A new cast of characters emerged at Wednesday’s impeachment hearings — including Alexandra Chalupa, a former Democratic National Committee contractor and staffer who dug for dirt on the Trump campaign with help from Ukrainian officials.
Chalupa, a Ukrainian American who calls herself a “human rights lobbyist,” made a cameo minutes into the opening statement of House Intelligence Committee ranking member Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) in which he railed against the Democrats’ secretive impeachment process.
“Violating their own guidelines, Democrats repeatedly redacted from transcripts the name of Alexandra Chalupa, a contractor for the Democratic National Committee who worked with Ukrainian officials to collect dirt on the Trump campaign which she provided to the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign,” Nunes said.
Chalupa is the founder of a Washington political consulting firm and is co-chair of the DNC’s Ethnic Council, which reaches out to diaspora groups around the country to increase voter turnout, according to her LinkedIn.
But her most important role to date appears to be her investigation into Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign manager, and his ties with Russia — which she conducted with the help of Ukrainian officials.
The investigation provoked a firestorm in 2017 and prominent Republicans such as Sen. Chuck Grassley publicly accused Chalupa of working with Ukraine, the DNC and the Clinton campaign to undermine Trump’s candidacy.
Chalupa denied the claims, telling CNN she was a “part-time consultant” during the 2016 US election and that DNC officials never asked her to “go to the Ukrainian Embassy to collect information.”
“I was not an opposition researcher for the DNC, and the DNC never asked me to go to the Ukrainian Embassy to collect information,” she said in July 2017.
The Democratic staffer said it was her Ukrainian American heritage that made her aware of Manafort’s consulting work for Victor Yanukovych — a former Ukrainian president with ties to Moscow.
“When it was announced that the Trump campaign hired Manafort, many Ukrainian Americans were alarmed and concerned it was an early signal that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin was trying to influence the US election,” Chalupa said.
“At that time, I flagged for the DNC the significance of his hire based on information in the public domain,” she added.
While she admitted to having a “couple” of meetings with Ukrainian officials, they had nothing to do with Manafort, Trump or Clinton.
Still, a Politico investigation published in November 2017 detailed how Ukrainian government officials tried to “help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump,” and named Chalupa as a Democratic operative who met with Ukrainian officials to try to expose ties between Trump and Russia.
Republicans last month named Chalupa as one of the witnesses they wanted to testify during this month’s impeachment hearings, and on Tuesday she told Politico she was on a “mission to testify.”
But she wasn’t called on, and instead took to Twitter on Wednesday morning to defend herself and claim she was the victim of a Russian misinformation plot.
“For the past 4 years I’ve been a target of the Kremlin’s cyber warfare & disinformation warfare, including conducted by the GRU & Putin’s top spokespeople,” Chalupa told her 48,000 followers.
“In Congress, you’ve elevated Moscow’s disinformation attacks targeted at me, an American. Please explain why,” she wrote.
https://nypost.com/2019/11/13/who-is-alexandra-chalupa-the-dnc-operative-republicans-say-dug-for-dirt-on-trump/