Legal scholar exposes the strange ‘missing link’ in Rudy Giuliani’s debunked Ukraine conspiracy theory

Ryan Goodman, a professor at New York University School of Law, has written a new article with NYU colleague Alex Potcovaru exposing the direct link between President Donald Trump's request to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and to investigate a debunked conspiracy theory pinning the blame on Ukraine for interfering in the 2016 presidential election.

Writing at Just Security, Goodman and Potcovaru examine past statements made by Giuliani both on cable news shows and on social media, and have discovered that Giuliani's efforts to get Ukraine to probe the 2016 election are also an effort to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden.

According to Giuliani's conspiracy theories, which have been repeatedly debunked, Biden not only got a former Ukrainian prosecutor fired to protect his son who had taken a job at a Ukrainian energy company Burisma, but also to install a new prosecutor who would help cover up the Democratic Party's purported efforts to frame Russia for interfering in the 2016 election.

Or put another way, Goodman and Potcovaru write, Giuliani expected both of the investigations that President Donald Trump requested of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to massively damage Biden should he be the 2020 Democratic nominee.

"The most egregious form of the quid pro quo involved pressure on Ukraine to open the '2016 investigation' in exchange for U.S. military aid," they argue. "That Trump-Giuliani deal should be understood as directly linked to trying to interfere in the 2020 election by specifically damaging Biden too."

Read the whole post here.