Something weird is going on at Politico.
The newsgroup reports that there is “no evidence” to support the idea that Ukraine worked hand-in-hand with the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign to torpedo then-GOP nominee Donald Trump.
“According to Giuliani,” Politico notes, “Ukrainian officials conspired with the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to help boost the Democratic nominee’s campaign and damage Trump’s candidacy. No evidence has emerged to support that idea [emphasis added].
This comes as a bit of a surprise considering reporters Ken Vogel and David Stern reported for Politico in 2017 that “Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office.”
Their article, titled “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire,” claimed also that Ukrainian officials “disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.”
“Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton,” the article’s subhead reads.
Here are some especially pertinent passages from the 2017 report (bear with the sheer volume of information; the authors are careful to build their case):
She occasionally shared her findings with officials from the DNC and Clinton’s campaign, Chalupa said. In January 2016 … Chalupa told a senior DNC official that, when it came to Trump’s campaign, “I felt there was a Russia connection,” Chalupa recalled.
[…]
[Ukrainian Embassy] officials there became “helpful” in Chalupa’s efforts, she said, explaining that she traded information and leads with them. “If I asked a question, they would provide guidance, or if there was someone I needed to follow up with.” But she stressed, “There were no documents given, nothing like that.”
Chalupa said the embassy also worked directly with reporters researching Trump, Manafort and Russia to point them in the right directions.
[…]
Andrii Telizhenko, who worked as a political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy under [Oksana Shulyar, aide to Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S. Valeriy Chaly], said she instructed him to help Chalupa research connections between Trump, [Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort], and Russia. “Oksana said that if I had any information, or knew other people who did, then I should contact Chalupa,” recalled Telizhenko, who is now a political consultant in Kiev. “They were coordinating an investigation with the Hillary team on Paul Manafort with Alexandra Chalupa,” he said, adding “Oksana was keeping it all quiet,” but “the embassy worked very closely with” Chalupa. In fact, sources familiar with the effort say that Shulyar specifically called Telizhenko into a meeting with Chalupa to provide an update on an American media outlet’s ongoing investigation into Manafort.
Telizhenko recalled that Chalupa told him and Shulyar that, “If we can get enough information on Paul [Manafort] or Trump’s involvement with Russia, she can get a hearing in Congress by September.”
Chalupa confirmed that, a week after Manafort’s hiring was announced, she discussed the possibility of a congressional investigation with a foreign policy legislative assistant in the office of Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), who co-chairs the Congressional Ukrainian Caucus. … Asked about the effort, the Kaptur legislative assistant called it a “touchy subject” in an internal email to colleagues that was accidentally forwarded to Politico.
Vogel, who reports now for the New York Times, and Stern wrote a lengthy, in-depth, and seemingly well-sourced article for Politico detailing efforts by Ukrainian officials to feed damaging information about Trump and his associates to top Democratic operatives during the 2016 election. But now the same newsgroup reports that there is “no evidence” to support the notion that Ukrainian officials “conspired” with Democratic officers to destroy the Republican nominee.
Huh?
“The 2017 article detailed several instances in which Ukrainian government officials sought to raise questions about Donald Trump and his campaign,” a spokesman for Politico said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “These included alleged instances of cooperation by officials in the Ukrainian embassy to the United States with the efforts of Alexandra Chalupa, a consultant to the Democratic National Committee, to research then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s ties to pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine. Chalpua said her research was undertaken on her own, though she briefed DNC officials.”
He added, “The story also outlined ways in which a Ukrainian parliamentarian in the ruling party touted ledgers that purported to show $12.7 million in payments earmarked for Manafort from a pro-Russian party in Ukraine. And the story cited social media posts and an op-ed by Ukrainian government officials that were highly critical of Trump and his candidacy. The article did not state that the Ukrainian government conspired with the Clinton campaign or the DNC.”
In other words, the 2019 Politico report relies on the distinction between Kyiv operatives working directly with the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee versus what Stern and Vogel reported, which is that Kyiv officials relied on intermediaries to transmit allegedly damaging information about the then-GOP nominee. That seems like a pretty thin distinction.
