WASHINGTON, D.C. — Alexandra Chalupa, the Ukrainian-American woman who threw a wrench in Republican Party candidate Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election race, has come under renewed attack from the White House and the president’s allies as the report about investigations into Trump’s dealings with Moscow is expected to be made public on Apr 18.
Chalupa told the Kyiv Post that the Trump administration had repeated accusations against her and Ukraine by Russian propagandists. The president himself has tweeted more than once about a book called “Spygate” which names Chalupa in its opening pages as part of a Ukrainian conspiracy to damage Trump’s presidential bid.
In 2016, candidate Trump’s opaque financial dealings in Russia and regular public praise for Kremlin dictator Vladimir Putin were already sounding alarm bells when Chalupa dramatically raised the stakes by revealing Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s links to powerful Kremlin-connected figures.
An American political operative and spin-doctor, Manafort had long been reviled in Ukraine for his many years of lucrative service to the country’s ex-gangster, pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2014.
An embarrassed Trump was forced to fire Manafort in August 2016. Chalupa also correctly warned at the same time that Moscow would interfere in favor of Trump and to besmirch his Democratic Party rival, Hillary Clinton, who he defeated in the November 2016 vote.
During the election, Chalupa was a part-time consultant to the Democratic National Committee, the party’s governing body. Currently, she serves as the elected co-chair of the DNC’s Ethnic Council.
Her information revealed that Yanukovych had paid Manafort millions of dollars for his services, credited with reinventing Yanukovych’s thuggish image and enabling him to win power in 2010.
The payments had been logged in a secret ledger found at Yanukovych’s obscenely lavish Mezhyhirya estate near Kyiv after he fled to Moscow in February 2014.
Serhii Leshchenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament who previously worked as an investigative journalist, publicized the payments. Soon, it emerged that Manafort had hidden the money in murky overseas accounts to avoid paying U.S. taxes.
Trump empire hits back
As allegations about the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia gained traction, Trump’s associates and some within the Republican Party tried to hit back by accusing the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign of “colluding” with Ukraine via Chalupa.
Most people dismissed as baseless bluster the effort to equate the information Chalupa provided about Manafort to massive Russian interference in the election, an intervention confirmed by all of America’s intelligence agencies.
Soon after Trump took office in 2017, an investigation was launched into the allegations of Russian collusion. Robert Mueller, the special counsel who headed the investigation, focused much of his attention on Manafort, who was linked to Russian oligarchs known to be close to Putin associates.
One of Manafort’s closest business partners in Ukraine was an alleged former GRU Russian intelligence officer suspected to still be working for Moscow. Many of the targets of Mueller’s investigation faced prosecution and were convicted. However, most received light sentences in exchange for cooperation agreements.
Manafort recently was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for tax fraud and lying to investigators in breach of a cooperation agreement with them.
Mueller also indicted 13 Russian citizens and three Russian entities for interfering in the election, but there is no realistic expectation they will ever be tried in a U.S. court.
Mueller concluded the investigation and submitted a final report to President Trump’s recently-appointed Attorney General, William Barr, on March 22, 2019.
Barr summarized the Special Counsel’s report in a four-page letter, but initially refused to let Congress see the full results. Following angry demands from Congress, he agreed to share the report on April 18, albeit with sections dealing with ongoing prosecutions or which might present a danger to national security blacked out.
According to Barr, the report concluded that there was not enough evidence to prove Trump or his campaign were involved in collusion with Moscow.
‘The biggest scandal in political history’
But whereas Trump has repeatedly boasted that the report exonerated him, Barr has admitted that Mueller wrote: “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
Trump had always dismissed the probe as a vengeful reaction by the Democrats to losing an election that even he said they should have won. He accused his own intelligence agencies, Mueller and other investigators and witnesses of lying and trying to remove him from office by a coup.
As the Russia investigation seemed to be approaching completion and a report became imminent, Trump’s attacks grew in frequency and intensity to a frenzied pitch. He has tried discrediting those associated with the report, claiming its origins were “illegal,” “treasonous” or “evil.”
The allegations by Trump and others contain many mentions of Chalupa. On March 20, 2019 Trump retweeted a post from Fox News saying “As Russia collusion fades, Ukrainian plot to help Clinton emerges.”
A number of times, Trump’s tweets have recommended a book called “Spygate” by author Don Bongino. The pro-Trump Bongino’s book exposes what he claims is “the corrupt spying operation against Donald Trump’s team” something he asserts is “the biggest scandal in political history.”
The book features Chalupa and Ukraine’s alleged plans to damage Trump’s candidacy. The president’s lawyer, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, said the book provides “an analysis of some real collusion between Hillary, Kerry and (former vice-President Joseph) Biden people colluding with Ukrainian operatives to make money and affect the 2016 election.”
Senior Republican Senator and Trump loyalist Lindsey Graham wants to appoint a special counsel to examine how the Russia probe came about, including looking into the Democrats involved, something Chalupa takes as a reference to people such as herself.
Chalupa said a Kremlin spokesperson and Russian-sponsored news agencies initiated the “Ukrainian collusion” conspiracy on November 30, 2016, and have redoubled their efforts to spread it recently using English-language broadcasts and tweets naming her. She has also received a plethora of anonymous insulting and threatening messages.
These disinformation tactics started directly following the 2016 election. However, the summer prior she also experienced a wave of strange occurrences at her home, including car break-ins and strangers lurking around her property — including one who tried to break into her home, which she shares with her husband and three young daughters.
She wants the Mueller report to be released in full because she hopes “it will clarify the extent of Putin’s attack on America’s democracy, how he tried to help Donald Trump win the White House, and why Trump and his associates continue to discredit the investigation and bury its findings.”
“While we currently do not know the full extent of the Special Counsel’s findings and what he included in his report, what we have seen since the investigation started is that Donald Trump has gone to great lengths to attack the investigators, to use his platform to intimidate witnesses or anyone he feels has a truth to tell about what happened in 2016. He has mislead the public about his business dealings with the Russians.
“We also saw how he attacked our intelligence community and the FBI directly. This behavior hurts the morale of the men and women on the front lines protecting our country and endangers our national security.”
She believes that Trump has tried to hinder efforts by the U.S. Congress to help Ukraine in its war against Russia and has shown he wants to side with Putin. Chalupa said Trump has repeated the Russian narrative that Ukraine interfered in the U.S. election as a distraction from the then breaking news reports about his son, son-in-law and Manafort meeting a Kremlin agent at Trump’s offices in New York.
Understanding Trump: money-laundering and avarice
Chalupa is certain that the Democrat-dominated House of Representatives will, despite White House opposition, carry out its own thorough probe into accusations that Trump has collaborated with the Kremlin — something made possible by Democrats gaining a majority in the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections. The Republicans, however, control the Senate and can neutralize or dilute some Democratic attempts to probe Trump’s history or impeach him.
Chalupa believes that Trump’s dealings with Moscow are rooted in avarice and that his business has been saved by questionable Russian money.
“We’ve learned a lot about Trump’s business dealings with Russia, including information his own children made public. For example, his son Eric stated that his father could not release his tax returns because people would misunderstand the disproportionate Russian business dealings they would expose.
“His daughter Ivanka spoke of her father being billions in debt in the early 1990s. Who got him out of debt? Americans can find the answers in Trump’s tax returns if not in the Mueller report, both of which Trump and Republicans are desperately trying to hide.”
She said it was vital for the American public to see the Mueller report to give them a better understanding of how Putin operates, what U.S. vulnerabilities are and how to protect national security moving forward.
She said that unless America introduces safeguards and educates everyone — its citizens, community organizers, political operatives, and voters — on how Russian efforts to undermine democracy work, then Moscow will use the same tactics again. And other countries may copy Moscow’s methods against the U.S.
“We have to learn the big picture of what happened in 2016 to ensure this never happens again. At the end of the day, that’s the most important part of this process. Right now, we have a president who is trying to hide this information, after spending the last two years since the election dismissing and denying Russian interference.”
Chalupa’s book
Chalupa is preparing to write a book about the events surrounding the 2016 U.S. election, which will also incorporate her family’s history of surviving the 1932-1933 Holodomor famine – widely regarded as a genocide against the Ukrainian people launched by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin – her grandfather’s experience as a target of Stalin’s purges and surviving imprisonment and torture, and her grandparents’ lives in displaced persons camps in Germany before they immigrated to the U.S.
She said her family’s story, like that of millions of other Ukrainians and eastern Europeans, inspired her to become involved in politics and specifically influenced her work engaging first-, second-, and third-generation Americans in the political process. She will also focus on the 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution and Putin’s playbook used in Ukraine.
“If the U.S. media and politically influential Americans paid more attention back then to the developments in Ukraine — the Maidan, revolution and war — which Putin used as a testing ground for his political hybrid warfare tactics, Americans would have had a better understanding during the 2016 election of the national security concerns we faced.
“Importantly, I want to tell how the same characters and tactics used against Ukraine were used against our own democracy in 2016. This is the story that most Americans still do not fully understand to this day, including the key role Paul Manafort played in both. Donald Trump knows that, so do U.S. counter-intelligence officials and Special Counsel Mueller.”
