They’re leaked communications from the Democratic presidential frontrunner and conservatives are already sharing them all over social media in hopes they’ll help Trump’s re-election campaign. It sounds like the final months of the 2016 election—or the height of 2019’s Burisma madness—but the tapes released on Tuesday are from a new breach.
Andriy Derkach—a Ukrainian politician with a KGB background, a penchant for conspiracy theories, and a friendly relationship with Rudy Giuliani—released a host of conversations between former Vice President Joe Biden and former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. The leaked talks purport to show the two discussing the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor in exchange for American support for a billion dollar loan from the IMF. It’s something Biden himself admitted years ago and it’s since launched unfounded conspiracies about an alleged vendetta Biden had for Ukraine’s former prosecutor general. So where did the recordings come from and what do they show?
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Who leaked the tapes? In Ukraine, news of the Biden-Poroshenko recordings came as a surprise to some in the administration of Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky. One person familiar with the conversations said the call transcripts and recordings were likely held in a difficult-to-reach, classified archive system.
That individual said someone in the administration could have had access to that system and leaked the recordings to the media. The other possibility is that Russia hacked into the system and disseminated the recordings at will, the individual said. “Either way there’s a clear reason why these were leaked,” they said.
Zelensky is set to hold a press conference Wednesday—the second of its kind since he took office—and is likely to face tough questions on the leak.
Derkach, a former member of a pro-Russia party in Ukraine who is known for propagating conspiracy theories and holding lengthy press conferences about his allegations, released the recordings on Tuesday. The Daily Beast previously obtained a dossier of Derkach’s documents accusing Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, or NABU, of being the key institution behind what it describes as Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
It’s just one of a number of exotic conspiracy theories floated by the Ukrainain member of parliament. Derkach has accused Vice President Biden of secretly receiving $900,000 from Burisma for lobbying, claimed that Democrats thwarted his visa application to visit the U.S. in 2020 in order to protect Biden, that American diplomats at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv tried to protect Ukrainian oligarchs from prosecution, and that a Ukrainan secretly funded Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Derkach attended the Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB in Moscow and was for a time a member of the pro-Russia party—the Party of Regions—in the Ukrainian parliament. He also served in the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, in Dnepropetrovsk; his father headed the organization in the late ’90s and early ’80s.
Is it Russia? Speculation about a possible Russian role in obtaining the tapes is understandable given Moscow’s role in the region and its history, but it’s far from proven.
Russian intelligence isn’t above leaking intercepted material in order to embarrass its adversaries. In 2014, Russian intelligence was reportedly behind the leak of a phone call from the Obama administration’s top diplomat in Europe, Victoria Nuland, trashing the European Union about its handling of Ukraine during its revolution to oust a pro-Russian government. But in the murky, cutthroat world of Ukrainian politics, leaked recordings of politicians aren’t unheard of either—one almost recently claimed the career of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s prime minister.
The tapes don’t reveal much beyond what we already know and what Biden has already admitted: the Obama administration, like other Western nations at the time, pressured the Ukrainian government to oust shady prosecutor Victor Shokin and improve its track record on corruption and used a billion dollar loan from the IMF as leverage to get it done.
Instead, the videos released by Derkach to accompany the tapes rely on insinuation and a red highlighter for dramatic intrigue. The heavily edited tapes contain snippets of conversations between Poroshenko and Biden discussing the Obama administration’s push to remove Shokin as prosecutor. Biden’s comments that it’s “critical for [a new prosecutor] to work quickly to repair the damage Shokin did” and half phrases like “extremely strong motivation” and “this is my second step for keeping my promises” from former President Poroshenko are bolded in red with the unexplained implication that they’re incriminating.
A different kind of Ukrainian pipeline: One thing we did learn from this latest set of leaks: the Ukraine-to-America pipeline for Biden dirt is still functioning smoothly.
The Ukraine scandal and the subsequent impeachment of Trump helped to forge a lot of relationships between pro-Russian or just plain opportunistic Ukrainian political players and American right-wing media and activist groups.
It started in the spring of 2019 when the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, went shopping for dirt on Biden in Ukraine and linked up with former prosecutors Victor Shokin and Yuriy Lutsenko, who were only too happy to tell the former New York mayor scandalous(and dubious) stories about Biden’s son, Hunter, and an otherwise obscure gas company, Burisma. Ukrainian oligarchs with legal problems stepped forward to help out American conservatives with the quest to find Biden dirt. Along the way, conservative media outlets like the rabidly pro-Trump OAN began to establish their own relationships with the same players as they sought to discredit the Trump impeachment.
Now, Ukrainian politicians with conspiracy theories to peddle don’t even have to rely on an overzealous Trump ally to introduce them to American audiences. The right-wing media ecosystem already keeps an eye on Ukrainian politics and knows a number of the characters.
Before Zero Hedge and Judicial Watch helped break news of Derkach’s Biden tapes release to American conservatives on Tuesday, they’d spent plenty of time hyping his other conspiracy theories about George Soros and phony secret payments to Biden.
-- Erin Banco contributed reporting
