If you are leery already of the press’ coverage of allegations that President Trump pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate Joe Biden, botched reports this week from ABC News and Axios will make you only more suspicious.
Axios breathlessly tweeted Wednesday evening: “JUST IN: An adviser to Ukraine’s president tells ABC News that Trump’s insistence for the two leaders to discuss a possible investigation into Joe Biden was a precondition for their now-infamous July 25 phone call.”
As of this writing, that tweet, which is still live, has been shared more than 8,000 times.
JUST IN: An adviser to Ukraine’s president tells ABC News that Trump’s insistence for the two leaders to discuss a possible investigation into Joe Biden was a precondition for their now-infamous July 25 phone call. https://t.co/ah8VHMb5z5
— Axios (@axios) September 25, 2019
Axios’ accompanying story, which mostly just repeats ABC’s original reporting, originally bore the headline, “Adviser to Ukraine’s president says Biden case was precondition to Trump phone call.”
Sounds big.
ABC, for its part, published its original “scoop” earlier Wednesday, titled “Ukrainians understood Biden probe was condition for Trump-Zelenskiy phone call: Ukrainian adviser.”
The report began originally:
But after weeks of discussions with American officials, Ukrainian officials came to recognize a precondition to any executive correspondence, the adviser said.
“It was clear that [President Donald] Trump will only have communications if they will discuss the Biden case,” said Serhiy Leshchenko, an anti-corruption advocate and former member of Ukraine’s Parliament, who now acts as an adviser to Zelenskiy. “This issue was raised many times. I know that Ukrainian officials understood.”
The Trump administration’s alleged insistence that the two leaders discuss a prospective investigation into Biden, one of the president’s political opponents, casts his July 25 conversation with Zelenskiy in a new light.
The only problem with this story: The supposed adviser to the Ukrainian president is no longer an adviser. In fact, Leshchenko has been on the outside since even before the July 25 phone call, meaning he is (at best) just another guy who heard a thing from another guy.
But it is actually even worse than that, according to Radio Free Europe’s Christopher Miller, whose beat includes covering Ukrainian politics. Leshchenko “said he DID NOT tell ABC insistence for leaders to discuss Biden probe was precondition for call,” the Radio Free Europe reporter tweeted.
Well, this is awkward.
Axios and ABC have amended their respective stories since to correct the record, but they are still quite flawed as they stand.
The ABC story now includes an editor’s note that reads:
Axios tweeted later in a note that has been shared only 373 times, “CORRECTION: We have updated the story to reflect that Serhiy Leschenko is no longer an adviser to the Ukrainian president as ABC News first reported.”
CORRECTION: We have updated the story to reflect that Serhiy Leschenko is no longer an adviser to the Ukrainian president as ABC News first reported.
— Axios (@axios) September 26, 2019
Axios’ report also bears an editor’s note that reads, “ABC News has corrected its story to reflect that Leshchenko is no longer an adviser to Zelensky. We have updated our story accordingly.”
Good on ABC and Axios for including a correction, but, uh, their stories still cite Leshchenko as the source of the claim that a Biden investigation was a condition of the July 25 call. Are we just going to ignore the part where the former adviser was distanced from the Zelensky administration months before the call even took place? Are we going to continue to pass Leshchenko off as an in-the-know informant and not just another second-hand source of intel? Are we also going to ignore the part where Miller reported that Leshchenko told him explicitly that he had not told ABC that the Biden investigation was a precondition for the phone call?
Nobody likes to issue full retractions, I guess.
