FBI Ignored Repeated Warnings That Manafort ‘Black Ledger’ Might Be Fake
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Thu, 06/20/2019
Just when you thought the Steele dossier was the only piece of “garbage” intel the FBI relied on in its efforts against the Trump campaign, The Hill’s John Solomon reveals that Ukrainian officials thought Paul Manafort’s “black cash ledger” was likely a fake which should not be relied on.
The ledger, which was reported in 2016 and resulted in Manafort’s resignation from the Trump campaign, purported to show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Manafort from former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s political party between 2007 and 2012.
The FBI relied on this ledger to obtain search warrant affidavits “months after the feds were warned repeatedly that the document couldn’t be trusted and was likely a fake,” according to Solomon, who cites documents and over a dozen interviews.
For example, Ukraine’s top anticorruption prosecutor, Nazar Kholodnytsky, told me he warned the U.S. State Department’s law enforcement liaison and multiple FBI agents in late summer 2016 that Ukrainian authorities who recovered the ledger believed it likely was a fraud. -The Hill
“It was not to be considered a document of Manafort. It was not authenticated. And at that time it should not be used in any way to bring accusations against anybody,” said Kholodnytsky, who says he told FBI agents the same thing.
Manafort’s Ukranian business partner, Konstantin Kilimnik – a longtime State Department informant – told the US government that the ledger was probably a fake shortly after an August 2016 article about it appeared in the New York Times.
Kilimnik said in an August 2016 email to a senior US official that Manafort “could not have possibly taken large amounts of cash across three borders. It was always a different arrangement — payments were in wire transfers to his companies, which is not a violation,” adding “I have some questions about this black cash stuff, because those published records do not make sense. The timeframe doesn’t match anything related to payments made to Manafort. … It does not match my records. All fees Manafort got were wires, not cash.”
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