You Give Me Yovanovitch and I'll Give You Biden
This story’s been up for over 3 hours now; I’m surprised no one has picked up on it:
That would be the crooked Ukraine prosecutor, Yuri Lutsenko, who lost his job when Zelenskiy defeated his boss, Petroshchenko, for the Ukraine presidency.
Lutsenko wanted to get rid of Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador, in part because she had been critical of his office and supported a quasi-independent anti-corruption bureau he despised.
So he offered to make up dirt on Biden if Parnas could arrange for the Ambassador to be recalled. We knew something about this earlier, but now we can connect the dots, from Lev Parnas’s gift to the House Intel Committee:
The messages, written in Russian, show Lutsenko urging Parnas to force out Yovanovitch in exchange for cooperation regarding Biden. At one point, Lutsenko suggests he won’t make any helpful public statements unless “madam” is removed.“It’s just that if you don’t make a decision about Madam — you are calling into question all my declarations. Including about B,” Lutsenko wrote to Parnas in a March 22 message on WhatsApp.It’s unclear if ‘B’ is a reference to Biden or Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company on whose board Hunter Biden served from 2014 to 2019.Four days later, Lutsenko told Parnas that work on the case against the owner of the gas company is proceeding successfully and evidence of the money transfers of “B” had been obtained.
So now we have another reason for Trump to want to get rid of Yovanovitch: He could get dirt on the Bidens in return.
Lutsenko has been identified as the “unnamed Ukrainian” in the Parnas/Furman indictment:
The unnamed Ukrainian official referenced in a federal indictment as directing a plot to oust the then-U.S. ambassador is Ukraine’s former chief prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko, according to a U.S. official familiar with the events. www.nbcnews.com/… [Oct 11, 2019]
Lutsenko knew Trump wanted info on the Bidens because back in the spring, Giuliani had asked him for some:
Ukraine’s former top law enforcement official says he repeatedly rebuffed demands by President Trump’s personal lawyer to investigate Joe Biden and his son, insisting he had seen no evidence of wrongdoing that he could pursue. www.latimes.com/… [Sep 29 2019]
Now, Lutsenko is not the world’s most reliable witness. But that doesn’t matter; we have the document where he says to Parnas: “It’s just that if you don’t make a decision about Madam — you are calling into question all my declarations. Including about B.”
In short, the President of the United States fired our ambassador to Ukraine at the request of a corrupt prosecutor who offered him dirt on his political opponent in return.
