Perhaps the CIA or NSA has indeed assessed—informed by secret intelligence, with high confidence—that Russia planted the idea in Trump’s mind that Ukraine interfered in his election, and that the Kremlin thus triggered a history-making impeachment vote. It’s hard to know what we don’t know. But neither Fiona Hill nor the Times offered the concrete details, direct quotes, or names that would ordinarily back up such a grave claim.

David A. Graham: What happened in Ukraine?

Disinformation campaigns are almost always designed for publicity, and therefore leave public traces. Judging solely on the basis of publicly available evidence, the fictional narrative about Ukraine was concocted and propagated first and foremost by American conspiracy theorists, not Russian disinformation puppeteers.

The conspiracy theory that “Ukraine did it” comes in three progressively more extreme versions, and each time the “it” that Ukraine “did” is different. The first version is that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Hillary Clinton; the second version is that somebody in Ukraine, not Russia, hacked Democratic computer networks in 2016; and the final version is that CrowdStrike, the security firm that helped the DNC, somehow is “Ukrainian-based” or “owned,” and that the DNC server is in Ukraine. (For the record: CrowdStrike was never based in Ukraine, or owned by anybody Ukrainian, and one physical DNC server never existed, because the infrastructure in question was cloud-based.) I’ll refer to those three theories as Ukraine-interfered, Ukraine-hacked, and Ukraine-owned.

Trump, since at least April 2017, subscribes to a mix of all these Ukraine conspiracy theories, as suggested by the summary of his July 25, 2019, call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and by his 53-minute conversation with Fox & Friends on November 22.

So when and how did these three layers of conspiracy theories emerge?

The Ukraine-interfered narrative originated, legitimately, in Ukraine itself. By the end of May 2016, the paper Ukrayinska Pravda reported on the so-called black ledger, a 22-page document that revealed corruption under Viktor Yanukovych, a former pro-Russian president of Ukraine. On August 14, 2016, the Times broke the story that the handwritten ledger listed Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign manager, as the recipient of $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments from Ukraine’s pro-Russian political party. Less than a week later, Manafort resigned. Another week later, on August 28, a Financial Times headline read: “Ukraine’s Leaders Campaign Against ‘Pro-Putin’ Trump”; the piece argued that Ukrainian politicians were “intervening” in a U.S. election. Trump’s confidant Roger Stone read the FT piece, republished it on his personal website, and shared it on September 6 with his then 79,000 followers on Twitter—an entire month before the John Podesta leaks even started. “The only interference in the US election is from Hillary’s friends in Ukraine,” Stone said. The Ukraine-interfered idea further gained steam in early 2017, thanks to a now-infamous Politico investigation, which was circulated, in turn, by the far right.