Possibly a 52-year-old Dutch supporter of US President Donald Trump is involved in the Ukraine affair. The man is said to have followed the former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, reports NBC News Saturday.
The Dutchman acknowledges that he sent messages to a Republican politician with apparent information about the former ambassador.
The man, Anthony de Caluwe, however, states that the messages were a joke and describes them as “ridiculously amicable.” A spokesperson for De Caluwe says against NBC News that he is a Dutch financial advisor who often travels to Belgium.
His reports about Yovanovitch eventually ended up with businessman through Republican politician Robert Hyde Lev Parnas, who allegedly worked for Trumps personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. This is evident from reports released by the House of Representatives last week.
Former diplomats and Democrats in the US Congress reacted furiously to the news that an ambassador might have been supervised by Giuliani’s relations.
De Caluwe: “I have no connections in Ukraine”
The spokesperson for De Caluwe states that he does not know Parnas. According to her, De Caluwe and Hyde started to communicate in a playful way, after De Caluwe had seen a Facebook message from Hyde about Yovanovitch. Later they met for the first time in Florida.
After Hyde came under fire for collecting information about Yovanovitch, he referred to De Caluwe. According to Hyde, he only sent some screenshots of his app conversations with him to Parnas.
De Caluwe now describes those app conversations as a joke. He would never have collected real intelligence about Yovanovitch and had no connections in Ukraine.
Yovanovitch: “I was the target of a smear campaign”
Yovanovitch was fired by the White House in April last year. The former ambassador says that in the run-up to her resignation as an ambassador, she was faced with a smear campaign against her, which was conducted under the leadership of Giuliani.
In a telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump described her as “bad news“The phone call led to the launch of a sediment investigation, as the US president would have threatened to withhold millions of dollars in military support if Ukraine did not investigate his political rival Joe Biden and his son.
On Tuesday, a political trial will commence in the Senate controlled by the Republicans, in which it will be decided whether Trump will actually be deposed. Earlier the House of Representatives put him in the official state of accusation.
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