The Ukraine conspiracy theory that captured President Trump’s imagination and put him in jeopardy of impeachment is more complex and probably a bit older than you think. Before Rudy Giuliani started thundering about it on Fox News, some Ukrainian officials were apparently trying to flag it to the Trump Justice Department. So how did the idea that former Vice President Joe Biden intervened in Ukraine to help his son come about?
Welcome to Rabbit Hole.
Synergy: The Biden allegations appear to have grown out of a related conspiracy theory about Ukraine. With the Mueller Report out of the way, conservative pundits and Trump allies have tried to discredit the Russia investigation and its origins, an effort that culminated in an investigation launched by Attorney General William Barr.
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Trumpworld has long portrayed the Russia investigation as a plot against the president, and the conspiracy theories about it have usually revolved around the FBI as the lead villain. Other conspiracies cast doubt on the cyberforensics that attributed the 2016 hacking campaign to Russia. As The Daily Beast’s Kevin Poulsen reported on Wednesday, one of the theories pushed by Trump in his July phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky centered on a long-running myth that Crowdstrike, the cybersecurity firm that found Russian hackers on Democratic networks, withheld evidence from the FBI.
Patient zero: In March, The Hill opinion writer John Solomon published allegations from Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko that the publication of a secret ledger showing corrupt payments from ousted pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was actually a plot by Ukrainian officials and an anti-Trump “deep state” in the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv to get Hillary Clinton elected in 2016.
Lutsenko, like his predecessor Viktor Shokin, was criticized for slow-rolling corruption investigations against well-connected political figures in the country and only came out with his claims once he’d earned the ire of the State Department for his lackluster efforts at cleaning up Ukrainian politics.
Nevertheless, the opinion piece earned Solomon an opportunity to air the conspiracy theory at the top of Sean Hannity’s show on March 20. The appearance caught the attention of Hannity’s most devoted viewer, Donald Trump, who tweeted about Solomon’s story after the show.
Enter Rudy: Barely a week later, Solomon was back with another column about another prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, and the basic contours of the Biden-Ukraine conspiracy—that Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire its unenthusiastic anti-corruption prosecutor to quash an investigation into a company where his son Hunter sat on the board.
Then Rudy Giuliani got involved.
Giuliani’s first public airing of the Biden-Ukraine allegations happened on Fox News just a week after Solomon’s column on the subject was published. Until that point, Solomon’s theories—about Ukraine interfering in the 2016 election and Biden getting a Ukrainian prosecutor fired—were distinct narratives. In Giuliani’s telling, however, the boundaries between the two stories began to blur. He claimed not to be interested in Biden but an investigation of Ukraine broadly “because I think in the Ukraine, we are going to find a lot of answers for how the Steele dossier was put together.”
Enter Trump: By the end of April, the Ukraine conspiracy theories had reached the president, as evidenced by his appearance on Hannity’s show. Hannity flagged The Hill columnist’s writing on Ukraine for Trump and the president—who’d previously tweeted about Solomon’s Ukraine conspiracy theories on Hannity’s show—at least appeared to act surprised.
“It sounds like very interesting with Ukraine. I just spoke to the new president a little while ago, two days ago, and congratulated him on an incredible race,” Trump told Hannity.
The April phone call Trump referred to, according to The Daily Beast’s reporting on Wednesday, is now the subject of an investigation by House Democrats.
Enter the Justice Department: So the Biden-Ukraine conspiracy story got launched in late March and early April by The Hill’s John Solomon and then gained steam once Giuliani and Fox News hopped on board and got the president’s attention, right?
Well, maybe. Maybe not.
There are hints that the Ukrainian officials who made the allegations at the heart of these conspiracies were pitching these stories a lot earlier than the timeline suggests. And both Solomon and Giuliani suggested that the Justice Department was behind in not jumping on the story.
During Giuliani’s first Fox News interview on the subject in early April, he said, “I got information about three or four months ago” about the alleged 2016 Ukrainian interference plot. Giuliani appeared perplexed that Barr hadn’t taken up the issue. “The Justice Department should investigate this. But it’s up to them to take hold of it. So far, there has been no serious investigation of how these phony allegations started.”
Solomon, too, suggested that the Ukrainian officials at the heart of his stories had tried to flag the attention of the Trump administration earlier and hinted at attempts to get the Justice Department’s interest involved. In an appearance on Hannity’s show in early April, he said his sources had “been trying to get this information to the U.S. Justice Department for more than six months and have not got a receptive audience.”
The Justice Department appeared to confirm at least some outreach from Ukraine on the issue, according to reporting from The New York Times late Wednesday. In a statement to the Times, the department said “certain Ukrainians who are not members of the government have volunteered information” to John Durham, the special counsel appointed by Barr to investigate the origins of the Russia investigation.
By the end of April, Trump was also suggesting that the Justice Department should get involved. “I would certainly defer to the attorney general and we'll see what he says about it,” Trump told Hannity during his April Fox News call-in.
Your wish is Barr’s command: Thanks to the release of a partial transcript for Trump’s July phone call with Zelensky, we know that the Ukrainians pitching stories of deep state perfidy got what they were apparently looking for in late 2018: the attention of the Justice Department and Barr.
“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution, and a lot of people want to find out about that,” Trump said of an alleged Ukrainian investigation into Burisma, where Hunter Biden sat on the board. “So whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great.”
