Philip Bump took a deep dive into Trump (and Barr’s) successful effort to turn Russia’s manipulation of him into a “fake news” story. There’s a lot there and I can only excerpt a piece of it. But you can read the whole thing with this link:
Out there in the broader world, the “Russia collusion hoax” skeptics are abundant, if not a plurality of the public. There has perhaps been no sales pitch offered by Donald Trump that has paid larger dividends than his immediate, long-standing push to cast any questions about Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 campaign as the deranged rantings of weirdo liberals. He’s inculcated an immediate, visceral reaction from members of his base as well as Americans more broadly that when they hear “Russia” in the context of “Trump,” they should dismiss what follows as false and defamatory.
This reaction has provided him an enormous amount of space to avoid very serious questions about the ways in which Russia worked to his benefit while he was in office — and may continue to do so.
There is news on this front. On Monday, the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) brought charges of treason against Oleksandr Dubinsky, a former member of the Ukrainian parliament. Dubinsky is accused of helping Russia to spread “fakes about the alleged interference of Ukrainian high-ranking officials” in the United States’ 2020 presidential elections, according to a Post translation of the charges.
Dubinsky has long been an ally of another Ukrainian politician, Andriy Derkach. The SBU accused Derkach last year of having provided assistance to Russia during its expanded invasion of Ukraine.
Derkach and Dubinsky have been linked to Russian intelligence efforts by the U.S. government, as well. In September 2020, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Derkach for having “waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning U.S. officials in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election, spurring corruption investigations in both Ukraine and the United States designed to culminate prior to election day.” Dubinsky was sanctioned as part of that effort in January 2021, before Trump left office. Last December, Derkach was indicted by the Justice Department.
You probably picked up on the theme here: that Derkach and Dubinsky were involved in efforts to spread false information with the aim of affecting the 2020 election. Those efforts directly involved Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. They are also interwoven with the ongoing effort by Republicans to impugn President Biden, though the line between driving and leveraging doubt about Biden is often blurry.
BY this time you certainly know the story of corrupt prosecutor Viktor Shokin being ousted at the behest at the entire western world and the Republicans trying to claim that Biden did it to protect his son even though Shokin wasn’t investigating him. And you also knowby now that Shokin, who is a real snake,began chatting up Rudy Giuliani pushing the story that Biden pushed him out because of Hunter even though it never made any sense. All this is what precipitated Trump’s “perfect call” demanding the announcement of an investigation into Biden and his first impeachment.
Giuliani was undeterred, however, and kept working this angle, thirstily drinking up every bit of disinformation Russia friendly Ukrainians were giving him.
In October 2020, there was another “disinformation” allegation: the publication of elements of Hunter Biden’s laptop after the owner of the Delaware computer store had given them to Giuliani.
It is known that there was information from Hunter Biden floating around as early as the spring of 2019. Time reported that multiple people in Ukraine had been approached about emails and photos involving Hunter Biden in that time period. Giuliani’s aide Lev Parnas wrote in a letter to House investigators that he’d been approached about digital material belonging to Hunter Biden in June 2019, information allegedly stolen from Biden’s laptop by Russian intelligence and Zlochevsky allies during a trip Biden made to Kazakhstan. (Parnas, it’s worth noting, is himself not an entirely reliable narrator.)
Given the Russian effort in 2016 to affect the presidential election by releasing information stolen from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, the laptop story was quickly identified as a possible similar effort. No evidence has emerged to suggest that it demonstrably wasn’t the result of Hunter Biden abandoning his laptop, with the FBI first taking possession of its contents in late 2019. It is nonetheless noteworthy that Giuliani, having been offered material stolen by Russian actors from Hunter Biden’s laptop in June 2019, ended up in possession of material from Hunter Biden’s laptop in August 2020. Trump, of course, has been eager to present questions about the laptop’s authenticity as further evidence that no valid questions about Russia exist.
This brings us to the through line that Trump demands we ignore, this surfeit of post-2016 activity in which information potentially damaging to Joe Biden has however-tenuous connections to Russian disinformation efforts. Giuliani chatting with Dubinsky and Derkach. The alleged offer of Hunter Biden material is known to be circulating in Ukraine. Questions about the information presented by the confidential informant. Trump has been so effective at poisoning any question about Russia’s effort that questions about what is intended often simply aren’t asked.
In May of this year, Derkach leaked recordings of several calls, including ones between Biden and Ukraine’s former president centered on Shokin. This came after Grassley and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) had raised questions about the bribery claims made to the informant — claims that included an allegation that Zlochevsky was in possession of recordings of calls involving himself and Joe Biden.
Despite Derkach already having been penalized as a Russian agent and charged with federal crimes, OAN ran a segment that month hyping the recordings as inculpatory. Giuliani was interviewed to offer his thoughts.
“Russia, Russia, Russia” he cries and the press corps shrugs its collecting shoulders and moves as quickly as possible away from anything to do with it. But there’s a huge story there.