Ukrainian diplomat who warned about Hillary Clinton & Hunter Biden is now marked for assassination

A Ukrainian former diplomat who exposed corrupt Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden networks, and who warned Americans about a Russian agent of influence, is now on what appears to be an assassination list.

After working for years with the Obama White House and a Clinton-aligned lobbying firm working for the Burisma gas company, Andrii Telizhenko became a source for Senate Republicans in 2019-2020.  He helped expose some of Hunter Biden’s corrupt dealings in Ukraine and their dangers to American national security policy.

Telizhenko had been one of many witnesses who provided evidence to joint Senate committee investigation of Hunter Biden, the Burisma gas company, and corruption impacting US government policy.

Arcancide: False partisan accusations result in putting innocent man on murder list

Telizhenko’s revelations prompted Senate Democrats to accuse him of being a Russian disinformation agent, and ultimately for partisan bureaucrats to trick the Trump Administration into sanctioning him as a Russian asset in the last days before Biden took office. Two of Telizhenko’s accusers, Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) pushed the Russian disinformation in the discredited Steele Dossier.

Now that wrongful partisan action was used to put Telizhenko on what many Ukrainians consider a kill list.

The list appears on a website that Ukrainian ultranationalists use to dox and track people they consider pro-Russian. Ukrainians understand it to be a kill list in the event of armed conflict with Russia.

Many on the list are indeed Russian agents, assets, collaborators, and sympathizers. Others are not so likely. They reportedly include Wolfgang Ischinger, former German ambassador to the US and the UK and now chairman of the Munich Security Conference; and Croatian President Zoran Milanovic.

Ukrainian exposed the Hillary and Biden connections to Johnson and Grassley

Telizhenko fell afoul of Democrat partisans in the US Treasury and State Department bureaucracies after he began exposing Hillary Clinton’s corrupt networks relating to Ukraine, and to Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian gas company.

He said he learned of the networks between 2013 and 2019 while serving as a Ukrainian diplomat, working with the Obama White House and the office of then-vice president Joe Biden, and State Department; and working for a Clinton-affiliated lobbying group called Blue Star Strategies. The lobby shop had a contract with Burisma while he was a contractor there.

Telizhenko was one of many witnesses who helped a joint investigation by the Senate Homeland Security Committee and Finance Committee, chaired at the time by Senators Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA).  Democrat defense of then-candidate Joe Biden caused the Republicans under Johnson and Grassley to issue their own staff report, which discussed Telizhenko’s testimony and email and WhatsApp messages he produced as evidence.

Democrats were fine with Telizhenko until he exposed Hunter Biden. Then they called him a Russian agent.

“The Obama administration and the Democrat lobby shop Blue Star Strategies had consistent and extensive contact with Andrii Telizhenko over a period of years,” the Johnson-Grassley report said.

Telizhenko told me that his involvement with the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton’s team began in 2013, during the Revolution to overthrow the pro-Putin regime of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. He said he was coordinator of international relations for the Maidan movement and worked with the US Embassy in Kyiv between 2010-2014 to remove Yanukovych and his government. (Photo: Telizhenko, left, enters meeting with then-Senator Bob Corker, center; and at right, President Obama’s ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt weeks after the ouster of Yanukovych.)

“Yet despite these well-documented contacts with Democratic officials, Democrats have attempted to impugn this investigation for having received some Blue Star-related records from him. … Democrats have claimed that Telizhenko is involved in a Russian disinformation campaign,” according to the senators’ staff report.

“In doing so, they conveniently have ignored their own long history of meeting with Telizhenko and his year-long for a Democrat lobby shop. If Democrats are concerned that Telizhenko presents any risk of advancing disinformation, it is notable that the Ranking Members [Democrat Senators Gary Peters (D-MI) and Ron Wyden (D-OR)] have not expressed any curiosity about his work with the Obama administration or Blue Star Strategies.”

Permanent bureaucracy retaliates

After the Johnson-Grassley report was released in August 2020, the Trump administration sanctioned Andrii Derkach, a veteran KGB officer and Ukrainian political and media figure.

Derkach had been a trained Soviet KGB officer, as had been his father, who had briefly served as head of Ukraine’s KGB successor agency, known as SBU. The senior Derkach was brought down in a scandal tied to the Russian mafiya that implicated him and the Ukrainian president at the time in the mutilation murder of an investigative journalist.

Senators Grassley and Johnson issued a joint statement praising the September 10, 2020 Derkach sanctions

At that point, politicized bureaucrats began their revenge. Sources tell this writer that they compiled a file to destroy Telizhenko by portraying him falsely as part of the Russian Derkach operation.

The bureaucrats drew up an official US government order to sanction Telizhenko, bundled it with similar drafts to sanction real Derkach network members, and sent it “up the chain” to then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to sign during the rush of the last days of the Trump administration.

The sources say that they do not believe that Pompeo or his deputy knew the details behind what they were signing.

State Department official George Kent: Telizhenko wasn’t working for Russia

During the joint investigation, a Senate Democrat lawyer grilled State Department official George P. Kent about Telizhenko. Kent, a former official at the US embassy in Kyiv who was deputy assistant secretary of state for Eastern Europe at the time, was derogatory about the Ukrainian, but rejected the idea that Telizhenko was working for the Russians.

Kent was a star witness in the House impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.

“In your testimony you spoke about some Ukrainians – some Ukrainian actors being corrupt, some being liars, and some advancing Russian disinformation. Which category does Mr. Telizhenko fit into,” Senate Democrat counsel Zachary Schram asked Kent, who was legally bound to tell the truth as he knew it.

“I would put him in the category of liar,” Kent said.

Schram pressed him: “Do you have reason to believe he falls into any of the other categories?”

Kent: “I would stick to him as a liar.”

Schram went on later in the questioning, citing former Trump National Security Council staffer Fiona Hill, who referenced the Russians “writing the script for others” to interfere in the 2020 elections as she claimed they had done in 2020. Said Schram: “And in your view, is Mr. Telizhenko reading from that script?”

Kent replied, “I have no knowledge or information to suggest that he is carrying out a plan from Moscow.”

As it turned out, Kent had quietly shared Telizhenko’s concerns, but never said so in public. “The real issue to my mind was that someone in Washington needed to engage VP Biden quietly and say that his son Hunter’s presence on the Burisma board undercut the anti-corruption message the VP and we were advancing in Ukraine,” Kent had told then-US Ambassador to Kyiv Marie Yovanovitch in a confidential 2016 cable.

Journalist John Solomon obtained the document, hidden for five years, after a series of Freedom of Information Act requests.

FBI didn’t consider Telizhenko a Russian agent

During the investigation, the Senate committees and their members requested information from the FBI, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and individual intelligence agencies. The FBI is the lead agency in the intelligence community, or IC, concerning election interference.

Grassley and Johnson investigators asked for guidance on Telizhenko and were informed that the Ukrainian did not cause a barrier to the probe, meaning that the FBI did not consider him a Russian agent.

“The FBI already has repeatedly briefed the Committees on behalf of the IC,” the Johnson-Grassley report said. “At a March 2020 briefing, which included the Ranking Members’ [Democrats’] staff, the FBI informed the Committees that there was no reason they should not continue with their investigation. On Aug. 6, 2020, the FBI reiterated the same to the Chairmen,” it said.

The Senate investigators, as far as the FBI knew, were not being misled by foreign disinformation.

Telizhenko had warned about Derkach and his Russian disinformation network

After Telizhenko turned against the Clinton-Obama-Biden camp and went public with his own accounts and documentary evidence, “Derkach seemed eager to get in on the action” with his own stories in November 2019, Time reported. The veteran KGB man pushed his own theory called DemoCorruption, distributing a chart containing photos of Grassley, Johnson, and Telizhenko, as if he, Derkach, was part of the Senate investigation.

Time magazine’s Simon Shuster reported that at that time, after the Derkach DemoCorruption news conference, Telizhenko “repeatedly raised the alarm about Derkach” to Giuliani. “’It was the Russia connection,’ he told me when I asked him to explain these concerns,” Shuster wrote. “‘Even if his [Derkach’s] material looked good, it smelled terrible. It was all tainted by Russia. I explained all this to Rudy,” Telizhenko told Shuster.

Time magazine report coincides with what Telizhenko told author

Telizhenko told this writer in 2019 about Derkach, expressing worry that Derkach, with his KGB background and known Putin ties, was a Russian agent of influence trying to penetrate Republicans in the United States.

He said that Derkach began a confusing, convoluted disinformation campaign after Telizhenko surfaced against the Democrats. He says he never met Derkach in person, but was in the same room with him once in December 2019, when Derkach emerged without warning at a political meeting in Kyiv. He says he refused to speak to Derkach.

A Ukrainian-Canadian Derkach business partner brought the reputed Russian asset with him to meet former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani “without telling anybody so I was in the same room with him when the mayor was talking to him, but I did not speak with him,” Telizhenko told me.

The former diplomat says he spoke with Derkach only on one occasion, in August 2020. “I called him because I was told he was responsible for blocking me with Ukrainian journalists,” Telizhenko said. “So I called him about that. And that he used my photo as well as Senator Johnson and Senator Grassley at his press conferences, so I had to confront him.”

Intelligence sources speculate that the US intercepted Derkach’s communications, including Telizhenko’s phone call, which others would use to draw a connection between the two.

Weeks later, on September 10, the US government sanctioned Derkach. Telizhenko says he never spoke to Derkach again.

The US sanctions put Telizhenko on the hit list

On January 11, 2021, Treasury announced that it had cracked down on what it called “a Russia-linked foreign influence network associated with Andrii Derkach,” whom it designated “for his attempt to influence the 2020 US presidential election.”

The retaliation against Telizhenko had begun. He was permanently tagged as part of what Treasury called Derkach’s “Russia-linked foreign influence network.”

Telizhenko’s alleged offense to disseminate and promote what Treasury called “fraudulent and unsubstantiated allegations involving a US presidential candidate,” whom the statement did not name.

The candidate was Joe Biden.

After the US government sanctioned Telizhenko, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinsky sanctioned him for good measure.

Democrats uncharacteristically praised Trump administration for Telizhenko sanction

When the Trump administration sanctioned Telizhenko in January 2021, Senate Democrats praised the action. “The Treasury Department today identified additional foreign nationals involved in a larger conspiracy to influence the 2020 presidential election,” Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) announced.

“The decision to impose sanctions on Andriy [sic] Telizhenko for his role in these efforts is welcome and long overdue. By imposing sanctions on Telizhenko, the Trump administration confirms that Senate Republicans’ year-long investigation was based on Russian disinformation,” they claimed.

Wyden specifically called out Johnson and Grassley for having met with Telizhenko in person and for having cited him “42 times in the letters sent as part of this investigation.” He alleged that the Republicans “ignored repeated warnings to not give credibility to disinformation,” wording his allegation in such a way as to lead to the conclusion, without stating falsely, that the warnings were about Telizhenko.

Now, the Ukrainian man who exposed Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden’s dealings in his country is falsely marked by the United States and his own government as a Russian agent. Ukrainian ultranationalists used the sanctions as reason to mark him to be murdered.