Thread by @DLasater_99362

@HouseIntel Obama administration took the rare step of trying to press the Ukrainian government to back off its investigation of both the U.S. aid and the group. thehill.com/opinion/campai…

@HouseIntel At the time, the nation’s prosecutor general had just been fired, under pressure from the United States, and a permanent replacement had not been named.

@HouseIntel A few months later, Yuri Lutsenko, widely regarded as a hero in the West for spending two years in prison after fighting Russian aggression in his country, was named prosecutor general and invited to meet new U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch

@HouseIntel Lutsenko told me he was stunned when the ambassador “gave me a list of people whom we should not prosecute.” The list included a founder of the AntAC group and two members of Parliament who vocally supported the group’s anti-corruption reform agenda, according to a source..

@HouseIntel ..directly familiar with the meeting.

It turns out the group that Ukrainian law enforcement was probing was co-funded by the Obama administration and liberal mega-donor George Soros. And it was collaborating with the FBI agents investigating..

@HouseIntel ..then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s business activities with pro-Russian figures in Ukraine.

The implied message to Ukraine’s prosecutors was clear: Don’t target AntAC in the middle of an America presidential election..

@HouseIntel ..in which Soros was backing Hillary Clinton to succeed another Soros favorite, Barack Obama, Ukrainian officials said.

“We ran right into a buzzsaw and we got bloodied,” a senior Ukrainian official told me.