Every time U.S. President Donald Trump’s sympathizers bring up my name, “Leshchenko,” at the U.S. House impeachment hearings, I can imagine the effort it takes. The name has a Ukrainian sound in the middle that for a lack of an English equivalent is transliterated as this complicated combination, “shch.” Not an easy one to say.
So to spare American politicians the trouble of having to deal with the “shch” sound, I want to clarify my actions and respond to the accusations made during the hearing by Congressmen Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), and Steven Castor, Republican counsel for the House Oversight Committee.
I want to dispel the fog of conspiracy around my name, which has dragged out the impeachment process in the U.S.
Republican politicians bring up my name in the context of two false narratives. Both narratives aim to feed the conspiracy theory that lies at the basis of Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, which in its turn started the impeachment inquiry.
Falsehood #1
The first narrative is that I was allegedly a source of information for Fusion GPS, a company that had been preparing a dossier on Trump and his possible connections in Russia. This was claimed by Nellie Ohr in her statement to the U.S. Congress last year.
In their statements, congressmen Jordan, Nunes and counsel Castor assume and sometimes even falsely claim that I was working for the Democrats and “digging” up dirt on Trump and his staff. To stop this flow of lies, I tweeted back at congressmen Jordan, Nunes and counsel Castor.
I said I’ve never met Ohr or anyone else involved with Fusion GPS. As a member of the Ukrainian parliament, which I had been until August, I have held thousands of meetings over the past five years. But I have never met these people. Perhaps they met me and introduced themselves using different names, but I definitely wasn’t talking to them as their source in the way Jordan, Nunes and Castor were trying to show.
I also do not rule out that when Ohr mentioned me as a source of information, she was referring to my public statements or press appearances. I don’t understand what she meant, and I can’t even ask her, because I don’t have her contacts.
Falsehood #2
The second narrative is that I allegedly tried to undermine Trump’s candidacy in 2016 by targeting his then-campaign manager Paul Manafort. I allegedly did so by publishing the papers known in Ukraine as the “black ledger” of the Party of Regions, the party of former President Viktor Yanukovych, ousted by the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2014. Representatives of the Republican Party say that since the documents mentioned payments to Manafort during his work for Yanukovych, it must mean I did it to hurt Trump’s campaign. Yet these statements don’t pass even the most basic fact-checking.
Because, of course, I never was the original source of the information regarding Manafort’s payments in Ukraine.
I published the first portion of the “black ledger” on May 31, 2016. I published 22 pages from the secret manuscript of the Party of Regions, which was sent anonymously to my official email address at the parliament’s domain. The document listed under-the-table cash payments to Ukrainian politicians, lawmakers, judges and members of the Central Election Commission. However, Manafort was not mentioned there. His name was not in the 22 pages I obtained.
I did not have any other pages except for these ones, although I now know it was an excerpt from more than 800 pages that the black ledger contained. Believe me, had Manafort’s name been in the pages I obtained, I would have published it, because I think Manafort helped establish one of the most outrageously corrupt regimes in the world, headed by Yanukovych.
I learned that Manafort was featured in the full version of the black ledger only on Aug. 14, 2016 when the New York Times reported it. The day before, I was contacted by a Times’ journalist and asked if I knew anything about Manafort in Yanukovych’s records. I said I didn’t, and it was true. If I had that information, I would have been the first to publish it.
Four days after the New York Times article, on Aug. 18, 2016, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, or NABU, officially confirmed that Manafort’s name appeared in the black ledger. According to it, he received cash payments of more than $12.7 million.
The next day, on Aug. 19, 2016, I held a joint press conference with my colleagues Sevgil Musayeva-Borovyk, the chief editor of Ukrainska Pravda, a news outlet that published the leaked excerpt, and Anton Marchuk, an anti-corruption expert, where we called for the establishment of the truth about Manafort’s actions in the interests of Yanukovych.
Thus, the conspiracy theory of congressmen Jordan, Nunes and counsel Castor is falling apart, as I was not the original source of information about Manafort’s shady payments in Ukraine. I wouldn’t mind being the first one to publish the information about Manafort, but I simply didn’t have it. I found out about it the same way that everyone else did — from a New York Times article.
And, as it is known from the testimony given by Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, in the Robert Mueller investigation, Manafort himself knew that he was mentioned in the black ledger of the Party of Regions a few months before the New York Times story ran.
In conclusion, I can add that I have been openly critical of Manafort since the time he worked as a political mentor to Yanukovych. And, of course, the fact of Manafort’s involvement in Trump’s presidential campaign, along with the change of the Republican Party’s attitudes toward Ukraine on the eve of the American elections in 2016, could not but cause a critical reaction from Ukrainians.
Many Ukrainian politicians and journalists have spoken out against Trump on social media. However, such criticism has always been made openly and published on personal accounts. It is a manifestation of freedom of speech, a key value of a democratic society — and one that America has been promoting for centuries.
And such criticism has nothing to do with the whole set of measures taken by Russia to undermine American democracy in 2016, which were established by the U.S. investigation. Now it appears that Russia, using some U.S. politicians as well as its agents of influence in Ukraine, is trying to shift the responsibility for interfering in the 2016 elections to my country.
Russia, which has been waging war against Ukraine for five years, is the main beneficiary of this conspiracy theory. This conspiracy undermines U.S. bipartisan support for Ukraine and undermines the foundations of American democracy.
Therefore, I call on U.S. politicians to operate exclusively with facts and reliable quotes to establish truth in the events of 2016.
Sergii Leshchenko is a Ukrainian journalist, a Kyiv Post columnist, and a former member of parliament.
