Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory

The background of Russian involvement in spreading the false allegations revolves around Andrii Derkach and Konstantin Kilimnik.[24] The two used corrupt access to the Ukrainian Parliament and connections to media and politicians in the United States to spread the falsehoods.[34]

Andrii Derkach is a former Ukrainian politician, now stripped of citizenship,[35] who is believed to have been an agent or asset of Russia.[36] He played a central role in spreading falsehoods about Biden and Ukraine.[24]

Derkach released snippets of a supposed conversation between Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Poroshenko, in which Biden linked loan guarantees to the ouster of Viktor Shokin, the country's corrupt and ineffective prosecutor general.[5] The recordings, which were not verified as authentic and appeared to be heavily edited,[37] did not provide evidence to support the ongoing conspiracy theory that Biden wanted the prosecutor fired to protect his son.[38] In June 2020, Poroshenko denied that Joe Biden ever approached him about Burisma and characterized the recordings as fake.[39][40] In September 2020, the United States Department of the Treasury sanctioned Derkach, stating he "has been an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services". The Treasury Department added that Derkach "waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning U.S. officials in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election," including by the release of "edited audio tapes and other unsupported information with the intent to discredit U.S. officials".[41][42]

Konstantin Kilimnik oversaw a network of people working on behalf of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) to influence the 2020 elections.[43] Kilimnik had the single strongest ties, authorized by President Putin,[44] to the Trump administration in both 2016 and 2020 elections.[45] He organized Russia's media outreach campaigns to spread lies about Biden and corruption in Ukraine as part of Russia's efforts to help Trump.[46][47]

American media organizations with ties to the Trump campaign were involved in the spread of the false allegations.[24] Specifically Peter Schweizer,[48] John Solomon,[24] Fox News,[49] and the OAN Network[50] were essential in creating and disseminating the lies that built the background for this conspiracy theory.

Peter Schweizer, editor-at-large at Breitbart News and president of the conservative Government Accountability Institute, was the first person to spread the falsehoods about Joe Biden and Burisma in his book "Secret Empires".[24] The plagiarized book[51] included a false story that on January 12, 2017, Joe Biden, who was then the vice-president, sought to end an investigation into Burisma to protect Hunter Biden, who had a profitable post on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company run by a shady oligarch.[24]

Schweizer launched a media blitz in 2019 to help the conspiracy spread and appeared and wrote editorials repeating his lie in multiple news outlets.[52] This, in turn, helped to lead Trump allies in Ukraine[53] and Congress to promote the lie.[54]

Washington Post attributes John Solomon, formerly of The Hill, the most responsibility[55] for the spread of the false narrative in U.S. media.[24]

Beginning in the spring of 2019, Solomon published a series of editorials which The Hill notes are now part of Congressional inquiries due to their connection to the spreading of lies. Solomon relied heavily on Schweizer's book.[24] The story being pushed by Solomon had significant flaws,[55] including relying on a corrupt source who would not substantiate the claims.[56] In testimony before Congress, Alexander Vindman noted Solomon's claims were "entirely made up in full cloth".[57]

Media Matters reported in September 2023 that the previous month Solomon published a State Department briefing memo prepared for Joe Biden's December 2015 trip to Ukraine. The memo read, in part:

There is wide agreement that anti-corruption must be at the top of this list, and that reforms must include an overhaul of the Prosecutor General's Office including removal of Prosecutor General Shokin, who is widely regarded as an obstacle to fighting corruption, if not a source of the problem.[4]

Fox News was also involved in the spread of the falsehoods.[49] Fox ran at least twelve broadcasts about John Solomon's report about the Burisma probe. The false conspiracy theory was mentioned on Sean Hannity's program, with him claiming Solomon had caught Joe Biden in an "international corruption scandal".[58][59]

One America News Network (OANN) is a pro-Trump conservative news outlet with reporters who also work for Russian news agencies,[60] and the network was essential to spreading lies about Biden and Burisma.[61]

OANN produced a "documentary series intended to debunk the impeachment case", and an OANN crew traveled with Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine to gather information.[62] OANN later aired a misleading documentary about Biden and Burisma called "The Ukraine Hoax: Impeachment, Biden Cash, and Mass Murder"[63] produced by Michael Caputo,[61] a member of the Trump campaign, and Sergey Petrushin, a Russian living in Florida. The documentary used fake documents provided to Giuliani by Lev Parnas on behalf of Andrii Derkach and Konstantin Kilimnik.[49] Following Caputo's work in spreading the falsehoods through OANN, Donald Trump made Caputo the assistant secretary of public affairs for the Department of Health and Human Services.

The Trump campaign's actions in spreading the conspiracy, especially the active engagement of Rudy Giuliani with possible Russian agents,[64] were highlighted during Donald Trump's first impeachment.[65]

Trump's first impeachment charge of abuse of power was triggered by a July 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in which then-President Trump unsuccessfully tried to pressure Zelenskyy in a quid pro quo manner to start a publicly announced investigation of Burisma and the Bidens in exchange for the release of congressionally mandated financial and military aid to Ukraine and the promise of a Trump–Zelenskyy meeting at the White House.[66] During the hearings and impeachment trial of President Trump in 2019–20, he and his allies repeatedly alleged that Joe Biden and his son had engaged in corrupt activities in Ukraine.[67][68] Trump said he planned to make it a major issue during the 2020 United States presidential election,[69] while a Republican-controlled Senate committee carried out an investigation into the allegations in spring 2020.[70] The investigation by the Republican-controlled Senate Homeland Security and Finance Committees concluded in September 2020 that Hunter Biden "'cashed in' on his father's name to close lucrative business deals around the world", but that there was no evidence of improper influence or wrongdoing by Joe Biden.[71]

Working together with Andrii Derkach (an active Russian agent),[41] Dmytro Firtash, and other individuals linked to Russian intelligence and organized crime,[72][39] Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and his associates spearheaded an effort to gather information in Ukraine to advance the allegations, and Attorney General William Barr confirmed that the Justice Department had created an "intake process" to review Giuliani's findings.[73]

In late 2019, it was revealed that the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which Giuliani had once led, was investigating him for multiple felonies relating to his activities in Ukraine.[74][75] Intelligence officials warned Ron Johnson, the chairman of the Senate committee investigating the Bidens, that he risked spreading Russian disinformation.[76] The Washington Post reported in October 2020 that American intelligence agencies warned the White House in 2019 that Giuliani was the target of a Russian influence operation, and National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien warned President Trump about accepting what Giuliani told him. While monitoring Russian assets, U.S. intelligence recorded Giuliani communicating with them.[77] According to officials interviewed by The Daily Beast, then-National Security Advisor John Bolton told his staff not to meet with Giuliani, as did his successor Robert C. O'Brien, because Bolton had been informed that Giuliani was spreading conspiracy theories that aligned with Russian interests in disrupting the 2020 election. These officials were also concerned that Giuliani would be used as a conduit for disinformation, including "leaks" of emails that would mix genuine with forged material to implicate Hunter Biden in corrupt dealings.[78] Interviewed by The Daily Beast, Giuliani would later declare that Derkach's being sanctioned was the result of a conspiracy led by George Soros and that "the chance that Derkach is a Russian spy is no better than 50/50".[79]

In October 2020, during the last weeks of the presidential campaign, the New York Post published an article, with the involvement of Donald Trump's personal attorney Giuliani and former chief strategist Steve Bannon, about a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. The laptop contained an email, the authenticity of which was later verified by The Washington Post in 2022,[80] showing what the New York Post characterized as a "meeting" between Joe Biden and Vadym Pozharskyi, a Burisma advisor, in 2015, though that characterization was disputed by witnesses.[5] The article's veracity was strongly questioned by most mainstream media outlets, analysts and intelligence officials, due to the chain of custody of the laptop and its contents, and suspicion that it may have been part of a disinformation campaign.[81][82][83] The Washington Post was provided data from a Republican activist on a portable drive, which was purported to come from the laptop. The Post confirmed that some of the materials provided to them were genuine, but could not confirm that the materials on the portable drive came from the laptop; the Post also concluded that most of the data could not be verified and fake material may have been mixed in with it.[80] Hunter Biden said that it is possible the laptop could be his.[84][85]

Ukrainian businessman Hares Youssef told The Times that an associate of Dmytro Firtash asked Youssef to lie about Hunter Biden's business dealings to damage Joe Biden's presidential campaign, in exchange for a United States visa.[86]

Viktor Shokin was appointed to the position of Prosecutor General of Ukraine by Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, to whom he was loyal. Due to his own corruption and failures to do his job to clean up corruption, representatives of the EU, the United States, the World Bank, and International Monetary Fund,[6] pressed Poroshenko for his removal.[87]

In March 2016 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, former ambassador to Ukraine John E. Herbst stated, "By late fall of 2015, the EU and the United States joined the chorus of those seeking Mr. Shokin's removal" and that Joe Biden "spoke publicly about this before and during his December visit to Kyiv". During the same hearing, assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland stated, "we have pegged our next $1 billion loan guarantee, first and foremost, to having a rebooting of the reform coalition so that we know who we are working with, but secondarily, to ensuring that the prosecutor general's office gets cleaned up."[8] An overwhelming majority vote in the Ukrainian Parliament in March 2016 led to Shokin's removal from office[88] after an investigation into extortion of another company led to associates who were found in possession of diamonds, cash and other valuables,[89] as well as documents and passports belonging to Shokin.[90]

In an August 2023 Fox News interview, Shokin said he was fired as prosecutor general "at the insistence of then-Vice President [Biden] because I was investigating Burisma." One month later, Poroshenko was asked on Fox News for his reaction to Shokin's assertion. Poroshenko responded:

First of all, this is a completely crazy person. There is something wrong with him. Second, there is not one single word of truth. And third, I hate the idea to make any comments and to make any intervention in an American election. We have very much enjoyed the bipartisan support, and please, do not use such a person like Shokin to undermine the trust between bipartisan support and Ukraine.

The Fox News interviewer responded, "Okay, so that is not true. He didn't get fired because of Joe Biden." Poroshenko confirmed this, adding Shokin was fired by the Ukrainian parliament "for his own statement" and "he played a very dirty game unfortunately."[91][92]

Hunter Biden is a lawyer whose career previously included a period as an executive vice president at MBNA and three years at the United States Department of Commerce. He then worked as a lobbyist until 2006, when George W. Bush appointed him to the board of directors of Amtrak. Hunter Biden resigned from Amtrak in February 2009, shortly after the inauguration of Barack Obama, when his father Joe Biden became vice-president. He resumed lobbying, and was counsel at the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, until the Ukrainian oil and gas firm Burisma Holdings appointed him to its board of directors in April 2014.[93] As Hunter Biden had no prior experience in Ukraine or the energy sector, some viewed this as a likely attempt to buy influence via his father, though Hunter Biden was hired to conduct general corporate consulting rather than to provide energy expertise.[94] Hunter Biden's employment was described by some as a potential conflict of interest, and advisors to the Obama administration considered the situation awkward.[95]