On Wednesday, The Daily Beast reported that President Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani received a dossier of anti-Ukraine propaganda and conspiracy theories last week in a meeting with Andriy Derkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker who was part of a pro-Russia party and served in the nation's security services.
Derkach, who has baselessly claimed America is skimming money from Ukrainian energy companies and that a donor to the Clinton Foundation is a Russian spy, often appears on Russian state broadcasts.
His claims that Ukrainian law enforcement tried to give evidence on election interference to the United States have also been echoed by right-wing reporter John Solomon.
The Daily Beast obtained the dossier given to Giuliani, and found a number of wild claims, with the overarching narrative being that Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) was behind the 2016 election interference rather than Russia.
"NABU, one dossier document claims, is 'under the control of certain persons from the US Embassy and US State Department,'" wrote reporters Erin Blanco and Anna Nemtsova. "One such person it claims is pulling the commission’s strings is George Kent—the memorably bow-tied diplomat from the impeachment hearings—who the document alleges was 'present near the courthouse' during a corruption case 'providing orders to organize and accompany a positive decision for NABU.'"
Derkach's dossier also alleges that Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who is serving a seven-year prison sentence for bank fraud and tax evasion related to his dealings with Ukrainian oligarchs, was actually framed by NABU with "the intention of damaging the image of Donald Trump’s [sic] and the Republican party of the United States" — and that Trump actually cut aid to Ukraine in retaliation for this, rather than to extract dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden.
Atlantic Council senior fellow Anders Aslund told NBC News that Derkach and his colleague Oleksandr Dubinsky are "professional disinformers" who are widely known in Ukraine to be "not credible."
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