According to a news report released on Thursday, Ukraine’s embassy wrote that an insider for the Democratic National Committee reached out in 2016 in an attempt to get dirt on President Trump’s campaign. These new revelations have given fuel to the Republican’s allegations that Democrats were the ones that were actually guilty of colluding with foreign agents during the 2016 presidential race.
According to Ambassador Valeriy Chaly, Alexandra Chalupa, a contractor for the DNC, encouraged then-president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko to bring up Paul Manafort’s business ties to Ukraine in a public manner while he was visiting the United States. As reported by The Hill, Chaly also said that Chalupa was looking for detailed financial information on Manafort’s dealings in the country.
In a statement released by the Ukrainian embassy, Chaly said: “The Embassy got to know Ms. Chalupa because of her engagement with Ukrainian and other diasporas in Washington D.C., and not in her DNC capacity. We’ve learned about her DNC involvement later. We were surprised to see Alexandra’s interest in Mr. Paul Manafort’s case. It was her own cause. The Embassy representatives unambiguously refused to get involved in any way, as we were convinced that this is a strictly U.S. domestic matter.”
Chaly continued by saying: “All ideas floated by Alexandra were related to approaching a Member of Congress with a purpose to initiate hearings on Paul Manafort or letting an investigative journalist ask President Poroshenko a question about Mr. Manafort during his public talk in Washington, D.C.”
The DNC and Chalupa, who works in Washington D.C. as a political consultant, didn’t immediately respond to Fox News when they reached out for a comment. In an interview from 2017, Chalupa told CNN: “During the 2016 US election, I was a part-time consultant for the DNC running an ethnic engagement program. I was not an opposition researcher for the DNC, and the DNC never asked me to go to the Ukrainian Embassy to collect information.”
Even though Chalupa admitted to meeting with “representatives of the Ukrainian Embassy,” she claimed that the topic of conversation was an “Immigrant Heritage Month women’s networking event.” Chalupa also told CNN that when Manafort was appointed as Trump’s campaign chairman, she flagged Manafort for his business ties with Russian-backed Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukraine president at the time. Records from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) confirmed that the Chalupa’s firm provided different services to the DNC in 2016. The records also show that the DNC paid Chalupa over $412,000 from 2004 to 2016.
When President Trump spoke to Fox News’ Hannity last week, he said that Attorney General Barr was handling the “incredible” and “big” new revelations that Ukrainian actors allegedly leaked harmful information about Manafort in order to help Clinton’s campaign. Just last month, Ukraine Prosecutor General Yurii Lutsenko began a probe into the alleged “black ledger” files that caused Manafort to suddenly leave Trump’s campaign. The investigation was caused by an audio recording that showed a senior Ukrainian anticorruption official allegedly admit to leaking Manafort’s financial information in order to benefit Hillary Clinton.
Earlier this month, Ukrainian law enforcement officials said that they had several pieces of evidence that proved collusion and wrongdoing by Democrats that they were attempting to share with the U.S. justice department. Recently, a Ukrainian court ruled that Manafort’s document leak equaled to illegal interference in the election in the U.S. by parliamentarian Serhiy Leshchenko and Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau.
When President Trump was asked by Sean Hannity whether or not Americans needed to see the results of Ukraine’s investigation into whether their officials worked with Clinton, he said, “I think we do.” Trump continued by saying: “I would imagine [Barr] would want to see this. … I would certainly defer to the attorney general, and we’ll see what he says about it. He calls ’em straight. It sounds like big stuff, very interesting with Ukraine. I just spoke with the new president a while ago, and congratulated him. … But that sounds like big, big stuff, and I’m not surprised.”
An investigation done by Politico in 2017 found that Ukrainian officials not only wanted to publicly undermine Trump, but they also did everything they could to make sure that Clinton won the election. Politico also found that the Ukrainian government worked with Chalupa to find dirt on Trump.
