anger at Manafort,” Leshchenko says.
“He helped bring a regime to power that
robbed my country.”
In August 2016, the New York Times
revealed that Manafort had received more
than $12 million in payments from that
regime, and he was forced to resign from
the Trump campaign. Days later, Lesh-
chenko held a press conference in
Kiev calling for Manafort to be
investigated. That kindling—a
wounded Trump campaign,
the New York Times and
an obscure Ukrainianlawmaker—would soon start a fire on
the Internet, conflating events both real
and imagined.
Leshchenko’s calls to investigate
Manafort became part of a Ukrainian
scheme with Democrats to smear the
chairman of the Trump campaign. Crowd-
Strike, the security firm hired to investi-
gate the hacking of emails from the DNC,
was said to have covered up Ukraine’s role
and framed Russia instead. And starting
soon after his Inauguration, Trump piled
on. “I heard [CrowdStrike is] owned by a
very rich Ukrainian, that’s what I heard,”
Trump told the Associated Press in April- He would continue to repeat in
other interviews that the firm was owned
by Ukrainians or based there, despite
the fact that it is a U.S. company based
in Sunnyvale, Calif., with no known ties
to Ukraine. Three months later, he cryp-
tically tweeted about “Ukrainian efforts
to sabotage Trump campaign” that had
been “quietly working to boost Clinton.”
Whenever new allegations of Trump’s
Russia ties emerged, his allies would re-
vive the Ukraine theory. As the Muel-
ler probe gained steam in the summer
of 2017, Fox News host Sean Hannity
devoted segments of his show to
the allegations that the Clinton
campaign had received help
from Ukrainian officials,with a banner of the country’s blue-and-
yellow flag reading in all-caps UKrainian
eLeCTiOn inTerFerenCe? Trump’s son
Donald Jr. amplified the Ukraine theories
after his infamous Trump Tower meeting
with a Kremlin-linked lawyer became
public in July 2017, retweeting that “DNC
operatives actively worked with Ukrainian
government officials to dig up oppo re-
search,” asking, “No outrage???” Trump’s
attorney Jay Sekulow ran with this mes-
sage on CNN a few days later, referring to
“the situation with the Ukrainians and the
DNC and the Clinton campaign, where in-
formation actually was shared.” Trump’s
allies pointed to reporting by Politico
and the New York Times that a DNC out-
reach coordinator had met with Ukrai-
nian officials in Washington and sharedinformation about Manafort’s work in
Ukraine with reporters and the DNC.
As the Mueller probe drew to a close
in the spring of this year, the President
and Giuliani began to speak out more fre-
quently about these theories. “As Russia
Collusion fades, Ukrainian plot to help
Clinton emerges,” Trump tweeted on
March 20, two days before Mueller de-
livered his final report to the Attorney
General.
All along, the pied piper of the Ukraine
narrative was Giuliani. On the morning
of May 11, a few days after a Senate com-
mittee called Trump’s eldest son to tes-
tify, Ukraine’s new government awoke
to news footage of Giuliani declaring
that there were “enemies of the United
States” among them. Raising his voice
over the anchor’s attempts to interrupt
him, Trump’s lawyer even name-checked
Leshchenko, the former journalist. He had
been in line to join the Cabinet of Presi-
dent Volodymyr Zelensky, but Trump’s
lawyer got in the way. “We knew Giuliani
is the hand of Trump,” Leshchenko tells
TIME. “Once he called me an enemy, it
was clear I had to step aside.”
Trump soon took the theories about
Ukraine straight to the country’s Pres-
ident. In a phone call on July 25—the
day after Mueller’s testimony before
Congress—Trump urged Zelensky to do
him a favor. “I would like to have the Attor-
ney General call you or your people” about
this alleged collusion, Trump said. “And I
would like you to get to the bottom of it.”When the WhIte house released a
declassified summary of that call on
Sept. 25, it showed just how aggressive
Trump had been in pursuit of the mat-
ter, and just how varied a team he had
enlisted in the effort. While Giuliani is
a central player, Barr is second only to
Trump in the power he wields in its ex-
ecution. But when he first learned that
Trump had raised his name on the call
with Zelensky, the Attorney General was
“angry and surprised to be lumped in to-
gether with the President’s personal attor-
ney,” not least because Barr has never spo-
ken about Ukraine to Giuliani, a person
familiar with Barr’s thinking tells TIME.
But Barr’s role in this story has
drawn plenty of attention, and criti-
cism. While Trump publicly mused that
Barr’s predecessor, Jeff Sessions, shouldTrump’s favorite
Fox News host
has devoted part
of his prime-time
show to Ukrainian
interference theories Trump pressed Ukraine’s leader to
investigate a debunked conspiracy
theory about Ukrainian collusion
with the Clinton campaign
The Attorney General asked
foreign officials for help
investigating the origins of the
counterintelligence probe into
the Trump campaignWhat’s left are
multiple probes and a
loose narrative, based
on real and fictional
events, in which
Ukraine allegedly
interfered in the 2016
U.S. election