It would be really helpful for Democrats and liberals in the national media to get their story straight in the debate over whether Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election. Right now, they have four different and contradictory stories, and that makes it all but impossible to, you know, have an actual debate.
Their initial position was to deny that any meddling by Ukraine took place at all. The problem with that is the New York Times broke the story in 2016 that an entire Ukrainian government agency was investigating Paul Manafort, who at the time was serving as Trump’s campaign chairman.
Back then, the paper reported that Ukraine’s “newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau,” which worked in conjunction with America’s FBI, was in possession of a mysterious, handwritten diary that showed Manafort was receiving millions of dollars in payments from one of the country’s pro-Russian politicians. “Investigators assert,” the Times reported, “that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials.”
Yes, I’m sure all of that was by coincidence, a matter of fate that Ukraine’s most consequential government agency was looking into the head of a major-party presidential campaign. It surely wasn’t a form of retaliation against Trump, who had been saying positive things about Russia.
And so, during the impeachment hearings last month, Republicans were able to finally jog the public’s memory and demonstrate that yes, there was something untoward about Joe Biden and his son’s involvement with a seedy Ukrainian gas company — and yes, government officials in Ukraine did oppose Trump.
After that, Democrats and the media admitted that Ukraine slid into 2016’s direct messages, but, they said, it wasn’t bad like the Russian meddling. They said Ukraine’s interference was essentially negligible, even though Politico in 2017 reported that “Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office” and “disseminat[ing] documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election.”
Late last month, Paul Farhi of the Washington Post looked back on that Politico report and belittled it for having “implied an equivalence with Russian efforts to undermine Clinton.” Ukraine’s interference, said Farhi, was not “the type of hacking and disinformation campaign waged by the Russians in 2016.”
So one man’s explicit, documented election interference by a foreign country is apparently another man’s “implied equivalence.” Okay.
As of Monday, we’ve discovered yet one more circle on the impeachment Twister map that Trump’s opponents can reach for. On his CNN show Monday, Chris Cuomo said Trump was “gladly giving life to conspiracy theories” and urging other Republicans to defend him, even though, Cuomo said, “Their own party debunked it in the Senate.”
The “debunked” part isn’t new. They’ve been claiming — without evidence! — that any suggestion Ukraine meddled in 2016 has been “debunked,” “discredited,” and “dismantled” throughout this entire freak show.
But the part about the GOP having “debunked it in the Senate” is based on a news report this week, purporting with a sleight of hand that Republicans know themselves that Ukraine had no substantial involvement in 2016.
That’s not true. The report by Politico said that “the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee thoroughly investigated that theory” about Ukraine and “found no evidence that Ukraine waged a top-down interference campaign akin to the Kremlin’s efforts to help Trump win in 2016.”
But who said anything about a “top-down interference campaign”? No one. What we know is that Ukrainian government officials, plus their most important government agency, used their power to influence and interfere in the 2016 election. Not a single person has suggested that the country’s leader directed any of it.
If it’s okay to just start making up what people are actually saying on the matter, let’s try it in reverse. How about we say that Democrats have investigated Russia’s interference in 2016 and found no evidence that Vladimir Putin directed agents to help Trump’s campaign by manipulating voter machines?
Was anyone saying that he did? No — but it’s been debunked by Democrats! So that means no Russian interference, right?
So, what’s their next position on Ukraine going to be?
