Post

Stephen McIntyre

@ClimateAudit

Sep 21, 2023 • 54 tweets • 16 min read • Read on X

In May 2020, a Ukrainian parliamentarian asked a question that is once again being revisited: a few months before Biden's demand for Shokin's resignation, Poroshenko, Europe and State Dept had all positively assessed progress of Prosecutor General Office. What caused change?

needless to say, the two prominent Ukrainians who asked that question were subsequently sanctioned by the US security state. Under the so-called "Trump administration" and remain censored to this day. But question was and is valid.

the Ukrainians had an interesting explanation that I'll get to later on. First, I'll review some known dates, while adding some details. Biden defenders say that demand for Shokin resignation arose in the "interagency". If so, records ought to be abundant in the bureaucracy

we KNOW that there was an interagency meeting on Sept 30, 2015 at which the interagency agreed that "Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third guarantee" and the minutes (to vast list) made no mention of Shokin firing justthenews.com/sites/default/…

Republicans (with usual inefficiency) have more or less totally neglected production of relevant interagency documents in Oct-Nov 2015 that would shed light on this issue, but there is an important, undiscussed available document from Nov 5, 2015 - narrowing period a lot

On Oct 23, 2015, Christina Segal-Knowles followed up her Oct 1, 2015 minutes with a final list of conditions precedent for the third loan guarantee (the one that Joe Biden later held hostage.)

later, on Jan 15, 2016 (on eve of meeting with Ukrainian prosecutors), Segal-Knowles (at NSC with Ciaramella and Zentos) sent document entitled "2015-11-05 CPs for Ukraine LG3_clean.docx" [CPs=Conditions Precedent]. See Pyatt Transcript Exhibits, p 143.

for the purposes of our chronology, the 2015-11-05 Conditions Precedent were distributed one day before Amos Hochstein's meeting with Hunter Biden and were up-to-date interagency policy prior to that meeting.

The 2015-11-05 Conditions Precedent were shown in Pyatt Transcript Exhibits, p 147-148 (the very end). In regard to Prosecutor General, they required establishment of Inspector General office in Prosecutor General Office. Nothing about firing Shokin.

On Oct 29, 2015, Burisma's Vadym Pozharskyi had traveled to Washington to meet with Hunter Biden, Devon Archer and Blue Star (Tramontano, Painter) about "deliverables" in respect to US. On Nov 2, 2015, Pozharskyi sent email memorializing meeting.

Burisma had far-reaching expectations from its extravagant payments to Hunter Biden, Devon Archer and (soon) Blue Star. While the arrangement is well known, far too little attention is paid to Pozharskyi's stated expectations. Which he'd reviewed with Hunter in person on Oct 29.

They expected Hunter to ensure that "high-ranking US officials in Ukraine (US Ambassador) and in US publicly or in private communication/comment expressing their "positive opinion" and support of Nikolay/Burisma to the highest level of decision makers here in Ukraine"

Burisma also expected "a visit of a number of widely recognized and influential current and/or former US policy-makers to Ukraine in November" with a view to "close down any cases/pursuits against" Zlochevsky.

as discussed in a previous thread, Hunter called Amos Hochstein's office on Nov 2 and arranged a meeting on Nov 6. Hochstein testified that it was the ONLY time that Hunter sought a meeting with him and that they discussed Burisma.

in his testimony to Senate Committee in 2020, Hochstein stated, inter alia, that (1) he wanted prosecution of Zlochevsky and Burisma; (2) that he had warned Joe Biden in late October about "Russian disinformation" pointing to Hunter's association with Burisma

(3) that Hunter told him that Joe had talked to him (Hunter) about his discussion with Hochstein and that Hunter wanted to talk directly with Hochstein to get his views on Burisma.
Hochstein's evidence was incorrect on many public details of Burisma events and may be self-serving

On Nov 13, Joe Biden announced a trip to Ukraine. Pozharskyi emailed Hunter immediately. One of his key deliverables was a "visit of a number of widely recognized and influential current and/or former US policy-makers to Ukraine in Nov". Had Hunter delivered? Beyond expectation?

this thread began with Burisma's Pozharskyi trip to Washington on Oct 29, 2015 to set out required deliverables to Hunter, Archer and Blue Star. The explanation from Ukr parliamentarian (Derkach) and prosecutor (Kulyk) links back to earlier thread on Chornovol's hate for Kasko

Readers may recall Nabuleaks exhibits showing transfers from Burisma account in Latvia to Morgan Stanley account of Rosemont Seneca Bohai. Originally presented in October 2019 by Derkach and were (uncredited) source of first hard info on size of Hunter payments.

There's an interesting feature to the dates in these ledgers. Though we know that payments to Hunter continued until much later, the latest listed payment to Rosemont Seneca was Nov 18, 2015. So why doesn't the ledger show ongoing later payments?

The answer is pretty clear: the Latvian bank documents were delivered to the Prosecutor General's Office in November 2015. It's a reasonable surmise that arrangements for delivery of the documents had been negotiated in or about October 2015 and delivered a few weeks later.

Kulyk was the prosecutor who succeeded in recovering $1.5 billion of funds from Yanukovich "syndicate" in 2017 - the only substantial recovery of funds. In contrast, FBI, DOJ recovered $0, despite constant bleating and complaining.

Kulyk spent next two years (to March 28, 2019) on further investigation of money laundering associated with Sergei Kurchenko, the young oligarch who appears to have acted as "wallet" for the Yanukovych syndicate (who were prior to Poroshenko syndicate, prior to Zelensky syndicate

on March 28, 2019, the second anniversary of confiscation of $1.5 billion, Prosecutor General Lutsenko announced that Kulyk had finished enormous money laundering investigation, with suspicions issued to nearly 100 people. See tsn.ua/ukrayina/sprav…

more later.

@PetriKrohn @USTreasury @MoonofA I've archived copies of some of the videos using wget - a technique that I didn't know until a few years ago. For Bitchute, I had to look up the exact mp4 link in the view-source.

@Comment4_U Rather than US micro-management of its Ukrainian colony leading to reduced corruption, it appears to have dramatically exacerbated the already bad corruption. I think that this issue ought to be discussed much more as Burisma isn't only issue that deserves sunshine.

@RockKenwell Derkach was source for information that Hunter Biden was being paid $83,333 per month by Burisma, the amount first being public in October 2019. That information was not "Russian disinformation", no matter how often the mantra was repeated by US intel agencies.

Lutsenko March 28, 2019 announcement of Kulyk's report (Deputy Head, International Legal Cooperation) was both a milestone and turning point that was ignored in west. I'll discuss in separate thread but note highlights here briefly. Kulyk's team assembled more than 3000 volumes

Lutsenko reported a wide range of offenses associated with the Kurchenko money laundering network. One would have thought that US embassy, ostensibly so committed to "anti-corruption", would have been praising Lutsenko and Kulyk to roof tops. But they weren't.

Lutsenko also reported that 98 people had been issued suspicions.

bonus points to any readers who connected Kurchenko back to the original seizure of Zlochevsky $25 million in London in 2014, about which George Kent, Pyatt and US Embassy hyperventilated and purported to blame on Shokin (while ignoring Kulyk's success in seizing $1.5 billion).

$20 million of the deposits into the Brociti (Zlochevsky) account in London had come from a Kurchenko company. Z's lawyer (Kicha) informed court that a Kurchenko company had, in 2013, purchased an oil terminal from Zlochevsky, owned by Z since 2002.

the UK anti-corruption prosecutor countered by observing that Kurchenko had been sanctioned on Mar 6, 2014 (only a few days after US-backed regime change)

Zlochevsky's lawyer argued that each of the transactions "resulted in real assets being exchanged for real cash":

ultimately, UK judge determined that UK prosecutors hadn't supported their ex parte seizure and released the funds. Contrary to US embassy disinformation, Shokin was NOT Prosecutor General at the time. In fact, it was Kasko (their favorite) who was then in charge of International

a full exegesis of US embassy disinformation and misunderstanding of the London case re seizure of Zlochevsky funds needs to be written up (I have lengthy notes on the topic).

anyway, back to March 28, 2019 and the Lutsenko-Kulyk announcement. It precipitated a weird series of events -weird even by Ukrainian-Biden corruption standards and totally unreported in west. Even as both Lutsenko and Kulyk were then attracting attention via John Solomon

in U.S., online journal ForumDaily[.]com reported that members of Poroshenko's inner circle were issued suspicions, specifically former Presidential Administration (PA) head Lozhkin, former National Bank head Gontareva, current PA deputy head Filatov forumdaily.com/genprokuratura…

ForumDaily also reported that Zlochevsky had been caught up in the Kurchenko investigation and suspicions, linking to a previous ForumDaily article on Mar 26, 2019 forumdaily.com/podkupit-bajde…

the March 28, 2019 ForumDaily article (the sourcing of which is unclear) was immediately cited by Ukrainian media to disseminate allegations against Poroshenko's inner circle: ; ; vesti.ua/strana/330571-…
unian.net/politics/10496…
tsn.ua/ukrayina/sprav…

Within minutes, the Prosecutor General Office walked back the suspicions against Poroshenko's inner circle and began a process of icing and eventually firing Kulyk. Unian ; Facebook ; TCH unian.net/politics/10496…
facebook.com/lysenko.andrii…
tsn.ua/ukrayina/rechn…

later that day, Kulyk's files were removed from his office. Ultimately, Kulyk's investigation, with its 3000 volumes of evidence, appears to have been transferred to NABU (controlled by US Embassy) where it seems to have fizzled out without anything being done. Kulyk later fired

subsequently, Kulyk - praised by Chornovol as the prosecutor who recovered $1.5 billion of embezzled money, the ONLY such recovery to date - joined Derkach in his press conferences on Ukrainian corruption under Biden regency, to which Kulyk brought receipts.

Kulyk was subsequently sanctioned on Jan 10, 2021 by Treasury under so-called "Trump" administration, for disseminating supposed "Russian disinformation". But, when one looks at backstory, Kulyk had paid his dues as Ukrainian prosecutor with actual accomplishments

while Kulyk was carrying out his monumental investigation into Kurchenko money-laundering syndicate, he was simultaneously being investigated by NABU on charges of illegal enrichment in 2011-2015, including a complaint that he took a 10-day vacation in Bulgaria by car

ultimately, it's a herculean and probably impossible task to sort out which Ukrainian is more corrupt. What does seem certain is that there's little to no reason to trust George Kent or Amos Hochstein on such matters. Or for US embassy to be micro-managing.

back to the original question of what changed regarding Shokin in Oct-Nov 2015 as asked by Derkach and Kulyk having established that Kulyk had exhaustively investigated Kurchenko money laundering in which Zlochevsky was reported in 2019 to be a participant.

right now, none of us KNOWS what triggered the change. We KNOW that Vadym Pozharskyi, Zlochevsky's #2, visited Hunter Biden, Archer and Blue Star in Washington on Oct 29, 2015, following up with a memo on "deliverables" on Nov 2, 2015

We KNOW that Hunter Biden requested a meeting with Amos Hochstein on Nov 2, that they met on Nov 6 and that this was only such meeting ever requested by Hunter of Hochstein and that Hunter initiated discussion of Burisma.

here's Kulyk and Derkach's explanation for the sudden concern by Burisma and Biden. They stated in May 2020 that the Kurchenko money laundering investigation had discovered $3.4 million payment of "laundered money" to Rosemont Seneca Bohai

while there has been much publicity to the issue of quid pro quo, if the funds (quid pro quo or not) resulted from money laundering (as Kulyk believed), the situation is much worse.

we also know from Tetiana Chornovol that Shokin, Chornovol and Tyshchenko had had an explosive meeting with US embassy favorite Kasko (then head of International) about his failure to obtain money laundering documents from Latvia, such that Shokin set up parallel channel

the dates on the ledgers from Latvia indicate that
Shokin's direct channel to Latvia (circumventing the obfuscating Kasko) began yielding results in Oct-Nov 2015, exactly as US embassy/Biden began seeking Shokin's head.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh

More from @ClimateAudit

Stephen McIntyre

@ClimateAudit

Aug 12

Here's a listing of Minority HPSCI Staff in early 2017. Most of the redactions in yesterday's release can be identified here.

In two of the 302s, WHISTLEB described the HPSCI Democrat system for exfiltrating secret information from a secure room in a three letter agency: presumably FBI, from which copies and notes were prohibited.

As a work-around, three HPSCI Democrat staffers would attend the Secure Room and, after each visit, "would immediately compose summaries" on a standalone computer set up in a back room by "committee's network administrator" for exclusive use by "Russian team" members. After the three Russian team members had completed their visit summaries, they briefed certain other staffers.

All of the names underneath the redactions can be plausibly identified from contemporary HPSCI Democrat staff rosters as shown below.

Here is a transcription of each of the two descriptions of the Russian team and secondary briefees, showing character counts.

The Russian Team had two 16s (at least one with LN8) and an 11. (number denotes character count of full name.)

The secondary briefees were a 6+5 (12), two 13s (one a 5+7), an 11, and the communications director (a 14). One of the 13s was a new hire.

Read 9 tweets

Stephen McIntyre

@ClimateAudit

Jul 31

Durham Classified Appendix is almost entirely about "Clinton Plan". Unsurprisingly, nothing about the post-election events during which Russiagate collusion hoax actually metastasized under FBI and CIA into a national flesh-eating disease.
Emails from Lenny Benardo of Soros' Open Society Foundation feature prominently. Note that Benardo was mentioned in a Washington Post article by Demirjan and Devlin Barrett on May 24, 2017 (a few days after Mueller appointment) - archive archive.is/w43O2 reporting that the email had been dismissed by FBI as "unreliable". DWS, Benardo and Renteria said at the time that they had never been interviewed by FBI.

https://x.com/FOOL_NELSON/status/1658525717183725569

Fool_Nelson proposed Julie Smith as Foreign Policy Advisor-2 in Durham report at the time:

https://x.com/FOOL_NELSON/status/1658525717183725569

Here's a July 27, 2016 email (attributed to Benardo) which contains a detail relevant to the argument against @DNIGabbard's first drop, claiming that Russian interference concern was NEVER about election infrastructure, but always about DNC hack and Buff Bernie memes. Here Benardo talks about how to make Russia "a domestic issue" by raising the spectre of a "critical infrastructure threat for the election". Brennan subsequently did just that: raised concern about "infrastructure threat". ODNI played down that threat in their briefings and ultimately in the proposed post-election PDB of December 8, 2016 which was cancelled by Obama intervention.

Read 4 tweets

Stephen McIntyre

@ClimateAudit

Jul 22

the ICA version in the recent DNI documents is a different version (dated January 5, 2017) than the released version (dated January 6, 2017). There were many changes overnight - some substantive.

Before editorializing, I'll laboriously go through comparisons - final version on left, previous day version on right. (I apologize for not marking this on each of the following slides.)

The Jan 6, 2017 version contained a preface entitled "Background... The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution", not present in the Jan 5 version (as shown). It has two sections.

The first section entitled "The Analytic Process" stated that these assessments "adhere to tradecraft standards".

"On these issues of great importance to US national security, the goal of intelligence analysis is to provide assessments to decisionmakers that are intellectually rigorous, objective, timely, and useful, and that adhere to tradecraft standards."

Now recall the dispute over inclusion of Steele dossier information in the ICA as an appendix and, as we recently learned, as a bullet supporting the assessment that Putin "aspired" to help Trump. Some IC professionals objected to the inclusion of Steele dossier information on the grounds that it did not meet tradecraft standards for inclusion in an ICA. Comey, McCabe and FBI insisted on its inclusion on the grounds that Obama had said to include "everything" - which they interpreted as mandating inclusion of Steele dossier information even though it didn't meet tradecraft standards.

Reasonable people can perhaps disagree on whether this was justified or not. What was not justified was the claim that the inclusion decision complied with "tradecraft standards". It was bad enough to include non-compliant material, but the claim that the included material "adhered to tradecraft standards" was miserably false. The recent Tradecraft Review should have addressed this fault.

The preface also included the following assertion:
"The tradecraft standards for analytic products have been refined over the past ten years. These standards include describing sources (including their reliability and access to the information they provide), clearly expressing uncertainty, distinguishing between underlying information and analysts’ judgments and assumptions, exploring alternatives, demonstrating relevance to the customer, using strong and transparent logic, and explaining change or consistency in judgments over time."

The "past ten years" here refers to the period of time since the savage tradecraft review by the WMD Commission, an excellent repot on a previous intelligence failure of similar scale to the Russia collusion hoax as an //intelligence failure// - which it was (even if non-criminal).

They state that "standards include describing sources (including their reliability and access to the information they provide)". Now apply that to the description of the Steele network in the classified appendix (declassified and released in 2020) shown below and transcribed as follows:
"the source is an executive of a private business intelligence firm and a former employee of a friendly foreign intelligence service who has been compensated for previous reporting over the past three years. The source maintains and collects information from a layered network of identified and unidentified subsources, some of which has been corroborated in the past. The source collected this information on behalf of private clients and was not compensated for it by the FBI".

This description does not remotely comply with the warranty in the Preface. We know that Steele (the "source") had told the FBI that his information was funneled through a "Russian-based sub-source" who Steele refused to identify. Steele did however tell the FBI that Sergei Millian was one of the sub-subsources to the "Russian-based sub-source". By mid-December 2016, the FBI had figured out that Steele's "Russian-based sub-source" was Igor Danchenko, an alumnus of U of Louisville, Georgetown and Brookings Institute, who lived in northern Virginia and had an American-born daughter. A fulsome description of sources IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE WARRANTY IN THE PREFACE would have included these details and more.

It would have also stated that the FBI planned to interview the Primary Sub-Source as soon as possible. Given the importance of the document, the obvious question from any sane reviewer of the draft ICA would be: "uh, why don't you interview Steele's Primary Sub-Source right now? Today? " "And, by the way, why are you saying that he is 'Russian-based' when he lives in northern Virginia?"

If the reviewers had known that Steele's Primary Sub-Source had lived in northern Virginia and was available for interview, maybe they would have said: "uh, maybe we should hold off this ICA until we talk to Danchenko. This is a big document, maybe we should do some due diligence". But they weren't given that option, because Danchenko's location in northern Virginia was concealed from them. The warranty in the prefatory Background was false.

Subsequently, a few weeks later, when the FBI interviewed Danchenko and he revealed that there wasn't any "layered network" and that the key allegations were based (at best) on an anonymous phone call and that many of the sourcing claims in the dossier were untrue, the intelligence community had an obligation to fess up. To retract their claims about the Steele dossier, which, by the end of January, had emerged in public consciousness as the driving predicate of the Russia collusion investigation. Once the FBI knew that the sourcing claims were fraudulent, they had an obligation to disclose that to the rest of the IC and to publicly disown the Steele dossier, which had become important to the public precisely because of its endorsement in the ICA.

Read 9 tweets

Stephen McIntyre

@ClimateAudit

Jul 14

Trump's latest tariff venture is a 50% tariff on copper, ostensibly for national security reasons. Copper markets are something that I analysed in the 1970s; so I know the structure of the markets and statistics. I was even been involved as a junior analyst in a trade case about US copper tariffs.

Under the US Defense Production Act, Canada is considered "domestic production" for the purposes of national security, but neither Trump nor the Canadian government seem to have had any interest in this legislation.

I remember the difficulties of trying to make long-term forecasts of copper supply and demand. Copper is also a market with voluminous statistics maintained consistently for a very long period. US Geological Survey for US consumption and primary production of refined copper for 1950-2024 are shown below. As someone who, in the 1970s, actually thought about what this chart would look like, it was interesting to re-visit.

In the 1920s and 1930s, US copper company were industrial behemoths: Anaconda, Kennecott, Phelps Dodge and Asarco, all now forgotten, were among the top 20 or top 50 US stocks back in the day. In the 1970s, they were still major companies. US accounted for about 25% of world production and consumption.

But, as you can see, since 2000, both US primary production and US refined consumption have declined precipitously. US refined consumption is now at lower levels than in the 1970s and US primary production is less than the early 1950s.

What will be the impact of a 50% tariff on copper imports? In the next post, I'll show how the changes in US market compare to world production.

although US copper production has declined since the 1970s, world copper production has almost quadrupled. US share of world copper refined production (here primary plus secondary scrap) has decreased from about 25% to 3%.

US copper production and consumption no longer dominate world markets - despite what the Beltway may imagine. An approximate 3% share doesn't get to dictate prices.

That means that the 50% copper tariff will be borne entirely by US copper consumers (i.e. manufacturers using copper). US producers will almost certainly increase their price to match the price of imports. So the tariff will be a bonanza for US domestic producers (e.g. Freeport McMoran) and a burden for US manufacturers.

the copper data also shows a vignette into the remarkable change in world economic geography since 9/11. In 2001, US still produced more copper than China. In 2024, China produced more than 13(!) times as much copper as USA. This isn't just production, but also consumption. Chinese manufacturers consume most of their copper production; their copper consumption is accordingly an order of magnitude greater than US copper consumption.

So when Trump puffs about the importance of USA as a market, this is simply not true of a basic commodity like copper. And I'm skeptical that it is true for other basic commodities.

Read 4 tweets

Stephen McIntyre

@ClimateAudit

Jul 9

on first page: Brennan's lawyer, Robert Litt, was General Counsel at ODNI in 2016 and involved in some key events. Litt published an article in October 2017 lawfaremedia.org/article/irrele… which claimed that "The dossier itself played absolutely no role in the coordinated intelligence assessment that Russia interfered in our election." The recent Tradecraft Review, abysmal as it was, admitted that the dossier was cited in the classified ICA as a bullet support for the claim that Putin "aspired" to help Trump get elected.

@15poundstogo very Clintonian here

Brennan refers here to two press releases issued by William Evanina in July and August 2020. The Evanina statements were prompted in large part by the release of Biden-Poroshenko tapes by Ukrainian parliamentarian Andrii Derkach (who had previously in October 2016 published receipts showing that Hunter Biden was getting paid $1 million per year by Burisma). Shortly after Evanina's statements, "Trump" administration sanctioned Derkach. As a result of these sanctions, Derkach was de-platformed and the Biden-Poroshenko tapes were deleted from nearly all locations. One of the tapes showed that Poroshenko and Biden gloated in August 2016 about the removal of Manafort as Trump campaign chair as a result of Ukrainian interference (Black Ledger announcement.)

Read 11 tweets

Stephen McIntyre

@ClimateAudit

Apr 13

New thread on new information from redactions.

I just noticed that the information in Binder on Trump briefing in Aug 2016 was previously published by Grassley in July 2020, a few days after identification of Steele Primary Sub-source (and thus we, in this corner, were otherwise preoccupied).
grassley.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/…

The new version sheds light on a previous redaction. Katrina, Norm, Ted, John and Amir were mentioned. Just noting this for future reference.

something else that I'm noticing in the less redacted documents: Kevin Clinesmith was much more prominent in Crossfire Hurricane operation than we previously realized.

In real time, Hans, myself and others had vehemently and savagely criticized Durham's useless plea agreement with Clinesmith that had failed to use their leverage over Clinesmith to obtain a road map of the Russiagate hoax operation. Compare for example Mueller's use of leverage over Rick Gates to interview him about 20 times, If anything, there was more leverage over Clinesmith.

Durham's failure to lever Clinesmith looks worse and worse as we now see Clinesmith's name in multiple Crossfire documents that had previously been redacted.

For example, here is Clinesmith on August 30, 2016 - early days of Russiagate hoax - approving the reporting of FBI surveillance of Trump and Flynn while they were supposedly providing a counterintelligence briefing.

In this briefing, they failed to give Trump and Flynn the same warning about Turkey that they had previously given Clinton's lawyers.

here's an example where the "declassified" Binder contains a redaction not made in the version published by Grassley almost five years ago. the name of Edward (Ted) Gistaro of ODNI

Read 19 tweets

Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

Stephen McIntyre

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

More from @ClimateAudit

Stephen McIntyre

Stephen McIntyre

Stephen McIntyre

Stephen McIntyre

Stephen McIntyre

Stephen McIntyre

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Send Email!