(Newswire.net— September 13, 2020) — The United States sanctioned a Ukrainian politician, an alleged Russian agent, on Thursday, for trying to “discredit” Joe Biden.
Trump’s administration introduced sanctions to Andriy Derkach who allegedly incriminated democratic presidential opponents to Donald Trump with questionable accusations.
“Andriy Derkach, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, has been an active Russian agent for more than ten years, constantly in close contact with Russian intelligence services,” the US Treasury Department said in a statement.
The U.S. government accuses Derkach of being involved “in foreign interference in an attempt to undermine the presidential election.”
That “secret” operation, which was “directed by Russia” in order to “influence the opinions of American voters”, was supposed to “culminate before the voting day”, the head of American diplomacy, Mike Pompeo, assessed in another statement.
According to the Ministry of Finance, “the warning to Moscow and its representatives is clear: such activities will not be tolerated.”
At the end of 2019, Andriy Derkach met with Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, in an effort to prove the alleged acts of corruption that Joe Biden and his son Hunter allegedly committed in connection with Ukraine. In May this year, Ukrainian Member of Parliament published a montage of recordings of telephone conversations from 2016 by Joe Biden, who was vice president of the United States at the time, with then Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko. That audio was supposed to support the allegation of corruption.
The US Treasury Department, however, pointed out that it was in fact their intention to support “unfounded” claims in order to “discredit” American officials more widely.
This summer, the current President Trump, who is running for his second term in the elections against Joe Biden, retweeted the message that contains those recordings, after the American intelligence service has already proved that the audio has been tampered with in an attempt to discredit the Democratic candidate.
Andriy Derkach, however, promised to reveal “new scandalous facts”.
Three Russians: Anton Andreev, Daria Dmitrievna Aslanova, and Artem Mikhailovich Lifshitz were also punished as employees of the Internet Research Agency (IRA), an organization close to the Kremlin, for accusations of cybercrime. Russian President’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the statements a lie, MBS reports.
The IRA, which is considered to be one of the main centers that helped manipulate social networks in the United States, has already been put on the American “blacklist” for trying to interfere in the midterm elections for the 2018 US Congress. Thursday’s sanctions confirm the risks of new Russian interfering, American intelligence services have already issued a warning. A whistleblower on Wednesday accused the White House of wanting to reduce Russian interference in the next presidential election.
A whistleblower posing as the U.S. intelligence official Brian Murphy, said last week that Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf personally asked him in mid-May to stop leaking intelligence reports about the threat of Russian interference in the United States, and instead report interference of China and Iran.
Those orders came “directly” from the White House, according to the whistleblower.
According to the American intelligence agencies, Russia interfered with the American elections in 2016 in favor of Donald Trump, whose pre-election team is accused of negotiating with Moscow. These claims were never proved.