Unreported: Backers, timing of Schiff staffer’s Ukraine junket

FPI / October 8, 2019

Twelve days after the so-called Trump-Ukraine “whistleblower” officially filed his complaint, a staffer for Rep. Adam Schiff's House Intelligence Committee traveled to Ukraine as part of a program funded in part by Burisma Holdings and George Soros, a report said.

The Schiff staffer, Thomas Eager, visited Ukraine from Aug. 24-31 in a trip sponsored and organized by the Atlantic Council think tank, according to a report by Breitbart Jerusalem bureau chief Aaron Klein.

The corporate media has downplayed many aspects of the Ukraine story that do not fit an impeachment inquiry narrative.

Along with not reporting on the timing of the Schiff staffer’s visit to Ukraine, major media outlets also glossed over the fact that Schiff knew about the whistleblower complaint in advance, and continue to overlook the Bidens' Ukraine scandal.

Related: Fleitz among first to smell a rat on Ukraine story; He was right, CNN was wrong, October 7, 2019

The whistleblower filed his complaint about President Donald Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Aug. 12.

The Atlantic Council is funded by and routinely works in partnership with Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian firm which paid Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden $50,000 a month to sit on its board. Burisma was being investigated by the prosecutor Joe Biden boasted about getting fired.

According to a report by The Hill’s John Solomon, Joe Biden admitted during a 2018 videotaped speech that, as vice president in March 2016, he threatened to cancel $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to pressure Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko to fire the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin.

The Schiff staffer’s Atlantic Council trip in August was billed as a “Ukraine Study Trip,” and culminated in a meeting with Poroshenko.

Besides funding from Burisma, the Atlantic Council is also financed by Google Capital, leftist billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations as well as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc. and the U.S. State Department, Klein’s report noted.

In his phone call with Zelensky, Trump also mentioned CrowdStrike, the outside firm utilized to conclude that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee’s servers during the 2016 presidential election. The DNC would not allow the U.S. government to inspect the servers.

CrowdStrike founder Dmitri Alperovitch is a nonresident senior fellow of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council.

“There are common threads that run through an organization repeatedly relied upon in the so-called whistleblower’s complaint about Trump and CrowdStrike,” the Breitbart report said.

Klein’s report noted: “One of several themes is financing tied to Google, whose Google Capital led a $100 million funding drive that financed Crowdstrike. Google Capital, which now goes by the name of CapitalG, is an arm of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company. Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Alphabet, has been a staunch and active supporter of Hillary Clinton and is a longtime donor to the Democratic Party.”

Perkins Coie, the law firm that represented the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, reportedly helped bring on CrowdStrike to aid with the DNC’s allegedly hacked server.

On behalf of the DNC and Clinton’s campaign, Perkins Coie also paid Fusion GPS to produce the discredited anti-Trump dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.

Breitbart News reported last month that Google, Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Fund and an agency of the State Department “each also finance a self-described investigative journalism organization repeatedly referenced as a source of information in the so-called whistleblower’s complaint alleging Trump was ‘using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country’ in the 2020 presidential race.”

The charges in the July 22 report referenced in the whistleblower’s complaint and released by the Google and Soros-funded organization, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), “seem to be the public precursors for a lot of the so-called whistleblower’s own claims,” Breitbart News reported.

One key section of the whistleblower’s document claims that “multiple U.S. officials told me that Mr. Giuliani had reportedly privately reached out to a variety of other Zelensky advisers, including Chief of Staff Andriy Bohdan and Acting Chairman of the Security Service of Ukraine Ivan Bakanov.”

This was allegedly to follow up on Trump’s call with Zelensky in order to discuss the “cases” mentioned in that call, according to the so-called whistleblower’s narrative. The complainer was clearly referencing Trump’s request for Ukraine to investigate the Biden corruption allegations.

Even though the statement was written in first person – “multiple U.S. officials told me” – it contains a footnote referencing a report by the OCCRP.
That footnote reads: In a report published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) on 22 July, two associates of Mr. Giuliani reportedly traveled to Kyiv in May 2019 and met with Mr. Bakanov and another close Zelensky adviser, Mr. Serhiy Shefir.

The whistleblower’s relies on the same OCCRP report on three more occasions to:

• Write that Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko “also stated that he wished to communicate directly with Attorney General Barr on these matters.”
• Document that Trump adviser Rudi Giuliani “had spoken in late 2018 to former Prosecutor General Shokin, in a Skype call arranged by two associates of Mr. Giuliani.”
• Bolster the charge that, “I also learned from a U.S. official that ‘associates’ of Mr. Giuliani were trying to make contact with the incoming Zelenskyy team.” The so-called whistleblower then relates in another footnote, “I do not know whether these associates of Mr. Giuliani were the same individuals named in the 22 July report by OCCRP, referenced above.”

The OCCRP report repeatedly referenced is actually a “joint investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and BuzzFeed News, based on interviews and court and business records in the United States and Ukraine.”

BuzzFeed infamously also first published the full anti-Trump dossier.

Breitbart News noted that “The OCCRP and BuzzFeed ‘joint investigation’ resulted in both OCCRP and BuzzFeed publishing similar lengthy pieces on July 22 claiming that Giuliani was attempting to use connections to have Ukraine investigate Trump’s political rivals.”

The so-called whistleblower’s document, however, only mentions the largely unknown OCCRP and does not reference BuzzFeed, which has faced scrutiny over its reporting on the Russia collusion claims.

Another listed OCCRP funder is the Omidyar Network, which is the nonprofit for liberal billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

Together with Soros’s Open Society, Omidyar also funds the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which hosts the International Fact-Checking Network that partnered with Facebook to help determine whether news stories are “disputed.”

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