President Trump’s political commissars — AG William Barr, Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf, and DNI John Ratcliffe — have been hard at work to downplay any reports of Russian interference in the 2020 presidential election.
Republican lawmakers such as Sens. Ron Johnson have embarrassed themselves by relying on Russian disinformation in an effort to smear Joe Biden. And Rudy Giuliani has been reduced to peddling a ridiculous story about a waterlogged laptop brought in to a repair shop with a hard drive purportedly containing emails and salacious videos smearing Hunter Biden.
That’s all the more reason for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff to call for hearings to get to the bottom of Russian interference in the 2020 presidential election.
I believe that there is a chain of circumstantial evidence indicating that Russian intelligence may have been acting as early as fall 2018 feeding disinformation to Trump's personal lawyer Giuliani in an effort to derail Joe Biden's candidacy.
I am not a conspiracy theorist. I spent a decade as a correspondent in Eastern Europe for U.S. and British news outlets, and more than 20 years as a supervisor on an international news editing desk.
Over the past decade, Russian leader Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB agent, has been directing a widespread disinformation campaign targeting Western democracies and their social order. For background here is a link to a report in Carnegie Europe.
Russian intelligence has used its propaganda outlets like RT and Sputnik and the Leningrad-based Internet Research Agency troll farm to spread disinformation aimed at undermining the European Union and NATO. Russian meddling in the 2016 Brexit campaign in Britain was a harbinger of what was to come in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And this year Russia has been caught spreading disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic.
So it should come as no surprise that Russia has been active in trying to undermine Biden and prop up its preferred agent of chaos — Donald Trump — who has done more harm to the U.S. than any weapon in the Russian arsenal.
U.S. Intelligence has confirmed that Russia has been spreading disinformation about Biden’s mental health. Microsoft revealed that the same Russian military intelligence outfit that hacked the Democrats in 2016 has been trying to breach computers at more than 200 organizations, including political campaigns and their consultants. And a U.S. cybersecurity firm reported that Russian military intelligence hacked Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company at the center of Trump’s impeachment trial.
Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin wrote that a top-secret CIA assessment has concluded that Putin and his top aides are “probably directing” a Russian foreign influence operation which involves a prominent Ukrainian lawmaker, Andriy Derkach, identified by U.S. intelligence as a Russian agent, who has been providing anti-Biden information to Giuliani.
Now we’re all familiar with the story that Trump was impeached for abusing his office by seeking to extort the newly elected Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelensky into announcing a probe of Burisma and Joe and Hunter Biden.
But that’s a bit like walking in on Act III of Hamlet. You know that Hamlet is trying to prove that his Uncle Claudius murdered his father to seize the crown, but you don’t know who put the idea into his head, At least, Hamlet’s suspicions proved true.
The Washington Post and other news outlets recently reported that U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that Giuliani was the the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence and being used to feed Russian disinformation to the president.
But when did Russian intelligence start feeding disinformation to Giuliani?
Giuliani has made the unfounded claim that Biden, while vice president, moved to get Ukraine’s prosecutor general Viktor Shokin dismissed in order to avoid an investigation of Biden’s son Hunter, who was on the board of Burisma. This claim has been totally debunked.
And if it is untrue then logic dictates that Rudy Giuliani could not have come up with this conspiracy theory on his own. Someone spoon fed it to him and he eagerly swallowed it because of his antipathy to Biden and desire to impress Trump.
Rudy might have provided a clue in a Tweet made during the Senate impeachment trial. (Jane Raskin was a lawyer on the Trump defense team.)
CNN’s Jake Tapper pointed out that the Tweet contradicted what Giuliani had previously said about what led him to push Ukraine to investigate the Bidens and Burisma.
In a May 2019 New York Times story Giuliani said the Biden-Burisma connection came to light in the course of his efforts as Trump’s lawyer to counter the Mueller investigation by seeking evidence that Democrats conspired with some Ukrainian officials to help initiate what became the special counsel’s inquiry into the Trump-Russia connection. The claim about Ukrainian involvement in the 2016 election has been debunked as Russian disinformation.
“I can assure you this all started with an allegation about possible Ukrainian involvement in the investigation of Russian meddling, and not Biden,” Giuliani told the Times. “The Biden piece is collateral to the bigger story, but must still be investigated.”
This dossier was apparently handed to Giuliani sometime in the fall of 2018. So that raises some obvious questions: Who prepared it? What are the contents? Who are the witnesses? And who gave the dossier to Giuliani?
So was this dossier prepared and handed over to Giuliani as part of a Russian intelligence operation back in the fall of 2018.
And there are many possible suspects. A month before President Trump’s Senate impeachment trial, NBC News published a guide to the controversial figures helping Giuliani dig up dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine. The story noted that “most of them have ties to pro-Russian political figures or oligarchs, and appear eager to burnish their political clout by ingratiating themselves with allies of the American president.”
www.nbcnews.com/…
One of Rudy’s helpers, a prosecutor named Kostiantyn Kulyk, did prepare a seven-page, English-language dossier in late 2018 that accused Hunter Biden of corruption related to his service on Burisma’s board, according to The New York Times. The dossier also made the dubious claim that U.S. diplomats covered up for crimes committed by the Bidens. Ukrainian officials said Kulyk had ties to a warlord in eastern Ukraine accused of working for the Russian intelligence services.
Kulyk also had a checkered past that included several indictments on corruption charges and being accused of bringing politically motivated criminal cases against his opponents.
It is not clear whether this was the same dossier that Giuliani was referring to in his Tweet. Former Ukraine Prosecutor-General Yuriy Lutsenko denied in an interview with the New Yorker that he gave the Kulyk dossier to Giuliani.
What was going on at the time in 2018? Joe Biden had indicated that he was strongly considering a 2020 presidential bid. And in August 2018 polls showed the former vice president leading Trump in a head-to-head matchup, and also leading the potential Democratic primary field.
So could that have been motivation for Putin to have his intelligence operatives launch an operation aimed at dissuading Biden from entering the race. And If that failed, weaken Biden’s front-runner status, encourage more candidates to enter the Democratic presidential race, and create an extended and very contentious nominating contest that might yield a candidate whom Trump would have had a better chance of defeating (pre-pandemic).
We know that Russia keeps voluminous personal files on prominent American politicians and business leaders. You can imagine what’s in Trump’s file. Biden posed a more difficult challenge. In a nearly 50-year career in public service, he has never been mired in a corruption scandal or accused of using his office to enrich himself.
But Biden has an Achilles’ heel — his love of family and wearing his emotions on his sleeve. In 1972, Biden’s wife and daughter were killed in a car accident that also injured his two sons, Hunter and Beau, just weeks after the 29-year-old had won an upset victory over the Republican incumbent in the Delaware Senate race. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield had to convince the distraught single father to take his Senate seat anyway. And in 2016, Biden did not enter the presidential race because he was mourning the loss of his son Beau to brain cancer.
So what would be the impact of concocting a fake corruption scandal centered around a smear campaign targeting Biden’s sole surviving son? And if you could get Ukraine to announce the investigation even better because it would undermine bipartisan U.S. support for Ukraine.
And how to inject this poison pill into the American body politic. One method used by Russian intelligence is to put ideas into the head of someone who is receptive to the same goal — in this case derailing Biden’s candidacy.
And Rudy Giuliani was ready, willing and able to wage a vendetta against Joe Biden.
As Trump’s personal lawyer, he had access to the president who has repeatedly expressed his willingness to get dirt on his political opponents from foreign sources. And Giuliani’s international consulting practice had clients in Ukraine dating back to at least 2008.
The notion that Biden was the front-runner for the Democratic nomination and stood a good chance of defeating Trump in 2020 must have really stuck in Giuliani’s craw.
After all, it was Biden who turned “America’s mayor” into a national laughing stock in an October 2007 Democratic presidential debate.
“Rudy Giuliani... I mean, think about it! Rudy Giuliani. There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence — a noun, a verb, and 9/11. There’s nothing else! There’s nothing else! And I mean this sincerely. He’s genuinely not qualified to be president,” Biden said.
At the time, Giuliani was the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. He ended up running a campaign considered one of the most humiliating disasters in modern U.S. political history, raising more than $60 million and winning only one delegate before dropping out.
Biden went on to become vice president, sharing in the success of the Obama administration. Giuliani vanished into the political wilderness for eight years, only to re-emerge as Trump’s personal lawyer and hatchet man.
It might be useful here to provide a link to a Ukrainegate timeline compiled by the website Just Security, an online forum that analyzes U.S. national security law and policy based at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law.
And it should be noted that around August 2018, Giuliani Partners was hired by the Boca Raton-Florida company Fraud Guarantee co-founded by Ukrainian-American businessman Lev Parnas. He ultimately was paid $500,000 for undisclosed business and legal advice, according to
Reuters.
Parnas and his associate Igor Fruman were arrested in October 2019 at Dulles Airport as they were about to board a flight to Europe. They were charged with violating U.S. campaign finance law by funneling foreign money to unnamed U.S. politicians in a bid to influence U.S.-Ukrainian relations.
The biggest donation was $325,000 to the pro-Trump American First PAC from a shell company set up by Parnas and Fruman. That was enough for both men to get invited by America First to an exclusive donors’ dinner in April 2018 with Trump at his Washington hotel at which both men urged the president to fire U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, an anti-corruption crusader, claiming that she was unfriendly to the president and his interests, the
Washington Post reported.
Both Soviet-born emigres had an unusual history of political donations that suddenly emerged during the 2016 election, according to the Open Secrets.org website.
Parnas not only donated the maximum $2,700 to Trump in 2016 and 2018 and $33,400 to the Republican National Committee, but also made more than 20 donations of $661 each to the Republican Party in states across the country, such as Alabama, Wyoming and Kansas.
Fruman’s donations were mostly hidden under the name
Furman. His only listed donations before 2018 were to Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign. But in 2018, he donated $2,700 to Trump, $33,000 each to the Republican National Committee and National Republican Congressional Committee, and smaller amounts to several dozen Republican congressional candidates.
Parnas and Fruman became Giuliani’s facilitators and translators as he revved up efforts to go after Joe Biden who was still months away from actually declaring his candidacy.
In late 2018. Parnas and Fruman arranged a Skype call between Giuliani and former Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, the source of the debunked reports that Joe Biden had him fired to stop him from investigating wrongdoing in Burisma. The call linked together two men who both had a big axe to grind with Joe Biden.
CNN reported that Parnas and Fruman held a private meeting with Trump and Giuliani during the White House Hannukah Party on Dec. 6, 2018 at which Trump tasked Parnas and Fruman to pressure the Ukraine government to investigate the Bidens, according to associates Parnas told around the time and in the ensuing days.
Bloomberg News reported that Giuliani met for the first time with then-Ukraine Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko for several days in New York in late January 2019. Giuliani held another meeting with the Ukrainian prosecutor in Warsaw, Poland, in mid-February. Parnas and Fruman attended both meetings.
And then we get to the quid pro quo. The Wall Street Journal reported that in late Feburary 2019 Parnas and Fruman met with then Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to press him to initiate an investigation of Hunter Biden and a debunked theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Hillary Clinton. They said if Poroshenko went along he would be rewarded with a state visit at the White House. That would have been a boon to Poroshenko, who at the time was locked in a tough campaign for re-election against Volodymyr Zelensky.
Sound familiar? But why didn’t the Trump administration try to extort Poroshenko by withholding arms sales? Well there might have been another quid pro quo.
In Spring 2019, the Trump administration was finalizing plans to provide military aid to Ukraine, including Javelin anti-tank missiles. In early April, a Ukraine anti-corruption prosecutor froze four cases involving Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, the
New York Times reported. Ukraine announced on April 30 that it had received the Javelins.
One of the cases resulted from the mysterious black ledger. In August 2016, Ukraine officials revealed the existence of a secret ledger that appeared to detail payouts totaling $12.5 million to Manafort for his work as a consultant to the former pro-Russian Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych.
That announcement led to Manafort’s resignation as Trump’s campaign manager. Russia then launched a disinformation campaign that claimed the leaks about the ledger showed that some Ukraine officials were meddling in the election on behalf of Clinton.
Initially Prosecutor-General Lutsenko fed information to Giuliani during their early 2019 meetings, including bank records that detailed Burisma’s payments to Hunter Biden, but did not indicate any wrongdoing by the Bidens, according to a New Yorker magazine profile of the Ukrainian prosecutor.
In return, Parnas told the New Yorker that Giuliani offered to help Lutsenko secure meetings in Washington with Attorney General William Barr and other high-level administration officials that would bolster his stature. They also discussed removing U.S. Ambassador Yovanovitch who was seen as an obstacle to their efforts.
Lutsenko told the New Yorker that he suggested to Giuliani that if U.S. authorities launched an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden’s activities in Ukraine, the prosecutor-general’s office would share any relevant information. Lutsenko said he wanted to set up a “joint investigation team” with Barr that would seek to recover billions in Ukrainian assets he believed were held by a U.S. investment firm — a claim the U.S. firm has said is not true.
But Lutsenko soon realized that a meeting with Barr was not happening despite Giuliani’s promises. He told The New Yorker that what seemed most important to Giuliani was to get him, as the Ukraine prosecutor general, to “announce” investigations into the Bidens and into claims of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.
Lutsenko said he didn’t have grounds to announce an investigation into the Bidens under Ukrainian law. Also, Lutsenko said he sensed that President Poroshenko was worried that publicly announcing such investigations would damage Ukraine’s relations with the Democratic Party. Republicans were already enmeshed in conspiracy theories put forth by Russian intelligence that Ukraine had intervened in the 2016 election to help Clinton.
“I was near the red line, but I didn’t cross it,” Lutsenko told The New Yorker. “I was wondering what kind of game he (Giuliani) was playing. I felt like we were getting scammed.”
Now imagine what would have happen if Lutsenko had crossed that red line in March-April 2019 and publicly announced the investigations. It would have come completely out of the blue since there was no knowledge of any whistleblower.
Joe Biden had not even announced his candidacy. There would have been stories in the New York Times, Washington Post and all major news outlets that Biden and his son were under investigation for corruption. How would Joe Biden have reacted to a nasty smear campaign against his sole surviving son who was in a fragile state as he struggled to recover from substance abuse problems?
In February 2019, Biden appeared at a gathering at the University of Delaware to celebrate the naming of the Joseph R. Biden Jr. School of Public Policy. At the event, Biden said he had held a family meeting earlier that month in which there was “a consensus” that he should run for president.
Biden said he was “being prodded” by his wife and two children but acknowledged he had been uneasy about “taking the family through what would be a very, very, very difficult campaign” against Mr. Trump. “I don’t think he’s likely to stop at anything, whomever he runs against,” Mr. Biden said.
So if Ukraine had done Giuliani’s bidding, Biden might very well have decided against entering the race, and if he did he would have launched his campaign with a huge cloud over his head.
On April 21, 2019, Zelensky, running on an anti-corruption agenda, defeated Poroshenko in a presidential run-off election. On April 25, Biden released a video officially launching his presidential campaign.
Giuliani and his associates were back at square one. That set in motion the series of events — including the removal of Ambassador Yovanovitch — leading to Trump’s “perfect” phone call with Zelensky and his eventual impeachment.
After stepping down as prosecutor-general in August 2019, Lutsenko told the Washington Post in an interview the following month that he believed that Hunter Biden did not break any laws in Ukraine.
“From the perspective of Ukrainian legislation, he did not violate anything,” Lutsenko told the Post.
But Giuliani did not give up there. He continued to collect disinformation about the Bidens from Ukrainian sources with links to Russian intelligence. And if Ukraine wouldn’t open the investigation, there were “useful idiots” among Republican lawmakers who were ready to do that.
(To be continued)