Alexandra Chalupa

Early life Chalupa was born in Davis, California, to Tanya Keis and Leo M. Chalupa, both Ukrainian immigrants.

When Chalupa was 2–1/2, her life was saved by a child car seat when her parents' car spun out of control and crashed while traversing the Alps in Italy. In 2024, she earned a Master of International Security at the University of Sydney.

Career While attending UC Berkeley Chalupa started her political career working for Republican California Governor Pete Wilson in the Capitol and San Francisco offices. She then worked for Democrats, including Congressman Vic Fazio, Phil Angelides campaign for Treasurer, and in the White House during the Clinton administration in the Office of Public Liaison. After law school, she served on the John Kerry presidential campaign and then as a senior staffer and eventually as a consultant for the Democratic National Convention. According to FEC records, she was paid $412,000 from 2004 to June 2016 by the DNC, including as Executive Director of Democrats Abroad, the DNC's arm for engaging American voters residing abroad, Director of the Office of DNC Vice Chairs, and senior advisor to the DNC Chair.

She began warning Ukrainian-American community leaders and the Executives of the DNC in January 2016 that Manafort was Russian president Vladimir Putin's "political brain for manipulating U.S. foreign policy and elections and her concerns that he was involved in the U.S. election even though he did not publicly join any campaign at that point." Manafort's joining, Chalupa briefed the DNC's communications staff on Manafort's and Trump's ties to Russia.

FBI outreach

During the 2016 election, Chalupa proactively tried to reached out to the FBI several times with concerns about Manafort and active measures she experienced, including requesting to speak with the FBI agent working with the DNC. She testified before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee and FEC that DNC General Counsel Marc Elias, who secretly financed the Steele Dossier, blocked her from speaking with the FBI on multiple occasions. She finally spoke on the phone to the agent assigned to the Democratic National Convention who took down her information and passed it on to his colleagues in counter intelligence. On September 14, 2016, after she quit the DNC weeks earlier, Chalupa was interviewed by two agents from the FBI at her home and she asked them to conduct forensics on her electronics that she suspected were compromised by Russian hackers. In 2019, U.S. Senators loyal to Trump who called for investigations against Chalupa, including Chuck Grassley, Ron Johnson, and Lindsey Graham tried to pressure the FBI Director to provide them with the contents of Chalupa's computer and phone imagining. In media interviews and during a Congressional hearing Trump-appointed FBI Director Christopher Wray debunked claims that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.

Ukrainian embassy The Ukrainian embassy did not collaborate with Chalupa to expose Manafort, as Chalupa tested under oath. While falsely accused by Republicans, Chalupa publicly volunteered to testify during Trump's first impeachment. According to Politico, the DNC encouraged Chalupa to ask the Ukrainian embassy to arrange a call with Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko to discuss Manafort, Trump, and their connections to Russia, but the embassy declined.

In 2018, Telizhenko told the Ukrainian news site Strana.UA that Poroshenko worked with Chalupa to discredit Trump. Oleg Voloshyn, a Russian former Ukrainian lawmaker close with Yanukovych and Manafort, also accused Poroshenko and Chaly of favoring the Clinton campaign and called for an investigation into the alleged cooperation between Chalupa and the Ukrainian Embassy. In 2023, Voloshyn was accused by Ukraine of state treason for "promoting the military-political leadership of the Russian Federation in subversive activities against Ukraine."

In early 2019, Trump's private lawyer and Manafort's longtime associate Rudy Giuliani pushed for Ukraine to investigate Chalupa and the Bidens, working with opinion writer John Solomon to plant related stories in The Hill, which later centered in Trump's first impeachment hearings. Several months later, the publication conducted an extensive multi-panel investigation into Solomon's 14 Ukraine related opinion pieces, and found that his writings were unreliable and often included sources that could not be trusted. One of the articles included in the investigation involved Chaly, who while under pressure by Trump's associates, provided a written statement to The Hill, and claimed that Chalupa had approached the embassy in 2016 and tried to push the embassy to assist with supplying information on Manafort, including a request to allow a journalist to ask President Poroshenko questions about Manaforts dealings in Ukraine. He clarified Manafort was her own cause. He said "the Embassy representatives unambiguously refused to get involved in any way, as we were convinced that this is a strictly U.S. domestic matter." Chalupa was open about the fact she tried to connect American journalists to Ukraine's embassy and encouraged Ukrainian journalists to work with their American counterparts to teach them about Manafort's Kremlin-linked work in Ukraine, but publicly denied Chaly's accusations that she asked for documents or research related to the Republican operative. Despite this, a pro-Trump Political Action Committee used Chaly's statement to launch a second FEC complaint against Chalupa timed during Trump's impeachment. The FEC dismissed it for lack of evidence and based on Chalupa's under oath testimony during the first related FEC investigation launched against her in 2017 by Mathew Whitaker when he was Executive Director of FACT, which was found to be based on "Russian disinformation". Valeriy Chaly's Ambassadorship ended less than two months after his letter to the publication, and less than a week before Trump's infamous call with Zelenskyy pressuring the recently elected Ukrainian president to launch investigations into Trump's opponents, which sparked his impeachment. The following year, a Republican-led U.S. Select Intelligence Senate Committee report was released that concluded Manafort's presence on Trump's campaign was "a grave national security threat" and that he worked with Russian intelligence agents and oligarchs in Putin's circle before, during, and after the 2016 election, and had multiple communications with the Ukrainian embassy during this period.

Intimidation campaign In late April 2016, Chalupa began receiving daily administrative alerts from Yahoo! warning her that state actors were attempting to break into her email account. alleges that the research assistance the Ukrainian embassy provided to her during the 2016 election campaign was an illegal campaign contribution to the DNC because of her work for them at the time. The pro-Trump super PAC Committee to Defend the President filed a similar FEC complaint against the DNC in September 2019, alleging that the DNC ordered Chalupa to investigate Manafort and Trump.

In 2019, the FEC sent a letter to Chalupa stating that its attorneys "found reason to believe that you violated [the Federal Election Campaign Act] by soliciting, accepting or receiving contributions from foreign nationals" and that "the Ukrainian Embassy made in-kind contributions to the DNC by performing opposition research on the Trump campaign at no charge to the DNC." In a separate letter sent to the DNC, the FEC said that the DNC "does not directly deny that Chalupa obtained assistance from the Ukrainians nor that she passed on the Ukrainian Embassy's research to DNC officials." And that DNC officials "may have authorized Chalupa to act as an intermediary [with the Embassy] to solicit and receive negative information about the Trump campaign."

In 2021, the FEC voted 4-2 to dismiss the allegations that Chalupa or the DNC had violated any federal campaign laws. The FEC general counsel's office concluded that Chalupas actions amounted to soliciting an illegal foreign contribution to aid the Clinton campaign, but Democratic Commissioner Ellen Weintraub said the investigation into the matter relied on tainted testimony from Andrii Telizhenko, who Weintraub claimed was a Russian agent.

Calls for DOJ investigation U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley urged the Department of Justice (DOJ) on two occasions to investigate alleged coordination between Chalupa and the Ukrainian government to interfere in the 2016 election. In July 2017, he sent a letter in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Grassley and Senator Ron Johnson sent a second letter in September 2019 in their capacities as the chairs of the Senate Finance and Homeland Security Committees. Both letters cite the 2017 Politico article as evidence.

Impeachment Inquiry During the US Congress' 2019 Impeachment Inquiry hearings, House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes several times cited Alexandra Chalupa as a fact witness that committee chairman Adam Schiff refused to bring before the committee. Chalupa responded that she would welcome the opportunity to testify and push back against the Republican narrative about her involvement with Ukrainian officials.