Free Republic

The information presented below confirms the participation of each of the listed individuals in the Derkach tapes disinformation campaign, demonstrates the connection between them, as well as the coordinated nature of their actions. On January 11, 2021, the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on a number of Ukrainian politicians and civil servants for interfering in the US presidential elections by spreading disinformation. The decision concerned the individuals involved in the publication, legitimization and distribution of the disinformation concerning so-called “Derkach tapes”, in which allegedly Joe Biden and Petro Poroshenko discuss issues of Ukrainian politics and raise the topic of Burisma....

As Donald Trump began his meteoric rise to the presidency, the Obama White House summoned Ukrainian authorities to Washington to coordinate ongoing anti-corruption efforts inside Russia’s most critical neighbor. The January 2016 gathering, confirmed by multiple participants and contemporaneous memos, brought some of Ukraine’s top corruption prosecutors and investigators face to face with members of former President Obama’s National Security Council (NSC), FBI, State Department and Department of Justice (DOJ). The agenda suggested the purpose was training and coordination. But Ukrainian participants said it didn’t take long — during the meetings and afterward — to realize the Americans’ objectives included...

While special counsel Robert Mueller has concluded there was no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, some of the key people in creating the Russia-collusion narrative themselves have ties to a foreign nation. Both the Democratic National Committee as well as Fusion GPS—the company hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign to research the Trump campaign—were using Ukrainian sources in their efforts to discredit Trump. Serhiy Leshchenko, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, was a common thread involved in Democratic opposition research efforts into former Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort. Leshchenko, along with Artem Sytnyk, the...