Sergii Leshchenko: Republicans keep lying about me at impeachment hearings
https://www.kyivpost.com/article/opinion/op-ed/sergii-leshchenko-republicans-keep-lying-about-me-at-impeachment-hearings.html
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.
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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, Nuns 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.
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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 the 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.
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