On Friday, Politico’s Natasha Bertrand and Andrew Desiderio reported that Trump officials testified that they had not seen evidence that the Ukraine government acted to stop President Donald Trump from winning the 2016 election.
The authors call it a “conspiracy theory” to suggest otherwise. From Politico:
According to [Trump attorney Rudy] Giuliani, 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.
The “no evidence” line is the one the media likes to use a lot in the Trump era. It lets them dismiss evidence that goes against the Left’s narrative. The line could have been used in the Obama era as well, but the media dutifully reported whatever that administration told them as if it was fact.
In January 2017, two other Politico reporters – Kenneth Vogel and David Stern – reported that there was evidence of what Giuliani had claimed:
Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also 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, a Politico investigation found.
That seems to vindicate everything Giuliani has claimed.
Journalist Tim Pool, who first noticed the disconnect between the outlet’s reporting, suggested the wording from the most recent Politico story could give them leeway in their claims.
“The way Natasha characterizes what the conspiracy is gives them plausible deniability. ‘oh no we KNOW Ukraine did this, but we meant that they thought it was DIRECTLY with Clinton’s campaign,’” Pool tweeted.
As Politico reported nearly three years ago, a Ukrainian-American consultant for the DNC, Alexandra Chalupa, shared information she received from her Ukraine sources with the DNC in an effort to undermine Trump’s candidacy. She told the outlet she also shared the information she found on Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort’s Ukraine dealings with the country’s ambassador to the U.S., Valeriy Chaly, and one of his top aides. The aide, Oksana Shulyar, claimed that she and Chalupa didn’t work with Clinton’s campaign to dig up dirt on Trump. More from Politico:
But Andrii Telizhenko, who worked as a political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy under Shulyar, said she instructed him to help Chalupa research connections between Trump, 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.
The idea that there is “no evidence” that Ukraine officials helped Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC to undermine Trump is the height of media bias. One can object to phrasing, but the evidence we have suggests that there was some level of coordination between the DNC and campaign and Ukraine officials.