U.S. Intel Repeatedly Warned About Rudy's 'Russian Agent' Pal
At the end of an elegant dinner in May 2019 in downtown Kyiv, Ukrainian parliamentarian Andriy Derkach handed a thick packet of papers to a former senior U.S. official he’d known for years.
The packet was unremarkable in its presentation, the papers clipped on the top and crunched in the corners. The packet bore no insignia, title, or index page, and did little in the way of intriguing the former U.S. official. It wasn’t until months later that the official read through the pages. What was more remarkable was that U.S. intelligence had, for over a month, warned that Derkach was a stalking horse for the Russian security services and their attempts to interfere in American politics. It was the first in a series of reports, beginning in the spring of 2019, naming Derkach as part of a broader push to upend the U.S. election once again.
Despite the odd nature of the handoff, the dinner was one of the earliest known attempts by Derkach, current and former officials say, to pass materials to Americans in an attempt to push the debunked conspiracy theories that the former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter were complicit in the siphoning of millions of dollars from the Ukrainian people and that Ukraine, rather than Russia, interfered in the 2016 election. (The latter is “a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services,” according to President Donald Trump’s former point person for the region, Fiona Hill.)
Derkach’s dossier was not flagged for officials inside the State Department until months later, when Derkach began holding press conferences and Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, reiterated the same talking points as Derkach on a range of issues. But officials inside the U.S. intelligence and national security apparatus, with the help of officials on the ground in Kyiv, had drafted reports warning that Russian proxies, including Derkach, were attempting to undermine the 2020 election process in America.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-intel-repeatedly-warned-rudy-083000010.html