestorm that has led to the impeachment investigation of President Trump.

But even as he was reopening a corruption case related to Hunter Biden’s service on the board of Burisma Holdings, a major Ukrainian gas company, Mr. Kulyk himself was under a cloud of suspicion.

He has been indicted three times on corruption charges and accused of bringing politically motivated criminal cases against his opponents. In a Ukrainian security clearance form, Mr. Kulyk admitted having ties to a warlord in eastern Ukraine accused of working for the Russian intelligence services.

Yet none of this — including the case related to the Bidens — has seemed to harm the career of Mr. Kulyk, who remains a department head in the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office under a new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

“In Ukraine, a toxic person can keep a job,” said Yuriy Butusov, editor in chief of the political news outlet Tsenzor.net. “That’s not a problem.”

Mr. Kulyk’s continued presence in the halls of government illustrates the blending of politics and criminal justice in Ukraine, where investigations are routinely used as political weapons or to grease the business interests of wealthy insiders. And the spread of his dossier in Washington shows how these tactics have spilled into American politics.

Ukraine and the Impeachment Inquiry
The former prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/05/world/europe/ukraine-prosecutor-trump.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article , has become a key figure in the investigation.

In a July phone call that is central to the impeachment inquiry, President Trump asked Mr. Zelensky to investigate the Biden case, including supposed conflicts of interest by Mr. Biden when he was vice president, and a debunked theory .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/us/politics/trump-ukraine-conspiracy.html?module=inline .. that Ukraine, not Russia, hacked the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Zelensky agreed, according to White House notes on the call .. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/25/us/politics/trump-ukraine-transcript.html?module=inline , saying a new prosecutor general “will look into the situation,” though he said later that the new prosecutor would act fairly and independently.


President Trump with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in New York last month. Doug Mills/The New York Times

In a statement, the prosecutor general’s office declined to clarify if Mr. Kulyk retains control over the Biden case, which is now under an audit that delays any prosecutorial decisions. Mr. Kulyk did not respond to requests for an interview.

Mr. Kulyk’s dossier did more than revive the Biden case. The seven-page document he compiled and circulated also accused American diplomats of covering up for crimes committed by the Bidens, a spurious theory that played a role in the recall of the American ambassador to Ukraine .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/11/us/politics/marie-yovanovitch-trump-impeachment.html?module=inline , Marie L. Yovanovitch.

A strapping former military prosecutor with a buzz cut, Mr. Kulyk pivoted his allegiance to Mr. Zelensky late in the Ukrainian presidential race last spring, allowing him to continue holding sway over important matters.

Currently, he is pursuing a case against a former central bank governor that could aid a powerful oligarch, Ihor Kolomoisky .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/world/europe/ukraine-zelensky-kolomoisky.html?module=inline , a former business partner of Mr. Zelensky. The case has become entangled in talks with the International Monetary Fund about a $5 billion aid program for Ukraine. Those broke off last month amid concerns .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/world/europe/ukraine-corruption.html?module=inline .. about Mr. Kolomoisky’s influence on the government. Calls seeking comment from Mr. Kolomoisky on a phone number he has used in the past went unanswered.

The Kolomoisky case and Mr. Kulyk’s role in it have become a credibility test for Mr. Zelensky, who swept to office on an anticorruption platform.

“If he doesn’t fire Kulyk it will be a big negative for him, because then no one will believe that he is a reformer,” said Valeria A. Gontareva, the former central banker involved in the case. “If this country doesn’t get real rule of law then all of our reforms will be easily reversed.”

In March, Mr. Kulyk, who with a former prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/05/world/europe/ukraine-prosecutor-trump.html?module=inline , had coordinated with Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to promote the allegations against the Bidens, suddenly switched allegiance in Ukraine’s domestic politics.

He and Mr. Lutsenko had been seen as staunch enforcers for President Petro O. Poroshenko. But two days before the first round .. https://censor.net.ua/blogs/3119217/bumerang_ruchnoyi_prokuror_udaril_po_poroshenko .. of the country’s presidential election — with opinion polls showing Mr. Zelensky crushing Mr. Poroshenko — Mr. Kulyk filed criminal corruption charges against dozens of Poroshenko aides. He then went on a television talk show to discuss the highlights of these cases.

An on-air confrontation ensued. Mr. Poroshenko rushed to the studio and accused Mr. Kulyk of naked political abuse of the justice system. The 11th-hour smear nevertheless reinforced Mr. Zelensky’s campaign message that the country needed a new leader to root out corruption.

Corruption allegations trailed Mr. Kulyk long before his role in the Biden case. In 2016, he was indicted on charges of illegal enrichment, with prosecutors noting that his expensive tastes seemed incongruous with his modest salary as a prosecutor. Court documents describe Mr. Kulyk as owning assets equivalent to 1,615 times the minimum cost of living for Ukraine, including two apartments in central Kiev and a Toyota Land Cruiser that together cost more than four years’ worth of his income.


Mr. Kulyk in court in 2016, when he was a military prosecutor. Vyacheslav Ratynsk/Unian

“In any other country a prosecutor like this would have been fired a long time ago,” said Andrii Savin, a lawyer with Ukraine’s Anticorruption Action Center who has followed Mr. Kulyk’s career closely. “But what happened in this country? The prosecutor general promoted him.”

Mr. Kulyk has also come under fire for his ties to a man believed to be a Russian intelligence agent in his hometown, Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine.

Mr. Kulyk disclosed the friendship in an application for security clearance in 2014 as war broke out between Russia-backed separatists and Ukraine, Mr. Kulyk’s former boss in the military prosecutor’s office, Anatoly Matios, told Ukrainian media .. https://tsn.ua/ru/politika/matios-nazval-skandalnogo-eks-prokurora-ato-kulika-nichtozhestvom-no-professionalom-896880.html .. in 2017.

Mr. Kulyk had known the man, Yevhen Zhylin, when Mr. Kulyk served in the Kharkiv regional prosecutor’s office and Mr. Zhylin ran a martial arts club in the city, called Oplot, or the Stronghold. Oplot was subsequently transformed into a large, Russian-backed paramilitary unit fighting on the separatist side.

Mr. Matios told the Ukrainian media that Mr. Kulyk had passed the security clearance, but added: “I will tell you something: The moral principles of this person are worthless.”

Investigators who pursued the illegal enrichment case against Mr. Kulyk did, however, find the source .. https://tsn.ua/ru/ukrayina/zhena-prokurora-ato-podtverdila-chto-ezdit-po-dzhipe-separatista-zhilina-660539.html [not in English] of one unexplained asset: the Toyota Land Cruiser. It was registered to the father of Mr. Zhylin, the commander on the pro-Russian side in the war.

In the middle of his corruption trial, Mr. Kulyk was transferred from the military prosecutor’s service to Kiev, where he became a department head in the prosecutor general office’s international department. (Ms. Yovanovitch, then the new American ambassador, was among those who objected to the move.)

It was in this position that Mr. Kulyk began digging into Burisma, the gas company where Hunter Biden served on the board.

In an interview .. https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/437719-ukrainian-to-us-prosecutors-why-dont-you-want-our-evidence-on-democrats .. published in The Hill in April, Mr. Kulyk told the conservative commentator John Solomon that he had been trying to give the United States government what he said was evidence of sweeping wrongdoing by Democrats and American diplomats, but had been blocked by officials in the American Embassy in Kiev.

[Insert: The Invention of the Conspiracy Theory on Biden and Ukraine
[...]
As an anonymous whistle-blower’s complaint to Congress revealed, and as the Washington Post .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-a-conservative-columnist-helped-push-a-flawed-ukraine-narrative/2019/09/26/1654026e-dee7-11e9-8dc8-498eabc129a0_story.html .. has reported, no journalist played a bigger part in fuelling the Biden corruption narrative than John Solomon, who until last week was an opinion columnist and executive vice-president of The Hill, in Washington. Solomon had been a respected investigative reporter for the Washington Post, but in recent years he worked for overtly conservative outlets, including a stint as the editor of the Washington Times. As Giuliani conspired this past spring with questionable Ukrainian sources, Solomon pumped out a string of eye-catching stories echoing those sources’ claims about the Bidens. This appears to have been no coincidence. According to NBC, the Giuliani documents show that Solomon’s columns were part of the Trump team’s strategy. (The New Yorker was unable to reach John Solomon, and a question e-mailed to the editor of The Hill, about whether the publication stood by Solomon’s stories, went unanswered.)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=151547287]


The substance of the interview was consistent with the theory laid out in the dossier he compiled in late 2018, according to his former colleagues at the prosecutor’s office. The dossier, which was leaked by a Ukrainian blogger, asserted that Ukrainian prosecutors had evidence that “may attest to the commission of corrupt actions aimed at personal unlawful enrichment by the former Vice President of the United States Joe Biden.”

Mr. Lutsenko, the former prosecutor general, said in an interview that he never gave Mr. Kulyk’s dossier to Mr. Giuliani. But notes taken by Mr. Giuliani during their meeting in January, passed to Congress this month by the State Department inspector general, mirror the ideas laid out in Mr. Kulyk’s memo.

And in her testimony in the impeachment inquiry on Friday, Ms. Yovanovitch, the former ambassador, suggested that Mr. Kulyk’s dossier, or its main points, had filtered even higher in the American government. She said her recall from Kiev last spring was tied to “unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives.”

Maria Varenikova contributed reporting.

Ukraine and the Impeachment Inquiry
Ukraine’s own domestic struggles, feuds and dysfunctions helped shape the impeachment inquiry now roiling Washington.

Owner of Firm Tied to Hunter Biden Will Be Subject of Ukraine Prosecutor’s Review Oct. 4, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/world/europe/ukraine-biden-burisma.html

‘The New Berlin Wall’: Why Ukraine Is Central to the Scandal Sept. 27, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/world/europe/ukraine-zelensky-cold-war-trump-giuliani.html

How a Shadow Foreign Policy in Ukraine Prompted an Impeachment Inquiry Sept. 28, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/28/us/politics/how-a-shadow-foreign-policy-in-ukraine-prompted-impeachment-inquiry.html

Correction: Oct. 16, 2019
An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of the prosecutor who compiled a
dossier that accused Hunter Biden of corruption. He is Kostiantyn H. Kulyk, not Konstiantyn.


Andrew E. Kramer is a reporter based in the Moscow bureau. He was part of a team that won the 2017 Pulitzer
Prize in International Reporting for a series on Russia’s covert projection of power. @AndrewKramerNYT

Michael Schwirtz is an investigative reporter based at the United Nations. Previously he covered the countries of the former Soviet Union from
the Moscow bureau and reported for the Metro Desk on policing and brutality and corruption in the prison system. @mschwirtz • Facebook

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/15/world/europe/ukraine-prosecutor-biden-trump.html

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