WASHINGTON — State Department emails declassified Oct. 13 show the department was weighing whether to revoke Ukrainian political consultant Andriy Telizhenko’s U.S. visa by early August 2020, a month before the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv pulled it on Sept. 8. The emails are part of a 75-page package the White House Government Transparency Task Force released Oct. 22. It also includes FBI and intelligence reports on Telizhenko and the Treasury Department memo used to sanction him in January 2021.
Telizhenko was due to travel to Washington in September 2020 to assist Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley in their investigation of Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian gas company Burisma. The visa revocation kept him out. Treasury later designated him under an executive order on foreign election interference, calling him “a former low-level Ukrainian diplomat” who arranged meetings between Russian-linked lawmaker Andriy Derkach and U.S. persons.
Each page carries the stamp “Declassified by Counsel to the President Scharf on 13 October 2026.” President Trump announced in August that Will Scharf would become White House counsel on Sept. 1.
A revocation discussed from August
On Aug. 5, 2020, a staffer in the State Department’s intelligence bureau wrote to the visa office that the FBI “has gotten wind” the department was considering revoking Telizhenko’s visa, and asked whether an agency had requested it. The visa office replied that it had received no request “for anyone by that name.”
The final steps took about a day. An FBI Foreign Influence Task Force employee wrote on Sept. 8 that the bureau had just learned of Telizhenko’s travel plans and was drafting a letterhead memorandum to request revocation. The next day, an FBI email said that work had stopped “since he was already revoked.” Another reply in the same thread, its sender and date redacted, says the writer had just spoken to “the Deputy” and “he approved the revocation,” so no memo was needed.
A parallel State thread from Sept. 8 and 9 shows staff searching for an intelligence report on Telizhenko that “D,” State’s shorthand for the deputy secretary of state, had read the week before and asked to see again. One official wrote that the department revoked the visa before his “imminent travel” and that D had been reviewing material “to determine whether or not we should take this action.”
The records give two different dates for the revocation. A visa office email of Oct. 7 says the office never received a revocation request and that the embassy revoked the visa “at Post on September 8th.” An Oct. 20 update relayed from the Kyiv consular section says it revoked the visa “earlier this month” because he was “imminently getting on a plane.”
That same day, Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent listed Telizhenko among Ukrainians denied visas or sanctioned over the previous two years. Kent wrote that the visa was revoked the day before Telizhenko was to travel “to provide manufactured case information out of the Pechersk district,” the central Kyiv district where many government offices sit.
What the intelligence reports say
The package contains three intelligence characterizations, and they differ in how firmly they tie Telizhenko to Moscow.
A Feb. 10, 2020 CIA World Intelligence Review article says his collaboration with Ukrainians supporting the Kremlin’s preferred narratives “suggests he is, at a minimum, unwittingly fueling known Russian Government influence programs.” A later, heavily redacted response to questions about him says that as of August 2020 he coordinated with Derkach to influence the election, and adds, “We do not know if Telizhenko was witting.”
An FBI intelligence report published Aug. 23, 2020, sourced to an officer of another law enforcement agency, says Russia banned Telizhenko in 2014 over his role in Ukraine’s revolution and listed him as a spy. It says Russian officials tried to reach him on Facebook and in person in the summer of 2019, and that he blocked the account. It also says he turned down an in-person recruitment attempt by someone acting for a Ukrainian politician whose name is redacted.
The record behind the sanctions
Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) laid out its case in a 14-page evidentiary memorandum backed by 35 exhibits. Its intelligence citations include a Nov. 12, 2020 FBI letterhead memorandum and a July 7, 2020 FBI report that Russia’s FSB planned an “active measure operation” to pass damaging information about a U.S. candidate to Derkach “and his team.” OFAC assessed that the team included Telizhenko, based on a BuzzFeed News article in which another sanctioned Ukrainian, Oleksandr Onyshchenko, named him as part of “Team Giuliani.”
The exhibit list breaks down as follows. Footnotes in the memo cite Media Bias Fact Check ratings for each news outlet it relies on.
| Type | Exhibits | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Redacted in full | 4, 5, 13, 16, 21–29 | 13 |
| Government records | 1, 2, 6, 7, 9, 14, 17 | 7 |
| News articles | 3, 8, 12, 19, 20, 31 | 6 |
| Media Bias Fact Check pages | 10, 11, 18, 30, 32, 34 | 6 |
| Other websites | 15, 33, 35 | 3 |
The government records include the executive orders, a Treasury press release, a Federal Register notice, the competing majority and minority staff reports from the Senate Homeland Security committee of Sept. 23, 2020, and the Nov. 12 FBI memorandum. The news articles come from BuzzFeed, the Daily Beast, Sputnik, the Washington Post and the New York Times. The other websites are equestrian federation pages and a Britannica entry on Rudy Giuliani. The memo includes a section headed “Exculpatory Information,” which cites Telizhenko telling the Daily Beast he “never liked” Derkach. OFAC assessed that statement as false.
A separate Oct. 6, 2020 email in the package says there was “no basis” to revoke a visa “beyond some vague ties to Derkach.” That thread concerns another person whose name is redacted. Telizhenko’s visa had been revoked a month earlier.
Who released it
The task force posted the records on the White House transparency page as a single ZIP file. Its summary there repeats, word for word, the opening of a Just the News report published at 6:04 a.m. Oct. 22 under the bylines of Steven Richards and John Solomon. Solomon chairs the task force while on leave from Just the News, as reported in DeClassified Now’s Yovanovitch report. The Washington Post reported Oct. 17 that the task force had released 113 documents in 14 batches.
The White House page says the task force runs through Dec. 31, 2026. It advises the president, through the White House counsel, on which records to declassify.
The records are posted on the White House transparency page as a ZIP archive. Just the News also posted them as a single PDF.
What’s next: Solomon told the Post he is negotiating a dozen more releases with government agencies and expects the task force to finish its work in late fall. No date has been announced for the next batch.
Filed under: White House Government Transparency Task Force / Department of State / FBI / Treasury
Sources
- White House Government Transparency Task Force, Telizhenko declassified documents (ZIP, stamped Oct. 13, 2026)
- Just the News copy, “Telizhenko Release Consolidated” (75-page PDF)
- White House, Government Transparency & Election Integrity page
- U.S. Treasury, “Treasury Takes Further Action Against Russian-linked Actors” (Jan. 11, 2021)
- Just the News, “Feds used slim evidence to revoke Ukrainian witness’ visa, thwart Senate’s Biden corruption probe” (Oct. 22, 2026)
- The Washington Post via the Spokesman-Review, “Trump’s election fraud task force is going after the people who investigated him” (Oct. 17, 2026)
- The Daily Signal, “Trump Names New White House Counsel” (Aug. 10, 2026)