On May 1, 2019, The New York Times ran an article titled, “Biden Faces Conflict of Interest Questions That Are Being Promoted by Trump and Allies.” The article stated that Vice President Joe Biden had threatened to withhold U.S. aid to Ukraine as he sought the dismissal of a prosecutor who “had his sights” on Burisma, a company where his son Hunter sat on the board. That claim by the Times simply was not true, as was confirmed a few days later in a series of Bloomberg articles. The Times article also stated that Ukrainian officials had decided to reopen an investigation into Burisma. That was also not true.
The source of the two principle lies in the Times story was not difficult to determine. The story stated that “the renewed scrutiny” of Biden’s action in Ukraine had “been fanned by allies of Mr. Trump.” The reopened investigation was “encouraged” by Trump’s allies, who were eager to gain a political advantage. So were “other Ukrainian inquiries that serve Mr. Trump’s political ends.”
But there were no investigations. The investigation into Biden had not been reopened. The “other Ukrainian investigations,” meaning the attempts to tie Ukraine to conspiracy theories related to the 2016 election, had been neither started nor announced.
None of those investigations were underway. None of them ever got underway. The idea that they already existed, as was breathlessly reported by The New York Times, is one of the most jaw-dropping successful expressions of pure stenography-as-journalism in modern political history. The Times not only reported as fact a scandal that had never happened, but it also reported as fact an entire series of investigations that did not exist. However, if the Times was not accurate in reporting facts, it was remarkably on track when it came to describing what the inspector general for the State Department would later identify as “a packet of propaganda.” What it reported as fact was exactly what Rudy Giuliani had been pushing as the approach Trump should take to use Ukraine for maximum personal advantage.
And perhaps what’s most amazing about the May 1 article is that it shows just how set the plan to discredit Biden and tie Ukraine to “Hillary Clinton’s emails” already was before Trump called Vladimir Putin on May 3, before Trump met with Victor Orban on May 13, before Trump sat down with his team on May 23 to give them their marching orders. All those other events ramped up the intensity of the efforts, but the plan was already in place.
Just when Dmytro Firtash, a convicted billionaire fighting extradition to the United States, sent Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman to help Rudy Giuliani build a case to extort Ukraine isn’t clear. Certainly Parnas was funneling hundreds of thousands of Firtash’s dollars into Republican coffers more than a year before the Times article appeared. In 2019, both Parnas and Fruman served as interpreters and contacts for Giuliani as he made repeated visits to Kyiv, and tagged along with him on other trips in the ongoing quest to find someone who would turn the claims made in the May 1 article into facts. Neither Giuliani nor his eager “associates” appear to be the authors of the lies against Biden or the incredible fantasy about a world-wandering email server. Those things already existed as long-debunked conspiracy theories circulating in the alt-right.
What Trump’s personal attorney would go on to do was not to investigate any of these claims. Instead, Giuliani’s search was to find someone who would go along by making the claims true, or at least true-ish, by announcing an investigation into Biden and the 2016 claims. That’s equally true of the diplomatic team that was also put at Giuliani’s disposal. The texts exchanged by that team show that the concern was, again, not determining what had happened, or even having an investigation into what had happened. The concern was getting a public announcement of an investigation. In multiple texts, particularly those from Gordon Sondland, who was often mediating between Giuliani and the State Department, it is made clear that the goal is to extract “an announcement” from Ukraine. Sondland even expresses that he wants to see the announcement, to make sure that Ukraine delivers the claims that Trump wants. What happens after the announcement … never comes in for a moment’s concern.
In any case, it’s clear that, by May 1, Trump and Giuliani had settled on their scheme. On May 3, Trump called Putin, who told Trump just what he wanted to hear: that Ukraine was a corrupt state, suitable only to be used as a political tool. That message was reinforced on May 13, when Trump met with Hungarian autocrat Victor Orban, who had long worked to keep Ukraine from making firm connections with Western Europe. By May 23, when Trump pulled his whole team together, and Mick Mulvaney dispatched the “three amigos” to make it so, the plan and the goal were both firm.
At that point, Trump had also already put a block on Ukrainian aid. Because he thought he needed it to properly twist the arm of what his friend Putin had told him was a corrupt and unreliable state. He need it to force Ukraine to put some facts behind a scheme that Giuliani had spelled out, and the TImes had dutifully written down, back on May 1.
It’s not because the authors of that article could see into the future. It was because the attempt to turn that “stack of propaganda” into something Trump could use included getting it published in The New York Times.