Well John, I wonder what you’re thinking right now. Two years ago you were the hottest and most hard-hitting right wing “journalist” out there. You brought a patina of “respectability” to the MAGAverse with your mind-meltingly complex reporting on the manifold plots in the Deep State against your Orange God-Titan in the White House with “blockbuster” pieces such as “Nellie Ohr’s ‘Hi Honey’ emails to DOJ about Russia collusion should alarm us all” and “Bill Clinton sought State’s permission to meet with Russian nuclear official during Obama uranium decision”.
None of those classics ended up with the eventual impact as this one however: “Joe Biden’s 2020 Ukrainian nightmare: A closed probe is revived”. With the benefit of hindsight and the assurance of Trump’s loss, we can all say that’s where you fucked up.
Russian-backed Ukrainians knew you’re a MAGA pajamas-wearing Trump fanboy. They knew you’re the politics equivalent of the “I’m not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens” guy on the History Channel, taking the most tenuous of threads and weaving them into beautiful yarns of conjecture. They knew you were reliable, because you’d done the work for them when they needed you to help convince mentally ill Trump fans that Hillary gave America’s uranium away to the Russian government the same week Robert Mueller was handing down his first indictments. So they turned to you when they realized Joe Biden was the biggest threat to a second term for their asset.
Now, at first glance the sentence “In 2016 Vice President Joe Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire lead prosecutor Viktor Shokin by threatening to withhold foreign aid, while his son Hunter sat on the board of a Ukrainian company that had been investigated by that prosecutor’s office” does give one pause. That’s a real quid pro quo with a foreign government – in the strictest definition of the term.
It’s only when the longer version is spelled out and the parts you purposely omitted are put back in that the problems become apparent. Without getting too deep into it, you only wrote what Trump and his fans wanted to hear and not what actually happened: Joe Biden was enforcing official US Government policy, with the full knowledge and consent of at least two Republican Senators, the European Union, and the Ukrainian people to force a corrupt piece of shit out of office. On a separate and wholly unrelated note, Burisma is indeed a sketchy company and has been the subject of probes, but Hunter Biden is a Yale-educated attorney with a specialization in representing international firms under legal and regulatory pressure from governments. In any event, six weeks after you published that piece, Shokin’s successor cleared Joe and Hunter Biden of any wrongdoing, saying specifically “Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws – at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing. A company can pay however much it wants to its board”.
Of course, that wasn’t enough for you. Or President Trump, for that matter. At that time in the late Spring of 2019, of all the then-hopeful 2020 Democratic presidential primary candidates, Joe Biden was the leader in all head-to-head matchups against the incumbent. He was a threat that needed to be dealt with. As we now know, with the help of some Ukrainian “sources”, you worked with Trump’s lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Joe DiGenova to sell the president on this quid pro quo story which led Trump to initiate his own dark mirror version of what Biden had accomplished in pressuring Ukraine to remove Shokin in 2016.
It almost worked. In June 2019, Trump pressured the new Ukrainian president, Volodimir Zelensky to announce a newly reopened investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden by withholding military assistance funds to help the nation fight against Russian-backed insurgents in the country’s eastern Donbass region. Two months later, that aid was suddenly released without explanation, just as Zelensky was negotiating an exclusive interview with CNN journalist Fareed Zakaria in which Zelensky had apparently planned to make that announcement. Then came the whistleblower, and everything went to shit.
True, Trump did survive impeachment. But five months of drama meant for a lot of news cycling and a lot of people got to know what exactly you and your Orange Warlord were trying to do – torpedo Biden’s candidacy with allegations of an abuse of power for self-interest, and that those allegations amounted to a big-ass nothingburger for everyone living outside the MAGAverse. That set the stage for the hilarious failures of October 2020, where Twitter and Facebook bombed the “laptop from hell” on the runway and some asshole with a funny name was laughed off when he had “serious allegations” against the Bidens.
Your name wasn’t on that, but that was your work. You built that. There’s a straight line from your reporting/opinioning to Trump’s impeachment to the spectacular letdown of the Hunterghazi October surprises. Now to be fair, Trump most likely would have lost anyway given his utter dereliction during the worst pandemic in history. But you never know. A really well-executed hit job, coming as a surprise, could’ve been the “Comey Moment” of 2020 and tilted the electoral college to Trump again.
Maybe that’s where your head is at these days, what could have been if things had gone differently. If you had just been a little smarter, more tenacious, made different decisions about when and where to strike, rather than unintentionally making sure that the kind of misinformation you traffic in mattered least when your team needed it the most.
Or maybe you’re preoccupied with other matters, like you’re worried that your website’s seafood selections aren’t moving like you’d hoped. Whatever.