How Giuliani Is Conning The World Into Buying A False Biden-Ukraine Narrative

[riversedge]

Very readable and should be passed around IMHO.




How Giuliani Is Conning The World Into Buying A False Biden-Ukraine Narrative



https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/how-giuliani-is-conning-the-world-into-buying-a-false-biden-ukraine-narrative


Rudy Giuliani attempts to spin a false narrative about Joe Biden's involvement in Ukraine. (TPM Illustration/Getty Images)

September 23, 2019 1:21 pm


While President Trump may be breaking new ground in political corruption, his lawyer has reached a new peak in bad faith with his smears of Joe Biden.

Lies, mischaracterizations, fibs — whatever word you have doesn’t fully capture what Giuliani is selling. It’s less a specific falsehood than an all-encompassing false narrative that’s ready-made for news organizations to pick up, more like a redux of the Benghazi scandal than a single lie.

The media’s approach to it thus far illustrates the point: outlets covering the burgeoning scandal hasten to state that there is no evidence of Biden committing any wrongdoing in Ukraine. A true statement, but one that misses the point.

There is overwhelming evidence that Giuliani and Trump are running a smear operation, abetted in part by the U.S. foreign policy apparatus. It shouldn’t be hard to explain, and yet we struggle to capture it.

Giuliani weaves different misrepresentations and untruths together to tell a story about Biden abusing his office to quash an investigation into his son.

In fact, there was no investigation to quash. Biden was arguably the most influential in a cacophony of western voices calling for the prosecutor’s resignation as part of the West’s bid to help the former Soviet republic root out corruption.

All this comes after it emerged that Giuliani — and Trump — have pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to open investigations into the matter.

From the starting point of Hunter Biden’s seat on the board of a scandal-ridden Ukrainian gas company, Giuliani has made up a narrative of abuse of power tailored to support allegations of corruption against the Democratic frontrunner, while demanding that Kyiv supply likely fabricated evidence to support his narrative.

Everyone wanted the prosecutor out

Reforming Ukraine’s graft-ridden law enforcement institutions was at the top of the country’s western backers’ agenda in the years following the 2014 EuroMaidan revolution. Then-chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin was widely seen as refusing to investigate any cases of high-level corruption and came to represent one of the biggest obstacles towards establishing rule of law.

Calls for Shokin’s removal dominated news coverage of Ukraine for months in 2016, as the IMF and EU threatened to withhold financial support from the country if he stayed in the job.

Biden, at one point, threatened to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee until Shokin was removed. “Son of a bitch, he got fired,” Biden later said, recounting the response.

Giuliani spins that situation into a personal vendetta of Biden’s to protect his son................................................................

[Gothmog]

1. The press has investigated this story and found that trumps claims are bogus

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[Cha]

2. Thanks, Goth.. shouldn't the title

say.. "TRYING" to con the world. The "World" better not be "conned".

[Gothmog]

3. Fact-checking President Trump's wild jabs at Joe Biden

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[Cha]

4. 3 Cheers for Josh Marshall!

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Mahalo, Goth!

[Gothmog]

5. Former Ukraine prosecutor says Hunter Biden "did not violate anything"

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A former top Ukrainian prosecutor, whose allegations were at the heart of the dirt-digging effort by Rudolph W. Giuliani, said Thursday he believed that Hunter Biden did not run afoul of any laws in Ukraine.

“From the perspective of Ukrainian legislation, he did not violate anything,” former Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuri Lutsenko told The Washington Post in his first interview since the disclosure of a whistleblower complaint alleging pressure by President Trump on Ukraine’s president, Volodymr Zelensky.

Lutsenko’s comments about Hunter Biden — which echo what he told Bloomberg News in May — were significant, because Trump and his personal attorney Giuliani have sought to stir up suspicions about both Hunter and former vice president Joe Biden’s conduct in Ukraine in recent weeks. Joe Biden is leading Trump in many opinion polls ahead of the 2020 election.

Hunter Biden has denied any wrongdoing, and there is no evidence he was involved in any lawbreaking in his work in Ukraine with the country’s largest private gas company.