But then Schiff’s witnesses, particularly Kent, added to the narrative. They directly acknowledged at least four of the names Lutsenko gave me in the March interview were the subject of a pressure campaign by the U.S. embassy in Kiev. They included:
- a nonprofit Ukrainian group partly funded by George Soros and the US embassy called the AntiCorruption Action Centre.
- a Ukraine parliamentary member named Sergey Leschenko who helped release the Manafort documents
- a senior law enforcement official named Artem Sytnyk, who also helped release the Manafort documents
- a journalist named Vitali Shabunin, who helped found the above-mentioned nonprofit.
Kent acknowledged he signed an April 2016 letter asking Ukrainian prosecutors to stand down an investigation against the anti-corruption group, and his explanations about the pressure the embassy applied on the Shabunin and Sytnyk probes are worth reading.
“As a matter of conversation that U.S officials had with Ukrainian officials in sharing our concern about the direction of governance and the approach, harassment of civil society activists, including Mr. Shabunin, was one of the issues we raised,” Kent testified.
As for Sytnyk, the head of the NABU anticorruption police, Kent stated: “We warned both Lutsenko and others that efforts to destroy NABU as an organization, including opening up investigations of Sytnyk, threatened to unravel a key component of our anti-corruption cooperation.”