The Ukraine Hoax: Impeachment, Biden Cash, and Mass Murder is a documentary film. [1] Several news outlets have suggested [2] that this documentary was propaganda produced by Russian intelligence agents Konstantin Kilimnik [lower-alpha 1] and Andrii Derkach, [6] an inference made after a declassified US intelligence report [7] stated that a "documentary that aired on a US television network in late January 2020" [1] was Russian propaganda [8] but did not specify the network or documentary. [9] [10]
The film was made by Michael Caputo, a former Trump advisor who had served as the spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, and co-produced by Sergey Petrushin, who is a Russian living in Miami and a close associate of Caputo for over 25 years. Purporting to "expose Biden-Obama corruption" related to Ukraine, it aired at the same time Donald Trump was facing a Senate impeachment trial for withholding military aid from Ukraine while pressuring the country to launch criminal investigations targeting the Bidens. [1] [11] Andrii Derkach, who is a member of the Russian intelligence community, and Andrii Telizhenko, who is a close associate of Rudy Giuliani, supported Caputo and Petrushin on the documentary. The film aired on the One America News Network (OANN) on 21 January 2020, only two weeks before the Senate's acquittal of Donald Trump. [1] [2] [7] [9] [12] [13]
Disinformation is false information deliberately spread to deceive people. It is sometimes confused with misinformation, which is false information but is not deliberate.
Paul John Manafort Jr. is an American lobbyist, political consultant, attorney, and convicted felon and fraudster. A long-time Republican Party campaign consultant, he chaired the Trump presidential campaign from June to August 2016. Manafort served as an adviser to the U.S. presidential campaigns of Republicans Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bob Dole. In 1980, he co-founded the Washington, D.C.–based lobbying firm Black, Manafort & Stone, along with principals Charles R. Black Jr. and Roger J. Stone, joined by Peter G. Kelly in 1984. Manafort often lobbied on behalf of foreign leaders such as former President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych, former dictator of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos, former dictator of Zaire Mobutu Sese Seko, and Angolan guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi. Lobbying to serve the interests of foreign governments requires registration with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA); on June 27, 2017, he retroactively registered as a foreign agent.
Robert Hunter Biden is an American attorney who is the second son of U.S. President Joe Biden and his first wife Neilia Hunter Biden. Biden is also a hedge fund, venture capital, and private-equity fund investor who formerly worked as a lobbyist, banker, public administration official, and registered lobbyist-firm attorney.
One America News Network (OANN), also known as One America News (OAN), is a far-right, pro-Trump cable news channel founded by Robert Herring Sr. and owned by Herring Networks, Inc., that launched on July 4, 2013. The network is headquartered in San Diego, California, and operates news bureaus in Washington, D.C., and New York City.
Leonid Vasylovych Derkach was a Soviet and Ukrainian politician, intelligence officer, and general who was Head of the Security Service of Ukraine from 22 April 1998 to 10 February 2001. Called the "Ukrainian Sorge", he headed one of the five groups in the Dnipropetrovsk Mafia. The Derkach family maintains very close relationships with Oleg Deripaska, Mikhail Fridman's Moscow-based Alfa Group and Petr Aven's Alfa-Bank.
Serhiy Volodymyrovych Lyovochkin is a Ukrainian politician, currently a member of the Parliament of Ukraine. Over 20 years, he has held various leading posts in civil service as well as top corporate positions.
Sergey (Georgy) Petrushin is a Russian entrepreneur. He is the founder and co-owner of the marketing agency Zeppelin PRO, founder of the nightclub Zeppelin, producer of the blues band CrossRoadz, producer of the Europe's largest electronic music festival, co-owner of an art gallery Zeppelin, and collector of photo art. He was a business partner of Michael R. Caputo who, in March 2021, told Mother Jones that Petrushin was his "business partner and friend for 25 years" and that Petrushin lives in Miami. Producer of Sleeping Beauty Dreams
Andy Victor Kuchma, formerly Andrii Viktorovych Artemenko, is a former Ukrainian politician and businessman. Andrii Viktorovych Artemenko was a People's Deputy of Ukraine of the 8th convocation of Verkhovna Rada and chairman of the "Solidarity of Right Forces" party.
Since Donald Trump was a 2016 candidate for the office of President of the United States, numerous links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies have been discovered by the FBI, Special counsel, and several United States congressional committees, as part of their investigations into the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. Following intelligence reports about the Russian interference, Trump and some of his campaign members, business partners, administration nominees, and family members were subjected to intense scrutiny to determine whether they had improper dealings during their contacts with Russian officials. Several people connected to the Trump campaign made false statements about those links and obstructed investigations. These investigations resulted in many criminal charges and indictments.
Michael Raymon Caputo is an American political strategist and lobbyist. In April 2020, Caputo was appointed as assistant secretary of public affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services in the Trump administration. He worked for the Reagan Administration with Oliver North, and later as director of media services on the campaign for President George H. W. Bush in the 1992 United States presidential election. Caputo moved to Russia in 1994, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and was an adviser to Boris Yeltsin. He worked for Gazprom Media in 2000 where he worked on improving the image of Vladimir Putin in the U.S. He moved back to the U.S. and founded a public relations company, and then moved to Ukraine to work on a candidate's campaign for parliament.
Andrii Leonidovych Derkach is a Ukrainian politician and businessman. He has been a member of the Ukrainian Parliament since 1998, serving seven terms, with several parties. In 2021, the United States Government accused him of being a "Russian agent" and sanctioned him for interference in the 2020 United States elections, and the Ukrainian government sanctioned him for spreading Russian propaganda. In June 2022, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said that Derkach received funds from the Russian GRU to create private security companies that Russia planned to use to capture Ukraine, and that Prosecutor General of Ukraine had started a pre-trial investigation into his role.
Konstantin Viktorovich Kilimnik is a Russian/Ukrainian political consultant. In the United States, he became a person of interest in multiple investigations regarding Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, particularly due to his ties with Paul Manafort, an American political consultant, who was a campaign chairman for Donald Trump.
This is a timeline of major events in first half of 2018 related to the investigations into links between associates of Donald Trump and Russian officials that are suspected of being inappropriate, relating to Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. It follows the timeline of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections before and after July 2016 up until election day November 8, the transition, and the first and second halves of 2017, but precedes the second half of 2018, the first and second halves of 2019, 2020, and 2021. These events are related to, but distinct from, Russian interference in the 2018 United States elections.
This is a timeline of events in the first half of 2019 related to investigations into links between associates of Donald Trump and Russian officials that are suspected of being inappropriate, relating to the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. It follows the timeline of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, both before and after July 2016, until November 8, 2016, the transition, the first and second halves of 2017, the first and second halves of 2018, and followed by the second half of 2019, 2020, and 2021.
Russian interference in the 2020 United States elections was a matter of concern at the highest level of national security within the United States government, in addition to the computer and social media industries. In 2020, the RAND Corporation was one of the first to release research describing Russia's playbook for interfering in U.S. elections, developed machine-learning tools to detect the interference, and tested strategies to counter Russian interference. In February and August 2020, United States Intelligence Community (USIC) experts warned members of Congress that Russia was interfering in the 2020 presidential election in then-President Donald Trump's favor. USIC analysis released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in March 2021 found that proxies of Russian intelligence promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about Joe Biden "to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration." The New York Times reported in May 2021 that federal investigators in Brooklyn began a criminal investigation late in the Trump administration into possible efforts by several current and former Ukrainian officials to spread unsubstantiated allegations about corruption by Joe Biden, including whether they had used Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani as a channel.
Since 2016, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump and his allies have promoted several conspiracy theories related to the Trump–Ukraine scandal. One such theory seeks to blame Ukraine, instead of Russia, for interference in the 2016 United States presidential election. Also among the conspiracy theories are accusations against Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, and several elements of the right-wing Russia investigation origins counter-narrative. American intelligence believes that Russia engaged in a years long campaign to frame Ukraine for the 2016 election interference, that the Kremlin is the prime mover behind promotion of the fictitious alternative narratives, and that these are harmful to the United States. FBI director Christopher A. Wray stated to ABC News that "We have no information that indicates that Ukraine interfered with the 2016 presidential election" and that "as far as the [2020] election itself goes, we think Russia represents the most significant threat."
Chanel Rion is an American broadcaster, political cartoonist, and children's book author. She is the chief White House correspondent for One America News Network (OAN), a far-right American cable channel. She is known for promoting conspiracy theories.
The Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference in the 2016 United States presidential election, officially titled Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence United States Senate on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election, is the official report in five volumes documenting the findings and conclusions of the United States Senate Intelligence Committee concerning the Russian attack efforts against election infrastructure, Russia's use of social media to affect the election, the U.S. government's response to Russian activities, review of the Intelligence Community Assessment, and counterintelligence threats and vulnerabilities. The redacted report is 1,313 pages long. It is divided into five volumes.
The Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory is a series of false claims centered on the baseless allegation that while Joe Biden was vice president of the United States, he engaged in corrupt activities relating to the employment of his son, Hunter Biden, by the Ukrainian gas company Burisma. They were spread primarily in an attempt to damage Joe Biden's reputation during the 2020 presidential campaign. United States intelligence community analysis released in March 2021 found that proxies of Russian intelligence promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about the Bidens "to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration." The New York Times reported in May 2021 that a federal criminal investigation was examining a possible role by current and former Ukrainian officials, including whether they used former Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, who is the subject of a separate federal investigation, to spread unsubstantiated claims.
The Hunter Biden laptop controversy involves a laptop computer that had belonged to Hunter Biden, son of the then-US presidential candidate and former vice president Joe Biden. The FBI seized the laptop after being informed of its existence by a computer repair shop owner in Wilmington, Delaware, John Paul Mac Isaac, who said that it had been brought to his shop in April 2019 by a person who said that he was Hunter Biden. The person never came back to retrieve the computer. Three weeks before the 2020 United States presidential election, the New York Post published a story, presenting Mac Isaac's claims, that concerned material from the laptop that was allegedly compromising for Joe Biden. Incumbent president and presidential candidate Donald Trump tried to turn the story into a so-called October surprise to hurt Joe Biden's campaign, with Trump falsely asserting that Joe Biden had acted corruptly regarding Ukraine while in office. PolitiFact wrote in June 2021 that, while "over time, there has been less doubt that the laptop did in fact belong to Hunter Biden", the laptop "was real in the sense that it exists, but it didn't prove much", as "[n]othing from the laptop has revealed illegal or unethical behavior by Joe Biden as vice president with regard to his son's tenure as a director for Burisma".