The
Ukrainian Influence Peddling Rings—A Microcosm
Of How Imperial Washington Rolls
By
David Stockman
November 24/25, 2019 "Information
Clearing House"
- We heard some knucklehead on the War Channel
(CNN) braying about Ukraine as a vitally
important "ally and strategic partner".
The
implication, of course, was that the Donald’s
attempted squeeze play on its new President was
dangerously undermining national security.
What
unadulterated tommyrot!
The
safety and security of the American homeland has
absolutely nothing to do with it. That’s because
Ukraine is a no count, strategically irrelevant
patch of earth that was long ago ruined by the
old Soviet Union, and thereafter turned into an
economic trainwreck by its own corrupt oligarchs
– along with plenty of help from Washington
interventionists.
The
latter spent the post-Soviet years fomenting
"color revolutions" and attempting to steer its
politics toward the west and NATO membership.
But when the Ukrainian people elected a
pro-Russian president in 2010 and all efforts to
bribe and bully him westward failed, Washington
instigated, funded and instantaneously
recognized an illegal putsch on the streets of
Kiev in February 2014.
That
blatant, unprovoked assault on a sovereign
nation, in turn, set in motion a destructive
civil war internally; a dangerous and utterly
unnecessary politico-military confrontation with
Russia on its own doorstep; and, now, a
hysterical campaign by the House Dems and their
Deep State allies to impeach a duly-elected
American president for the sin of wading into
the very cesspool of corruption that the
Washington establishment itself foisted upon
this hapless, $150 billion sliver of a failed
state and crippled economy.
The
latest dispatch from the Wall Street
Journal on the stench wafting westward
from Kiev reveals more about the rotten
foundation of UkraineGate than its authors
probably understood.
Burisma Holdings’ campaign to clean up its
image in the West reached beyond the 2014
hiring of Hunter Biden, son of the then-U.S.
vice president, to include other well-connected
operatives in Washington, according to officials
in both countries and government records.
The Ukrainian company, owned by
tycoon Mykola Zlochevsky, also hired a
lobbyist with close ties to then-Secretary of
State John Kerry, as well as a consulting group
founded by top
officials in the Clinton administration that
specialized in preparing former Soviet-bloc
countries to join NATO (Blue Star Strategies).
Soon
the efforts bore fruit. With the help of a New
York-based lawyer, Mr. Zlochevsky’s U.S.
consultants argued to Ukrainian prosecutors that
criminal cases against the company should be
closed because no laws had been broken.
Burisma later became a sponsor of a Washington
think tank, the Atlantic Council, whose
experts are often cited on energy and security
policy in the former Soviet Union.
Simple
translation: Zlochevsky was an ally,
officeholder (minister of ecology and natural
resources) and inner-circle thief in the ousted
government of Viktor Yanukovych. He therefore
needed to powder the pig fast and thoroughly in
order to hold onto his ill-gotten billions.
So he
hired the best Washington influence peddlers
that money could buy under the circumstances.
First up was Hunter Biden, because his old man
was running point on what amounted to the puppet
government Washington had installed in Kiev, and
Devon Archer, because he was a former bundler
for former Senator (and then Secretary of State)
John Kerry.
But so
as to leave no stone unturned, Zlochevsky also
had Burisma hire another Washington influence
peddler just one month after Biden the Younger
joined the board in April 2014. Again, according
to the WSJ, the additional lobbyist
firepower came from one,
David Leiter
of Washington lobbying firm M.L. Strategies…..
Mr. Leiter was John Kerry’s chief of staff
when Mr. Kerry was a U.S. senator from
Massachusetts….According to disclosure records,
Mr. Leiter, who also had worked for the Energy
Department, lobbied on behalf of Burisma on
“promoting transparency and good corporate
governances” at both chambers of Congress,
the State Department, the Treasury Department,
the Energy Department, and US AID.
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
|
Needless to say, only in Imperial Washington
would all the above named arms of the US
government care a whit about "transparency and
good governance" at a two-bit gas producer in
Ukraine. During 2018, for example, the company
produced the trivial sum of 1.3 BCF of natural
gas and booked revenues of just $400 million – a
rounding error in just about any energy market
that matters.
But as
it happened, Washington was calling the shots in
Kiev, and Burisma needed its government licenses
and gas concessions. So the lobbying happened on
the banks of the Potomac where the real power
was actually exercised.
Finally, the Clinton wing of the Washington
racketeering system had to be covered, too –
hence the above mentioned Blue Star Strategies.
And the bolded sentence from the WSJ
story quoted below tells you all you need to
know about its business, which was to "….help
former Soviet countries prepare for NATO
consideration".
That’s
right. With the Soviet Union gone, its 50,000
tanks on the central front melted-down for scrap
and the Warsaw Pact disbanded, the rational
order of the day was to declare "mission
accomplished" for NATO and effect its own
disbandment.
The
great parachuter and then US president, George
Bush the Elder, could have actually made a jump
right into the giant Ramstein Air Base in
Germany to effect its closure. At that point
there was no justification for NATO’s continued
existence whatsoever.
But the
Clinton Administration, under the baleful
influence of Washington busybodies like Strobe
Talbot and Madeleine Albright, went in just the
opposite direction. In pursuit of Washington’s
post-1991 quest for global hegemony as the
world’s only superpower and putative keeper of
the peace, they prepared the way for the
entirety of the old Warsaw Pact to join NATO.
So
doing, however, they also laid the planking for
a revival of the cold war with the Kremlin. As
the father of containment and NATO during the
late 1940s, Ambassador George Kennan, observed
at the time, the Clinton Administration’s policy
of expanding NATO to the very doorstep of Russia
was a colossal mistake.
It not
only violated Bush the Elder’s pledge to
Gorbachev at the time of German reunification
that NATO would not be expanded "by a single
inch to the east", but also set Washington on a
confrontation path with the rump state of Russia
that posed no threat whatsoever to America’s
homeland security.
Moreover, in the case of Ukraine specifically,
it had not simply been a Warsaw Pact "captive
nation" like Poland or the Czech Republic. It
had actually been an integral component of the
old Soviet Union, and before that a vassal and
sometimes province of Czarist Russia.
As the
1897 map below indicates, what is today Ukraine
barely even existed as an independent state
(dark yellow area) during the final centuries of
the Russian Empire; and the Russian-speaking
regions in what is today eastern Ukraine (yellow
area on the map) had actually been known as "New
Russia" owing to the Czarist policy of settling
Russians there to provide a bulwark against
encroachments by the Ottoman Turks.
Indeed,
Crimea (orange area) had been actually purchased
from them by Catherine the Great in 1783 to
complete the Russification of the region north
of the Black Sea. It had never been even
remotely a part of Ukraine until its mainly
Russian-speaking population was transferred to
the Soviet Socialist Republic of the Ukraine by
Khrushchev in 1954 as a reward to his Ukrainian
compatriots for their support during the
post-Stalin struggle for power in Moscow.
Moreover, the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, which
had been largely incorporated by Moscow in 1923,
had a modern bloody history that was always a
civil war waiting to happen.
To wit,
western Ukraine had sided with the Nazi and
Hitler’s Wehrmacht as it brutally made its way
through Ukraine to the siege of Stalingrad
during WWII, while eastern Ukraine had lined up
with the Red Army during its equally bloody
campaign of destruction and revenge as it chased
the defeated Nazi army back to Berlin after
1943.
So the
very idea that Ukraine should be induced to join
NATO was beyond the pale – and most especially
after Washington had recruited modern-day
political descendants of the WWII pro-Nazi
brigades to replace the Yanukovych government in
March 2014. Washington’s obtuseness to this
history reflected pure imperial arrogance.
What is
worse, of course, is that no count apparatchiks
from the Clinton machine – Sally Painter and
Karen Tramontano – had cashed in on this madness
by setting up a practice in helping Washington
to meddle in places where not an iota of
homeland security was at stake.
Image
result for 19th century map of the Ukraine as
part of czarist Russia
As the
Wall Street Journal noted, Blue Star
Strategies had no compunction about using its
Clinton and Biden connections in behalf of
Burisma – notwithstanding the odor of
oligarchical corruption which surrounded it,
Blue Star Strategies, which has
been lauded in the West for its work to help
former Soviet countries prepare for NATO
consideration. Its
founders: Sally Painter, a senior adviser
to the Commerce Department in the Clinton
administration, and Karen Tramontano, a
deputy chief of staff in the Clinton White
House.
At about the time of Mr. Shokin’s
dismissal, Blue Star helped Burisma hire lawyer
John D. Buretta, who argued before prosecutors
in Ukraine that cases against Burisma should be
closed, according to
one Ukrainian official and others familiar with
the matter.
“I
thought I was meeting someone who was going to
help with the investigations, and all he wanted
to talk about was why they should be closed,”
said one former Ukrainian prosecutor who met
with Mr. Buretta.
So
that’s how the Imperial City rolls. People make
policies which extend the Empire while in office
– as did these Clintonistas with the NATO
expansion project – and then cash-in afterwards
by peddling influence in the corridors of the
beltway on behalf of Washington’s newly acquired
vassals and supplicants.
In this
case, all roads lead to the Atlantic
Council, which is the semi-official
"think tank" of NATO in Washington and is
infested with Russophobes and Clinton/Biden
operatives. The latter, of course, make a
handsome living peddling anti-Putin propaganda –
the better to grease the Washington purse
strings for unneeded military spending and
foreign aid, security assistance and weapons
sales to the "front line" states allegedly in
the path of Kremlin aggression.
In
fact, so-called think tanks like the Atlantic
Council are thinly disguised lobbying arms for
both the Empire’s foreign supplicants as well as
the U.S. agencies which feed them. Thus, in the
racketeering wards of the Imperial City weapons
contractors and foreign purchasers make common
cause. So do the dispensers and recipients of
foreign aid, security assistance and the
multitude of Washington propaganda programs run
through the State Department, Endowment for
Democracy, Board for International Broadcasting
and countless more.
In
fact, the network of one hand washing the other
is so pervasive and massive that it is not
surprising that foreign policy and national
security have become one giant racket enveloped
in a bipartisan consensus in favor in
intervention and meddling in the fairest parts
of the planet.
The
entire Ukraine intervention project, for
instance, has been heavily choreographed by the
Atlantic Council, which in turn derives its
ample funding from virtually all parties –
domestic and foreign – to the Empires far flung
rackets.
Thus,
US government contributors include the Pentagon,
the U. S. State Department, the US Air Force,
the US Navy, the Air Force Academy, the US Army
War College, National Endowment for Democracy
and even NATO itself.
Then
there is an endless litany of foreign
governments and quasi-official institutions
including the British Foreign and Commonwealth
Office, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and
embassies, foundations and sovereign funds
representing Denmark, South Korea, Australia,
Japan, Hungary, Sweden, Norway, Germany,
Romania, Netherlands, Hong Kong and countless
more.
Not
surprisingly, the roster of
military/industrial/intelligence contractors and
international energy and financial institutions
runs on for pages. It includes Chevron, HSBC
Holdings, BP America Inc., Lockheed Martin
Corporation, Raytheon, United Technologies,
Boeing, ExxonMobil, Textron, Statoil, Bank of
America, ConocoPhillips, JPMorgan and dozens
more.
Also,
amply represented in its contributor lists are
other foreign policy advocacy and funding
institutions including The Wallenberg
Foundations, the Soros Open Society Foundations,
the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Arabia
Foundation, Center for International Strategic
Studies, the Starr Foundation, the Smith
Richardson Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation
etc.
Finally, there is an endless list of everyone
and their brother who does business in
Washington lead by the Victor Pinchuk
Foundation. The latter is the influence peddling
front of Ukraine’s leading billionaire who
essentially stole much of its iron and steel
industry after the Soviet Union collapsed and
has been a leading funder of the Clinton
Foundation ($6 million) and various Russophobe
think tanks in addition to the Atlantic Council.
But
that additional list also includes such odds and
sots as Facebook, Inc., Google, Inc., Squire
Patton Boggs, Starbucks Coffee Company, Twitter,
McKinsey & Company, CNN and dozens more.
So it
is not surprising that Burisma quickly put its
money where its spotted reputation could be
cycled through a refurbishment process at the
Atlantic Council. Indeed, in an extensive
expose, Max Blumenthal noted exactly hour the
Atlantic connection came about:
Even
with Hunter Biden on his company’s board,
Zlochevsky was still seeking influential allies
in Washington. He found them at the Atlantic
Council in 2017, literally hours after he was
cleared of corruption charges in Ukraine.
On Jan. 19, 2017 – just two days after the
investigation of Zlochevsky ended – Burisma
announced a major “cooperative agreement” with
the Atlantic Council.
The deal was inked by the director of the
Atlantic Council’s Eurasia program, a former
U.S. ambassador to Ukraine named John Herbst.
Since then, Burisma
helped bankroll Atlantic Council programming,
including an
energy security conference
held this May in Monaco, where Zlochevsky
currently lives.
The
story actually gets even more convoluted from
there as we will essay in Part 2. As it turns
out, virtually the entire caste of
whistleblowers and Deep State testifiers now
being called before the Impeachment Tribunal
were in one way or another organized, financed
or sponsored by the Atlantic Council.
David Alan Stockman is an American politician
and former businessman who was a Republican U.S.
Representative from the state of Michigan and
the Director of the Office of Management and
Budget under President Ronald Reagan.
https://www.contracorner.co/
This
article was originally published by "David
Stockman's Contra Corner"
- -
Do you agree or disagree?
Post your comment here