Topic: Newsmax
Gavin Wax wrote in his Nov. 28 Newsmax column:
With the prosecution of Donald Trump and his supporters in full effect, the deep state is ripping the mask off and going full Soviet-style totalitarian in preparation for the 2024 presidential election.
Foreign affairs are becoming messier and jumbled, with long-standing political alliances breaking down and the situation at hand becoming exceedingly difficult to navigate. The confusion only empowers the corrupt interests who are using the chaos to tighten their iron-clad grip upon the world.
Former Ukrainian MP Andriy Derkach is one whistleblower with the credibility to cut through this fog.
Derkach has released damning evidence of influence peddling by President Joe Biden in Ukraine, offering the receipts showing the blackmailing of corrupt former President Petro Poroshenko to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. He also produced evidence of alleged shadow income given to the Bidens from Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky.
Derkach stands out among other whistleblowers because of his credibility with the Ukrainian people, as a member of parliament for decades.
Wax's evidence for this is an anonymously written story at 21st Century Wire, a conspiracy and conjectiure site with with an affinity for Russia. And therein lies the issue with Wax's column: Derkach is actually a Russian agent who fed misinformation to Rudy Giuliani with the goal of disrupting the 2020 eleciton. In 2022, U.S. authorities charged Derkach with financial fraud and money laundering. That link to Russia means it's highly unfortunate that Wax is trying to tout Derkach's alleged "credibility with the Ukrainian people," given that Russia is currently waging war on Ukraine. Also, Shokin was fired because he wasn't doing his job of prosecuting corruption, not because he was.
But don't worry about any of that, Wax says, because Derkach is really a victim of the "deep state" and did absolutely nothing wrong:
The U.S. Treasury Department levied economic sanctions against Derkach in Sept. 2020 while Trump was still in office. The deep state smeared him as a Kremlin agent without evidence, and he suffered significant hardships as a result.
His Ukrainian bank accounts were shuttered, and his U.S. visa was canceled. Coordinated attempts to shut him down remain, with the 2020 presidential election around the corner as more sanctions are inflicted upon Derkach that Biden is in office, and internal barriers are holding back deep state overreach.
In 2022, Derkach was charged with treason for "undermining Ukraine's relationship with the United States” as part of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s crackdown against dissent. The persecution of Derkach mirrors what is happening with President Donald Trump and his supporters.
Wax made no effort to actually disprove any of the charges against Derkach, or even that it was a "smear" to point out his links to the Kremlin. Instead, he concluded by huffing that "Derkach’s work will be vindicated, and the final stakes can be driven through the Russian collusion narrative. This is the great hope of any America First activist, as Derkach is the key to foiling the deep state’s agenda in 2024." In fact, there was plenty of evidence to support the narrative, and the investigation was ruled to have been justified.