Teimuraz Sharashenidze, Georgia's envoy to Ukraine, was told to pack and return until further notice, Davit Zalkaliani, the country's Foreign Minister, told the media this Friday.

The chief diplomat said that "further steps are needed to consult with the ambassador" because, as he put it, "certain problems" had emerged in the relationship between Kiev and Tbilisi.

The demarche, considered a sign of extreme displeasure in diplomatic practice, came after Georgia's former president, Mikhail Saakashvili, was appointed head of Ukraine's National Reform Council.

Giving a top government job to "a person convicted and wanted by the Georgian judiciary" raises questions, Foreign Minister Zalkaliani stated.

In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky said he hoped the US-educated Saakashvili would "give an impetus" to effect much-needed change, but back at home, law enforcement agencies accuse him of large-scale embezzlement, abuse of power, and corruption.

He fled the country after his term ended in 2013, and the new leadership has, since then, pushed for criminal charges against the fugitive politician.

However, Georgia's diplomatic demarche won't be escalated any further, its foreign minister revealed, saying that severing ties between the two "friendly" post-Soviet nations isn't on the table.

Saakashvili reinvented himself on Ukrainian soil following the 2014, West-inspired Euromaidan coup in Kiev. But his political fortunes in Ukraine have seen ups and downs, from being made (surprisingly) governor of the Odessa region by then-President Petro Poroshenko to becoming a stateless person and a deportee to neighboring Poland.

In Georgia, he remains a highly divisive figure since he seized power on the back of the 2004 revolt in Tbilisi. Supporters hail him for battling corruption and making governance more transparent, but opponents accuse the ex-president of silencing dissent and persecuting rivals.

Saakashvili's foreign adventures earned him a reputation of being a volatile, impulsive leader. He gained notoriety for briefly deploying Georgian troops to Iraq in the mid-2000s, and giving a green light to the 2008 invasion of the breakaway republic of South Ossetia which triggered a six-day armed conflict, in which Russia responded to Georgia's attacks on its peacekeepers and local civilians.

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Germany's Constitutional Court said that the ECB had overstepped its mandate with massive bond purchases. EU's top court retorted that it alone has the power to rule whether EU bodies breach the bloc's rules. Court of Justice of the European Union's statement:

"In general... In order to ensure that EU law is applied uniformly, the Court of Justice alone... has jurisdiction to rule that an act of an EU institution is contrary to EU law. Divergences between courts of the member states as to the validity of such acts would indeed be liable to place in jeopardy the unity of the EU legal order and to detract from legal certainty."

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Specifically, Rosenstein's memo instucted Mueller to investigate "allegations that Carter Page committed a crime or crimes by colluding with Russian government officials with respect to the Russian government's efforts to interfere with the 2016 election for President of the United States, in violation of United States law." Recently declassified evidence has shown that by the time that instruction was given, the FBI had:

• fired Steele as an informant for leaking;
• interviewed Steele's sub-source, who disputed information attributed to him;
• ascertained that allegations Steele had given the FBI specifically about Page were inaccurate and likely came from Russian intelligence sources as disinformation;
• been informed repeatedly by the CIA that Page was not a Russian stooge but, rather, a cooperating intelligence asset for the United States government.

Former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, who long called for the release of the unredacted scoping memo, said Wednesday's development confirmed his worst suspicions. He accused prior officials of the Justice Department of unnecessarily hiding the evidence from Congress and the American people before Attorney General William Barr intervened.

"This information was redacted until now for one single reason — to hide the fact that false allegations from the Steele dossier were included in Mueller's scoping memo," Nunes told Just the News. "In other words, a bunch of lies paid for by the Democrats were used to engineer the appointment of a Special Counsel to drag the Trump administration through the mud for years. The Russia collusion hoax was a disgrace, and we can't let anything like it ever be repeated."

The degree to which the FBI had discredited Steele's intelligence reporting on Page — including allegations he colluded with Russia — only came into focus with the December, 2019 release of DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report on FBI abuses of the FISA surveillance that targeted Page. In addition, just-declassified evidence showed the FBI had learned by February 2017 that Steele's information on Page was likely disinformation from Russian intelligence planted with Steele.

"Most relevant to the Carter Page FISA applications, the specific substantive allegations contained in Reports 80, 94, 95, and 102, which were relied upon in all four FISA applications, remained uncorroborated and, in several instances, were inconsistent with information gathered by the team," Horowitz wrote in debunking key allegations against Page.

More recently, declassified footnotes made clear that Steele's claim that Page had met back in 2016 with a senior Russian named Igor Sechin and been offered a lucrative finder's fee had been debunked by the FBI by February 2017 — months before Mueller was appointed. In fact, Steele's own source challenged the veracity of the information attributed to him inside the dossier.

"The Primary Sub-source told the FBI that one of his/her sub-sources furnished information for that part of Report 134 through a text message, but said that the sub-source never stated that Sechin had offered a brokerage interest to Page," Horowitz reported.

"The Primary Sub-Source also told the FBI at these interviews that the sub-source who provided the information about the Carter Page-Sechin meeting had connections to Russian Intelligence Services (RIS)," he added.

Horowitz's footnotes also made clear that the allegations about Page had only come from Steele and had not been substantiated anywhere else by the time Mueller was named.

"We found that the FBI did not have information corroborating the specific allegations against Carter Page in Steele's reporting when it relied upon his reports in the first FISA application or subsequent renewal applications," Horowitz wrote.

You can read the full scoping memo here (pdf).

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