Quote (IceMage @ May 2 2019 04:35pm)
Accepting dirt from a person as part of a hostile foreign government's plan to help your campaign is collusion.
On that note Icemage, new story is breaking:
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/441892-ukrainian-embassy-confirms-dnc-contractor-solicited-trump-dirt-in-2016full account from the Ukrainian Embassy claims that they didn't solicit the DNC to pass them the Manafort ledger, but it was the other way around- the DNC actively solicited the ledger from them;
Quote
In written answers to questions, Ambassador Valeriy Chaly's office says DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa sought information from the Ukrainian government on Paul Manafort’s dealings inside the country, in hopes of forcing the issue before Congress.
Chalupa later tried to arrange for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to comment on Manafort’s Russian ties on a U.S. visit during the 2016 campaign, the ambassador said.
Chaly says that, at the time of the contacts in 2016, the embassy knew Chalupa primarily as a Ukrainian-American activist, and learned only later of her ties to the DNC. He says the embassy considered her requests an inappropriate solicitation of interference in the U.S. election.
“The Embassy got to know Ms. Chalupa because of her engagement with Ukrainian and other diasporas in Washington D.C., and not in her DNC capacity. We’ve learned about her DNC involvement later,” Chaly said in a statement issued by his embassy. “We were surprised to see Alexandra’s interest in Mr. Paul Manafort’s case. It was her own cause. The Embassy representatives unambiguously refused to get involved in any way, as we were convinced that this is a strictly U.S. domestic matter.
“All ideas floated by Alexandra were related to approaching a Member of Congress with a purpose to initiate hearings on Paul Manafort or letting an investigative journalist ask President Poroshenko a question about Mr. Manafort during his public talk in Washington, D.C.,” the ambassador explained.
Reached by phone last week, Chalupa said she was too busy to talk. She did not respond to email and phone messages seeking subsequent comment.
Chaly’s written answers mark the most direct acknowledgement by Ukraine’s government that an American tied to the Democratic Party sought the country’s help in the 2016 election, and they confirm the main points of a January 2017 story by Politico on Chalupa’s efforts.
In that story, the embassy was broadly quoted as denying interference in the election and suggested Chalupa’s main reason for contacting the ambassador’s office was to organize an event celebrating women leaders.
The fresh statement comes several months after a Ukrainian court ruled that the country’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), closely aligned with the U.S. embassy in Kiev, and a parliamentarian named Serhiy Leshchenko wrongly interfered in the 2016 American election by releasing documents related to Manafort.
The acknowledgement by Kiev’s embassy, plus newly released testimony, suggests the Ukrainian efforts to influence the U.S. election had some intersections in Washington as well.
Of course, the fact that the Ukrainian embassy denies any involvement and 'unambiguously refused to get involved in any way', is belied by the fact that the ukrainian Manafort ledger was promptly released by the DNC after that solicitation.
So given that they're obviously lying, it calls into question their denial of who was soliciting who, but hey its a bit of finger-pointing nonetheless, and an admission that there
was an inappropriate relationship between the DNC and Ukraine.