By: Jeffrey Winograd
If you really believe that Russian operatives were working covertly to undermine the candidacy of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign, then you must surely want to know if Ukrainian conspirators were overtly working to support Hillary and undermine the candidacy of Donald Trump. Wouldn’t you?
Well, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, together with Speaker Nancy Pelosi ((D-CA) and most Democrats on Capitol Hill, would rather you don’t even ponder such an outrageous possibility.
This is clearly evident from the words frequently emanating from the mouth of Schiff. As he well knows, words have meaning and they often have great importance in the halls of Congress.
Schiff has been spewing forth “discredited” so much in recent weeks that I thought to take a look in the dictionary to see what it actually means.
“Discredit,” as defined in the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th Ed.), means: “(1) to refuse to accept as true or accurate; (2) to cause disbelief in the accuracy or authority of.”
The past tense of this verb now seems to be a favorite of the congressman and here are some choice examples:
Schiff on Nov. 19: “One of those investigations involved the Bidens and the other involved a discredited conspiracy theory that Ukraine and not Russia was responsible for interfering in our 2016 election.”
Schiff on Nov. 20: “The first investigation was of a discredited conspiracy theory that Ukraine – and not Russia – was responsible for interfering in our 2016 election.”
Rep. Schiff’s modus operandi during the impeachment inquiry seems to be if he says discredited often enough, the average person will accept, as fact, that there was no Ukrainian conspiracy and only the Russkies would stoop to such despicable conduct.
Clearly, to say that something has been discredited does not mean that it has been proven false. Schiff is engaging in a bit of razzle-dazzle to distract people from what is clearly provable.
Ukrainians Apparently Conspired To Impact Election
A serious investigation is warranted to see if disparate events, when taken together, constitute a conspiracy, but there are clearly enough provable facts to suggest this was most likely the case.
What follows are some examples.
#1 There is the matter of the so-called “black ledger” which contained financial documents claiming to show that Paul Manafort, who briefly served as Trump’s campaign manager, received under-the-table payments for services rendered to the tainted former president, Viktor Yanukovych. The New York Times reported on this in its Aug. 14, 2016 edition.
#2 Who actually leaked the document to the media? A guy by the name of Serhiy Leshchenko, a well-known former parliamentarian and vocal supporter of Clinton. Fast forward to Dec. 11, 2018, when a Ukrainian court found that Leshchenko had interfered in the American election. The court also found that the chief of the country’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau illegally participated in the “black journal” affair.
#3 On Aug. 4, 2016, Valerly Chaly, Ukraine’s ambassador in Washington, tossed his hat into the anti-Trump ring, stating in a scathing op-ed in The Hill: “Even if Trump’s comments [regarding Crimea] are only speculative, and do not really reflect a future foreign policy, they call for appeasement of an aggressor and support the violation of a sovereign country’s territorial integrity and another’s breach of international law.” Is it normal conduct for an ambassador to publish such an opinion in the midst of a hotly contested political campaign?
#4 In a July 20, 2017, letter from Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), who at the time was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the senator voiced his concerns about the activities of Alexandra Chalupa, a contractor for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) who had a close association with the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington. According to Grassley, “Chalupa’s actions appear to show that she was simultaneously working on behalf of a foreign government, Ukraine, and on behalf of the DNC and [Hillary] Clinton, in an effort to influence not only the U.S. voting population but U.S. government officials.” Almost two years after Grassley sent his letter, the Ukrainian Embassy released an official statement on the matter
Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire
Adam Schiff wants people to think that the intelligence community has clearly proven, which it has not, that the Russians, and no other government, hacked the DNC servers.
However, as you have just seen, those who are crying out about Ukrainian interference have not been alleging hacking, It’s all about those overt activities.
Meanwhile, something rather despicable has been going on.
Various Democrats on the impeachment inquiry panel have sought to discredit the honest reporting of John Solomon, who has been relentless in his probing of a likely conspiracy among Ukrainian – both in and out of government – to influence the presidential campaign in favor of Clinton. Un-American-Activities.com reported on Solomon’s efforts in its Nov. 13th edition.
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Un-American Activities 