Bob's Blog

Ukrainian officials announced Saturday they intercepted a $6 million bribe offered to stop an investigation into the founder of Burisma Holdings, the energy firm that had Hunter Biden as a board member until 2019.

Artem Sytnyk, the head of Ukraine’s national anti-corruption bureau (NABU), said at a press conference in Kyiv that $6 million in cash was recovered during a sting operation on Friday. He said that three people were detained in the operation, including a Burisma employee and a current and former Ukrainian tax official, according to Reuters.

Sytnyk said that $5 million in bribe money was offered to NABU officials, and another $1 million was reserved for a middleman who brokered the deal.

...President Donald Trump and his allies have accused Joe Biden of forcing the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor in 2016 in order to stop an investigation into Burisma. Biden bragged during a speech in January 2018 that he forced former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, by threatening to withhold $1 billion in loan assistance to Ukraine.

...But the Democrats have already heard from John Bolton. On August 27, 2019, Bolton gave an interview with Radio Free Europe and spoke about both of Trump's phone calls with President Zelensky.

Bolton was asked if he planned to meet with President Zelensky, and what messages he planned to bring to him.

“Well, I will be meeting Zelensky, he and President Trump have already spoken twice. The President called to congratulate President Zelensky on his election and then on his success in the parliamentary election. They were very warm and cordial calls," Bolton said. [Emphasis added]

Bolton continued, "The success of Ukraine maintaining its freedom, its system of representative government, a free-market economy free of corruption and dealing with problems of the Donbas and the Crimea are high priorities here obviously and high priorities for the United States as well.”But the Democrats have already heard from John Bolton. On August 27, 2019, Bolton gave an interview with Radio Free Europe and spoke about both of Trump's phone calls with President Zelensky.

Bolton was asked if he planned to meet with President Zelensky, and what messaged he planned to bring to him.

“Well, I will be meeting Zelensky, he and President Trump have already spoken twice. The President called to congratulate President Zelensky on his election and then on his success in the parliamentary election. They were very warm and cordial calls," Bolton said. [Emphasis added]

Bolton continued, "The success of Ukraine maintaining its freedom, its system of representative government, a free-market economy free of corruption and dealing with problems of the Donbas and the Crimea are high priorities here obviously and high priorities for the United States as well.”

Democratic senators took campaign cash from Ukrainian interests while begging Ukraine for help in removing a duly elected President from office. And these are the people who would participate in a Senate impeachment trial. The inmates are indeed running the asylum.

Today, two questions remain.

One is whether it was ethically improper or even illegal for Biden to intervene to fire the prosecutor handling Burisma’s case, given his son’s interests. That is one that requires more investigation and the expertise of lawyers.

The second is whether Biden has given the American people an honest accounting of what happened. The new documents I obtained raise serious doubts about his story’s credibility. And that’s an issue that needs to be resolved by voters.

How did a minor country intersect with three presidential campaigns, those of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump, the Mueller investigation and the business dealings of the Biden clan?

Ukraine’s government is a dysfunctional oligarchy that exists in a state of permanent conflict between billionaires, energy interests, nationalists, Russian front groups, European front groups and street thugs. To make matters more confusing, some of those categories overlap and sometimes shift back and forth.

The Ukraine is one of the poorest countries in the region. Its per capita income is miserable. Its life expectancy is slightly higher than that of Syria. Its real prize is a complex energy sector interwoven with those of Russia and the European Union. Every reason why Ukraine has been in the news comes back to that energy sector and its role in the power balance between Russia, Europe and the United States.

Without that energy sector, the Ukraine would have wallowed quietly in a morass of corruption. Instead its scandals touch off explosions in Moscow, Brussels and Washington D.C. because they originate there.

That’s why the origin of the latest Ukraine scandal begins, unsurprisingly, with an energy company.

Burisma Holdings, the energy company, paid Hunter Biden, Joe’s son, $50,000 a month to sit on its board. That’s not a commonplace arrangement. But energy companies in that part of the world are never just private companies. They’re closely linked to political interests and political leaders.

The company that was paying Biden’s son a cool $50K a month was founded by a businessman who had been the Minister of Natural Resources in the Yanukovich government. The Yanukovich government, which was pro-Russian, was forced out by nationalist and pro-EU activist protests. Yanukovich fled to Russia and Putin responded to the fall of his government by invading the Ukraine and annexing Crimea.

And Crimea is all about the pipelines.

Yanukovich’s party employed American political consultants from across the spectrum including Tony Podesta, the brother of Hillary’s campaign chair, Tad Devine, Bernie Sanders’ chief political strategist, and Paul Manafort, briefly Trump’s campaign chair. While Podesta won’t be charged and Devine got off, Manafort had the book thrown at him because our political class and the Russian and Ukrainian political classes have more than a few things in common. And the similarities are only growing.

The Manafort case was collateral damage from the infighting between Ukraine’s old government and its new government. But Democrat operatives seized on the Ukrainian scandals because of their potential usefulness to their anti-Trump cause, ignoring Podesta and Devine, while focusing on Manafort.

...Ukraine is an energy industry battlefield. So is America.

Some of the biggest backers of impeaching President Trump are in the green energy business. Trump’s backing for oil and coal lit a fire under our economy, but it’s been bad news for the folks who make money from subsidized renewables and, even more shamefully, carbon credits. If Trump loses, they win.

Congressman Adam Schiff (to experience the deep void, look into his eyes) has fallen into a trap in which he aims at the president and wounds his party’s front-runner, Joe Biden, instead.

...There is also a very strong similarity between Schiff’s consistent lies about the Mueller investigation and the phony Russian Collusion story and the effort to remove the President for trying to repair relations with Ukraine, relations jeopardized by the former administration’s corruption. He hopes the moribund press will broadcast his claims loudly and readers will not go beyond those headlines. In the meantime, as is their wont, the hysterical press on the left is drooling over the possibility of another impeachment angle, all else having failed to work and the President’s popularity growing as their candidates manage to turn off tranche after tranche of voters .

Once again, Schiff pushed hard on the revolving door and it’s about to smack him and his party in the face. This coming week, President Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky are set to meet. Watch for it.

I realize you’ve been forgetting things lately, @JoeBiden, but it’s weird that you’d forget this

You bragged about getting a Ukrainian prosecutor - who was investigating your son - fired

Seems like an abuse of power, no?pic.twitter.com/Y95djVhwn1

— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) September 21, 2019

The last month has seen Russia pull out of peace talks (citing attacks in Crimea and detention of key individuals) and an increasing mobilization of Ukraine troops near the Russian border, and now, after the deadliest month since last August, Ukraine president Poroshenko has warned he isn't ruling out a full-scale Russian invasion and may institute a military draft if the situation with its neighbor worsens.

The Pentagon has identified eight staging areas in Russia where large numbers of military forces appear to be preparing for incursions into Ukraine, according to U.S. defense officials.

As many as 40,000 Russian troops, including tanks, armored vehicles, and air force units, are now arrayed along Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia.

Additionally, large numbers of Russian military forces will conduct exercises in the coming days that Pentagon officials say could be used as cover for an attack on Ukraine.

“Russian units will likely practice reinforcing the [Crimean] peninsula through such activities as amphibious landings and air defense exercises, and this may involve the change out of equipment and long convoys of military vehicles,” one defense official said.

The military exercises are an ominous sign. Similar large-scale Russian exercises were conducted near Ukraine a month before Moscow carried out the covert military operation to take over the strategic Black Sea peninsula in March 2014.

The central-American nation of Honduras is ruled today by an extremist far-right government, a fascist junta-imposed government, because of what Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did in 2009. The lives of all but the top 0.001% of the population there are hell because of this.

...The soaring murder-rate after the U.S.-supported coup caused a soaring number of escapees from the violence; they’re flooding into the U.S. now as illegal immigrants.

In Haiti, the situation is similar as an example of the U.S. backing aristocrats, so as to keep the masses in poverty and for American aristocrats to profit from doing so. On 1 June 2011, the Nation headlined "WikiLeaks Haiti: Let Them Live on $3 a Day," and Dan Coughlin and Kim Ives reported that, "Contractors for Fruit of the Loom, Hanes and Levi’s worked in close concert with the US Embassy when they aggressively moved to block a minimum wage increase for Haitian assembly zone workers, the lowest-paid in the hemisphere, according to secret State Department cables. ... The factory owners told the Haitian Parliament that they were willing to give workers a 9-cents-per-hour pay increase to 31 cents per hour to make T-shirts, bras and underwear for US clothing giants like Dockers and Nautica. But the factory owners refused to pay 62 cents per hour, or $5 per day, as a measure unanimously passed by the Haitian Parliament in June 2009 would have mandated. And they had the vigorous backing of the US Agency for International Development and the US Embassy when they took that stand." Hillary Clinton's State Department pushed hard to reverse the new law. "A deputy chief of mission, David E. Lindwall, said the $5 per day minimum 'did not take economic reality into account' but was a populist measure aimed at appealing to 'the unemployed and underpaid masses.'" An "Editor's Note" from the Nation added: "In keeping with the industry’s usual practice, the brand name US companies kept their own hands clean, letting their contractors do the work of making Haiti safe for the sweatshops from which they derive their profits -- with help from US officials." Those "officials" were ultimately Clinton and Obama. On 3 June 2011, Ryan Chittum at Columbia Journalism Review headlined "A Pulled Scoop Shows U.S. Fought to Keep Haitian Wages Down," and he added some perspective to the story: “Hanesbrands CEO Richard Noll ... could pay for the raises for those 3,200 t-shirt makers with just one-sixth of the $10 million in salary and bonus he raked in last year.” And then, when the U.S. turns away "boat people," trying to escape the "voluntary" slavery of the Haitian masses, the standard excuse is that it's done so as to "protect American jobs." But is that really where Hillary Clinton gets her campaign funds?

Furthermore, under Secretary of State Clinton, failures at the U.S. Department of State also caused the basis for a hatred of the United States to soar in Afghanistan after the U.S. has drawn down its troops there. This failure, too, has received little coverage in the U.S. press, but our nation will be paying heavily for it long-term.

Hillary Clinton was the Administration’s leading proponent of regime-change, overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. That worked out disastrously. Hillary’s success at overthrowing Gaddafi served brilliantly the purposes of the U.S. aristocracy and of the jihadists who are financed by the Saud family and the other fundamentalist Sunni royal families in Arabia. Even if she doesn’t become President, she has already done enough favors for those royals so as to be able to fill to the brim the coffers of the Clinton Foundation.

Clinton was also the Secretary of State when the 2006-2010 drought was causing massive relocations of population in Syria and U.S. State Department cables passed along up the chain of command the Assad government’s urgent request for aid from foreign governments to help farmers stave off starvation. The Clinton State Department ignored the requests and treated this as an opportunity to foment revolution there. It wasn’t only the Arab Spring, in Syria, that led to the demonstrations against Assad there. Sunni jihadist fighters streamed into Syria, backed by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey. The U.S. was, in effect, assisting jihadists to oust the non-sectarian, secular Shiite leader of Syria and replace him with a fundamentalist Sunni dictator.

the takeover of Ukraine was an Obama operation in which she played an important role, to set it up.

Well, the answer is, that when we’re talking about guns, a bad issue for Obama, we’re not talking about other things that pose worse issues for Obama. And the list of those is long.

In Syria, Putin is making Obama look weak, ordering U.S. planes out of the sky, bombing CIA-supported rebels, and allying with Iranian troops. Obama has no real response, leading to The Economist headline, "Putin Dares, Obama Dithers.”

Meanwhile, despite Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, the 14-year-old war in Afghanistan goes on, with U.S. forces apparently bombing a civilian hospital run by Doctors Without Borders by mistake, killing many.

In Ukraine, Russia is deploying new, more advanced missiles. Putin is also building a major base near the Ukraine-Russia border.

After the Chinese Office of Personnel Management hack that some (including me) described as a ”cyber Pearl Harbor,” it turns out that way more fingerprint data was stolen than OPM originally reported. And the CIA was forced to pull spies out of China for fear that the hack compromised their identities.

Here at home, the Secret Service joined the list of agencies in the Obama Administration found to have abused its powers to target political opponents — in this case, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, — and then the Secret Service director changed his story, backing away from original claims that he didn’t know about it.

Meanwhile, the latest jobs numbers show a record 94,610,000 Americans not in the work force, for the lowest labor participation rate in 38 years, even as the economy shows other signs of sputtering.

And, of course, there’s the steady drip, drip of the Hillary Clinton email scandal. With Hillary, Obama’s secretary of State for most of his presidency, and with questions about how much the president and other officials knew about her shady practices, he’d just as soon we didn’t talk about it.

In fact, Obama would just as soon we didn’t talk about any of these debacles. The gun issue may not be a winner for him, but it’s an ideologically divided issue where most Democrats will take his side, and it’s a hot-button issue that lets him inflame debate just by bringing it up.

These other stories, meanwhile, raise questions about Obama’s presidency that even Democrats are finding hard to ignore. Is it any wonder that Obama would rather talk about guns?

...Based on past events, accusing Ukraine of escalation is propaganda cover, a cynical signal that his soldiers and proxy forces have begun new offensive operations. Putin has escalated, with calculation, and shattered the Minsk agreement ceasefire of February 2015. A wily propagandist, Putin always works a thread of truth into his lies. Full-scale direct clashes can be avoided -- if Ukrainian defenders surrender or retreat.

Violating agreements is yet another pattern: By invading and annexing Crimea, Putin shredded the 1994 Budapest accord. That deal traded Ukraine's nukes for Russia's guarantee that it would not violate Ukraine's territory. The Clinton administration supported the accord.

Despite the Minsk agreement, fighting in eastern Ukraine has never stopped, nor has Putin's propaganda war. It's another pattern: Since spring 2014, combat in Ukraine has spiked and then lapsed. It takes time, but solid evidence collects that Russian soldiers or proxies have spiked the combat. This repeats a historical pattern: the creeping war of aggression. This is not a new form of warfare. In 1991, Serb dictator Slobodan Milosevic ran one in Croatia and Bosnia.

Many observers expected a late-summer offensive, likely a drive on the Ukrainian Sea of Azov port of Mariupol. This fits a grand pattern. In Europe, August is a good month for vacations and war. The days are long and dry. An attacker can seize territory through late September, and then General Winter will help slow counterattacks.

This week, a U.S. State Department spokesman accused Russia and its proxy separatists of launching new attacks "just as they escalated the conflict last August."

...Mariupol lies between Russian-occupied areas and the Crimean peninsula. Seizing it is a logical operation, militarily and politically. Militarily, taking Mariupol robs Ukraine of a seaport and is a big step toward securing a land route to Crimea. A land corridor permits rapid tank and mobile infantry movement to and from Crimea.

and whenever the consequences of his actions create problems, it's because others didn't do what they were supposed to do. I pulled troops out of Iraq. I reneged on missile defense in Eastern Europe. I "reset" with Russia. I intervened in Libya. I didn't intervene in Syria. I told Leon Panetta to deal with Benghazi. I took the blue pill. The fact that the Iraqi pullout was destabilizing, that Putin saw his moves as weakness, that Islamists took over Libya, that Assad stayed in power, that the Matrix revealed itself anyway: These all reflect someone else's failures.

I don't think Barack Obama would go to war to defend Ukraine even if he said he would. As with his "red line" debacle, the worst thing a president can do is vow to take a hardline and then not take it. But would it be too much to ask the president of the United States to characterize a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine as outrageous?

The president of the United States isn't an observer. Obama is open to sending lethal aid — it seems — only if Ukraine is invaded. But refusing to send lethal aid makes invasion all the more likely. I understand that the president thinks he's very clever by seeing the guiding principle of his foreign policy as "don't do stupid sh*t." But the real-world consequence of that principle is to let events unfold and then whine about being neck-deep in sh*t you think you can blame on others. It's not leading from behind, it's failing from behind.

A real U.S. president would give Kiev the weapons it needs, impose devastating sectoral sanctions on Moscow, reinstate our Central European missile-defense system and make a Reaganesque speech explaining why.

All domination must end. But after how much devastation? If you leave it to the forces of history to repel aggression and redeem injustice, what's the point of politics?

The arc of history may indeed bend toward justice, Mr. President. But, as you say, the arc is long. The job of a leader is to shorten it. Otherwise, why do we need a president? And why did you seek to become ours?

The fact that Kremlin opposition to European fracking has nothing to do with environmental concerns should be clear even to the dullest among us, because Russia has massive fracking projects of its own underway in Siberia. The real goal is to keep Europe dependent upon Russia for its fuel supply. Natural-gas prices in Europe are quadruple those prevailing in the United States, and by maintaining a near-monopoly on overpriced European natural-gas imports, the Putin regime assures itself of a vast source of revenue. This allows it to rule and rearm Russia without permitting the freedom necessary to develop the country’s human potential. Furthermore, so long as Europe is kept critically dependent upon Russia for fuel, Moscow can paralyze and render ineffective any Western response to its plans for conquest, whose initial steps are currently being demonstrated in Ukraine. More, and much worse, is certain to follow so long as Europe remains helpless.

The Kremlin’s all-out effort to stop fracking in Western nations is not limited to openly broadcasting lies, hysteria, and propaganda through its official media organizations. It also engages in covert operations, behind-the-scenes lobbying and payoffs, and political manipulations using its agents of influence. Many of these are documented by former U.S. ambassador to Lithuania Keith C. Smith in a recent paper published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

In this paper, titled “Unconventional Gas and European Security: Politics and Foreign Policy of Fracking in Europe,” Smith details Kremlin/Gazprom behind-the-scenes operations that were instrumental in obtaining fracking bans in Germany and Bulgaria. Similar dirty work appears to have been involved in ramming through fracking bans in France, Italy, and other European countries.

Many Western companies are willing to support Moscow’s energy policies in order to gain stronger positions in the Russian market. As the UralSib Bank’s Chris Weaver remarked, “Gazprom does not have to knock on the door of the European Parliament, Total {French} and Basf {German} do it on its behalf” . . . West European intelligence services report that there has been little or no reduction in the number of Russian agents operating in their countries since the end of the Cold War. The Kremlin’s goals have shifted from military targets to developing “agents of influence” within European governments and in the three major EU institutions. With President Putin playing a direct role in Russia’s energy relations with Europe, one should assume that his KGB-honed skills and those of his major advisors are being applied to maintain Russia’s leading position in Europe’s gas import market.

If Europe’s fuel supplies remain under Russian control, the continent is doomed to fall under Russian domination. America could help supply gas, but its exports are being bottled up by the Obama administration, which refuses to approve the necessary permits for constructing liquid-natural-gas export terminals. France and Germany have plenty of shale suitable for producing gas, but on the instigation of Russian political agents of influence, they have not only banned fracking but are moving to shrink or shut down their own nuclear-power industries as well. The UK also has large shale resources that could be fracked to provide the necessary gas, which is why an all-out Moscow-backed campaign has been launched to stop fracking there as well. If that succeeds, the only remaining hope for Europe will lie in its east.

Ukraine has the third-largest shale resources in Europe. But, as a result of the Western paralysis caused by Europe’s Russian-gas dependency, Ukraine is being conquered, and in fact, its eastern reserves have already been overrun. The Baltic states also have plenty of gas-rich shale, so they will be targeted next. Based on the pathetic Western response to his Ukrainian land grab, Putin has every reason to believe that he can take them at will, and, unfortunately, he is probably right.

That leaves Poland, which has the largest shale-gas reserves of any country in Europe and a fiercely independent government intent on their development. Polish shale-gas reserves are estimated at 790 trillion cubic feet (TCF), more than 150 times the 5 TCF per year that Europe imports from Russia. If the Poles can develop those resources, Putin’s power to create an Eurasianist empire stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok will be severely compromised. But they will do Europe no good at all if Putin can seize them first.

Poland is a country that knows the value of freedom. When their turn comes, the Poles will fight. But if Putin’s anti-fracking campaign prevails, the Poles will fight alone.

Putin could take Eastern Ukraine, but it would do him no good. It’s the poorest part of the country and would turn into an instantaneous money pit for him, akin to the United States annexing Tijuana in Northern Mexico. He can’t possibly want that, not if he has any sense.

He’d lose all his leverage over Kiev. Even an unspoken threat of invasion, occupation, and annexation is enough to make Ukraine act with tremendous caution toward Moscow, but if Putin pulls the trigger, Kiev would have nothing left to lose.

Never mind the price he’d pay internationally for that kind of stunt; invading and occupying the largest country in Europe would require more than a half-million troops and God-only-knows how much money. And for what purpose? Ukraine poses no national security threat whatsoever to Russia.

It’s no big deal that Poland is asking for American ground troops. That’s just predictable, and prudent, geopolitical posturing. If Ukraine asks, though, that would be the time to start getting nervous.