The Ukraine Hoax: How Decades of Corruption in the Former Soviet Republic Led to Trump's Phony Impeachment

A BOMBARDIER BOOKS BOOK

An Imprint of Post Hill Press

ISBN: 978-1-64293-569-1

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-570-7

The Ukraine Hoax:

How Decades of Corruption in the Former Soviet Republic Led to Trump’s Phony Impeachment

© 2020 by Michael R. Caputo

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York • Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

To my long suffering wife Maryna and my daughters Maria, Ana, and Lia, who will always remember that the wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws—but together, we sailed away.

Contents

Chapter One: Sham Impeachment 

Chapter Two: Ukraine—Part of the Plan 

Chapter Three: Georgia—Anatomy of a Color Revolution 

Chapter Four: Ukraine Rises 

Chapter Five: A Problem with Gas 

Chapter Six: Murder on the Maidan 

Chapter Seven: The Bidens Cash In 

Chapter Eight: So Many Meddlers 

Chapter Nine: Just One Match 

Acknowledgments 

About the Author 

End Notes

chapter one

SHAM IMPEACHMENT

Oleg Sheremet and I drank a lot, one toast at a time. We were quite a pair. I had just stepped off my Miami Beach tugboat home for the first time in months to fly to Kyiv ¹, Ukraine in summer 2007. I hadn’t cut my shoulder-length hair. I hadn’t shaved my unkempt beard, nor did I leave my faded straw hat aboard. I looked about as out of place in the well-groomed, good-looking crowds of Kyiv as I could possibly be.

Oleg was well put together and vibrated with the enviable energy of an entrepreneur. His enthusiasm was beguiling; his knowledge was invaluable. I loved spending time with him.

Normally, we met at Magyar Haz, a Hungarian restaurant near my Pechersky District apartment, to eat paprika-soaked food that made you want more vodka. Goulash, drink. Cabbage rolls, drink. By the time the Indianer cream puffs showed up for dessert, we had solved the world’s problems.

I spoke no Ukrainian and Oleg, no English. We talked politics, business, music, and film through his translator, Maryna. He would tap his barrel chest when he talked about his country. For him, and for most Ukrainians, every political move affects them, so it becomes quite personal.

We talked a lot, despite our language difference, and Maryna translated Oleg’s harmless dirty jokes, blushing and smiling through the embarrassment. He was luminous; she was endearing. Two years later, I married her.

That was 2007, when we three worked together on a Ukrainian parliamentary campaign. I was a general consultant, and he was our campaign team manager. In former Soviet Union races, nobody wants to see American faces, so global experts hide behind local managers who execute Western-standard campaign plans.

Oleg was a master of his craft and a world-class campaign operative in his own right. He was brilliant and cunning and could tell a story over chilled vodka like nobody else. As our candidate rose unexpectedly in the polls, Oleg got the credit. He also got the blame.

Our dark horse candidate won on Election Day. All the Kyiv wags were shocked, Oleg most of all: an assassin fired several rounds from a Kalashnikov into his chest. His young children were nearby when he was murdered.

Since then, Ukraine has descended further into corruption, cronyism, and war. Kyiv today is Casablanca in the 1940s: rippling with intrigue and crawling with spies, double agents, mercenaries, and phony diplomats. And, of course, Ukrainians who yearn to live normal lives.

But there’s a problem: Ukraine is rich in oil and gas, crisscrossed by critical pipelines, and everybody wants it. What I learned in 2007, the world knows now: Ukrainian politics ain’t beanbag.

On April 24, 2019, almost twelve years after Oleg was gunned down in Kyiv, my wife and daughters and I rushed down a windowless White House corridor that led to the Oval Office. My mother-in-law, Nina of Cherkasy, Ukraine, herded our four- and six-year-old girls along the way. Busts of famous men, paintings of lush American landscapes, and the pinching new shoes we had picked up just hours before at Ross kept the girls distracted. But Madeleine Westerhout, the president’s longtime assistant, kept us at a brisk pace as she led our squad toward a familiar voice.

I told my children to take it all in, that they would remember that day for the rest of their lives.

Where’s Michael? Where’s Michael? It was Donald J. Trump, the president of the United States; I could hear his distinctive voice from down the hall.

We rounded a tight corner and entered a small office. Standing there was my friend and former 2016 campaign office mate, Dan Scavino, the president’s social media director. He offered his hand.

Great to see you, Michael. You have to know Dan Scavino; everybody should. He is perhaps the most hardworking, honest, loyal, and authentic person I’ve ever met in politics. Of course, he didn’t come up in the business, so he retained his soul. We talked about our families now and then in Trump Tower, so I introduced him to Maryna and tried to get my six-year-old, Ana, to say hello. She was holding my leg and craning her neck in the direction of an open door.

Michael! How are you?

I reached out, shook President Trump’s hand, and nearly hugged him. It had been over two years since we saw each other, but I stopped myself—you don’t hug the president of the United States. My left arm was already around his shoulder, so I patted him on the back as if that was my plan all along. That’s fine, I guess, for a couple guys who first met in 1988. But a hug? That would have been a disaster.

I was relieved to be there. After more than two years of enduring the Russia hoax, testifying before the House and Senate intelligence committees and Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel investigators, our family life was destroyed. Summoned to the White House, talking with the president again, felt like the ending we were hoping for since the Special Counsel investigation concluded and the Mueller report was revealed.

My attorneys advised me not to call the president during the life of the investigations. I always assumed he got the same counsel. This was a long-awaited reunion.

I introduced my wife, kids, and mother-in-law to the president and the radiant first lady—who lit the room, as always. Of course, they had met Maryna before, but I assumed the president had forgotten that she and her family were from Ukraine. They had never met our kids.

Ukraine, huh? The president said to Nina, who spoke no English. She nodded. He flashed his trademark grin; she smiled in reply. A lovely country. Great people.

And that was it, we talked about other things. No discussion of the faraway republic, no mention of former vice president Joe Biden or his son, Hunter, no talk of how Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and his men had interfered in our 2016 elections. No mention of actor and comedian Volodymyr Zelensky’s election as Ukraine’s president just days before. Nothing.

President Trump knows I lived in the former Soviet Union for many years in the 1990s; we had talked about the region before. Even so, he didn’t say anything more about Ukraine. If the media is right, and he was beginning to obsess over Biden and Ukraine at the time, he would have spoken to me about it. He’s ebullient and loves to connect with people on their own level, to discuss ideas he has in common with them.

Instead, President Trump didn’t say much of anything about Ukraine at all.

In late April 2019, few among the president’s closest advisors thought the radicalized Democrat Party would nominate former vice president Biden to run against the boss. But stories of an imminent Biden candidacy were leaking that very day, so I asked our famous host about the news.

The president laughed. Biden’s a joke, he said. The other candidates will eat him alive. I’d love to run against him, but it’ll never happen.

Accusing President Trump of swapping foreign aid for dirt on Biden is like alleging Hall of Fame quarterback Tom Brady kneecapped Colin Kaepernick to save his own job. It’s a fantasy—but it’s a fantasy the old-line Schumer-Pelosi Democrats need to save Joe from his own son. In fact, a Democrat competitor is more likely to fire the Hunter accusations at Biden and cut him down before he locks up the 2020 primary.

All diplomacy is transactional, built on quid pro quo, and the specious Democrats behind the impeachment of President Trump know it. In most cases, beyond humanitarian relief, if we’re not getting something for our money, the United States shouldn’t provide aid at all.

Foreign aid skeptics believe it causes more trouble than it solves, and that debate didn’t start with our forty-fifth president.

Concerns about the Biden family’s Burisma Holdings gambit began the moment Hunter Biden joined the corrupt Ukrainian gas company’s board in 2014. In summer 2016, incoming ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was briefed by Obama White House sherpas before her Senate confirmation hearing on how to take difficult questions about Hunter’s multimillion-dollar gig.² The Biden corruption was not much of a secret in Washington.

Legal graft, or pay-to-play, is offensive to Americans and especially offensive to President Trump. In 2013 and 2014, as we worked together to prepare him for a possible run for governor of New York, the billionaire real estate developer talked many times about Washington’s secret scams and how the American people deserved better—how only a strong leader could end the Beltway grift. Donald Trump loathes the clearly unethical behavior defended as perfectly legal or "not illegal" when exposed, the noisome floaters peppering the swamp.

President Trump was always going to get to the bottom of this Burisma con, and the election of a corruption fighter, Volodymyr Zelensky, as president of Ukraine on April 21, 2019, gave him a rare opening.

It’s not surprising that Zelensky’s victory made many people suddenly nervous. He had campaigned on a law-and-order platform, with zero tolerance of the crimes that earned Ukraine the reputation as one of the most Byzantine places on Earth. When he won, all the corrupt deals cut by Poroshenko would come crashing down—all of them, even deals cut with world leaders far away from Kyiv. Time to pay the piper.

Days after Zelensky’s election and our family’s Oval Office meeting with the Trumps, Joe Biden jumped into the 2020 race. Poroshenko was gone; Biden’s protector in Kyiv was finished. Some insiders believe Biden entered the campaign to insulate himself from investigation, but this move was never going to protect him.

Quid pro quo? Let’s put it in plain language: Washington is stuck on a threat to withhold vital assistance for illicit political interference in elections. Read on and it will be clear that the threat of withholding critical aid—not millions, but billions—for dirt on political opponents was only half of the reason for many calls and visits to Ukraine by President Obama’s cronies and sycophants during his lame duck years. Yes, this call had to do with a threat made, not by Trump, but by Vice President Joe Biden. As presidential elections approached in America, a cycle of dirty diplomacy beginning as early as April 2014 continued on behalf of Biden’s son, Hunter, ensuring his greater enrichment at the expense of US taxpayers.

Given the opportunity, President Trump will tell us cui bono (who benefited) because like Kyiv, America’s own capital city is lousy with this same brand of corruption. The impeachment was orchestrated to stop him.

I present to you an American tale of three cities, devoid of any nobility or redemption if Democrats are allowed to run out the clock. After all, holding out past statutes of limitation is the goal, as it was for Clinton Foundation pay-to-play. At stake is much more than meets the eye, mortal danger to Americans and our way of life.

Don’t be duped by a band of Deep-State skunks. Follow the money—it runs through Washington, Kyiv, and London.

Like any good story, this one begins in the middle. After voters elected President Donald Trump in 2016 to change our foreign policy, specifically when dealing with Russia, Washington insiders took a computer breach, thousands of anti-Hillary social media ads, and some feeble attempts by foreign actors to organize political events to concoct the tale that a Republican presidential candidate had colluded with these attackers because they were purportedly Russian. The server withheld from FBI forensics experts, without any corpus delicti save a forged black ledger and the alternate reality purported in the Steele dossier, Obama administration officials commissioned Russia investigations to reverse the election results, saying the Hand of the Kremlin turned voters against Hillary Clinton. Using the full power of the United States government to end the Trump presidency, they destroyed innocent people—dozens of the president’s associates and their families.

I should know; my family was one of those families. I was forced to testify before the House and Senate intelligence committees and to sit for questioning with Mueller’s Special Counsel investigators. With that came hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs, which I could not pay. I lost most of my clients. My public relations agency closed offices. I lost staff. Our family nearly lost our home. We drained my children’s college fund and struggled to pay the smallest bills.

All of that will sound familiar to my Trump campaign friends also caught up in this mess. I’ve known Paul Manafort and Roger Stone for years; both of them are destroyed. Many good men of valor like Commander J. D. Gordon, Lieutenant Carter Page, and General Michael Flynn have had their careers ruined.

The list goes on and on: a hardworking travel aide from the campaign was subpoenaed, which totaled his young family. Others—a house painter, a translator, and more—didn’t particularly care for Trump, but their lives were dragged through the muck anyway. Many lost their jobs or shed clients; both the husband and wife in one family lost their jobs. All for nothing.

The president’s associates’ phone calls were traced, our texts and emails read; our offices and homes were searched. We all accrued massive legal costs. Agents and informants spied on us in the United States and abroad until Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded that nobody conspired with Russia at all.

That strategy to end the Trump presidency failed. Its origins are being investigated by the Department of Justice (DOJ), and results of a criminal inquiry are expected in 2020. Fearing damning results, the president’s opponents scrambled again in another attempt to remove him, this time for a telephone call on July 25, 2019, with newly elected Ukrainian President Zelensky.

In November 2019, Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz revealed that the FBI kept their Russia investigations alive for two years after they already knew it was bunk. When Robert Mueller doddered through his concluding congressional testimony in July 2019, signaling the most ignominious of ends, schemers knew there was precious little time left to remove the president.

Their Russia hoax took too long to fail. The path to the House impeachment vote began with the presidents’ call on July 25—one day after Mueller’s surprisingly bad hearing performance. Trump’s opponents were suddenly scrambling to come up with Plan B fast, and Ukraine just got unlucky.

According to the White House transcript, the call opened with standard diplomatic niceties. A dozen or so American national