The House impeachment inquiry has not stopped the Trump team’s efforts to dig up politically damaging info on the Bidens, but this week, that push for Biden dirt took another dramatic turn with the abrupt overseas arrest of a former member of Ukraine’s parliament who’d been claiming to himself have dirt on the Bidens. Oleksandr Onyshchenko had made increasingly outlandish claims, like that the Ukrainian company Burisma Holdings that then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter had worked for sent $10 million to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. That, obviously, never happened, but Onyshchenko’s arrest after facing charges like embezzlement and treason comes as personal Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani himself visits Ukraine in search of the ever-elusive Biden dirt.
Importantly — and this applies to the dirt that Trump and his cronies have claimed to have an eye on as well — Onyschechenko’s claims “were widely seen in Ukraine as part of a Kremlin-orchestrated disinformation campaign meant to undermine the Ukrainian government as it sought to strengthen ties with the West.” Just recently, former top Trump adviser Fiona Hill told Congress that for Republican members to push a conspiracy theory of secret Ukrainian election meddling also constitutes propagating Russian propaganda. That hasn’t stopped Republicans — for example, prominent Trump ally Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) claimed that then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was “actively working” for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. That just didn’t happen. It’s a Russian smear against Ukraine.
His lawyer Oleg Ishemko claimed that he should be freed on political asylum claims, essentially. As he put it:
‘We are analyzing information in particular about the fact and basis for the detention of our client. According to our information, Oleksandr was in the process of seeking international protection and could not be arrested in accordance with Article 33 of the international convention relating to the status of refugees. Attorneys for Oleksandr are doing everything so that his rights, both in Ukraine and outside, are upheld in the necessary manner.’
There’s no indication that any of the charges against Onyshchenko are exaggerated in any way — and they’re serious, too. The treason charge that he’s facing is over allegations of helping Russian intelligence services destabilize Ukraine through his previous behavior. Does that sound familiarly reminiscent of a certain U.S. president and his allies or what?
At present, Giuliani himself is holding further meetings in Ukraine in an effort to drum up the dirt on the Bidens that the president had been seeking to exchange for military aid and a summit in D.C. for Ukraine.
Onyshchenko was a member of the political party led by Ukraine’s former Kremlin-aligned president, Viktor Yanukovych. He had been living on the run in Europe for several years prior to his recent arrest, when German authorities took him into custody in the city of Aachen. Although he’d previously fled, he’d recently said that he’d be returning to Ukraine in an effort to help new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky root out corruption, which he claimed to have evidence of. He also claimed to have evidence about corruption for U.S. authorities, although at present, they claim they had no further plans to contact him after an initial meeting.
