(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The rough transcript of Donald Trump’s conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy reveals a lot more than the former’s efforts to coerce the latter into providing dirt on a political opponent. It also suggests that the U.S. president entertains some pretty bizarre conspiracy theories – or at least finds them useful for his campaign goals.
Zelenskiy, who mixed obsequiousness with subtle irony in the July 25 conversation, didn’t directly mention that he’d like the U.S. to unfreeze $400 million in military aid to Ukraine. “We are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes,” he said instead. The aid package included funding under the Foreign Military Financing program, aimed at helping foreign governments purchase U.S.-made weapons such as the Javelin antitank missile, each of which costs upwards of $165,000 (for the launcher, electronic system and missile).
“I would like you to do us a favor, though,” Trump responded to Zelenskiy’s gentle hint – and went on to lay out, in a barely comprehensible way, the first of two conspiracy theories:
I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation... I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it.
Crowdstrike is the cybersecurity company that the Democratic National Committee hired in 2016 to investigate breaches allegedly perpetrated by Russian military intelligence. According to the prospectus from its initial public offering in June, the company doesn’t have any wealthy Ukrainians among its big shareholders.
So what did Trump mean? His words echo a theory – set forth in a 2017 post on CounterPunch, an anti-establishment website – that evidence of Russian election meddling was actually planted at the behest of anti-Russian Ukrainians. The post notes that Crowdstrike’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, which it described as “a think tank with openly anti-Russian sentiments that is funded by Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk, who also happened to donate at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation.”
Popular as the theory has been in the conservative-conspiracist echo chamber, it hardly stands up to scrutiny. The Atlantic Council lists the Viktor Pinchuk Foundation among groups that have donated between $250,000 and $499,999. Yet an affiliation with the think tank doesn’t link Alperovitch (who is of Russian, not Ukrainian, origin) or Crowdstrike directly with Pinchuk any more than it links him with other major Atlantic Council donors, ranging from Facebook to the Norwegian Ministry of Defense.
Nonetheless, Trump appears to focus on the alleged Pinchuk-Crowdstrike connection in his call with the Ukrainian president. When the president says “I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people,” he’s likely referring to rumors in Ukraine that Zelenskiy has made some kind of deal with Pinchuk, the son-in-law of former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma. The chatter, which Trump could have picked up from the “Ukrainian friends” he mentioned on the call, arose after Zelenskiy held two meetings with Pinchuk in late May and released no details. So Trump warned Zelenskiy against associating with a billionaire he placed in his opponents’ camp.
One enigmatic bit is Trump’s suggestion that Ukraine has “the server” – that is, the hacked DNC server (technically “servers”) that Crowdstrike examined but didn’t pass on to the FBI. Trump has repeatedly wondered about the server’s whereabouts, but I can’t find the source of his assertion that it somehow landed in Ukraine.
Trump’s second conspiracy theory is better known. It contends that Joe Biden, then the U.S. vice president, got former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin because the latter was investigating Burisma, the natural gas company where Hunter Biden, the vice president’s son, was a highly paid board member. This theory originates from an April article in the Hill that cites Shokin. At least in Trump’s mind, it has survived every attempt to debunk it.
In fact, none of the three prosecutors general who served under Poroshenko, including Shokin, made any serious attempt to investigate Burisma, and all contributed to burying the case. It’s impossible to determine now whether the Biden-Burisma association had anything to do with that, even though Hunter Biden’s board appointment – which came soon after U.K. prosecutors froze the firm’s assets - was transparently meant to help Burisma weather the storm.
During his call with Zelenskiy, Trump couldn’t have been playing to the crowd: The conversation was never supposed to be public. This suggests that the U.S. president actually believed the theories he aired. And now, Trump’s decision to release the rough transcript – even though it contains more damning evidence of a quid pro quo than anyone had expected – suggests that he intends to employ the theories in his election campaign.
The conspiracy theories can allow Trump to hammer Democrats with corruption accusations of his own, even as they try to impeach him. He can say their attacks on him are funded by Ukrainian oligarchs and that Biden, the Democratic front-runner, is linked to them, too, through his son. Trump knows that the dot-connecting doesn’t have to be fact-based or convincing to cause real damage. And he knows partisan voters will ignore any inconvenient evidence.
Trump’s revenge for Russiagate is coming. Expect Biden to find himself talking about Ukraine more often than he’d like, just as Trump once couldn’t dodge talking about Russia.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Whitehouse at mwhitehouse1@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.
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