By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Twitter @bfry1981, YouTube, Facebook)  September 26, 2020; UPATE September 21, 2024: BE SURE to check the Rachel Maddow-produced, Bill Corden-of-Cocaine Cowboy-directed From Russia With Lev (trailer here), the MSNBC documentary focusing mainly the exact same events and people I chronicled five years ago, excerpted below!

This is the Epilogue from my eBook published on November 23, 2019.  For the full context in one place, check out that eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), a detailed look at Trump-Russia and how its Ukraine machinations led to Trump’s impeachment (Sept. 27 update: this eBook also goes into detail on Trump’s long history of scandalous, criminal business dealings, bankruptcies, and financial problems that are of increasing interest since the bombshell report on Trump’s taxes was released on 9/27, and this article of mine offers a less complete version of those misdealings). As far as articles, for more info on Trump’s nefarious, criminal business dealings in Panama and how they connect to pro-Russian Ukrainian political force Viktor Medvedchuk; for specific context on now convicted-by-Mueller’s-team felon Paul Manafort’s work on Ukraine on behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s stooge Viktor Yanukovych alongside Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, one of the top partners in Ukraine for years of Russian mafia “godfather” Semion Mogilevich, himself a right-hand of Putin; for how Konstantin Kilimnik was a link between Manafort and the Kremlin; for how Andrii Artemenko fits into all this; and how Rudy Giuliani’s longstanding ties with Mogilevich-connected Sam Kislin are also of interest, as is the history of Kislin’s old partner Tamir Sapir in Trumpworld, especially the infamous Felix Sater-brokered Bayrock deals, see my articles How Cohen’s and Manafort’s Ukraine Ties Tell the Deeper Story of Trump-Russia and the Mueller Probe and Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind, which link to some more detailed work of mine on some of these individual subjects (the second article contains information on Trump’s banruptcies and business fiascos relevant to the 9/27 major report on Trump’s taxes).  For more on the inner workings of the Burisma issues in Ukraine involving various Ukrainian prosecutors, including Viktor Shokin and Vitaliy Kasko, and how they do—and do not—relate to the Bidens, see my other piece The Untold Story of the Bidens and Burisma.  You can see all my Trump-Russia coverage here.

The Circus Comes to Ukraine and Blows Everything Up

The Government Accountability Institute should be famous, but it is not.  Founded by none-other than Steve Bannon—former maestro of right-wing-propagandistic site Breitbart, former CEO of Trump’s presidential campaign (something of a replacement for Manafort), former top advisor to President Trump, and current orchestrator of a European pan-national right-wing movement—the Florida group was critical in advancing debunked disinformation on the Clintons during the 2016 election cycle.  Its then-and-current president, Peter Schweizer (also an editor at Breitbart), wrote the notoriously error-riddled Clinton Cash.  One thing he was good at, though, was getting mainstream media—including The New York Times—to feature his work prominently and help to get these false stories mass traction: myth would become reality and some of the main talking points used against Hillary Clinton during the election were first given prominence through Schweizer and his manipulations and continued to be amplified by him and his allies all throughout the election.  It was a concerted, deceitful, coordinated effort from right-wing media using dubious financing that depended on co-opting mainstream media outlets for legitimacy, and it succeeded wildly in its aims of damaging Clinton.  Such tactics actually even mirror Kremlin disinformation campaigns.

Defying belief, Schweizer and his Institute are doing the same thing again—and succeeding—with a newer book, Secret Empires, to target the Bidens with debunked disinformation and even eventually succeeded in 2019 in once again co-opting The New York Times for the same thematic purpose as before, among other outlets. 

Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor now acting as Trump’s personal lawyer, picked up on the new Schweizer false narratives late in 2018 and began engaging relevant Ukrainians in person in New York and Ukraine, including ousted former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, to advance them.  He also enlisted one of Shokin’s successors, Yuriy Lutsenko, in January, when Lutsenko made unsubstantiated incriminating claims about Hunter Biden (it was, interestingly, under Lutsenko’s watch that the aforementioned criminal record of Igor Anopolskiy, involved in the Trump Panama fiasco and apparently financially connected to Medvedchuk’s wife, was purged). 

Lustenko has a reputation for using his power as a personal political weapon and for being an amateur, and proved it for Giuliani, agreeing to work to reopen inquiries into Burisma and to focus on Hunter Biden, which he did in March even though he had earlier cleared the Bidens.  He was already clashing on corruption issues with then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch—who had pushed him to act more against corruption—and sought ways to discredit her with Giuliani, hoping his actions against the Bidens would earn him favor from Giuliani and Trump when he was not getting along with Yovanovitch.  Lutsenko accused her of giving him a list of certain untouchables, implying the Bidens, but later admitted he lied about this.

Yet the “political hit job” on Yovanovitch was successful: she was recalled from her post in May, in part because of the disinformation fed to Trump by Giuliani, right-wing media, and others as well as the complicity of her boss, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (it was this silence and inaction on his part that led to the abrupt resignation of Michael McKinley, one of Pompeo’s senior advisors, who has since testified in detail to investigators).  Also, in what could be an example of an earlier inappropriate quid pro quo with the Trump Administration, Lutsenko in early 2018 froze Ukraine’s investigations into Manafort and others related to the Mueller probe right when Trump Administration was deciding whether to provide Ukraine with advanced anti-tank Javelin missiles that could help check Russian armor (Lutsenko was also responsible for allowing Manafort’s colleague Kilimnik to escape to Russia without being asked questions that would have aided Mueller’s investigation).  Lutsenko would later even talk with Giuliani about the unsubstantiated wild conspiracy theory that Manafort was set up by Clinton supporters.  Lutsenko was fired for his misconduct in September, after which he admitted there was no evidence on which to base investigations against the Bidens and is now facing his own criminal investigation for abusing his power.

Another key Ukrainian Giuliani enlisted in this effort, Kostiantyn Kulyk, was Lutsenko’s deputy.  An opportunistic current prosecutor, he is known for corruption, for targeting his political opponents with investigations, and for ties to a Russian intelligence agent who set up a paramilitary unit of pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s east to fight the Ukrainian government.  With Lutsenko’s blessing, Kulyuk went all in on Giuliani’s Biden scheme in March, joining in the smearing of U.S. diplomats (including Yovanovitch) and even Democrats by accusing them of covering up for the Bidens, accusations he has not substantiated.  Also unsubstantiated was an apparently fabricated dossier authored by Kulyuk about the Bidens, purporting to describe the corruption of both Joe and Hunter Biden.  Fittingly, Kulyuk will soon be fired, much in the manner of his old boss.

Giuliani even began trying to coordinate strategy with Pompeo, who would be one of the most senior Trump Administration officials to parrot Biden disinformation and conspiracy theories, in essence encouraging a witch hunt.  Fox News began getting in on the action, too, and a prominent figure at The Hill, John Solomon, began intensely advancing debunked false narratives through a series of columns in the spring of 2019, even coordinating with Giuliani and interviewing Lutsenko.  They were not only attacking the Bidens though: they, too, began attacking Amb. Yovanovitch, spreading unsubstantiated claims that Ukraine had tried to help Clinton win in 2016 (sure to grab Trump’s attention) and repeated unsubstantiated, self-serving claims from Shokin about Biden.  On April 25^th, 2019, the very same day Biden officially began his presidential campaign, Trump himself called into the Fox News show of Sean Hannity—who has been predictably trafficking the Biden smears—and told Hannity he wanted to have his Attorney General, Bill Barr, to look into the Bidens.  The following month, The New York Times would have a major story on the “controversy” involving the Bidens.

As to this problematic May, 2019, New York Times piece: it was co-authored by Kenneth Vogel and Iuliia Mendel; in 2015, Vogel, writing for Politico, seems to have known how to properly characterize information coming from Schweizer, so it is not sure what changed in 2019.  His co-author Mendel was a Ukrainian freelancer at the time and was controversially hired the month after this article was published as the press secretary for freshly-elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, raising serious questions about her background, motives, and conflicts of interest.  The article was a major boost, perhaps even a turning point, in the attention given to the Bidens’ activity in Ukraine.  Earlier, just before Trump’s inauguration and during his Politico days, Vogel was also instrumental in advancing the false Kremlin propaganda that Kilimnik had fed Manafort who, in turn, fed it to Trump that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election and did so to help Clinton and hurt Trump.

A follow-up piece a week later in May by Vogel for the Times even portrayed Giuliani’s trip to Ukraine as a legitimate fact-finding mission and failed, again, to note the problematic, baseless origins of the claims even though Vogel was familiar with Schweizer.  Just to name one example of the mirror effect, even the BBC had a piece on the Bidens and Ukraine a week-and-a-half after.

It was 2016 all over again, just this time Biden was the target of the coordinated assault, not Hillary Clinton.

A conspiracy of lies had been birthed, raised in an accelerated program, and was now of fighting age, much like a clone trooper from Star Wars.  This clone trooper, like in Star Wars, was not produced randomly but was part of an organized plot pushed by people with nefarious, deceptive interests and operating and funded from the shadows.  And that false narrative of the Bidens is what is existing as reality in the eyes of many millions duped by this concerted right-wing disinformation campaign.  For those who can remember Kerry vs. Bush, this takes what happened with GOP attacks in 2004 on John Kerry—referred to as “swiftboating”—and injects that with steroids, especially in utilizing the official powers of the presidency and Executive Branch in doing so.

Within the context of this fabricated reality, Giuliani engaged in gross antics in Ukraine, to be detailed below in a bit.  Trump himself engaged in pushing this nonsense onto Ukrainian President Zelensky during a July 25^th phone call between the two, freezing aid authorized by Congress to Ukraine before the call and verbally pressuring him during it, both as part of a bid to try to force the new Ukrainian president to play along with the alternate-reality Biden fantasy world (and the “Ukraine was behind U.S. election interference” fiction) just to be able to receive aid for his country as it fought Russian aggression.

Trump’s goofy power play almost worked with the desperate Ukrainian president, but pressure from Congress on Trump to release the aid just two days before Zelensky was about to cave in to Trump’s demands in September salvaged propriety.  Even so, Ukraine’s new president still finds himself in an extremely uncomfortable situation with America even as he tries to defuse tensions in his own country.

For many, this moment was a Rubicon that had been crossed.  The actual U.S. government professionals who had spent years running Ukraine policy or enforcing ethical norms—from the State Department to the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, from the National Security Council to the Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General—were aghast at what was happening.  And, throughout Trump’s own Executive Branch, they revolted (including Yovanovitch and William Taylor, whom Firtash tried to sweet talk all those years ago), many coming out already to testify to Congress about Giuliani’s misdeeds and other details, with Trump and his minions attacking them in response in ways that amount to clear witness tampering.  And it is that revolt that has been dominating headlines lately, fueling the impeachment inquiry, and increasing support for impeachment like never before in Trump’s presidency.

Some of what has been happening on the ground in Ukraine involves some important details that may have been reported but have not received nearly as much attention as they deserve, nor been made top stories from top outlets, as they should be.  But these details are explosive in the context of everything outlined in this book and bring disparate elements of this narrative together, so are therefore discussed below.

Rather incredibly, Dmitry Firtash is trying to align his defense with claims made by Trump and Giuliani.  Yet, when one realizes that Firtash switched up his defense team in July to include Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova—a conservative married couple who are prominent media defenders of Trump (often passionately so on Fox News) and who work closely with Giuliani as business partners—this is hardly surprising.  The duo met with Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, also in July, to ask him to end the U.S. effort to extradite Firtash and present a case against the charges levied against their client, but Barr chose not to become involved.  It is worth nothing here that Brady Toensing, the son of Victoria Toensing and stepson of diGenova, began working for Barr’s Department Justice as a senior counsel for the Office of Legal Policy the month before his parents started working for Firtash.  Indications are he will recuse himself from at least some areas from which he should recuse himself, but the potential for conflict of interest here should not be forgotten.

Strangely, none other than the Ukrainian prosecutor ousted by pressure from Joe Biden and others pushing Ukraine on corruption, Viktor Shokin, submitted an affidavit on Firtash’s behalf to his legal team, claiming that Biden had had him fired to protect Hunter Biden and had pressured Ukraine’s government not to allow Firtash back into Ukraine in order to limit Firtash’s political influence (this second point is quite believable since Biden was working against corruption in Ukraine).  The idea was to discredit Biden, and Giuliani has made this affidavit a major pillar of his Biden attacks.

Here is where Soviet-born Americans Lev Parnas (from Ukraine) and Igor Fruman (from Belarus), two partners of Giuliani’s working for him to dig up dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine, enter quite interestingly into our story.

After their dramatic arrest early last month at Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, DC, trying to use one-way tickets to get out of the U.S. and travel to Vienna, Austria, they were front-page and round-the-clock TV material for a while.  They were charged by federal prosecutors from SDNY for breaking campaign finance law to feed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican groups and candidates including a pro-Trump super PAC.  Their indictment mentions that they were funneling money into these campaigns from an unspecified Russian to help gain leverage with certain state and national politicians regarding a recreational marijuana “future business venture” in Nevada and other states.  The indictment also notes that Parnas met with a congressman (former Republican Congressman Pete Sessions of Texas, who had lost to a Democrat in 2018 and is hoping to mount a comeback) to whom money from the scheme had been donated to try to get him to work towards the removal of then-Amb. Yovanovitch from her post, and that this was done at the request of at least one Ukrainian government official.  Sessions would join this effort, and now he has had to respond to federal grand jury subpoenas.

The whole investigation into Parnas and Fruman is part of an ongoing investigation, as Parnas and Fruman were arrested as a matter of necessity because they were leaving the country, not because prosecutors preferred that time for the arrest.  That piece of information and the keeping of several individuals’ identities in the indictment secret indicates that the SDNY prosecutors are holding their cards close to their chest and that more charges can be expected.  And it would hardly be surprising if the unnamed Ukrainian government official(s) were Lutsenko and/or Kulyuk and that this investigation into Parnas and Fruman were actually part the SDNY investigation into Giuliani’s finances and activities in Ukraine and his overall activities involving Parnas and Fruman (incredibly ironic since Giuliani made a name for himself as the SDNY U.S. Attorney), given what will be outlined below.

As part of their efforts in Ukraine as directed by Giuliani (who, it seems more and more, was in turn directed by Trump), Parnas and Fruman connected Giuliani with Shokin late in 2018.  We also just learned that, according to Parnas’ current lawyer (who claims his client has text messages and other documentation backing this up), at or near the same time, Shokin met in Vienna with, of all people, egregious Trump apologist and disinformation-and-conspiracy-theory all-star Devin Nunes, the disgraced leader of the Republican side on the House Intelligence Committee, which has been the recent front line in the impeachment fight (some of his most controversial efforts involved baselessly attacking the legitimate FISA surveillance of Carter Page).  Nunes was seeking to combine his efforts to dig up “information” on the Bidens with Giuliani’s intrigues, along with efforts to boost a discredited, baseless conspiracy theory pushed by the Kremlin that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the 2016 U.S. election meddling.   Nunes also met with Parnas around this time and directed his staffer, Derek Harvey, to coordinate efforts with Parnas, and they met repeatedly after.  Such meetings were confirmed by Solomon, whose “reporting” was a basis for some of Nunes’s lines of inquiry.  Nunes engaged and directed this activity after the 2018 midterm elections—in which Democrats took the House back from Republicans—but before the new Congress was seated specifically in order to avoid having to reveal details about his trips and meetings to the incoming Democratic leadership.   It is obviously extremely problematic that, in the public impeachment hearings exploring all of this, the highest-ranking Republican present during and helping to lead these public hearings has not disclosed that he was involved in the very efforts that are currently under the impeachment microscope.  It should be noted that, concurrent with Nunes in recent days spewing these lies about Ukraine on the record at these hearings, Putin himself exclaimed “Thank God, no one is accusing us of interfering in the US elections anymore; now they’re accusing Ukraine.”

We also know that in January of 2019, Giuliani asked the State Department to grant Shokin a U.S. visa: State said no, so then Giuliani asked the White House, and an official there also said no after discussing with State.  Giuliani also met Lutsenko with both Parnas and Fruman that same January in a meeting arranged by the pair, who engaged frequently with the then-prosecutor.  In February, the pair tried pressuring Poroshenko in person along with Lutsenko to announce an investigation into the Bidens, just months before Poroshenko lost to Zelensky.  They offered a formal state visit to Washington for Poroshenko in return—something he was actively seeking—and present at this meeting was Lutsenko.  Such a state visit in Washington could have bolstered Poroshenko’s support at home just before an election, but it never came and Poroshenko was crushed by Zelensky just two months later in April (voters had tired of Poroshenko, hamstrung as he was by competing interests and falling short of what he had promised).  In March, Parnas was the guy who orchestrated Lutsenko’s interview with The Hill conducted by Solomon in which Lutsenko disseminated lies he later retracted.  Parnas’s intro to Solomon, in turn, was facilitated by Rep. Pete Sessions, and Parnas and Solomon continued to coordinate after the Lutsenko interview.  Adding to the idea of a coordinated campaign, Solomon is represented legally by Toensing and diGenova; clearly, Solomon’s role is far beyond that of a just a writer.

Just days before Zelensky’s inauguration in May, Parnas and Fruman had a meeting with Serhiy Shefir, a member of Zelensky’s “inner circle;” according to Parnas’s lawyer, in that meeting Parnas laid out a list of demands: the Zelensky Administration must announce an investigation into the Bidens or both Vice President Mike Pence would not attend Zelensky’s inauguration and the U.S. would freeze aid for Ukraine, and these demands were made by Parnas on orders from Giuliani. 

In the end, Trump ordered Pence not to attend Zelensky’s inauguration, a clear a sign of retaliation for non-compliance with these demands.

Fruman and Giuliani deny the above account, at least so far; Fruman is represented by one of Trump’s former White House lawyers, John Dowd, who represented Trump as his top lawyer during the Mueller probe but ultimately resigned over Trump ignoring his advice and what he viewed as Trump’s risky approach to the whole situation.  With this current situation, Dowd tried to get Parnas to claim executive privilege to not have to answer questions, but that clearly did not happen.  Fruman’s other main lawyer is Todd Blanche, who also represents Manafort.

Sherfir, now President Zelensky’s top advisor, confirmed the May meeting but rather coyly said military aid, specifically, was not discussed (giving him a lot of wiggle room), but this statement, like Zelensky’s affirmation that no one pressured him, must be seen in the context of the extraordinary situation in which the Zelensky Administration finds itself.  Obviously, Zelensky is trying as hard as he can to appease and not to alienate Trump and must walk a delicate line with all his public statements relating to America since the brand new politician has been sucked into impeachment proceedings in an election year, so you can expect him to try not to say things to make either Trump and Republicans on the one hand or Democrats on the other hand think he is helping the other side, at least up to the point Trump looks as if he really will withhold aid or do something worse, as has kind of been happening already.  And all this happens while the young Ukrainian leader faces immense overall challenges in Ukraine.

Parnas and Fruman specifically clearly helped facilitate meetings designed to pressure, and to get Giuliani access to, Zelensky and others close to him (and Poroshenko before him) and were therefore very much a part of setting in motion the July phone call between Trump and Zelensky, with the May disputed meeting only the most emphatic example of the duo’s pressure.

And yet, ties get even more incestuous as far as our threads are concerned.  What received less attention was that one of the two associates of Giuliani, Lev Parnas, was working as a translator for Firtash’s legal team, but both Parnas and Fruman had worked for Firtash before “in an unspecified capacity.”  Toensing, diGenova, and Parnas were trying together to dig up dirt on Democrats with ties to Ukraine, involved Solomon in these coordinated efforts, and Parnas has even tried to portray Firtash as a victim.  Federal prosecutors working on Firtash’s case on Chicago for which the U.S. is supposed to extradite him reached out to their counterparts in New York about the relationship of Firtash with Parnas and Fruman.  The Chicago prosecutors had been investigating their ties to Firtash for some time and when the pair was arrested, they were heading to Vienna; Giuliani was supposed to fly there the following day, but canceled after the arrest.  The trips were to coordinate a meeting with Shokin to prep him for an interview he would do with Sean Hannity from Vienna.  But they could also easily have been trying to engage Firtash.  Either way, it is clear that the two camps of Firtash/pro-Russian Ukrainians and Team Giuliani/Trump were now coordinating, uniting on messaging and strategy.  Giuliani has even admitted to personally looking into Firtash as a resource, and clearly, Russian media along with America’s right-wing media are all too happy to further these narratives and provide assists. 

Firtash’s right-wing lawyers see any way to discredit Biden as corrupt and as going after both Shokin and Firtash for personal political reasons as the best way to help their client other than getting charges dropped.  Firtash even paid diGenova and Toensing $1 million to find incriminating information on Biden.  In this context, if Shokin (rewriting history, Trump is now saying that Shokin was “very good” and that it was “unfair” to fire him) and Firtash are remade into the good guys, then Biden must the bad guy and Trump benefits.

Reforms Biden pushed for intensely on corruption and for the gas sector may have cost Firtash up to $400 million a year, and he feels a rage towards Biden, calling him an “overlord” who wielded inappropriate and “enormous” influence on the Ukrainian government after Yanukovych’s ouster.  Lacking self-awareness, Firtash and his team seem not to have considered that such assertions, if anything, are a vindication of Biden’s efforts to fight corruption in Ukraine.  But maybe they are instead playing to an audience of one, hoping like so many others that winning over Trump is enough and will result in interference on his part that might save Firtash from extradition.  It seems Biden is to Firtash what Hillary Clinton was to Putin: his main American enemy, at least in his mind. 

Parnas and Fruman were also concurrently trying to pursue a change at the top of Naftogaz along with replacing Yovanovitch, with both moves designed to help them personally sell gas to Naftogaz and to benefit Firtash.  They worked with and received funding from Firtash towards this effort, advocating for the wiping out of the exiled gas tycoon’s debts with Naftogaz.  The current CEO of Naftogaz, Andriy Kobolev, is seen by Ukrainians and Westerners as a star of Ukraine’s anti-corruption efforts and had been tough on Firtash, accusing Firtash of illegally keeping some $2 billion since 2017 by not making required payments to Ukrainian state-owned companies.  Since Yovanovitch was supporting Kobolev, Parnas and Fruman thought getting rid of her would help them deal with Kobolev more easily.

Despite Parnas and Fruman being photographed repeatedly with Trump and working closely with Giuliani on behalf of Trump, Trump denies knowing either of them.  This has apparently hurt the feelings of Parnas, who now seems to be cooperating with investigators.

A third associate of Giuliani’s we should well remember: Ukrainian-born Sam Kislin, whom U.S. authorities believe is an important figure in the Mogilevich Russian mafia outfit and who did business with Trump both with Tamir Sapir—strongly linked to Sater’s Bayrock—and by selling a Trump condo to a future member of Ukraine’s Party of Regions.  Kislin also supported Giuliani politically by raising several million in fundraising for him and served on important New York City bodies at the behest of Giuliani while he was mayor.  Giuliani had denied in 1999 knowing that the U.S. government considered Kislin a serious Russian mafia member or associate, but that claim is impossible for him to maintain in recent years, when he engaged Kislin to help in these Ukraine shenanigans. 

See, Kislin, too, is neck-deep in the current Ukraine drama.  In January 2018, Kislin tried to push then Amb. Yovanovitch to assist in helping to release millions in funds in a Cyprus shell company of which he was the current owner.  That company held part of some $1.5 billion Yanukovych had criminally looted from Ukraine.  His effort to unfreeze the funds had, strangely, earlier been blocked by Lutsenko, of whom Kislin alleged improper conduct.  This mirrors a similar effort from another Ukrainian oligarch with another Cyprus-based shell company holding some of Yanukovych’s ill-gotten fortune, an oligarch named Pavel Fuks (or Fuchs) who was also tied to Giuliani and one of several attempts to make a Trump Tower happen in Moscow.  Fuks, who was introduced to Trump by Tamir Sapir, was also more recently involved in helping Giuliani go after the Bidens.  The shell companies owned by Kislin and Fuks held $20 million and $160 million, respectively, primarily in government bonds Ukrainian authorities now say were issued illegally by Yanukovych’s government.  Kislin had purchased his company, Opalcore Limited, in November, 2016, the very month Donald Trump was elected president.  In what seems to be a shady scheme to take money that belongs to the Ukrainian people, Kislin claims he did not know that the assets were frozen when he bought Opalcoare and alleged procedural malpractice by Ukrainian government officials during the freezing process, hoping that claim would lead to them being unfrozen and requesting Yovanovitch get involved to this end.

But Kislin is also currently advising Giuliani on Ukraine, is meeting with Ukrainian government officials, and seems to even have been an informal emissary for Trump there on the Biden smear campaign while also agitating against Poroshenko as the former president, too, is under investigation there.  Kislin is now apparently also “good friends” with Andrii Artemenko (to quote Artemekno himself), with the two coordinating and exchanging information on some of these efforts.  Somehow, Artemenko is now living in Washington, DC, and is a regular guest on Kremlin-run television, offering negative takes on Ukraine’s current leaders and now also pushing for a probe into Hunter Biden.  It was reported in October that Kislin was in communication with the House investigators, who are interested in his Ukraine activity in relation to Giuliani’s efforts.

Amid all of this context of clear, overt political pressure on Ukraine from the Trump Administration, in the middle of October, Ukraine’s new prosecutor general announced that he was auditing one previous case concerning Burisma’s owner, Zlochevsky, and that Hunter Biden could be fair game even though neither Burisma nor Hunter were specific points of focus, noting that this audit was a part of a general audit of fifteen high-profile cases handled by the previous administration.  The shady General Prosecutor’s Office is in the midst of a massive overhaul the Zelensky Administration hopes will fix the corruption that made it untrustworthy in the eyes of Ukrainians and Westerners alike, taking away its investigative powers and shifting them to other departments.  Kasko has been restored and promoted to the number-two spot in the office, and the new top prosecutor, Ruslan Ryaboshapka, has a history of working for transparency.  Different departments are expected to take up several cases involving Manafort, but there is worry that much of the information on them and other cases will be lost in the transition.  Perhaps this is in part a shrewd move to stall any findings during a turbulent time in American politics that Ukraine’s new president fears could provoke serious retaliation from Trump should either bad things come out about Manafort or the Burisma probe yields no dirt, likely outcomes given what is known that could leave the country exposed to the rage of President Trump.

In the interest of full disclosure, Brian interned for Joe Biden from September-December, 2006.

This article is an excerpt from Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here). Also be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

© 2019-2024 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) December 18, 2019; also see Brian’s related article on the diabolical efforts by right-wing media, Trumpworld, and the Kremlin to distort the truth and spin unfounded speculation as fact in their quest to destroy Hunter and Joe Biden, the latter whom they feared for good reason: The Nexus of American Right-Wing and Kremlin Disinformation Exposes Trump-Russia’s Mechanics, also excerpted and adapted from his eBook A Song of Gas and Politics, about how the Kremlin and right-wing media unite to spread disinformation on the Bidens and Ukraine

This article has been adapted from Brian’s November 23, 2019 eBook, details of which are given at the end of this article.

CAMBRIDGE—Today, as Donald Trump becomes the third president in U.S. history to be impeached by the House of Representatives and only the second in the modern era, Republicans will try hard—very hard—to make proceedings that should be about the conduct of the sitting president of the United States about unfounded, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about the Bidens and Burisma instead via gaslighting, a style of disinformation long-favored by Russia and now, increasingly, Republicans and Trump.

A good starting point to begin this exploration is by demolishing that which should not even discussed by respectable outlets.  Apart from the media not even attempting to convey the larger picture of the whole Trump-Russia saga, of which the Ukrainian issues driving impeachment are just a part, another gross media misfire is the “coverage” of how Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, is “involved” in this new phase of the Trump-Russia überascandal… except there is no evidence he is involved, none at all of this conspiracy theory pushed by President Donald Trump and his political allies, as any of multiple respectable fact-checks will show (no need to repeat their fine work here); Hunter Biden’s “involvement” rests on two paper mâché pillars: Republican bonfires of lies and the media pouring gasoline onto these fires.

To be clear, this is classic Kremlin-style disinformation, especially the propagandistic, perhaps libelous lie that Hunter Biden warrants some sort of criminal probe because of wholly unsubstantiated allegations of “corruption.”  Hunter Biden is no Eric Trump; while he has had some problems and his life has not been as soaring as that of Beau Biden—the close brother of Hunter and beloved son of Joe stolen before his time by cancer in 2015—Hunter did manage to pay his own way through Georgetown—even working odd jobs— and would eventually graduate from Yale Law School.  Hunter’s perch on the board of Burisma—a Ukrainian gas/energy company—reeks of the standard favoritism shown scions of elites, a banal favoritism devoured almost accidentally like a minnow by the speeding great white shark that is the over-the-top corruption of the mafia-like Trump clan, whose members give the impression that they deliberately broadcast their misdeeds, as if to do so is a boast along the lines of a lion roaring that wants everyone to know it can get away with breaking the rules.

Now, for the actual history.

In an election held just months after President Viktor Yanukovych—Russian president Vladimir Putin’s stooge-in-chief in Ukraine—fled in 2014 during the (Euro)Maidan Revolution, the pro-Western chocolate oligarch Petro Poroshenko was elected Ukraine’s president.  Even with an annexation in Crimea and war in the east, corruption was obviously a central issue for the new president, and it would need to be combatted effectively in order for Western companies to feel comfortable being more engaged, and for the EU to integrate more, with Ukraine.

As part of the Western effort to engage and push Ukraine on reform and especially corruption and as the point-person on all things Ukrainian for the Obama Administration, then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden in December, 2015, made his fourth personal visit to Kiev since the (Euro)Maidan revolution.  Reform on corruption had stalled and Biden called Ukraine’s leaders out on this in an impassioned address (highlights and full speech) to the parliament, telling them they were not doing nearly enough on corruption and that the time to act was now.  Corruption is specifically how Russian President Putin plays his game in Ukraine, while fighting it is what has been advancing U.S. interests there. 

Of particular target for Ukrainians and Westerners desiring reform—including Biden—was the prosecutor general’s office, especially Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

Shokin was a close, longtime ally of Poroshenko, and Poroshenko needed all the help he could get, having come to power in a deeply divided country torn apart by the Russian annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region and civil war in the country’s east, forcing him to engage in a delicate balancing act.  The deep divisions in Ukraine were hamstringing reform efforts, and Shokin was seen as a person who could balance different regional interests and avoid inflaming tensions, but the cost was his and his office’s blatant, total inaction on justice for abuses of both the previous and current governments: his energy was simply not there in fighting corruption in general.  The relatives of the protesters killed by the ousted Yanukovych’s security forces were especially vocal in their outrage at the inaction, and while Shokin was not terrible relative to others previously in his position, at that time, with the world watching, it seemed Ukraine really did need a crusader in that post.

But Biden’s message was complicated because, since April 2014, his son Hunter Biden had been on the board of Burisma, Ukraine’s largest private energy company.  There is zero credible evidence produced by anyone that has shown Hunter Biden acted or intended to act in any way that was inappropriate while on Burisma’s board, let alone illegal, nor that he tried to engage his vice-president-father to influence U.S. policy in any way so as to benefit himself or Burisma.  And the Burisma investigations that became dormant under Shokin had only involved activity that had occurred before Biden’s son was ever even on Burisma’s board.  But Burisma was owned by Yanukovych’s former natural resources minister, Mykola Zlochevsky, concurrently while he was in Yanukovych’s government, presenting a clear conflict of interest during his ministry tenure. 

Yet it was not clear to Ukraine’s people as his ownership was a secret kept hidden by secret Cyprus bank accounts.  It was at a conference at the end of April, 2014, focused on efforts to track down money Yanukovych and his circle had fleeced from Ukraine, when the UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) announced it had obtained a court order to freeze some $23 million in these accounts of Zlochevsky’s.  Ukraine’s Deputy Prosecutor General with an excellent record on fighting corruption, Vitaliy Kasko, pushed hard for his office to respond to British investigators’ requests for information on Zlochevsky, Burisma, and the $23 million, but to no avail: Shokin’s office stonewalled the most important requests and covered up for Zlochevsky, the case falling apart over time, with a British judge ruling in early 2015 that the SFO did not have the evidence it needed and unfreezing Zlochevsky’s assets.  And while these legal proceedings were unfolding, Joe Biden’s son was on Burisma’s board.

Yet Joe Biden’s message about corruption in Ukraine was still heard and he was not speaking alone: Shokin’s holding his position was holding up billions of dollars in EU and IMF aid, and Biden represented the will of the United States Government (including prominent Republican senators), the EU, the IMF, Kiev Mayor and former star boxer Vitali Klitschko, Ukrainian reform activists, and the Ukrainian people (polling had his support at a dismal 3.5%) who were all calling for this Prosecutor General Shokin to be removed from power.  Kasko even resigned in protest at Shokin’s and the office’s overall gross inaction two months later in March, 2016. The following month and three months after Biden’s visit, Shokin was finally removed from power.

Sure, Hunter being on Burisma’s board did not look good, but appearances can be deceiving.  For one thing, under Hunter’s watch, in 2016 and 2017, Burisma made at least two payments totaling at least $7 million in back taxes to address investigations into tax evasion, and all investigations into Burisma were closed, though, admittedly, some of the circumstances seem murky.  Furthermore, once the these investigations were closed, Burisma began formally cooperating with The Atlantic Council, a NATO-affiliated think tank that promotes democratic values and cooperation between democracies. Perhaps (far?) more should have been done (in principle?), but over $7 million in back taxes is a lot more than the zero that had been obtained under Shokin, and that money was obtained after a far more aggressive investigative stance than existed previously, even if such efforts could have been more vigorous.  To Joe Biden’s credit, asking for a prosecutor that would look into corruption, including into Burisma, could actually hurt the company that was paying his son by having a serious prosecutor who would re-open the Burisma cases, which is what happened after Shokin was removed.  Much the opposite of future-U.S. President Donald Trump with himself and his family, then, Joe Biden put his and his son’s interests aside and did his job as vice president by acting in the interests of the United States and its friend Ukraine and countering the interests of a nemesis in Russia that was acting counter to U.S. interests.

In these years, as has been mentioned before, Poroshenko’s government was only able to make progress by balancing Ukraine’s different political factions, with his allies’ positions in the Ukrainian parliament quite precarious, and the key takeaway here is that, both after Vice President Biden’s and Hunter Biden’s involvement, in the case of Burisma, Ukraine’s government and the company still cooperated and made progress on corruption and accountability.  In the end, while we do not know to what degree if any Hunter Biden was specifically involved the Atlantic Council move, as the efforts of Republicans to paint Hunter Biden negatively rely entirely on very weak circumstantial associations, the key here is that the only circumstantial evidence we do have shows that the situation with corruption got better, not worse, after Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma and after Joe Biden’s request to remove Shokin was honored.

Another obvious reality is that Trump, Republicans, the Russians, their agents, and Shokin himself have lied, engaging in a chaotic assault on reality by subscribing to not the obvious reality but its opposite: not that Biden had put his son’s position at risk to push for a prosecutor general in Ukraine that would actually tackle corruption, but the lie that Shokin was actively looking into Burisma and that Biden had him removed to protect his son and Burisma’s corruption.  That lie—we already established it was completely unsupported by any substantive evidence, and Shokin can certainly not be thought of as credible—has become the mantra in a Kremlin-style disinformation campaign of the Republican party, Trump, his White House, Giuliani and his associates, and Shokin himself, along with the Kremlin and its media arms joined with right-wing American media, much to their discredit and disgrace.  The even bigger disgrace is the impression of false equivalence put out by all too many of the more respectable outlets.

The favoritism shown Hunter Biden is far from rare and he is far from the poster-child of nepotism, but there is a place for a conversation about his preferential treatment.  Yet that place is not the 2020 election cycle, since the actions of the father—a different person and regarding whom zero evidence exists he did anything other than put aside thoughts of his son’s job with Burisma when engaging in Ukraine policy as a representative of the United States Government advancing the interests of the United States and its ally Ukraine—are not the actions of the son and since the Trump family, whom Biden hopes to oust from the White House in November 2020, are in a league of their own crassness in American national-level politics.  The counternarrative pushed by Trump, Giuliani, their associates in the U.S. and Ukraine and by extremist Kremlin and American media fly in the face of clear reality, and that their counternarrative at all even has a major place in the public discussion is already a defeat.  And with more and more of an unholy alliance between Kremlin media, American right-wing media, and even media in other countries, this will only get worse.

In the interest of full disclosure, Brian interned for Joe Biden from September-December, 2006.

This article has been adapted from Brian’s new eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook; preview here

© 2019 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) November 24, 2019 (Update: December 7, 2019: we now know Giuliani has been meeting in Ukraine with Andrii Artemenko and is still meeting with Lutsenko, Kulyuk, and Shokin!; December 19: added bullet-points)

WESTON — Herein is a preview/excerpt of Brian Frydenborg’s brand new eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia: An Epic Saga with Companion Sections in Fifteen Parts, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials

Available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook

(You don’t have to own a Kindle or Nook, you can use free apps to read!)

• The media has consistently miscovered “Ukrainegate,” portraying it at worst as a separate scandal from Trump-Russia/the Mueller probe, to, generally, at best, a related scandal. 
• But a deeper exploration reveals Ukraine has been at the center of Trump-Russia from almost the beginning.
• Not only are the same issues involved going back to even before Ukraine’s Orage Revolution (2004-2005) a decade-and-a-half ago, but many of the characters involved before in Trump-Russia and of note in the Mueller probe have ties to the people involved now in more recent Ukraine developments, or, it is even the same people involved in both.
• The saga involves two main threads:
  1. Russian mafia and Kremlin-linked people (often the exact same thing) connecting with Trump and/or people who were close or would be close to Trump, starting in the 1980s and through the present.  Central to all this is Russian mob boss Semion Mogilevich, close to Putin and who had many operatives in the U.S. making contact with Trumpworld.
  2. A massive Eurasian gas scheme that seems to have been planned by Mogilevich and other mobsters and the Russian government since at least the mid-1990s, only a few years into Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union.  The scheme amounted to billions of dollars and was designed to corrupt Ukraine’s ruling class to bend to Putin’s will and keep Ukraine under de facto Russian control.
• Multiple people involved in both schemes would cross over and join the other or become entwined in both.
• This has culminated with the now infamous Rudy Giuliani forays into Ukraine’s politics, with his and Trump’s efforts to get Ukrainian officials—including multiple presidents—to smear former Vice President and current 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden based on disinformation and propaganda with zero factual basis.
• The smears on Biden are based on circumstantial associations with no evidence, but the only evidence we do have—circumstantial or otherwise—is that, after both Joe Biden and Hunter Biden got involved, there was positive movement on corruption issues, including with Burisma, the gas the company on the board of which sat Hunter during the positive developments.
• Biden’s involvement in Ukraine was actually part of the West’s overall effort to reduce corruption in Ukraine and, therefore, to weaken the tools by which Putin dominated Ukraine and kept it from reducing corruption and orienting itself with the West politically, economically, and militarily, despite the wishes of Ukraine’s people.
• Essentially, Ukraine is the center of the main front line in the New Cold War between the West and Russia.
• In this New Cold War, Trump’s actions are essentially handing victories over to Putin.
• Putin’s efforts amount to an effort to corrupt the U.S. system through Trump to change it into what Ukraine resembled under Putin’s old stooge, Viktor Yanukovych, who was deprived of a cheated victory in the Orange Revolution (2004-2005) and driven out of power in the (Euro)Maidan Revolution (2013-2014).
• Since then, Ukraine has been plunged into occupation, annexation, and civil war, all orchestrated by Putin.
• The efforts by Trump to force Ukraine into helping him attack his political rival, Joe Biden, center on Ukraine’s desperate efforts to secure military and diplomatic support in its struggle against Putin’s Russia.
• Most tellingly, the people against whom Biden and the West worked against to fight corruption in Ukraine have untied with Giuliani and Trump to advance Trump’s and Putin’s interests at the expense of Western influence, democracy, and transparency. 

These issues that have now exploded this all into impeachment for Trump show the union of the two main threads in ways that make the corruption and duplicitousness of Trump and the bad actors in Ukraine painfully obvious, erasing any doubt about whether or not the Trump Administration and the Kremlin are working to advance their shared goals at the expense of longstanding U.S. interests in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Preface

Trump’s current Ukraine insanity is just an extension of old Trump-Russia and the media still does not know how to cover it.

As the Hunter Biden “story” keeps receiving attention, the myopic mainstream media—just as in 2016—is unable to present a coherent big-picture understanding of what is happening or how things fit together.  In a stunning lack of self-awareness, its top news outlets are once again playing into Trump’s and Putin’s hands, sabotaging the Democrats and spreading Kremlin and Republican disinformation.  The roots of much of this lie with the media’s overall failure both to understand the bigger picture of the Trump-Russia saga and, in part as a result, to realize that these “recent” Ukraine scandals are not something new so much as a continuation of the old Trump-Russia saga that was the focus of the Mueller probe.

The only way to get anything approaching a full sense of what is going on with Ukraine, Trump, Russia, and the media is to painstakingly trace the threads of corruption and Russian influence operations related to Putin’s Ukraine drama, Putin’s and his top mafia boss’s co-opting of Trumpworld, and the actors involved throughout the many stages of this overall saga.  These threads can be traced from their origins in the 80s and 90s directly into today’s White House and the battlefields in Ukraine.  Only then will the centrality of Ukraine to the whole Trump-Russia saga be understood, only then can the full scale of the horror be comprehended, but it can and must be.  The threads are solid and come together to form a powerful and clear line of remarkable influence of the Russian government in Moscow’s Kremlin and Russian mafia into the major players, policies, and decisions of the Trump White House.  As this exploration will make clear, simple logic and the sheer amount of billowing smoke plumes coming from so many points obviously show that Trump has been raised up and co-opted by Russian influence to the point of being an asset—whether willingly or if he is too stupid to realize it, he is a “useful idiot”—for Putin and his allies.  Even if the actual flames are obscured, the heat can be felt as we choke on the smoke: those fires still exist and are presented here even if most of the top media news outlets, playing Trump’s and Russia’s game in their inability to sustain focus, have largely missed these conflagrations.

Table of Contents (Main chapters)

I. Introduction: Trump and Putin, Playing the Media Like a Fiddle

II. A Song of Gas and Politics Prologue: How a Meeting in Tel Aviv May Have Set Up Two Decades of Ukrainian History

III. How A Russian Web Enveloped Trumpworld Starting in the 1980s & Kept Expanding

IV. A Song of Gas and Politics Part One: The Chess Pieces Begin to Move

V. The Collapse of Russia’s European Influence

VI. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Two: A Game of Revolution

VII. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Three: Putin’s and Manafort’s Gaslighting of Ukrainian Politics

VIII. Russian and Former Soviet Money Rife with Putin Ties Comes to America and Trumpworld when Trump Is Hurting for Cash

IX. The Curious Case of Michael Cohen: Linking Trump and Ukraine

X. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Four: Putin’s Triumph in Ukraine

XI. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Five: Hubris and Revolution

XII. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Six: The Untold Story of the Bidens and Burisma

XIII. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Seven: Manafort Crosses the Not-So-Narrow Sea & a Shady “Peace” Deal, or, How Our Saga’s Two Main Threads Unite

XIV. A Song of Gas and Politics Epilogue: Trump and Giuliani Bring Everything Together Full Circle (but the Media Misses It)

And, included below in this preview: XV. Conclusion: Collusion Beyond What Was Imagined and the Need for a Media Self-Correct

“Chaos Is a Ladder”

What makes Giuliani’s escapades in Ukraine so useful is that they present amazing illustrations of the overall dynamics of Trump-Russia, with all the key elements.  There is some sort of past event or incident involving someone who stands up to Putin and Trump—in this case Joe Biden and his push against Shokin specifically and corruption in Ukraine in general—and then the gaslighting begins.  Reality is turned on its head and then barely tangential facts—e.g., Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma—are blown enormously out of proportion.  A mostly demonstrably false narrative is built from a few tiny kernels of truth to try to tear down an opponent of both Putin and Trump in ways that help advance both their interests, in this case helping Trump in the 2020 election and seeing that Putin’s influence is extended in Ukraine.  The false reverse narrative is repeated and amplified so much that it becomes reality for a great many and even more so casts doubt where its creators want it to be: whether the e-mails of Hillary Clinton or Biden’s dealings in Ukraine, the fantasy narrative forms the backdrop for all other discussion.  People not even in the camps of Putin or Trump will buy into the narrative, then, or at least let it enter their calculus.  The very propagation of the narrative puts those slandered by it on the defensive, forcing them to adjust and react on ground not of their choosing.  What is constant throughout are lies, repetition, deliberate manipulation of the media, corruption, co-opting of parties that should be more neutral—the media, the State Department, Ukraine’s presidency and prosecutor generals—and an emphasis on factional loyalty best exemplified by following the lead of a cultish leader.  Whether Trump’s 2016 campaign or Putin’s second presidency, this is how these two and their camps operate.

If we may quote Game of Thrones again, both Putin and Trump are strong devotees of the Littlefinger School of Politics, which proclaims that “Chaos is a ladder.”  Confusion, disinformation, war, they all can be useful to those who know how to manipulate them for personal gain.  Ideals like democracy and the rule of law?  At Lord Petyr Baelish’s School, they are simply “a story we agreed to tell each other over and over ’till we forget that it’s a lie.”  Fools cling to such ideals and when they try to manage the chaos with such “illusions,” they lose.  They fail to realize the main truth: “The climb is all there is,” that all that matters is the pursuit of power.  This is how Trump and Putin live and how they govern.  They actively seek to undermine, then destroy, ideals and institutions so that all that remains is horse-trading.  In a world stripped away of ideals, the raw power of Trump, Putin, and their models suddenly become far more attractive. 

Trump has helped make this the true battle of American politics now, just as that is what Putin has done in Russia and what he aims to bring back to Ukraine, which he is currently doing with Team Trump’s help.  Zelensky is a perfect example: the young idealist is trapped, for either he assists Trump in his quest to damage Biden, thereby undermining the very ideals and personality of Zelensky’s that got him elected—turning himself into the opposite of that on which he campaigned, corrupting himself and Ukraine’s institutions in a way that serves Putin’s long-term goal to reestablish corruption as the fuel of Ukrainian politics—or he stands strong on his principles in a way that earns Trump’s disfavor, causing Ukraine to lose aid and support when his nation is spread thin standing up to Russian war, occupation, and corruption.  Zelensky loses no matter what, and Putin gains no matter what.  All that is required are lies, their repetition, and a willing partner in power: Kuchma and Yanukovych before, and now the far more powerful American president.  Trump truly is the biggest seed of doubt about the West Putin could ever hope to realistically have planted in such a position of power: nations and factions that work with Trump are still repelled by him and, therefore, the United States; they move away from the U.S. in their hearts and see working with America more as a naked power move than being representative of any true affinity or value system.  In doing so, they are more open, at least subconsciously, to the Russian model.  And since Trump clearly favors Russia, being closer to Trump brings them closer to Russia, too.  And if they move away from Trump and the America?  Russia is there, too, watching and waiting: you make your devil’s bargain one way or another, and Putin is the devil behind it all.

To be sure, Putin plays Littlefinger’s game (spoilers in that link) far better, but Trump is still dangerously good at enough elements of it to succeed.   From the war in Syria to Brett Kavanaugh, from border detentions to journalists’ assassinations, pretty much any issue for either man is approached with this gaslighting model.

As noted, Trump, Republicans, Russians, their agents, and Shokin himself have lied, engaging in a chaotic assault on reality by subscribing to not the obvious reality but its opposite: not that Biden had put his son’s position at risk to push for a prosecutor general in Ukraine that would actually tackle corruption, but the lie that Shokin was actively looking into Burisma and that Biden had him removed to protect his son and Burisma’s corruption.  That lie—we already established it was completely unsupported by any substantive evidence, and Shokin can certainly not be thought of as credible—has become the mantra in a Kremlin-style disinformation campaign of the Republican party, Trump, his White House, Giuliani and his associates, and Shokin himself, along with the Kremlin and its media arms joined with right-wing American media, much to their discredit and disgrace.  The even bigger disgrace is the impression of false equivalence put out by all too many of the more respectable outlets.  The favoritism shown Hunter Biden is far from rare and he is far from the poster-child of nepotism, but there is a place for a conversation about his preferential treatment.  Yet that place is not the 2020 election cycle, since the actions of the father—a different person and regarding whom zero evidence exists he did anything other than put aside thoughts of his son’s job with Burisma when engaging in Ukraine policy as a representative of the United States Government advancing the interests of the United States and its ally Ukraine—are not the actions of the son and since the Trump family, whom Biden hopes to oust from the White House in November 2020, are in a league of their own crassness in American national-level politics.  The counternarrative pushed by Trump, Giuliani, their associates in the U.S. and Ukraine and by extremist Kremlin and American media fly in the face of clear reality, and that their counternarrative at all even has a major place in the public discussion is already a defeat.  And with more and more of an unholy alliance between Kremlin media, American right-wing media, and even media in other countries, this will only get worse.

Furthermore, the manipulations that got to this point are also are blatant and beyond doubt.  Between the approval of Javelin missiles for Ukraine near the time when Manafort’s and Mueller’s cases were frozen, the offer made to Poroshenko for a state visit, the May pre-inauguration meeting with Zelensky’s top advisor (if Parnas is to be believed), and the phone call with Zelensky that sparked an impeachment drive in America, that is four possible examples we know of so far of attempts at an improper quid pro quo involving actions prescribed for Ukraine’s government designed to benefit Trump politically in exchange for policy favors from the Trump Administration. At least three of these involved Giuliani.

While there are so many different key players in Trump’s own administration raising grave concerns over his Ukraine actions, they are being extensively laid out and discussed well elsewhere.  What is overwhelmingly clear—no matter how much detail is released or not beyond that initial “transcript” that is not a transcript and the whistleblower complaint—is that Trump withheld both U.S. military aid to Ukraine that had been approved and authorized by Congress through law and the offer of other benefits to pressure and bribe the newly-elected Ukrainian president to go after Trump’s most formidable political rival in the upcoming 2020 presidential election as a personal favor (remember that “bribery” is one of the only specific offenses outlined in the U.S. Constitution as impeachable).  Between the American and Ukrainian sides, no one misspoke, there was no ambiguity, no confusion, no misunderstanding: by the end, the parties knew what was being asked for, and what was being dangled in response was also quite clear.

The late Christopher Hitchens once wrote that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” In this extraordinary Trump-Russia saga, both ends of his maxim have been easily satisfied as far as proving Ukraine is of a nefarious centrality in collusions between Trumpworld and Putinworld.  But nether end is met with the claims made by Trump and his people about the Bidens in Ukraine.  The media must internalize this going forward and immediately shutdown even the mention of any “wrongdoing” when it comes to the Bidens in any discussion about Ukraine in the context of 2020.

The only hope of beating Trump and Putin at their game of chaos—especially since the well-documented reality is so blatantly clear on one side and so absent from the other—is for the media to steer clear of the false gods of whataboutism (a classic Soviet-style propaganda technique well utilized by Team Trump) and false equivalence; bowing down to them does not make news “fairer” or “neutral.”  It must stop doing Trump’s and Putin’s work for them, stick rigorously to the facts, avoid overdoing speculation, and shutdown and deprive of oxygen the false flames of the Bidens in Ukraine “scandal,” which only exists as it does because of the mainstream media’s myopia.

Ukraine: The Heart of Trump-Russia

Besides not falling for and being used by Russian and Trumpian propaganda, the media also needs to see the bigger picture for what it actually is and to actually start explaining it to people far more robustly than it has tried before.  As it is, the larger tapestry is being missed, obscured, or only partially described in everyday mainstream coverage, and this is a huge problem, since if the public is not even really aware of what is happening, it cannot be properly alarmed about it, let alone make informed choices about how we as a nation should respond.  Simply put, analysis must be better and more robust.

The first and most immediate way to start fixing this crisis is for the media to begin presenting the reality of the current Ukraine firestorm as being the latest in a long series of Ukraine issues that form the heart of the Trump-Russia saga, which hardly ended with the release of the Mueller report.  Too many of the presentations of what is now hurtling Trump and America into impeachment have characterized it as something separate and distinct from the Trump-Russia scandal and its accompanying Mueller probe.

Yes, this chapter is easier for people to understand on its surface than the massive Trump-Russia scandal since it is a smaller chapter of a much larger, more complicated whole.  But that is like saying a piece of lettuce is easier to understand than a salad.  A piece of lettuce is not much by itself, but as part of a salad, it is so much more and has far more meaning, the same as a word in a sentence or a scene in a movie: the true meaning cannot be grasped in isolation.  Framing this as part of the old Russia scandal rather than some bright shiny new scandal is a necessary first step, then.

The next step is to find an easy way to demonstrate how these new developments tie into the older ones.  And Giuliani must be given credit for perhaps presenting the easiest opportunity to be able to do so with the cast of characters he has assembled in Ukraine.

Overall in our exploration, we have here so many threads coming together it can be challenging to keep track of their interweaving parts.  But in Ukraine this year, thanks to Giuliani, we have these key figures from earlier in our narrative working on behalf of or in coordination with Team Trump at the expense of the Bidens: Firtash, Kislin, Artemenko, and Shokin.  In Kislin and Artemenko, we have people who go back to early stages of Russian organized crime elements—especially tied to Mogilevich—that would be allied with Putin engaging Trumpworld and Ukraine, respectively.  Kislin is then later getting a future Party of Regions official an apartment in a Trump property.  We then have in Firtash a bridge to the main gas scheme and Manafort, who also hooks up with Artemenko, who, in turn, brings us up to the “peace” plan episode once Trump is president.  With Shokin we have the post-Maidan Biden situation, and then they all come together.  And they come together with the assistance of newer players in our discussion: Lutsenko, Kulyuk, Parnas, Furman, Fuks, diGenova, Toensing, Rep. Sessions, Solomon, and Sean Hannity, something of a goofy version of the Legion of Doom that took on the Justice League (the Legion of Doofuses?).  This second list brings people with connections to Trump, right-wing media, and Ukraine’s corrupt underbelly into the mix.  They are all joined by Secretary of State Pompeo, the White House, U.S. right-wing media, Kremlin run-and-linked media, and most Republicans in Congress in pushing the false narratives and standing by while the lies spread and people’s careers and lives—even U.S. policy—are ruined by them.  Here, we have Ukrainians, Americans, Republicans, Trump confidantes, media personalities, politicians, prosecutors, and mobsters and all holding hands in broad daylight working to advance a Russian agenda.  We see how Putin uses media, politicians, intelligence operatives, “businessman,” and organized crime like a modern general uses combined arms tactics.  Coming together, they represent decades of planning and preparation on the part of the Kremlin and its Russian mafia allies to both dominate Ukraine and co-opt Trump and people around him to turn him and his people into their useful idiots.

There are various words that can describe so many nefarious actors acting on behalf of a hostile foreign power and organized crime surrounding one person and his associates for decades and continually reengaging him and his people at different points on related issues with the same and/or connected people, but one of the words for sure is not “coincidence.”  Add to that more abstract description that we are dealing with the Presidents of the United States and Russia, and the word coincidence is even more surely not applicable in an exponential sense.

While there is also a good number of other connections between Trumpworld on one side and Putinworld on the other, here we have kept the focus on where those networks meet in Ukraine or are related to Ukraine.  No other topics in the Trump-Russia saga bring as many nefarious players together for nefarious purposes.  Thus, just this chunk alone—a significant portion of, but by no means all—of the Trump Russia saga, is deeply illuminating.

The Trump-Putin Assault on Biden in Ukraine Just the Latest Battle in Russia’s War with the West

As we consider Joe Biden’s earlier efforts in Ukraine, it is crucial to remember Ukraine’s identity crisis.  On one side, there is the old Ukraine, firmly in Russia’s orbit through a system of corruption and oligarchic machination in which gas and other resources are leveraged in ways to maintain Kremlin political control in Kiev.  On the other side, we have a younger Ukraine, looking eagerly to the West—the EU and America—that wishes for transparency, freer and fairer democracy, accountability, and independence from both Russian and oligarchic control.  Biden’s request concerning the prosecutor was very much a part of helping the second Ukraine rise at the expense of the first, part of longstanding U.S. policy since the end of Cold War, helping to advance American interests by seeing Ukraine transform into a fellow democracy committed to the rule of law, fighting corruption, and avoiding conflict in Europe. In this tug of war over Ukraine, those who foster conflict, thrive on corruption, and disdain the rule of law along with democracy are aligned against Biden and with Putin.  With Giuliani’s band of brigands trying to attack Biden, support shady prosecutors in Ukraine, oust a principled head of Naftogaz, restore Firtash to power, and corrupt hard-pressed leaders, it is clear which side Giuliani and Trump have chosen.  Putin has his own soldiers to do his dirty work in Ukraine, to be sure, but when Trump sends in Giuliani with his own people to come work on the ground with Putin’s allies and agents, we have an unprecedented amplification of Putin’s reach and capabilities because of his co-opting of the Trump Presidency.  And this is hardly limited to Ukraine: from Ukraine to Syrian Kurdistan, we are seeing the real-life effects of this play out and, to be sure, the U.S. is losing while Trump and Putin are winning.

In one way or another, all these folks mentioned here are working to further Trump’s and Putin’s interests in Ukraine are all contributing to undoing the reforms Joe Biden pushed for in Ukraine, reforms to make it less corrupt and less susceptible to Russian machinations.  Here, we have the most obviously blatant examples of agents with strong, direct, clear ties to Trump, Putin, and the Russian mafia all colluding together to boost Putin’s interests in Ukraine at the expense of reform long desired by both the West and Ukrainians themselves as well as to help Trump and damage Trump’s strongest electoral opponent, Joe Biden.  Here, the gas scam players and Team Trump are one team, with veterans from many a past campaign coming off the benches to work with younger blood.  Here, we see how Ukraine and gas really are at the heart of Trump’s candidacy and presidency as well as the heart of Putin’s relationship with Trump.

It could not have been executed more brilliantly by Putin: a sitting American president in 2019 uniting his agents with those of Putin and Mogilevich to advance perhaps Putin’s most important foreign policy goal: Russian dominance of Ukraine through corruption to the detriment of pro-Western forces in the country.  Ukraine is, then, ground zero for the New Cold War, the prime focus of competition between Russia and the West, viewed as an essential prize for Putin and Russian nationalism at he seeks to expand his influence into Europe.  This is not hyperbole: since the federal investigation into Giuliani and his Ukraine mischief includes a broader counterintelligence probe over concerns he may be the target of foreign influence operations, former FBI counterintelligence agent and current lecturer on national security law at Yale University Asha Rangappa notes this “means that the FBI believes …[Giuliani] may pose a national security threat to the United States.”

It is also crucial to note that the approach of the whole Russian operation in Ukraine—using Russia’s natural resources, deals related to them, and the profits from selling them to dominate and corrupt political, media, and business elites of neighboring and other countries, all coupled with disinformation and misinformation operations and eventually joined with hacking and cyberwarfare—is hardly unique to Ukraine; Putin is trying to do and has done much the same thing throughout Europe, has done the same to the U.S., and will keep trying to do so.

Putin’s Campaign to Turn America into His Ukraine

Tellingly, throughout this tale, we see here corrupt Russians, Ukrainians, and others from former Soviet Republics who are usually linked to the Kremlin trying to actively engage and collude with Team Trump in corruption by appealing to Trump’s personal interests (as opposed to America’s).  They see themselves and the corruption of their old-school post-Soviet systems supported by Putin in Trump and his candidacy, then his Administration.  That they even think this blatantly corrupt, bribery-and-extortion-laden approach will work with an American president speaks volumes about how low Trump has brought the United States, its credibility, and its reputation, as well as why Trump and Putin like each other so much.

The irony is that we are seeing something of a repeat in history.  Meddling in an election, Putin pushed for an easily pliable crony to take power in a foreign country.  Using corrupt methods but in a free and fair election and facing divided opposition, his candidate triumphed, yet in the span of four years, the extreme obsequiousness shown to Russia coupled with blatant corruption rubbed voters the wrong way.

This could describe either Yanukovych or Trump.  The people did rise in 2014 to oust Yanukovych, but it remains to be seen whether or not this will happen in America.  Many Ukrainians viewed Yanukovych and his Party of Regions not as pro-Russian but as “Russian-controlled,” and Trump and Republicans are facing similar views among many Americans.  For voters to make a truly informed decision in 2020, the media must realize that the Ukraine scandal propelling Trump and the nation towards impeachment is not separate at all, but the latest chapter in America’s Greek tragedy.  We fail to see how Putin uses the same techniques against America as he does against Ukraine, Syria, Georgia, and Europe.  And our willful inaction is empowering Putin to just keep doing it more and more to us and more and more around the world.

The number of people with close ties to the Kremlin and pushing for Russia’s interests—especially when it came to Ukraine—working for, or colluding with, Trump’s presidential campaign and presidency is a modern singularity without parallel and makes clear that Trump’s campaign was highly compromised by foreign agents.  Foreign interests interfering in American elections and co-opting top officials in their then-new American constitutional order was one of the greatest of all the major fears of the Founding Fathers, and Trump would have been their nightmare.  On leaving office, George Washington himself told us in his magisterial Farewell Address that “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”

In tragic plays, from ancient Greece to Shakespeare, our heroes failed often because they failed to learn from their mistakes and adjust, hence the tragedy format.  As Trump tries to make Putin-and-Yanukovych-style corruption the norm in American politics, will Americans, the media, Democrats, progressives, and maybe even some Republicans learn from theirs, or will the third decade of the twenty-first century in the U.S. become a tragedy as well?  Time will tell, but based on how people are behaving now and especially on how the media has miscovered Trump’s efforts to use America’s Ukraine policy to score a political hit job on his most intimidating opponent, it seems not.

What many people forget is that Mueller’s probe consisted of two parts: a criminal probe about which he was required by law to write and submit a report and a counterintelligence probe that would be far broader about which he was required to share nothing.  Asha Rangappa, the former FBI counterintelligence agent cited earlier, has written extensively about the Mueller probe and has been careful to make these points repeatedly.  More recently, she noted that the counterintelligence probe that was a huge portion of the Special Counsel’s overall probe may still be ongoing and that knowing if this is the case is important.  Even if it is not, her broader point is key, because Trump-Russia is not just the Mueller report, nor was Mueller’s full investigation simply what was in the Mueller report.  Those larger issues are at the heart of everything dealt with in this piece.

President Trump has acted to benefit Putin on everything from sanctions to Syria, Ukraine being just one hot front in a many-front war that still includes an active home front in America.  These operations thrive on chaos, which is only amplified by poor media coverage.  It is far past time for respectable media to frame “Ukrainegate” in its proper Trump-Russia context, presenting the full and clear picture to the American people of how Ukraine has been at the center from 2016 through today and is central to understanding Trump-Russia collusion, Trump’s rise to power, and Putin’s war against Western democracy.  It must do so by the beginning of the 2020 Democratic primaries and caucuses, and it must do so without juxtaposing demonstrable lies about Biden, Trump’s most threatening opponent.  Doing otherwise advances Putin’s interests by gaslighting the American people and committing election interference to the benefit of the Kremlin.  Especially after 2016, there is even far less excuse to miss the big picture, so the idea that the media would not know any better can no longer be an argument: laziness or carelessness would in this case make the media a willing useful idiot for Russia’s anti-American plans.  The media still can and must course correct and avoid a repeat of 2016 or worse, as the survival of both our American republic and the West itself may very well depend on it.

November 23, 2019

UPDATE: December 7, 2019: Giuliani is as of now back in Ukraine and has been meeting with Shokin, Lutsenko, Kulyuk (Kulyk), and even Artemenko. The layers of incrimination and collusion keep adding up!

A Song of Gas and Politics is available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook!

A sample of reviews below:

See related articles: Ukrainegate Proves the Media Has Learned Almost Nothing from 2016, The Untold Story of the Bidens and Burisma, and Time to Play Hardball with Russia

In the interest of full disclosure, the author interned for then-Senator Joe Biden for the last quarter of 2006.

© 2019 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) November 19, 2019; see Brian’s related brand-new e-Book, from which this below piece was adapted and greatly expanded: A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia: or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook

WSJ

WASHINGTON, WESTON, & CAMBRIDGE — These are dark times for America and its journalists, not least because a lack of self-awareness all but guarantees that we are not learning from history and are, therefore, doomed to repeat it in a way that threatens the viability of the fourth estate and the American republic itself.  A good starting point to begin this exploration is by demolishing that which should not even discussed by respectable outlets and noting aspects of how such outlets are being manipulated by nefarious forces.  Secondly, a brief examination of some of the challenges facing the media will follow along with why it is crucial that these challenges be addressed.  Finally, looking at some of the main problems from 2016 and how the media is already repeating its mistakes from then should raise awareness of the dire situation into which the media and the country are falling as we approach the 2020 elections.

Trump and Putin, Playing the Media Like a Fiddle

Apart from the media not even attempting to convey the larger picture (with only a tiny number of exceptions among major/respectable/established outlets), another gross media misfire is the “coverage” of how Joe Biden’s son is “involved” in this new phase of the Trump-Russia überascandal… except there is no evidence he is involved, none at all, as any of multiple respectable fact-checks will show (no need to repeat their fine work here); his “involvement” rests on two paper mâché pillars: Republican bonfires of lies and the media pouring gasoline onto these fires.

To be clear, this is classic Kremlin-style disinformation, especially the propagandistic, perhaps libelous lie that Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden, warrants some sort of criminal probe because of wholly unsubstantiated allegations of “corruption.”  Firstly, Hunter Biden is no Eric Trump; while he has had some problems and his life has not been as soaring as that of Beau Biden—the close brother of Hunter and beloved son of Joe stolen before his time by cancer in 2015—Hunter did manage to pay his own way through Georgetown—even working odd jobs to manage that—and would eventually graduate from Yale Law School.  Hunter’s perch on the board of Burisma—a Ukrainian gas/energy company—reeks of the standard favoritism shown scions of elites, a banal favoritism devoured almost accidentally like a minnow by the speeding great white shark that is the over-the-top corruption of the mafia-like Trump family, whose members give the impression that they deliberately broadcast their misdeeds, as if to do so is a boast along the lines of a lion roaring that wants everyone to know it can get away with breaking the rules.

Currently, the media receives a lot of unfair criticism from both the right (pretty much everything Trump and the GOP say these days) and the left (say, pretty much anything Bernie Sanders and his supporters say these days), and while the press has also conveyed this criminal and entitled mentality of the Trumps, it has been alongside normalizing coverage that blunts the ability of the audience to appreciate the utter simplicity of what this is.  Blatantly false propagandistic lies are often challenged by anchors who appropriately express exasperation, and more educated, elite viewers and readers may enjoy seeing a sharper anchor take down a serial liar, may see the hollowness of a poor argument on a page, but many others will simply hear another competing argument, their minds more susceptible to sexy talking points tailored to trigger preconceived notions.  Despite any pushbacks on TV or competing op-eds, the lies are allowed to repeatedly be aired and printed at length and in detail by respectable (sometimes even the most respectable) news outlets so that, if someone was not paying close attention, it sounds like there’s as much a concern (or at least somewhat comparable concern) about Joe and Hunter Biden’s “corruption” in Ukraine as there is Trump’s undeniably real corruption (just ask several of his own current and ex-top officials and appointees). 

This is exactly what the Kremlin does: the White Helmets group of Syrian civilians trying to save other civilians in the aftermath of Russian and Syrian airstrikes?  They’re terrorists, says Russia.  The Ukrainians trying to fight Russian and separatist aggression?  They’re Nazis, according to the Kremlin.  Even educated, elite news consumers fall for this nonsense: in the first case, the Russian lies play into the preconceived notion of some that pretty much all Syrian Muslims are bad and associated with terrorists, therefore Russia’s policy of backing Assad is justified as there are not distinctions between Syrian rebel groups, that Russia’s policy is the only way to keep the West safe from terror.  In the second, the U.S. has a history of backing right-wing fascistic regimes during the Cold War, from the Congo and Latin America to Vietnam and South Korea, so hey, looks like the same thing is happening in Ukraine to even educated people with a preconceived notion that any U.S. foreign intervention must be wrong and must support the “bad guys” (your Chomsky and Greenwald/Scahill Intercept crowds).  The truth itself does not matter, but the repetition of the lies does.  Even worse, the media follows whatever subject Trump wants them to like a pavlovian dog, doing his bidding by talking about whatever he wants them to talk about and when, asking the questions he wants asked, muddying the waters even further.  This is how the media often unwittingly plays into his hands (yes, even when it talks about the size of his hands).

Lies are repeated ad nauseum and networks and column space even in the top and best outlets are still taken up with the lies, such that “lies” and “non-lies” become two sides of roughly equal weight.  And once there are videos and articles perpetuating the lies, they can be shared and edited with virtually no filter on social media (even now, Facebook, Twitter, and Google are refusing to take down Trump campaign ads that are lies about the Bidens; Biden has the same luck when complaining to the New York Times about its publication of similar right-wing lies).  An alternate reality is constructed of lies simply by perpetuation and repetition.  The gods of false equivalence have seen the sacrifices offered and are pleased, rewarding those who pray to them.

What is happening now and has been happening for some time is at the level of having a “debate” about gravity existing (or, say, climate change), with most Republicans on television or writing columns in the media predictably, forcefully, and consistently repeating the lies in over-the-top Orwellian style, recalling the chilling passage from Orwell’s own 1984: “…if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”

There is something very Russian mafiaesque, very Putinesque, and very Soviet about this last point, and as we endure Trump and his family making a mockery of norms, laws, and the Constitution itself, the media still often keeps trying to cover Trump and his office as he has occupied as if it he and it can still be described in the normal language of politics (I got cut off at an Atlantic Council event when I pushed back both at Dr. Michael Pillsbury—a conservative China expert and an enthusiast of Trump’s China “policy” and who has recently inserted himself into the Hunter Biden “controversy”—for even thinking the Administration had something that could be labeled a China “policy” and at the moderator for trying to frame the conversation as if it was possible to discuss this “policy” like any other policy, this administration like any other administration [video here, excuse my appearance as I was out when I found out about the event and, to be fair to them, I did take a bit long to get to my point/question]).  Adam Schiff received much criticism for reducing Trump’s phone call to a scene from a mafia movie, but his dramatized description was for more accurate than the attempts to couch the interaction to any degree within the lexicons of diplomacy, governance, administration: this was a corrupt man engaged in criminal activity, winking and nodding and dangling the power and prestige of his office, the resources of the United States of America, as bargaining chips in a sordid, selfish attempt to damage his chief political rival and that had absolutely nothing to do with any policy or American interests.  Just as Putin and Soviet apparatchiks put out insane talking points and conspiracy theories, so too do Trump and his minions, and the media keeps covering them in a way that gives them oxygen and legitimacy, keeps having the same propagandists on who spew them at length.

Challenges for American Journalists that Must Be Overcome

Given their aims, why would they not keep it up?  After all, barely over one-third of American adults over twenty-five years of age have a four-year college degree, and many of those two-thirds and even some of the third are struggling just to get by and hardly have time to immerse themselves in the details of Trump-Russia news (especially as its reported so piecemeal, without showing the larger picture).  Even expecting educated, engaged people to understand the true nature of this saga when the typical reporting fashion is to throw pieces of a puzzle at people without providing the context of how those pieces fit in with each other and larger relevant history is difficult enough, but expecting most of America’s people—including many millions of low-educated, low-information voters—to understand this story presented as it has been and still is by the media is simply a fantasy.

Expecting readers to peruse dozens of 800-word reports and opinion pieces honing in on one aspect or several aspects of a massive picture—trying, as I have made the comparison before, to explain just a figure or a corner of the Sistine Chapel ceiling—might not be the best way to try to inform the public, at least if we are still to believe that there is something of a journalistic mission to inform the public as a whole and not just niche, paying slivers of the population.  Of course these micro-stories are vital, and without them, it would be impossible to piece together the larger puzzle because we’d have no pieces.  But is not analysis of all the component parts and how they fit together just as important? As I have explained in the past, the CIA and the U.S. intelligence community seems to think so, and that is why desk analysts and in-the-field source intelligence collectors are the two main sides of the same intelligence coin: each needs the other to be relevant to policymakers. 

Those in the news business who appreciate big-picture deep-dives sure would not knock puzzle pieces, but from my own experience—and from the sheer lack of deep-dive big-picture explainers in major publications and on television—it seems there is a serious degree of reluctance and even hostility to giving green-lights to the long, contextual explainers among media gatekeepers.  This strikes me as pretty irrational.  “It’s too complicated” is often what I have been told by representatives of mainstream outlets, and yet is that not the worst possible rationale to not publish for a news organization?  But this falls flat on a practical level, too.  Would not an overworked, time-pressed single-parent prefer reading a single longform article in several sittings if it explains the bigger puzzle picture and how pieces fit together over reading a much larger number of more disjointed articles that fail to point out important connections?  A point I often hear is that it is a challenge that may be too much to ask a reader to read a long article; abstractly, this point has some merit, but when compared with the challenge of making sense of story after story coming at you at the speed of Trump tweets, it sure seems more manageable than that alternative.  Thus, by not having enough faith in readers to even try to tell them the bigger picture, the media helps to dumb them down and keep them even less informed.

The dots are out there, and have been for years, begging to be connected and properly interpreted with the necessary context.  I get it, it’s hard, and in my almost thirty-eight years of life, I’ve never seen so many major stories come at us so fast, so furious.  And yes, it’s tough to keep up with it all, even for writers like myself.  But if the top-tier news outlets cannot transcend these difficult challenges, cannot show self-awareness, and cannot admit to and grow from their mistakes, there really is no hope.  It’s a high bar on incredibly complex stories, but that’s the media’s job: to get the tough stories right, to go into the necessary depth, to provide the necessary context, to assign a sense of weight and proportion.  If the media does not succeed here, America will fail and historians will be right point to the media as deserving much of the blame.

And yet, if past is prologue—and if a willingness to learn from the past is the first chapter—we do not have much reason to be optimistic…

The Media Let Itself Be Owned by Trump and Putin in 2016 and It Is on Track to Do the Same in 2020

If Trump has been and is good at anything consistently from being a candidate through his entire presidency thus far, it is manipulating the media for his personal and political ends.  My August, 2015, warning that he was a master media manipulator (and likely to win the nomination) proved all too prescient, and in some ways we are now seeing a repeat of the 2016 election cycle, including terrible news coverage (Ukraine and Burisma are replacing Benghazi and e-mails) and what should soon be known as the Second Russo-American Cyberwar, with indications that this will just continue to be the case. 

But to truly appreciate the horror of what is happening now, we should take a serious look at what really went down in 2016…

Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University

Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School

The above charts are quite clear: it was Trump’s chosen issues and his lines of attack that dominated coverage in in 2016, not Clinton’s; both in terms of issues and scandals, then, the media played alarmingly into Trump’s hands.  In explaining why the public focused so much on particular issues relative to others in a way that greatly disadvantaged Clinton, Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center noted within its extensive report—Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election—that “[t]he electorate appears to have been paying attention to the media (pg. 89).  Further backing up my own conclusions, the report noted that “[a] major critique of the media’s coverage was that it erred on the side of offering critical coverage of both candidates and ultimately misled the public by creating a sense of equivalence in the weaknesses and fitness for office of the two candidates” (pg. 69). 

The Shorenstein Center, also at Harvard and also corroborating our sentiments, made it clear in its concluding report on 2016 election coverage that is was journalists who failed:

Were the allegations surrounding Clinton of the same order of magnitude as those surrounding Trump? It’s a question that journalists made no serious effort to answer during the 2016 campaign. They reported all the ugly stuff they could find, and left it to the voters to decide what to make of it. Large numbers of voters concluded that the candidates’ indiscretions were equally disqualifying…

False equivalencies abound in today’s reporting. When journalists can’t, or won’t, distinguish between allegations directed at the Trump Foundation and those directed at the Clinton Foundation, there’s something seriously amiss. And false equivalencies are developing on a grand scale as a result of relentlessly negative news. If everything and everyone is portrayed negatively, there’s a leveling effect that opens the door to charlatans. The press historically has helped citizens recognize the difference between the earnest politician and the pretender. Today’s news coverage blurs the distinction.

The Berkman Klein report lays out how the professional media was duped by conservative extremists, noting that the right-wing activist group

Judicial Watch and the Trump campaign were doing what media activists have been doing forever: staging events that would motivate professional media as a way of setting the agenda. What we see here is a successful operation to put red meat too juicy to pass up in front of traditional media. The fact that the traditional professional media were the targets of intentional manipulation does not absolve them of responsibility for checking the materials put in front of them, much less of supporting a Trump campaign narrative. (118)

The report also did not shy away from noting the similarity of Republican and Trump operational techniques and those of the Russian government:

One technique we saw in the context of immigration was “flooding the zone”…This general approach of generating a large number of stories to create a wave of attention has been documented elsewhere, in the context of Russian propaganda techniques… [such flooding in part ends up] limiting the capacity of traditional journalism to fill its role as a neutral arbiter of the validity of fact-related claims, and inoculating the core target populations against corrective investigation and criticism. (128-129)

The conclusion of the report noted that Trump and his allies had shown the world “a master class in setting the public agenda” (130).  Even so, the report earlier noted that the false smear campaigns depended on the mainstream press allowing itself to be manipulated: “…it is central to the success of a propaganda and disinformation campaign to set the agenda for the mainstream press and then rely on that press coverage as an external source of validation and accreditation…  (128).  It further reinforces this in the conclusion and places an important part of the responsibility for this failure on the journalistic and editorial classes:

…the fundamental shift occurred only after the mainstream press picked up the story, legitimated it, and turned it from a proposed central item for the public agenda into the actual agenda item that became the one most widely discussed in August 2016. The only countermeasure to this first dynamic [of setting the public agenda] that is consistent with the First Amendment is a highly vigilant professional press. Recognizing that the press is being hacked and that certain storylines are the opposition researcher’s equivalent of clickbait for journalists is an absolute necessity for editors, even more than for line journalists. Receiving an “exclusive” from Peter Schweitzer and writing a story that paints Clinton in a negative light is the easy path for a journalist and an editor. Tracking down the funding and sponsorship of Schweitzer’s research, and developing an investigative story about who is behind this assault and why it is being launched, is harder. It is, nonetheless, the fundamental professional responsibility of the press if it is to retain its unique role. The second dynamic explored in this case study is propaganda and, in particular, disinformation. A sustained campaign of materially misleading political messaging was intended to shape its target population’s attitudes and beliefs and to keep that group from engaging in critical reflection on the policy and political choices they faced. It leveraged basic psychological features of memory and belief formation—that repetition and familiarity improve recall and credibility—and basic features of a network of interlinked sites to create the appearance of facts reported in many diverse outlets… (130-131)

Conclusion: Time Is Running Out and Things Do Not Look Good

Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images

It is not even 2020, and already false the equivalence of the Bidens and Trumps is getting plenty of “repetition and familiarity.”  Remember that Trump wants to run against Elizabeth Warren and timed this Biden “fake news” to gain traction in the weeks running up to the final debates before Iowa to damage him while he is entering that critical contest; remember that Warren has no serious record of accomplishing what she is talking about (unlike Biden with his long, accomplished career) and her leftist policy positions and ideology are far out of the mainstream, making her appeal to voters in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, and Michigan, (Wisconsin, too, in most polls) is significantly lower than Biden’s, making her by far the preferred opponent in the eyes of Team Trump compared to Biden and objectively less electable; even in her own state of Massachusetts in 2018, Republican governor Charlie Baker got almost 6.5% more of a share of the votes than she did: that’s right, in her liberal home state, she’s less popular than the Republican governor.  She sure had momentum before the Ukraine stuff became an issue, but she is much closer to him now in what is currently mainly a two-person race and is beginning to show signs she might be able to contend his front-runner status a few months before the Iowa caucuses, the first of the Democratic Party’s 2020 nominating contests.  Still, Biden is clearly leading in most national polls, in most large states, in most key states after Iowa and New Hampshire, and in most general-election swing states; he has the broadest, most geographically and ethnically diverse-and-deep coalition of any candidate.  Yet we have seen the damage that fake news disinformation propaganda can do to a candidate, and Trump and the GOP are focusing their smear campaign on Biden for the simple reason that they see him as a genuine threat in ways they do not see Warren or other presidential hopefuls.

And here we are, nearly a whole year to go, with the mainstream media already giving (and having given) ample oxygen to blatantly false conspiracy theories about Biden and his son to the degree that such theories are sure to dog him all throughout his presidential campaign.  In other words, things are all playing out (again) according to Trump’s and Putin’s plans, in large part thanks to the media, which is allowing itself to be weaponized by extremists and a hostile foreign government to commit election interference for the second presidential election cycle in a row.

See Brian’s related brand-new e-Book, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia: or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook; preview here

In the interest of full disclosure, the author interned for then-Senator Joe Biden for the last quarter of 2006.

© 2019 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!