By John Solomon, opinion contributor — 03/26/19 06:00 PM EDT
While
the 2016 presidential race was raging in America, Ukrainian prosecutors
ran into some unexpectedly strong headwinds as they pursued an
investigation into the activities of a nonprofit in their homeland known
as the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC).
The
focus on AntAC — whose youthful street activists famously wore “Ukraine
F*&k Corruption” T-shirts — was part of a larger probe by Ukraine’s
Prosecutor General’s Office into whether $4.4 million in U.S. funds to
fight corruption inside the former Soviet republic had been improperly
diverted.ADVERTISEMENT
The
prosecutors soon would learn the resistance they faced was blowing
directly from the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, where the Obama administration
took the rare step of trying to press the Ukrainian government to back
off its investigation of both the U.S. aid and the group.
“The
investigation into the Anti-Corruption Action Center (sic), based on the
assistance they have received from us, is similarly misplaced,”
then-embassy Charge d’ Affaires George Kent wrote the prosecutor’s office in April 2016 in a letter that also argued U.S. officials had no concerns about how the U.S. aid had been spent.
At
the time, the nation’s prosecutor general had just been fired, under
pressure from the United States, and a permanent replacement had not
been named.
A few months later, Yuri Lutsenko, widely regarded as a hero in the West for spending two years in prison after fighting Russian aggression in his country, was named prosecutor general and invited to meet new U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.
Lutsenko
told me he was stunned when the ambassador “gave me a list of people
whom we should not prosecute.” The list included a founder of the AntAC
group and two members of Parliament who vocally supported the group’s
anti-corruption reform agenda, according to a source directly familiar
with the meeting.
It turns out the group that Ukrainian law
enforcement was probing was co-funded by the Obama administration and
liberal mega-donor George Soros. And it was collaborating with the FBI
agents investigating then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s business activities with pro-Russian figures in Ukraine.
The
implied message to Ukraine’s prosecutors was clear: Don’t target AntAC
in the middle of an America presidential election in which Soros was backing Hillary Clinton to succeed another Soros favorite, Barack Obama, Ukrainian officials said.
“We ran right into a buzzsaw and we got bloodied,” a senior Ukrainian official told me.
Lutsenko
suggested the embassy applied pressure because it did not want
Americans to see who was being funded with its tax dollars. “At the
time, Ms. Ambassador thought our interviews of the Ukrainian citizens,
of the Ukrainian civil servants who were frequent visitors in the U.S.
Embassy, could cast a shadow on that anti-corruption policy,” he said.
State
officials told me privately they wanted Ukraine prosecutors to back off
AntAC because they feared the investigation was simply retribution for
the group’s high-profile efforts to force anti-corruption reforms inside
Ukraine, some of which took authorities and prestige from the
Prosecutor General’s Office.ADVERTISEMENT
But
it was an unusual intervention, the officials acknowledged. “We’re not
normally in the business of telling a country’s police force who they
can and can’t pursue, unless it involves an American citizen we think is
wrongly accused,” one official said.
In the end, no action was
taken against AntAC and it remains thriving today. Nonetheless, the
anecdote is taking on new significance.
First, it conflicts with the State Department’s official statement last week after Lutsenko first mentioned the do-not-prosecute list. The embassy responded that the claim was a fabrication and a sign that corruption is alive and well inside Ukraine.
But
Kent’s letter unequivocally shows the embassy did press Ukrainian
prosecutors to back off what normally would be considered an internal
law enforcement matter inside a sovereign country. And more than a
half-dozen U.S. and Ukrainian sources confirmed to me the AntAC case
wasn’t the only one in which American officials exerted pressure on
Ukrainian investigators in 2016.
When I asked State to explain the
letter and inclusion of the Soros-connected names during the meeting,
it demurred. “As a general rule, we don’t read out private diplomatic
meetings,” it responded. “Ambassador Yovanovitch represents the
President of the United States in Ukraine, and America stands behind her
and her statements.”
Second, the AntAC anecdote highlights a
little-known fact that the pursuit of foreign corruption has resulted in
an unusual alliance between the U.S. government and a political
mega-donor.
After the Obama Justice Department launched its Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative
a decade ago to prosecute corruption in other countries, the State
Department, Justice Department and FBI outsourced some of its work in
Ukraine to groups funded by Soros.
The Hungarian-American
businessman is one of the largest donors to American liberal causes, a
champion of the U.S. kleptocracy crackdown and a man with extensive business interests in Ukraine.
One
key U.S. partner was AntAC, which received 59 percent (or $1 million)
of its nearly $1.7 million budget since 2012 from U.S. budgets tied to
State and Justice, and nearly $290,000 from Soros’s International
Renaissance Foundation, according to the group’s donor disclosure records.
The
U.S.-Soros collaboration was visible in Kiev. Several senior Department
of Justice (DOJ) officials and FBI agents appeared in pictures as
participants or attendees at Soros-sponsored events and conferences.
One
attendee was Karen Greenaway, then the FBI supervisor in charge of
international fraud cases and one of the lead agents in the Manafort
investigation in Ukraine. She attended multiple such events and won glowing praise in a social media post from AntAC’s executive director.
In one event during 2016,
Greenaway and Ambassador Yovanovitch participated alongside AntAC’s
executive director, Daria Kaleniuk, and Lutsenko was present. The
message was clear: The embassy supported AntAC.
The FBI confirmed
Greenaway’s contacts with the Soros group, saying they were part of her
investigative work: “In furtherance of the FBI’s mission and in the
course of their duties, FBI employees routinely travel and participated
in public forums in an official capacity. At a minimum, all such travel
and speaking engagements are authorized by the employee’s direct
supervisor and can receive further authorization all the way up to the
relevant division head, along with an ethics official determination.”
Greenaway recently retired, and Soros’s AntAC soon after announced she was joining its supervisory board.
Internal memos from Soros’s umbrella charity organization, Open Society Foundations,
describe a concerted strategy of creating friendships inside key
government agencies such as State, DOJ and the FBI that can be leveraged
inside the countries Soros was targeting for anti-corruption activism.
“We
have broadly recognized the importance of developing supportive
constituencies in order to make headway in tightening the global web of
anti-corruption accountability,” a Feb. 21, 2014, memo
states. “We first conceived of this in terms of fostering and helping
to build a political environment favorable to high-level anti-corruption
cases.”
That same memo shows Soros’s organization wanted to make
Ukraine a top priority, starting in 2014, and planned to use the
Anti-Corruption Action Centre as its lead.
“Ukraine: Behind the
scenes advice and support to Ukrainian partner Anti-Corruption Action
Centre’s efforts to generate corruption litigation in Europe and the
U.S. respecting state assets stolen by senior Ukrainian leaders,” the
memo states.
The memo included a chart of Ukrainians the Soros team wanted to have pursued, including some with ties to Manafort.
Senior
U.S. law enforcement officials confirmed to me that the early
kleptocracy collaborations inside Ukraine led to highly visible U.S.
actions against the oligarch Dmitri Firtash, a major target of the Soros
group, and Manafort. Firtash is now represented by former Hillary Clinton lawyer Lanny Davis and former U.S. Attorney Dan Webb.
Documents
posted online by Open Society Foundations show that after U.S.
officials scored some early successes in corruption cases in Ukraine,
such as asset forfeitures, AntAC requested to receive some of the seized
money.
“Ukrainian NGO Anticorruption Action Centre (AntAC)
petitioned the United States Justice Department on behalf of Ukrainian
civil society to dedicate the nearly $3 million in forfeited and seized
assets allegedly laundered by former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo
Lazarenko, to creating an anti-corruption training facility,” a 2015 foundation document stated.
Spokespersons for AntAC and Open Society Foundations did not respond to repeated requests for comment.ADVERTISEMENTMichael
Vachon, a spokesman for Soros, deferred any comment about AntAC to the
group. But he did he confirm his boss supported the continued
investigation of Russia collusion allegations against Trump well past
2016.
Vachon said Soros wrote a sizable check from his personal funds
in fall 2017 to a new group, Democracy Integrity Project, started by a
former FBI agent and Senate staffer Daniel Jones to continue
“investigation and research into foreign interference in American
elections and European elections.”
Vachon said the group asked
Soros not to divulge the size of his contribution, and Soros later
learned the group hired Fusion GPS, the same firm that was paid by
Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic Party to create the
infamous “Steele dossier” alleging Trump-Russia collusion.
The
he said-she said battle playing out between Ukraine’s chief prosecutor
and the American ambassador doesn’t benefit either side, but an honest,
complete and transparent account of what the embassy communicated to
Ukraine’s law enforcement does.
And the tale of AntAC raises some cogent questions:
- Why would the U.S. Embassy intervene on a Ukrainian internal investigation and later deny it exerted such pressure?
- Did Soros’s role as a major political funder have any impact?
- Do Americans want U.S. tax dollars commingled with activists’ private funds when it comes to anti-corruption probes?
Someone in State and Congress should try to get the answers.
John
Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over
the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the
Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and
veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political
corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice
president for video at The Hill.
Tags Hillary ClintonPaul ManafortBarack ObamaCorruption in Ukraine2016 presidential campaignState DepartmentJohn Solomon
