Much of the coverage of the Ukraine scandal has focused heavily on Hunter Biden’s involvement with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, and how President Donald Trump hoped to use that involvement to harm a political adversary: former Vice President Joe Biden, Hunter Biden’s father. But Ryan Goodman and Alex Potcovaru, in an October 21 article for Just Security, stress that there is another crucial element to Ukrainegate: Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to prove an “unfounded” conspiracy theory that Joe Biden and other Democrats, in 2016, tried to harm Trump’s presidential campaign via Ukraine.
“Giuliani’s unfounded conspiracy theory is that Biden removed Ukraine prosecutor General Viktor Shokin and approved the new prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, as part of an effort to ‘frame (2016 Trump campaign manager) Paul Manafort and the Trump campaign in the 2016 election,” Goodman and Potcovaru explain. “Giuliani asserts, without evidence, that the new prosecutor dropped a case against an organization that had produced information in coordination with the Democrats and U.S. officials to taint Manafort. This conspiracy theory fits in with the overall idea that Russia was not behind the 2016 election interference, but instead, the real collusion involved Ukrainian and Democratic operatives.”
Giuliani, according to Goodman and Potcovaru, was not only trying to defame Joe Biden via his son’s connection to Burisma, but also trying to link him to the conspiracy theory that in 2016, it was the Ukrainian government rather than the Russian government that interfered in the presidential election.
View the complete October 21 aritcle by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.