There are a couple of aspects to the Ukraine scandal that I have found hard to understand: 1) the idea of a “Biden Scandal!!,” which comes up in all the right-wing comments I see; and 2) Trump’s curious mention of “CrowdStrike” in his Ukraine telephone call. Here’s my effort to figure out what these are and to lay them out in two coherent narratives. Sorry they came out so long, especially the first; it’s a complicated story, which is why I felt a need to figure it out for myself.
1) “Biden Scandal!!”
First up: why is Trump seemingly convinced that there is a “Biden Scandal!!” involving Ukraine, and why do so many on the right believe it too? What is the imagined “Biden Scandal!!” about?
Here’s the short version:
- In 2014 Vice President Biden pushed the government of Ukraine to fire their chief prosecutor, a guy named Shokin.
- Also in 2014, the major Ukrainian natural gas producer, Burisma, hired Biden’s son (Hunter Biden) to be on their board of directors, in spite of the fact that Hunter had just been pushed out of the US Navy Reserve for cocaine abuse and, of course, had no relevant expertise.
- Ukraine’s general prosecutor, Shokin, was at the time supposed to be investigating corruption allegations swirling around Burisma.
- So: did VP Biden go after prosecutor Shokin as a favor to his son, whose company Shokin was investigating?
In the short version, it sounds bad! But as soon as you look at the timeline and the fuller set of issues and characters involved, the seeming scandal pretty much evaporates. Here’s the timeline:
Burisma was owned by one of the corrupt oligarchs that came out of the chaotic breakup of the Soviet Union. In 2012, the prosecutor general of Ukraine began investigating tax fraud and other financial scandals involving Burisma and its owner. (Side note: given the general corruption of Ukraine, the investigation was in my uninformed opinion more likely part of a shake-down than anything like an effort to pursue justice.) In any case, the investigation went nowhere and soon became inactive, though it remained on the books.
Then, in February 2014, the Ukrainian Revolution swept away the corrupt and pro-Russian government. The new president, Poroshenko, who not coincidentally was yet another corrupt oligarch, fired the old general prosecutor and hired Shokin as the new one.
But Shokin was, it turned out, just another bureaucrat who specialized not in any actual prosecuting but rather in hanging out with the country’s oligarchs and doing their bidding, probably (I’m just guessing here) because there was something in it for him.
In any case, Shokin quickly became notorious among the people who care about such things (US and Western European justice ministers, finance ministers, and diplomats) for sitting on or quashing any and all corruption investigations involving the rich and powerful in Ukraine. Almost needless to say – but I guess it needs to be said, and emphasized, underlined and written in bold letters – Shokin did not ever lift a finger to investigate Burisma.
Shokin was “in charge of” the Burisma investigation only in the sense that he was the general prosecutor while the Burisma investigation had never been closed and was still officially on the books. But he never in any way did anything to investigate Burisma. On the contrary! Burisma was just the sort of oligarch-owned crony company that he was going out of his way to protect.
At the same time, in 2014 the Obama administration was trying to support the new Ukrainian government, not because they liked Poroshenko but because he was the democratically elected president of a country that had just undergone a pro-democracy revolution and overthrown the previous, pro-Russia government. He was also the head of a country that Russia had invaded and was attacking, and he needed US help.
Now that the US was a player in Ukraine, Burisma wanted to get on the good side of the US administration, so (thinking like the oligarchs they were) they could dream up nothing better than to hire the US Vice President’s own son. I guess Sasha and Malia were too young.
(Personal observation: yes, in my strong opinion, it was clearly wrong of Hunter to take that job, which is just the sort of everyday “corruption” that our political and economic elite’s no-good family members have always practiced; think Billy Carter or, for that matter, George W. Bush in his cocaine-snorting days as a no-show Air Force Reservist. But it’s not in any way illegal, and I’m not sure exactly how you could outlaw it, though I think Elizabeth Warren may have a plan for that. In any case, and regardless, it reflects badly on Hunter Biden, who is not running for anything.)
So that was the situation when western diplomats began raising a stink about Shokin and his oligarch-coddling ways. Career diplomats in the US State Department, in particular, were pressing Ukraine to fire the guy. Finally they asked for back-up from the White House, which sent Biden as the point guy to put the demand directly to the president of Ukraine.
In 2015, Biden went to Ukraine and told the government there: no reform, no loan guarantees from the US. He forwarded the diplomats’ demand that Shokin be fired, and that the coddling of oligarchs, which had crippled their democracy, be stopped. In his speech to them, Biden particularly stated that “The energy sector needs to be competitive, ruled by market principles—not sweetheart deals.” Ukrainians would have read this statement as a demand to restart the investigation of Burisma, the country’s largest energy company – in spite of the fact that doing so would be doing his own son no favor. In other words, Biden was telling the Ukrainian political elites as directly as diplomats ever do that they should leave family considerations aside and go after corruption wherever they find it.
So Shokin was replaced, but the next prosecutor wasn’t much better, and in the end not much was done about corruption at Burisma or anywhere else. I guess the moral of the story is something like “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown,” except that the 2019 coda to the story was the election of a new, anti-corruption president who unfortunately has no experience in politics (he’s a comedian and played a president on a popular TV show). And the new president’s tragedy is that he came into office in May 2019, at a time when the government of the US had gone from opposing corrupt oligarchical rule and Putinism, to whatever you want to call Trump’s foreign “policy.”
So, there’s your “Biden Scandal.”
If you stand back and look at it from a distance, it looks bad for Biden, but as soon as you ask any questions about it or learn who the players were, there’s no scandal there. And yet Trump keeps insisting that there is; probably because he’s incapable of reading, is my guess. He seems to get all his news from Fox and far-right Twitter, both of which continue to push the “Biden Scandal!!” line to their gullible audience. And who knows if Hannity isn’t dumb and uninformed enough to believe it himself.
In fact, when I dip into the fever swamps of the right, I see that the imaginary conspiracy goes far beyond anything that you would think any sane person could believe.
I read, for example, that Giuliani has told his Fox News audience that Biden was in Ukraine to protect George Soros from prosecution. I mean, seriously, he claimed this, more than once. (To which the only possible response is, wtf?)
Giuliani has also claimed that Biden was there to get the Ukrainians to “go dig up dirt on Trump and Manafort,” which is bizarre because nobody in 2014 could have imagined Trump would become the GOP candidate two years later, and certainly no one knew that he would hire the corrupt GOP operative Paul Manafort as his campaign manager.
In other words, instead of dying down, the “Biden Scandal!” narrative on the right has taken on a life of its own, and in the absence of any apparent need to find evidence to support it, keeps adding new conspiracies and new details as it mutates and grows.
And from the comments I’ve seen on twitter and in the online comment sections of newspapers, it seems that old guys on the right (and perhaps young guys too, though it’s always the old guys who write the comments) take the “Biden Scandal!!!” conspiracy narrative as an established fact. Such is life.
2) CrowdStrike!
Next up: CrowdStrike! This one is shorter but weirder.
In his July 25, 2019, call with the Ukraine president, Trump said this:
“I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people … The server, they say, Ukraine has it.”
Most of us scratched our heads and wondered, what is CrowdStrike? It turns out it’s at the heart of another bizarre conspiracy theory that has been circulating on the far right. CrowdStrike is a large (1700 employees, valued at something like $1,4 billion) American cybersecurity firm. It was the firm that the Democratic National Committee, DNC, called in when they found out that their servers had been hacked in 2016. It was CrowdStrike that figured out Russia was behind the hacking. The FBI has worked with CrowdStrike for years and trusts their investigations (there are lots of former FBI guys working at CrowdStrike), so they accepted the results of the CrowdStrike analysis and blamed Russia.
Putin’s government, meanwhile, was of course displeased, and began doing one of their disinformation campaigns to discredit CrowdStrike.
Somehow by the time this gets down to people like Limbaugh and Hannity, it has turned into a crazy-sounding conspiracy theory, which goes something like this:
It was (supposedly) not Russia that hacked the DNC but someone on the inside; maybe an inside job, maybe a disgruntled former employee. The DNC called in CrowdStrike not to investigate but to do a cover-up. CrowdStrike took the hacked DNC servers and (somehow! this part is never explained) spirited them away for safekeeping to Ukraine (for some reason! also never explained, though the fact that one of the three cofounders of CrowdStrike was born in Russia is always mentioned, as if that explains it). And somewhere in Ukraine the DNC servers sit to this day, presumably with all of Hillary’s incriminating emails (not the real ones, but imaginary “unreleased” ones) still sitting on them.
Trump wants the imaginary servers because he thinks that 1) they exist and 2) they will implicate Hillary and probably Biden and most likely all the Democrats in the world, and also 3) by proving that CrowdStrike is corrupt and unreliable, they will exonerate Trump’s best friend in the world, Vladimir Putin.
What can I say about this? What can anybody say? Apparently Hannity and Limbaugh and the crazy Q-Anon people and everybody to the right of them are talking about this all the time, and the rest of us “normies” have still never heard of CrowdStrike, and when we do hear the conspiracy theory we shake our heads and wonder what’s gotten into them. It’s like Pizzagate but for computer servers. Go figure.
More reading
The “Biden Scandal!!” has been covered a million times by every fact-checker under the sun, without deterring the true believers one bit, of course. Here’s one, if you’re interested – though if you are interested you probably don’t need to read it, and if you need to read it because you believe in the “Biden Scandal!!” you’ll most likely reject it out of hand because “ha ha, Washington Post, buncha liars” or some such. Sigh. Anyway, here it is:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/25/trumps-pinocchio-laden-claims-about-joe-biden-ukraine-polls/
If you want to read more about the CrowdStrike, here you go:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/25/trumps-mention-crowdstrike-call-with-ukraines-president-recalls-russian-hack-dnc/