Over recent months I’ve been telling you about various changes we’re making at TPM, expanding our team with the changes made possible with our membership program, setting up our new Investigations Desk and a bunch more. What I wanted with the Investigations Desk was to add a stable of new reporters who could dramatically increase our ability to break news on investigative stories like the Trump/Russia probe in addition to the critical reporting we already do on legislative and policy stories on Capitol Hill. A good example of the latter is what we’re doing right now on the on-going Trumpcare trainwreck. So I was excited on several levels when I saw this new story just out from iDesk reporter Sam Thielman and Editor Catherine Thompson. I was pumped to see this particular story but also to see our larger plans coming to fruition.
You know that for some time I’ve been focused on this ‘peace plan’ meeting from back in February where Trump business partner Felix Sater and Trump lawyer Michael Cohen met with a Ukrainian parliamentarian who had a ‘peace plan’ which would essentially give Russia everything it wanted in the Ukraine and also had a dossier of paper documents which he needed hand delivered to Mike Flynn. Cohen did hand deliver that dossier to Flynn at the White House. But we’ve never learned what was in it or what happened to it. Sam found there’s a significant additional backstory that had heretofore gone unreported. Artemenko, the Ukrainian lawmaker pitched his peace plan and dossier while he and Sater were already working on putting together a business deal to refurbish all Ukraine’s Soviet-era nuclear power plants and begin exporting energy to neighboring countries in Eastern Europe. Said Sater: “We were working on a business deal for about five months, and he kept telling me about the peace deal, and as the Trump administration won, that’s when I delivered it [the peace deal] to them.” Check out our full story.
