The conspiracy to reelect the president by misleading the American people about Joe Biden’s work in Ukraine continues, despite the impeachment inquiry triggered by revelations that Donald Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, tried to coerce Ukraine’s government into investigating the former vice president. Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, openly admitted on Thursday that Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine to press Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to open investigations requested by the White House.

The latest phase of the disinformation campaign has focused on what Giuliani calls crucial new evidence: an affidavit from the Ukrainian prosecutor Biden got fired in 2016. But the sudden appearance of this sworn statement, six months after Giuliani and his allies began claiming that Biden had acted with corrupt intent to get that prosecutor removed, raises questions about who orchestrated the filing of that affidavit and how the effort to smear Biden might be related to a Ukrainian billionaire’s fight against extradition to the United States to face bribery charges. In the sworn statement, which was submitted to a court in Austria last month, Viktor Shokin, the former prosecutor general of Ukraine, claims that he was forced out because he was leading “a wide-ranging corruption probe” of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company that paid Biden’s son Hunter to sit on its board. In fact, there is no evidence that such a probe ever existed. Shokin was forced to resign following complaints from international donors to Ukraine, and Ukrainian anti-corruption activists, that he had failed to pursue cases against corrupt former officials — including the owner of the gas company that employed Hunter Biden. By threatening to withhold U.S. aid unless Shokin was removed, Joe Biden had, in fact, made it more likely that his son’s employer would be prosecuted for corruption, not less likely. Giuliani, however, is dedicated to spreading lies about Biden’s role in Ukraine on Trump’s behalf, so he has taken to waving Shokin’s affidavit in front television cameras with a theatrical flourish, as he did in an appearance on ABC in which he mistakenly stated that it had been online for six months. Shokin, in fact, delivered his sworn testimony in front of a notary in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, on September 4, according to a note on the document.

The Bidens are doing all they can to silence me, this is why! pic.twitter.com/Qp1MOgKNuD — Rudy Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) September 30, 2019

That timing matters because it means that Shokin made his statement accusing Biden of corrupt intent only after Giuliani and his allies in the conservative media echo chamber had spent the previous six months loudly making the same claim without producing a shred of credible evidence. Although Shokin makes no mention of it in his affidavit, Giuliani had reached out to him to discuss Biden even earlier, interviewing him via Skype in late 2018. That call was set up by Lev Parnas, a Republican donor who was born in Ukraine and had paid the former New York mayor $500,000 for legal advice before acting as Giuliani’s fixer in Ukraine. Parnas and his business partner, Igor Fruman, were arrested last week and charged with making illegal campaign contributions, including $325,000 to a pro-Trump political action committee, using funds that had been provided by an unnamed Russian national. In the text of the affidavit, Shokin even says that he first heard that Biden had boasted of getting him fired from a report on an American website in April of this year, when the conspiracy theory about Biden was first promoted by Giuliani and John Solomon, a far-right columnist who recently joined Fox News. “After my dismissal, Joe Biden made a public statement (1), saying — even bragging — that he had me fired,” Shokin said, according to a footnoted English translation of the Russian language statement that somehow made its way to Solomon three weeks after it was filed. “This is when it became clear that the real reason for my dismissal was my actions regarding … Burisma and Biden’s personal interest in that company,” Shokin continued. A footnote in the affidavit cites as Shokin’s source an April 2, 2019 blog post from the American site LawandCrime.com, which in turn links back to a John Solomon column for The Hill, headlined, “Joe Biden’s 2020 Ukrainian Nightmare.” In that column, Solomon had incorrectly reported that Ukraine had reopened an investigation of the gas company that added Hunter Biden to its board in 2014. The affidavit was featured last week in a Trump campaign ad attacking Biden and the House impeachment inquiry, as part of the president’s $3.4 million propaganda effort targeting voters in the early Democratic primary states with disinformation.

The onscreen text in the Trump ad notably leaves out the fact that Shokin presents no direct evidence to support his claim that Biden had him removed to block an investigation of Burisma. “I assume,” Shokin says in a part of the statement not highlighted in the ad, “Burisma, which was connected with gas extraction, had the support of the US Vice-President Joe Biden because his son was on the Board of Directors.”

What is perhaps most interesting about the Shokin affidavit, though, is that it was made, as the former prosecutor says on the first page, “at the request of lawyers acting for Dmitry Firtash (‘DF’), for use in legal proceedings in Austria.” Firtash, who also goes by the Ukrainian form of his first name, Dmytro, is a billionaire natural gas magnate, who made his fortune in the chaos of the post-Soviet era and was described by federal prosecutors in Illinois in court papers in 2017 as an “upper-echelon” associate of Russian organized crime. The oligarch has since denied such links, but a leaked State Department cable published by WikiLeaks described a 2008 conversation with the then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor, in which Firtash had “acknowledged ties to Russian organized crime figure Seymon Mogilevich, stating he needed Mogilevich’s approval to get into business in the first place.” Firtash has been stranded in the Austrian capital, Vienna, since 2014, when federal prosecutors in Chicago unsealed an indictment charging him with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a federal law that makes it a crime for corporations and their subsidiaries to bribe foreign officials. The Ukrainian billionaire was accused of “an alleged international racketeering conspiracy involving bribes of state and central government officials in India to allow the mining of titanium minerals” to supply Boeing, the Chicago-based aircraft manufacturer, in 2007. Firtash denies that he paid or recommended any bribes, and claims that his arrest, in the immediate aftermath of the popular uprising that toppled Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Yanukovych, was a politically motivated effort by the Obama administration to block him from influencing the direction of Ukrainian politics. Firtash, a backer of Yanukovych, is also a former business partner of the deposed president’s American political consultant, Paul Manafort. In 2008, Firtash and Manafort planned an $850 million real estate project with the Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska to buy the Drake Hotel in Manhattan and convert it into a luxury property. A court in Vienna, which reviewed 2014 State Department messages apparently dictating where and when Firtash should be arrested, accepted his claim that his arrest was politically motivated and initially blocked the extradition, setting off a five-year legal battle with the Justice Department. In June, however, Austria’s Supreme Court ruled that Firtash could be extradited to stand trial in Chicago. That ruling was suspended the following month as the criminal court in Vienna is considering a request from the oligarch’s legal team to open a new proceeding based on newly submitted evidence, including Shokin’s affidavit and what the court spokesperson Christina Salzborn called “extremely extensive material.” In the affidavit, Shokin claims that the United States had directed Ukraine to prevent Firtash from returning home from Austria by threatening to arrest him, bolstering the oligarch’s claim that he was a victim of political persecution by the Obama administration. While Giuliani and Firtash have both denied any direct collaboration, since July, the oligarch’s legal team has included two veteran Republican operatives, Victoria Toensing and her husband Joe diGenova, who also represent Trump. As Chris Wallace of Fox News reported recently, Toensing and diGenova have been “working with Giuliani to get oppo research on Biden.”

“According to a top U.S. official, all three were working off the books apart from the administration,” Wallace added. “The only person in government who knows what they were doing is President Trump.” Toensing and diGenova did not respond to repeated requests to explain what role, if any, they played in getting Shokin to make his sworn statement or who provided an English translation of it to Solomon last month. Firtash’s Austrian lawyer, Dieter Böhmdorfer — a former justice minister who was once the personal lawyer for the extreme-right Freedom Party leader Jörg Haider — also did not respond to questions about the provenance of the Shokin affidavit. Dan Webb, a former special prosecutor in the Iran-Contra investigation who now represents Firtash in Chicago, also did not respond to questions about who solicited Shokin’s testimony. Two weeks ago, however, Toensing and diGenova used one of their regular appearances on Sean Hannity’s Fox News talk show to attack Biden and try to rehabilitate Shokin.

“We’ve known from the very beginning that Mr. Shokin was not a corrupt prosecutor,” diGenova said, in a clip that Trump shared on Twitter. “We’ve known that he was removed from office under pressure from Vice President Biden because he was investigating the vice president’s son, and because of the vice president’s connection to Burisma Holdings,” diGenova claimed. He went on to call the entire impeachment inquiry an “offensive” that had been launched merely “to protect Vice President Biden.” A research file of documents provided to the State Department by Giuliani in March included the notes of his own interview with Shokin and an email from Solomon to Toensing, diGenova, and Parnas, suggesting that he was coordinating his research with them. The email included a preview copy of a column published later that day in The Hill, in which Solomon falsely accused anti-corruption activists in Ukraine of being a front group for George Soros and claimed that Marie Yovanovitch, then the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, was in on the plot. Toensing, diGenova, and Giuliani have consistently endorsed the conspiracy theory that former Ukrainian officials accused of corruption, and Paul Manafort, have been framed by anti-corruption activists in Ukraine as part of a secret Soros-backed plot. As Jane Mayer observed in the New Yorker, “No journalist played a bigger part in fueling the Biden corruption narrative than John Solomon.” On Wednesday, Democracy Forward, a Washington advocacy organization, submitted a Freedom of Information Act request asking the State Department for all communications between Trump administration officials and Solomon, who is now a Fox News contributor. “The public deserves to know whether high-level Trump administration officials used John Solomon as a vehicle to spread misinformation that President Trump used to justify his request that a foreign government investigate a political rival,” Charisma Troiano, a Democracy Forward spokesperson, said in a statement. “The requested records could expose potentially illegal government propaganda.” Another reported connection between Giuliani’s efforts to bolster the anti-Biden conspiracy theory and the legal team working for Firtash is Parnas. He and Fruman were frequently spotted with Giuliani in Trump’s Washington hotel. Video posted on Facebook last month by a rabbi in Kyiv who has started a refugee camp modeled on the shtetl from “Fiddler on the Roof” showed them in the hotel lobby.

On September 20, a Reuters reporter photographed them having lunch in the hotel with a woman who looked like Toensing.

@AramRoston Was that Victoria Toensing sitting across from Giuliani, reflected in the mirror in your photograph? pic.twitter.com/WzVJpchRgW — Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) October 10, 2019

After Parnas and Fruman were arrested last week at Dulles Airport in Washington with one-way tickets to Vienna, diGenova and Toensing told the Wall Street Journal that they had hired Parnas in July to work as an interpreter related to their representation of Firtash. Giuliani, who told The Atlantic that he, too, was planning to fly to Vienna last week, said that Parnas and Fruman had traveled to the Austrian capital three to six times in recent months. Before their arrest, Trump’s former lawyer John Dowd, who represents Parnas and Fruman, told congressional investigators that the two men might not provide documents requested by the impeachment inquiry because they had assisted Giuliani “in connection with his representation of President Trump.” “Both men had worked in an unspecified capacity for Firtash before Parnas joined the Ukrainian’s legal team, according to a person familiar with the Florida men’s business dealings with Firtash,” Reuters reported on Saturday. The same unidentified source told the news agency that Firtash had been “financing” the activities of Parnas and Fruman. Their expenses had included private jet flights in the United States and travel to Vienna, according to the Reuters source.