Victor Pinchuk, the Clintons & Endless Connections

Victor Pinchuk, the Clintons & Endless Connections

March 11, 2018 by Jeff Carlson, CFA

I wrote on the role of Alexandra Chalupa – a Ukrainian-American DNC operative – who appears at the center of the DNC’s construction of information used in the Steele Dossier.
The role of former Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland in disseminating the Dossier – along with her involvement in shaping Ukraine – was also discussed.
The name Victor Pinchuk was mentioned.
Victor Pinchuk is a Ukrainian billionaire.
He is the founder of Interpipe, a steel pipe manufacturer. He also owns Credit Dnipro Bank, some ferroalloy plants and a media empire.
He is married to Elena Pinchuk, the daughter of former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma.
Pinchuk’s been accused of profiting immensely from the purchase of state-owned assets at severely below-market prices through political favoritism.
Pinchuk used his media empire to deflect blame from his father-in-law, Kuchma, for the September 16, 2000 murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze. Kuchma was never charged but is widely believed to have ordered the murder. A series of recordings would seem to back up this assertion.
On April 4 through April 12 2016, Ukrainian Parliamentarian Olga Bielkov had four meetings – with Samuel Charap (International Institute for Strategic Studies), Liz Zentos (National Security Council), Michael Kimmage (State Dept) and David Kramer (McCain Institute).
Doug Schoen filed FARA documents showing that he was paid $40,000 a month by Victor Pinchuk (page 5) – in part to arrange these meetings.
Schoen attempted to arrange another 72 meetings with Congressmen and media (page 10). It is unknown how many meetings took place.
Schoen has worked for both Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Schoen helped Pinchuk establish ties with the Clinton Foundation. The Wall Street Journal reported how Schoen connected Pinchuk with senior Clinton State Department staffers in order to pressure former Ukrainian President Yanukovych to release Yulia Tymoshenko – a political rival of Yanukovych – from jail.
The relationship between Pinchuk and the Clintons continued.
From the Kyiv Post:

In 2013, Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk welcomed current U.S. Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton onto the stage at his Yalta European Strategy, an annual conference he funds to promote Ukraine’s European integration and strategy, calling her: “a real megastar.”

Clinton and her husband Bill, the 42nd U.S. president, have been paid speakers at the annual YES and other Pinchuk events. They describe themselves as friends of Pinchuk, who is known internationally as a businessman and philanthropist.

To date, Pinchuk’s charitable foundation has given $125 million to various causes, according to his spokespeople.

Although exact numbers are not clear, reports filed by the Clinton Foundation indicate that as much as $25 million of Pinchuk’s “charitable donations” went to the Clinton organization.
From a New York Times article:

Victor Pinchuk, a steel magnate whose father-in-law, Leonid Kuchma, was president of Ukraine from 1994 to 2005, has directed between $10 million and $25 million to the foundation. He has lent his private plane to the Clintons and traveled to Los Angeles in 2011 to attend Mr. Clinton’s star-studded 65th birthday celebration.

Later, the Clintons would try to distance themselves from Pinchuk.
From a Washington Examiner article:

Emails made public Tuesday show a Ukrainian businessman and major Clinton Foundation donor was invited to Hillary Clinton’s home during the final year of her diplomatic tenure, despite her spokesman’s insistence in 2014 that the donor never crossed paths with Clinton while she served as secretary of state.

Amid scrutiny of Clinton’s ties to Pinchuk in 2014, the Democratic nominee’s spokesman, Nick Merrill, said Pinchuk had never met with Clinton during that time. He told the New York Times that, “from Jan. 21, 2009, to Feb. 1, 2013,” the Ukrainian businessman “was never on her schedule.”

Pinchuk, who has given up to $25 million to the Clinton Foundation, appeared on the guest list that was sent between Dennis Cheng, an executive at the foundation, and Huma Abedin, then Clinton’s deputy chief of staff at the State Department, ahead of a June 2012 dinner. Abedin noted in a subsequent email that the gathering would be hosted in Clinton’s home.

Pinchuk’s dinner invitation was exposed in a series of emails obtained by Citizens United.
There has been a repeated pattern of denial between the Clintons and their major donors. See: A Uranium One Primer – Clinton, Giustra & Kazakhstan’s Uranium Assets.
More from the article:

Melanne Verveer, a senior Ukrainian-American official at the State Department, often acted as a go-between for Clinton and Pinchuk. Verveer conveyed Pinchuk’s best wishes to the secretary of state in Feb. 2010 after meeting with him in Ukraine.

After speaking with Pinchuk in Sept. 2011, Verveer informed Clinton that the businessman had been asked by Viktor Yanukovych, then the president of Ukraine, to relay to her some of his diplomatic interests in deepening ties to the rest of Europe.

The intersection of Pinchuk’s advocacy for Yanukovych with Clinton’s State Department is noteworthy because Paul Manafort, former campaign manager for Donald Trump, was felled by his connections to Yanukovych. Manafort resigned from the Trump campaign last week.

Hacked Podesta emails released via Wikileaks showed ongoing contact between Pinchuk and the Clintons. From a March 30, 2015 email:

Victor Pinchuk is relentlessly following up (including this morning) about a meeting with WJC in London or anywhere in Europe. Ideally he wants to bring together a few western leaders to show support for Ukraine, with WJC probably their most important participant.

I sense this is so important because Pinchuk is under Putin’s heel right now, feeling a great degree of pressure and pain for his many years of nurturing stronger ties with the West.

In addition to being a Clinton Foundation donor, Pinchuk is also on the International Advisory Board of the Atlantic Counsel – an NATO-aligned American think tank specializing in the field of international affairs.
Pinchuk’s fellow Advisory Board members are industry leaders and former heads of state.
Their Board of Directors list is equally – if not more – impressive.
The Atlantic Counsel has been historically active in Ukraine through their Ukraine in Europe Initiative. More recently, on January 19, 2017, the Atlantic Counsel announced a partnership with Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Group.
Hunter Biden, former VP Joe Biden’s son, sits on Burisma’s board.
Biden was placed on Burisma’s board after Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt held a phone conversation regarding installation of Arseniy Yatsenyuk in place of then-President Yanukovych. Need of support from VP Biden was noted (more here):

On or before February 4 2014 – Call between Pyatt and Nuland discussing removal of Yanukovych and installation of Yatsenyuk.

February 22, 2014 – Yanukovych was removed as President of Ukraine.

February 27 2014 – Yatsenyuk was installed as Prime Minister of Ukraine. Yatsenyuk would resign in April 2016 amidst corruption accusations.

April 18 2014 – Hunter Biden was appointed to the Board of Directors for Burisma – one of the largest natural gas companies in Ukraine.

April 22 2014 – VP Biden travels to Ukraine and offers support and $50 million in aid for Yatsenyuk’s shaky new government.

The Atlantic Council, along with the Brookings Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, were the subject of an unflattering portrayal in a New York Times article, Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks:

More than a dozen prominent Washington research groups have received tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments in recent years while pushing United States government officials to adopt policies that often reflect the donors’ priorities, an investigation by The New York Times has found.

The think tanks do not disclose the terms of the agreements they have reached with foreign governments. And they have not registered with the United States government as representatives of the donor countries, an omission that appears, in some cases, to be a violation of federal law.

As a result, policy makers who rely on think tanks are often unaware of the role of foreign governments in funding the research.

The arrangements involve Washington’s most influential think tanks, including the Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Atlantic Council.

Each is a major recipient of overseas funds, producing policy papers, hosting forums and organizing private briefings for senior United States government officials that typically align with the foreign governments’ agendas.

Some interesting connections run through the Atlantic Council.
Dimitry Alperovich – the CEO of Crowdstrike that “investigated” the hacking of the DNC’s servers is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at Atlantic. The FBI was refused access to independently examine the DNC servers. Interestingly, Alperovich’s bio appears to have been disabled.
The Crowdstrike findings have been repeatedly called into questioned:

A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack – forensics indicate that DNC emails were copied by an insider via USB and not hacked via external actors.

Intel Vets Challenge ‘Russia Hack’ Evidence – DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack. Forensics show that the copying was performed on the East coast of the U.S.

New Questions Over Claim Russia Hacked the Election – Cybersecurity experts who were first to conclude that Putin hacked presidential election abandon some of their claims against Russia – and refuse to co-operate with Congress.

James Clapper – Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, serves on the Atlantic Council’s International Advisory Board. Clapper was the architect of the report on Russian Election Interference – Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections.
I encourage you to read the report. I think you’ll find it surprisingly lacking in detail – highly generalized with very little in the way of substance.
The report was technically created by a joint effort between the CIA (former Director John Brennan), FBI (former Director James Comey) and the NSA (current Director Mike Rogers) – and assembled by the DNI (former Director James Clapper).
The joint report contains one significant caveat:

CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has only moderate confidence.

Actually, NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers stated in Senate hearing testimony that his confidence did not reach even this threshold:

I wouldn’t call it a discrepancy, I’d call it an honest difference of opinion between three different organizations and in the end I made that call.…It didn’t have the same level of sourcing and the same level of multiple sources.

In essence, the DNI’s report was constructed by just three men – former DNI Director Clapper, former CIA Director Brennan and former FBI Director Comey.
This report was then used to push the entire Russian Narrative.
It’s appearing increasingly likely that Clapper either used or affirmed some data from the Steele Dossier in the IC Assessment Report.
Evelyn Farkas – who famously disclosed the plan to disseminate information gathered on President Trump, is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at Atlantic. Farkas served as Obama’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia.

The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence.

Irena Chalupa – does not appear to be related to Alexandra Chalupa (I’ve been unable to confirm and have seen conflicting reports) – is a Non-Resident Fellow at Atlantic. Irena Chalupa is also a senior correspondent at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. She is a former Director of the Ukrainian National Information Service (UNIS) – the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America’s Washington public affairs bureau.

Irena Chalupa is also a member of StopFake.org – Struggle Against Fake Information About Events In Ukraine.

Irena Chalupa’s ideological interests in Ukraine are aligned directly with those of Alexandra Chalupa.

Evelyn Farkas and Irena Chalupa worked together in 2014 on the Atlantic Council’s Coordinating on Ukraine.

Oleg Deripensky, a Russian oligarch once linked to Paul Manafort, published an Op-Ed in which he made the claim that George Soros was helping fund Fusion GPS.
He also highlighted a conversation between Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Victoria Nuland at the Munich Security Conference in February 2018.
I highlighted Nuland’s role in structuring the Ukrainian government in 2014.
I don’t know about the Soros connection but I did find the Whitehouse-Nuland conversation (Video is queued):

WHITEHOUSE: Even in an area [Climate Change] where the administration has carved out perhaps the most irresponsible position it could, on an issue of global significance, nevertheless you can’t really resist the pressure of fact and science – and I guess what the Breitbart crowd would call the Deep State – but what many of us would call knowledgeable professionals who’ve given their lives to these things and actually know what they’re talking about…

…So even on that worst of all issues there’s still a hope for continuity – at least in the Deep State.

Note John Kerry smiling and applauding in the crowd.

NULAND: Well colleagues, you’ve now heard our bi-partisan, bicameral panel of Deep State crowd loyalists give broad reassurance about continuity in U.S. leadership and in U.S. policy overall.

For the record, Sheldon Whitehouse is a blithering idiot.
Continue watching the video a moment longer to see Ex-Representative Jane Harman pay homage to John McCain:

HARMAN: His voice, his presence, was instrumental in training generations of members of the U.S. Congress on foreign policy issues.

NULAND: And the U.S. State Department…

HARMAN: And the U.S. State Department too. He had his favorites, you being one Victoria.

I doubt John McCain has ever been right – in either policy or ideology. But he did leave quite an unfortunate influence.
These people all think the same. And they all think they know better than anyone else.
Despite a tedious repetition of corruption and policy failures.