Ukrainian lawmaker releases leaked phone calls of Biden and Poroshenko

A Ukrainian lawmaker who met with Rudolph W. Giuliani late last year released recordings of private phone calls between former vice president Joe Biden and former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko in a new broadside against the presumptive Democratic nominee for U.S. president that has raised questions about foreign interference in the 2020 election.

Censor.NET reports citing The Washington Post.

Andriy Derkach, an independent member of Ukraine’s parliament who previously aligned with a pro-Russian faction, said at a news conference in Kyiv on Tuesday that he had received the tapes — which consist of edited fragments of phone conversations Biden and Poroshenko had while still in office — from "investigative journalists." He alleged they were made by Poroshenko.

Derkach has past links to Russian intelligence. He attended the Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB in Moscow. His father served as a KGB officer for decades before becoming head of independent Ukraine’s intelligence service in the late 1990s. His father was fired from that post amid a scandal over a Ukrainian journalist who was kidnapped and murdered.

The recordings played at the news conference Tuesday shed relatively little new light on Biden’s actions in Ukraine, which were at the center of President Trump’s impeachment last year. They show that Biden, as he has previously said publicly, linked loan guarantees for Ukraine to the ouster of the country’s prosecutor general in 2015. But Derkach used the new clips to make an array of accusations not proven by the tapes.

Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, posted one of the recordings on Twitter hours later and implied impropriety by Biden. "Yikes!!!! This is not a ‘perfect conversation,’ " Trump Jr. wrote.

The events have echoes of the 2016 presidential election when Russian operatives hacked and released emails from the campaign manager of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and officials at the Democratic National Committee, in what U.S. intelligence agencies later concluded was a Moscow-directed operation designed to boost Trump.

Trump’s allies, including Giuliani, have argued that Ukraine intervened in that election on Clinton’s behalf, in part by targeting Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. The country’s anti-corruption bureau released entries from a black ledger that allegedly showed $12 million in cash payments from its Russia-leaning political party to Manafort during the years in which he worked as a political consultant in Ukraine. Manafort said the document was falsified, but the revelations prompted him to resign from the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016.

Nearly four years later, Trump’s eldest son is blasting leaked information of unknown provenance from a Ukrainian lawmaker about his father’s rival in the 2020 election. Trump Jr.’s tweet linked to a YouTube page with a recording that was also packaged with English subtitles.

Giuliani, who serves as Trump’s personal attorney, met Derkach during a trip to Kyiv in December.