Showing posts with label government incompetence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label government incompetence. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

"The new CDC statistics show that only 6,640 deaths are due to COVID alone, rather than the commonly reported 164,280 deaths"


The Big COVID Con Exposed

One of the great grifter movies, aside from the Clinton and Obama presidencies, is The Sting. Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman) and Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford} team up, “to pull off a complicated scheme known simple as the Big Con,” a racket to crush Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) and his empire.

We have had several iterations of the Big Con over the past four years, with Gondorff and Hooker played by a rotating cast including James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, Joe Biden, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. All schemed and conspired to destroy Donald Trump and his family and presidency.

The latest sequel features Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx as the grifters and swindlers, using the Chinese coronavirus as the Big Con to keep President Trump from winning a second term in the White House. In the movie, the con succeeded but in Washington D.C., the con-verse is happening, with the schemes blowing up in the faces of the deep state grifters.

 

YouTube screen grab

In the past week, two pillars of the COVID Con collapsed: deaths and positive tests. Back in April, the news was all about death counts. Fox News ran a death tally on the screen, much like the running score of football game. Cable news shows talked about nothing but rising death counts, spreading fear porn to justify recommendations for staying at home and shutting down the U.S. economy.

The first crack in the pillar occurred in early May when task force member Dr. Birx claimed, “There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust.” She believed the CDC was inflating Wuhan flu mortality by as much as 25 percent.

The pillar of COVID deaths crumbled just days ago when the CDC updated their mortality numbers to reflect deaths “from COVID” versus deaths “with COVID.”

Death with COVID means that George Floyd is counted a COVID death because he tested positive at autopsy. This is similar to the case of a Colorado man dying of alcohol poisoning but the death was later blamed on COVID. Washington public officials counted gunshot fatalities as COVID deaths.

The new CDC statistics show that only 6,640 deaths are due to COVID alone, rather than the commonly reported 164,280 deaths allegedly associated with COVID. In other words, only 4 percent of media sensationalized deaths were due solely to COVID and not other underlying medical conditions.

Could COVID have been a contributory factor? Sure, but what about the underlying comorbidities such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, even terminal cancer, all of which significantly increased the risk of death from COVID or even the seasonal flu. The CDC summarized it succinctly, “For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned.”

What this means is that those at lower risk, younger and healthier, are extremely unlikely to die from the Chinese flu, and shutting down the economy to protect the healthy makes little sense, unless economic destruction is the ultimate goal.

Not surprisingly, this revision received little attention in the DNC media, covered only by conservative news sites like Gateway Pundit. Not only ignored, but the truth was suppressed with Twitter blaming the updated CDC numbers on QAnon and removing tweets discussing the new data.

It seems the left wants QAnon to be the new “vast right-wing conspiracy” that Hillary Clinton once blamed for reports that her husband was having sex with a young White House intern. Yet the CDC numbers are on their website and the blue dress spoke for itself.

As death counts became suspect and testing ramped up, the media did a smooth sashay to case counts, or positive tests. Death counts and hospitalizations were flat, suggesting herd immunity was present in many parts of the country. To justify keeping businesses, churches, and schools closed, the DNC media now focused on positive tests.

A positive test means simply that there are viral particles in a person’s respiratory tract. They have been infected months ago and the sensitive PCR test detected dead viral fragments. A positive test does not mean a person is sick or contagious. And more testing means more positive cases, leading to so-called “surges” that were anything but.

Days ago, in of all places, the New York Times, the second pillar of the COVID Con crumbled, as they reported,

The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus.

Most of these people are not likely to be contagious and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time.

Sensitivity of the PCR tests has to do with amplification of genetic material from the virus. The fewer cycles required, the higher the viral load and greater likelihood of being contagious. By setting the threshold of amplification cycles too high, the test is overly sensitive.

Imagine a home security alarm so sensitive that it is triggered by a wind gust or leaf hitting a window. The homeowner will certainly be alerted if an intruder is attempting to break in, but the alarm will be going off constantly with false, or in the case of the virus, non-clinically significant positives. Or as the NY Times put it,

Tests with thresholds so high may detect not just live virus but also genetic fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risk — akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left.

33 amplification cycles may be the upper limit for detecting live virus, according to the CDC, but many commercial labs are using 40 cycles as a positive test, in essence sounding the burglar alarm when a bird lands on the back deck.

The NY Times found, “Up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus.” Yet lockdowns of businesses and schools continue based on these wildly inaccurate numbers.

Is this purposeful or incompetent? I suggest the former. President Trump downplayed testing in favor of therapeutics such as hydroxychloroquine. The Democrat-media establishment immediately pushed for more testing and told everyone that hydroxy was as deadly as cyanide.

Fox News crank Neil Cavuto said of hydroxy, “It will kill you.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, claiming an “evidence-based” approach to combating the Chinese flu, pushed for “testing, testing, testing.” Yet both of those admonitions were fear-based, not evidence-based.

Here we are now with deaths and positive cases overstated by 90 plus percent, all to create fear and uncertainty ahead of a presidential election. How many excess deaths can be attributed to media gaslighting? How many people delayed necessary medical care or cancer screening, afraid to leave their homes over the daily barrage of fear porn from CNN and Fox News?

This is information warfare, weaponizing medical data to influence an election, regardless of the cost in lives and economic damage. But the Big Con is being exposed, darkness to light. Hopefully voters are noticing and awakening to the con pushed by the left and the media.

 

Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a Denver-based physician and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in American Thinker, Daily Caller, Rasmussen Reports, and other publications. Follow him on Facebook,  LinkedInTwitterParler, and QuodVerum.

 

One of the great grifter movies, aside from the Clinton and Obama presidencies, is The Sting. Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman) and Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford} team up, “to pull off a complicated scheme known simple as the Big Con,” a racket to crush Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) and his empire.

We have had several iterations of the Big Con over the past four years, with Gondorff and Hooker played by a rotating cast including James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, Joe Biden, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. All schemed and conspired to destroy Donald Trump and his family and presidency.

The latest sequel features Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx as the grifters and swindlers, using the Chinese coronavirus as the Big Con to keep President Trump from winning a second term in the White House. In the movie, the con succeeded but in Washington D.C., the con-verse is happening, with the schemes blowing up in the faces of the deep state grifters.

 

YouTube screen grab

In the past week, two pillars of the COVID Con collapsed: deaths and positive tests. Back in April, the news was all about death counts. Fox News ran a death tally on the screen, much like the running score of football game. Cable news shows talked about nothing but rising death counts, spreading fear porn to justify recommendations for staying at home and shutting down the U.S. economy.

The first crack in the pillar occurred in early May when task force member Dr. Birx claimed, “There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust.” She believed the CDC was inflating Wuhan flu mortality by as much as 25 percent.

The pillar of COVID deaths crumbled just days ago when the CDC updated their mortality numbers to reflect deaths “from COVID” versus deaths “with COVID.”

Death with COVID means that George Floyd is counted a COVID death because he tested positive at autopsy. This is similar to the case of a Colorado man dying of alcohol poisoning but the death was later blamed on COVID. Washington public officials counted gunshot fatalities as COVID deaths.

The new CDC statistics show that only 6,640 deaths are due to COVID alone, rather than the commonly reported 164,280 deaths allegedly associated with COVID. In other words, only 4 percent of media sensationalized deaths were due solely to COVID and not other underlying medical conditions.

Could COVID have been a contributory factor? Sure, but what about the underlying comorbidities such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, even terminal cancer, all of which significantly increased the risk of death from COVID or even the seasonal flu. The CDC summarized it succinctly, “For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned.”

What this means is that those at lower risk, younger and healthier, are extremely unlikely to die from the Chinese flu, and shutting down the economy to protect the healthy makes little sense, unless economic destruction is the ultimate goal.

Not surprisingly, this revision received little attention in the DNC media, covered only by conservative news sites like Gateway Pundit. Not only ignored, but the truth was suppressed with Twitter blaming the updated CDC numbers on QAnon and removing tweets discussing the new data.

It seems the left wants QAnon to be the new “vast right-wing conspiracy” that Hillary Clinton once blamed for reports that her husband was having sex with a young White House intern. Yet the CDC numbers are on their website and the blue dress spoke for itself.

As death counts became suspect and testing ramped up, the media did a smooth sashay to case counts, or positive tests. Death counts and hospitalizations were flat, suggesting herd immunity was present in many parts of the country. To justify keeping businesses, churches, and schools closed, the DNC media now focused on positive tests.

A positive test means simply that there are viral particles in a person’s respiratory tract. They have been infected months ago and the sensitive PCR test detected dead viral fragments. A positive test does not mean a person is sick or contagious. And more testing means more positive cases, leading to so-called “surges” that were anything but.

Days ago, in of all places, the New York Times, the second pillar of the COVID Con crumbled, as they reported,

The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus.

Most of these people are not likely to be contagious and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time.

Sensitivity of the PCR tests has to do with amplification of genetic material from the virus. The fewer cycles required, the higher the viral load and greater likelihood of being contagious. By setting the threshold of amplification cycles too high, the test is overly sensitive.

Imagine a home security alarm so sensitive that it is triggered by a wind gust or leaf hitting a window. The homeowner will certainly be alerted if an intruder is attempting to break in, but the alarm will be going off constantly with false, or in the case of the virus, non-clinically significant positives. Or as the NY Times put it,

Tests with thresholds so high may detect not just live virus but also genetic fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risk — akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left.

33 amplification cycles may be the upper limit for detecting live virus, according to the CDC, but many commercial labs are using 40 cycles as a positive test, in essence sounding the burglar alarm when a bird lands on the back deck.

The NY Times found, “Up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus.” Yet lockdowns of businesses and schools continue based on these wildly inaccurate numbers.

Is this purposeful or incompetent? I suggest the former. President Trump downplayed testing in favor of therapeutics such as hydroxychloroquine. The Democrat-media establishment immediately pushed for more testing and told everyone that hydroxy was as deadly as cyanide.

Fox News crank Neil Cavuto said of hydroxy, “It will kill you.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, claiming an “evidence-based” approach to combating the Chinese flu, pushed for “testing, testing, testing.” Yet both of those admonitions were fear-based, not evidence-based.

Here we are now with deaths and positive cases overstated by 90 plus percent, all to create fear and uncertainty ahead of a presidential election. How many excess deaths can be attributed to media gaslighting? How many people delayed necessary medical care or cancer screening, afraid to leave their homes over the daily barrage of fear porn from CNN and Fox News?

This is information warfare, weaponizing medical data to influence an election, regardless of the cost in lives and economic damage. But the Big Con is being exposed, darkness to light. Hopefully voters are noticing and awakening to the con pushed by the left and the media.

 

Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a Denver-based physician and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in American Thinker, Daily Caller, Rasmussen Reports, and other publications. Follow him on Facebook,  LinkedInTwitterParler, and QuodVerum.

 



Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/the_big_covid_con_exposed.html#ixzz6Wtomtg5k 
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

Saturday, August 22, 2020

If Cuomo won’t allow outside review of NY nursing home COVID-19 horror, he admits guilt

If Cuomo won’t allow outside review of NY nursing home COVID-19 horror, he admits guilt


Will Gov. Andrew Cuomo allow anything resembling an outside review of New York’s coronavirus nursing-home horrors? The test case is a bipartisan bill from state Sen. Jim Tedisco and Assemblyman Ron Kim.

At the height of the pandemic, the state’s March 25 mandate put infected patients among the elderly — who Cuomo has acknowledged are the most vulnerable to the virus. The gov insists any criticism of that order is pure politics.

The bill calls for an independent investigation to, as sponsors put it, “fully examine policies that led to the deaths of thousands of New Yorkers in nursing-home facilities” during the pandemic.

Team Cuomo has stonewalled all efforts to get answers, and lawmakers are furious.

“Some issues transcend partisan politics,” said Tedisco (R-Glenville), and the needless deaths of thousands is one of them.

“Don’t be publishing a damn book right now. Take responsibility for what is happening,” an exasperated Sen. Gustavo Rivera (D-Bronx) fumed at this week’s Empire Report forum on the issue.

One key point: Cuomo officials won’t provide data on nursing-home residents who died in hospitals. “If you die in the nursing home, it’s a nursing-home death. If you die in the hospital, it’s called a hospital death,” Cuomo told WAMC Radio in defending the decision to stop giving a public count of the latter — though New York is the only significant state to keep that info secret.

“It seems, sir . . . you are choosing to define it differently so that you can look better,” Rivera told Health Commissioner Howard Zucker at an Aug. 3 hearing.

Zucker admitted the state has both numbers — but refused to provide even a rough estimate when lawmakers demanded one. Weeks later, he still hasn’t shared the data.

The bipartisan bill isn’t perfect. The five members of its commission would be appointed by the Senate majority and minority leaders, the Assembly speaker and minority leader and the state attorney general. The Democratic leaders almost never cross Cuomo, while AG Letitia James owes her position to his sponsorship. That makes for a real risk of a whitewash.

That the gov pulled the mandate in May suggests he knows it was a deadly error. The virus killed at least 6,400 nursing-home residents — and the real number, the one Zucker refuses to reveal, could be twice that.

The people of New York deserve answers. If Cuomo and his allies don’t even allow this commission to look for them, it’s compelling proof of guilt.

Monday, July 13, 2020

Friday, June 26, 2020

Bureaucratic failure

To Correct the whistleblowers complaint: There was no shortage of equipment! Cuomo wanted 40,000 ventilators and the Trump administration provided him with so many he could give the thousands of surplus to other states. And as it turned out ventilators were not the benefit first thought.





The CDC Lost Control Of The Coronavirus Pandemic. Then The Agency Disappeared.

The world’s premier health agency pushed a flawed coronavirus containment strategy — until it disappeared from public view one day before the outbreak was declared a pandemic.
Posted on June 24, 2020, at 4:57 p.m. ET
On January 17, the world’s most trusted public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, announced it was screening travelers from Wuhan, China, because of a new infectious respiratory illness striking that city.
It was the CDC’s first public briefing on the outbreak, coming as China reported 45 cases of the illness and two deaths linked to a seafood and meat market in Wuhan. Chinese health officials had not yet confirmed that the new illness was transmitted from person to person. But there was reason to believe that it might be: four days earlier, officials in Thailand confirmed their first case, a traveler from Wuhan who had not visited the seafood market.
“Based on the information that CDC has today, we believe the current risk from this virus to the general public is low,” said Nancy Messonnier, the CDC’s director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. Messonnier, 54, was a veteran of the CDC’s renowned Epidemiological Intelligence Service, where she had risen through the ranks during the national responses to the anthrax attacks and the previous decade’s swine flu pandemic to eventually head the agency’s vaccines center.
Most of the novel coronavirus’s infections apparently went “from animals to people,” she explained, and human transmission was “limited.”
There were many reasons why the information the CDC had on January 17 was wrong. It was wrong because China’s leaders withheld what they already knew about the virus from the World Health Organization. It was wrong, perhaps, because Trump administration officials had cut CDC staffers in Beijing who might have reported the truth directly from China. And it was wrong because past coronavirus outbreaks provided a false guide to an illness new to humanity.
That last reason — a fateful misjudgment of the basic biology of the virus — drove a flawed strategy to contain the outbreak. In 17 press briefings from January to March, the agency pushed the idea that if travelers, first from Wuhan and then from China, were quickly identified, traced, and isolated, it could “slow and reduce” the spread of the virus on US soil. Believing people without symptoms didn't spread the virus, the agency limited testing, discouraged masking, and left the country blinded by a faulty COVID-19 test.
Then, when the containment strategy's failure became undeniable, just one day before the WHO declared the outbreak a pandemic — the CDC disappeared from public view.
“When the outbreak started, we had an aggressive tracing program, but unfortunately, as the cases rose, it went beyond the capacity,” CDC Director Robert Redfield later testified to Congress.
“We lost the containment edge.”
More than 120,000 US deaths and counting later, public health experts disagree whether the CDC — which only resumed its briefings on the coronavirus in June after its three-month vanishing act — could have ever contained SARS-CoV-2. Everyone agrees, though, that the US response has been a disaster across the federal government, with the CDC the most visible face of failure.
“We certainly could have done enormously better than we did,” former CDC director Tom Frieden told BuzzFeed News.
Could the US have stopped the outbreak completely, like Taiwan and New Zealand have done?
“Probably not,” said Frieden. “Could we be Germany, with way, way fewer cases and deaths and less economic dislocation? Absolutely.”
Peter Aldhous / BuzzFeed News

A fatal misunderstanding about the new virus

At that first CDC coronavirus briefing, Messonnier explained what two other coronaviruses, MERS and SARS, could tell us about how to contain the mysterious new virus. And she described the crux of their containment plan: stopping the disease from entering the US by screening for travelers with a fever and a cough, testing them, and putting sick people in isolation.
“We know from investigation of those two viruses that they are more likely to spread when somebody is more contagious,” she said. “Asymptomatic people can spread, but at a much lower rate.”
SARS was a novel coronavirus whose outbreak in 2002 and 2003 killed 774 people, largely travelers and hospital personnel. It was most contagious when someone was severely ill, making quarantines very effective because by the time someone was most contagious, they were usually already confined to a hospital bed. MERS, which has killed at least 845 people since 2012, is likewise most often transmitted from terribly ill patients.
Samuel Corum / Getty Images
Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, speaks during a press conference at the Department of Health and Human Services on Jan. 28 in Washington, DC.
SARS-CoV-2 is entirely different. We now know that COVID-19 patients have the heaviest viral load — and appear most infectious — at the onset of symptoms, not at the end. People who haven’t yet developed any symptoms, and therefore wouldn’t show up in the CDC’s temperature checks, are responsible for more than 40% of the virus’s spread. And only about 45% of cases early in an infection will develop a fever.
In its first briefing, CDC officials acknowledged they still knew very little about the new virus. “CDC will adjust its screening and response procedures appropriately,” said the CDC’s Marty Cetron, director of the Global Migration and Quarantine Division.
Three days later, China confirmed the virus spread from person to person. Within a week, Chinese officials took the unprecedented move of quarantining Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, sending a clear message that the illness could readily spread outside the hospital setting.
Nevertheless, the CDC stuck to its screening plan.
“We are looking for returning travelers who have fever, cough, and respiratory symptoms,” said Messonnier at the agency’s next briefing on January 23. At the following briefing, on January 27, she reiterated the core assumption of the agency’s screening strategy: “We at CDC don’t have any clear evidence of patients being infectious before symptom onset.”
We now know that the coronavirus was likely already spreading on US soil by this time, with at least four lines of evidence supporting that conclusion. There is the case of a Northern California woman who became sick on January 31 and died within a week. And there is genetic evidence: The slow but steady mutation rate of the novel coronavirus, amounting to a few tiny changes every month, serves as a kind of footprint to track its spread. Scientists currently believe that trail points to the virus’s spread starting in November in China and arriving in Washington state in January, spreading through undetected, asymptomatic cases.
On January 30, with 7,800 known cases in 22 countries, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. The same day, the US announced the first case of person-to-person transmission of the virus in the country; the husband of a Chicago woman who had acquired the illness in China.
The next day, Health and Human Service Secretary Alex Azar announced the outbreak was a national public health emergency, and the White House declared a ban on all foreign travelers from China.
China typically sent 14,000 air passengers a day into the US. The order allowed the quarantine of anyone exposed to the virus, and both Redfield and Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, cited the risk of asymptomatic transmission to justify the action.
Alex Wong / Getty Images
Redfield (top left) and Fauci (top right)
Among public health experts, the travel ban was divisive. Some called it both an overreaction and too late, while others have said that such restrictions applied worldwide delayed the outbreak of the virus from China until mid-February.
The real problem was that the travel bans by themselves were a Band-Aid on a dam about to burst, only helpful when paired with public health agencies performing widespread testing and isolating infected patients — both with and without symptoms.
That didn’t happen. California Department of Public Health officials would later complain in a CDC Monthly Morbidity and Mortality Report that the travel restrictions and screening were a distraction and a drain on its resources. “Monitoring travelers was labor-intensive and limited by incomplete information, volume of travelers, and potential for asymptomatic transmission,” said the report. “Despite intensive effort, the traveler screening system did not effectively prevent introduction of COVID-19 into California.”
The real problem was that the travel bans by themselves were a Band-Aid on a dam about to burst.
At a January 31 CDC briefing, Messonnier announced that 195 passengers brought back from Wuhan would be involuntarily held for 14 days at a California air base, the first time in over 50 years that the agency had issued a quarantine order. “We are preparing as if this were the next pandemic, but we are hopeful still that this is not and will not be the case,” she said.
Meissonier’s “next pandemic” statement should have triggered action across the federal government, Frieden, the former CDC director, told BuzzFeed News.
“That's the point at which Iceland and Korea and Germany and a bunch of other countries got the private sector commercial laboratories into scaling up test production, ventilator production, respirators, protective equipment production,” he said.
But that didn’t happen. The next two months would make this failure clear.

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Fired NY prosecutor was given Biden-Ukraine allegations in 2018 but didn’t follow up, emails show

Ukraine prosecutors didn't want the political spectacle that became impeachment and simply sought to turn over evidence about Joe Biden and election interference to U.S. prosecutors, memos show. 
Image
GeoffreyBerman
Then-U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman announced charges against associates of Rudy Giuliani in 2019. 
JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images
Last Updated:
June 22, 2020 - 11:30pm
Could the impeachment scandal have been prevented if the now-fired U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman had followed up on Ukrainian allegations about Joe Biden and his family in 2018?
That’s the tantalizing question raised by emails from fall 2018 between an American lawyer and the chief federal prosecutor in Manhattan that were obtained by Just the News.
The memos show that well before Ukrainian prosecutors reached out to Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s lawyer, in 2019 to talk about the Bidens and alleged 2016 election interference they first approached Berman’s office in New York in October 2018 via another American lawyer.
The memos show Little Rock, Ark., lawyer Bud Cummins, a former U.S. attorney himself, reached out at least five times in October 2018 to Berman seeking to arrange a meeting with then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko.

Lutsenko, who emerged as a key figure in the impeachment scandal, wanted to confidentially share with federal prosecutors in New York evidence he claimed to possess that raised concerns about the Bidens’ behavior as well as alleged wrongdoing in the Paul Manafort corruption case.
“Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko is offering to come to U.S. meet with high-level law enforcement to share the fruits of investigations within Ukraine which have produced evidence of two basic alleged crimes,” Cummins wrote Berman on Oct. 4, 2018, one day after the two had talked on the phone about the allegations.
The allegations included that Joe Biden had “exercised influence to protect Burisma Holdings” after his son Hunter and his son’s business partner Devon Archer had joined the Ukrainian gas company’s board of directors and “substantial sums of money were paid to them,” Cummins wrote.
At the time Hunter Biden and Archer joined Burisma in 2014, the company was under criminal investigation in both England and Ukraine for alleged corruption. The British case was dropped in 2015, and the Ukraine cases were eventually settled in the final days of the Obama administration.
Joe Biden boasted during a 2018 public appearance that he forced the firing on Lutsenko's predecessor, Viktor Shokin, back in 2016by threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine. At the time, Shokin was leading the investigation into Burisma. Biden denies the investigation factored into his decision.
Biden’s and Archer’s firm received more than $3 million in payments from Burisma between 2014 and 2016, bank records obtained by the FBI show.
Records recently released by the State Department also show Hunter Biden and Archer had contacts in 2015 and 2016 with senior State officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry and Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken.
In addition, Burisma’s U.S. representatives were lobbying the State Department in Washington and the U.S. embassy in Kiev seeking to make the corruption allegations go away, the State memos released under FOIA show.
“The allegation by Prosecutor General Lutsenko et al is that the US ambassador, Marie L. Yovanovitch, Biden and Kerry made conclusions about who were the good guys and the bad guys in local government. They believe Biden and Kerry were influenced by payments to Hunter Biden and Devon Archer to influence certain decisions, particularly those benefitting Burisma,” Cummins wrote, relaying the allegations from the Ukrainian officials.
In addition, Cummins told Berman that Lutsenko had evidence that a ledger found in Ukraine in 2016 alleging to show payments to Manafort from a Russian-backed political party in Ukraine was doctored and the U.S. knew the evidence was corrupted. The emergence of the ledger caused Manafort to resign as Trump’s campaign chairman in August 2016, and eventually led to his conviction on money laundering and tax charges.
“The second allegation above is that the Embassy and FBI willfully pressured Ukrainian officials to falsify evidence to be leaked to the media about Manafort to affect the outcome of the 2016 election,” Cummins wrote Berman.

Cummins said in an interview he had one phone call and four email contacts with Berman in October 2018 about the Ukrainian matter, but the prosecutor’s office never took Lutsenko up on his offer to come to Washington and lay out his evidence.
“I never heard from them again,” Cummins said of Berman’s office. “It was an opportunity for the Justice Department to address these concerns privately, and who knows how history would have turned out had the SDNY simply followed up.”
Berman, instead, would eventually indict two associates of Giuliani on campaign finance and other charges after they tried to help the former New York City mayor and Trump lawyer publicize the Ukraine prosecutors' concerns. (One of the indicted associates, Lev Parnas, worked as a translator and interview facilitator for this reporter on a handful of Ukraine interviews in 2019, but prosecutors do not allege he did anything wrong in that work.)
James Margolin, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in New York, declined comment Monday when asked about the Cummins overture in 2018.
Cummins said he was not representing Lutsenko as his client, but rather a Ukrainian-American citizen who was trying to help the prosecutor general get information into U.S. authorities' hands.
Cummins’ email states that Lutsenko wanted to meet with Berman because the U.S. attorney’s office in New York had successfully prosecuted Archer on unrelated charges earlier in 2018. Archer’s conviction, however, was overturned by a judge, and Berman’s office never retried the case.
Cummins' efforts to help arrange the meeting were confirmed by one of Lutsenko's deputies, Konstantin Kulyk, who said last year that Ukrainian authorities repeatedly tried to convey evidence about possible wrongdoing by Americans to the U.S. Justice Department but were thwarted.
Lutsenko said in an interview last year that when Cummins’ efforts failed to get an audience with the Justice Department he reached out to Giuliani, hoping to find a different channel to get information investigated.
It was those contacts that eventually spurred the entire impeachment inquiry, which ended in January in the Senate’s acquittal of Trump.
Democrats have tried to portray Giuliani’s activities as an effort to dig up dirt on Trump’s 2020 rival, and to get Ukrainian officials to launch a probe of Biden.
But Cummins’ emails make clear Ukrainian authorities weren’t interested in investigating the Bidens on Ukrainian law violations. Rather, they wanted to confidentially provide evidence of possible violations of U.S. law so American authorities could investigate. And they had no interest initially in involving the Trump White House. Rather, they simply wanted to share evidence with U.S. authorities at the prosecutor-to-prosecutor level.
Cummins’ emails to Berman make clear that Lutsenko did not trust the U.S. embassy in Kiev or the FBI to review the materials, fearing they were too political.

“Lutsenko faces political hurdles in getting a visa to come here. It is believed that the embassy in Kiev has blocked his obtaining a visa in the past. He believes it is because the US ambassador knows the nature of his investigation and wants to obstruct him from coming and sharing it,” Cummins wrote Berman on Oct. 4, 2018.
Five days later, Cummins wrote that Lutsenko was prepared to deliver serious evidence, including copies of two ledgers in the Manafort case that Ukrainian prosecutors believed were faked
“Presumably he will be prepared to discuss eyewitness testimony he believes will corroborate both this story and also the separate bribery allegations,” Cummins wrote.
When Berman stopped responding, Cummins offered to have Lutsenko meet with a lower-ranking federal prosecutor simply to transfer the evidence. “Perhaps you can provide at least one trusted prosecutor and trusted agent to meet with a couple of the actual investigators and just let them take down the information like they would if any citizen walked in the door with some information to share,” Cummins wrote on Oct. 18, 2018.
There was never any further response, Cummins said.
Ukrainian officials have said they did not believe the Bidens broke Ukrainian law but may have engaged in conflicts of interest prohibited by U.S. law. The concerns about the Bidens engaging in conflicts of interest were confirmed by U.S. officials as well.
During impeachment testimony last fall, both Yovanovitch and her top deputy in the Kiev embassy, George Kent, testified that Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma while his father oversaw U.S.-Ukraine policy created the “appearance of a conflict of interest.” Kent said he even tried to raise his concerns with Biden’s VP office but was rebuffed.
All federal officials are required by federal ethics laws to avoid taking actions that create the appearance of a conflict of interest.