Transcript

BROOKE GLADSTONE The rift between the news and opinion shows on Fox gets more toxic with every day of impeachment coverage. Even Rush noticed.

[CLIP]

RUSH LIMBAUGH You know, Fox really ought to change the name of the network from the Fox News Channel to the Fox Never Trump-er Network. [END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD And I'm Bob Garfield. Political historians have long held that conspiracy theories are the province of the fringes, but...

[CLIP]

JEET HEER If you actually look at the sort of history of American paranoia and conspiracy theories you often find that they're very elite figures who believe in them. Things like the Red Scare were led by J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy. [END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE And a trip to Ukraine reveals a different perspective on our impeachment woes.

[CLIP]

DARIA KALENIUK So is that, is it okay for the president of the United States to have Attorney General of the United States to call the president of Ukraine to discuss the investigation? Is that okay?

ILYA MARRITZ Well, I'm not a lawyer but I believe you are a lawyer. [END CLIP]

BOB GARFIELD It’s all coming up, after this.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD And I'm Bob Garfield. Let's talk about the global conspiracy against the American president that Trump himself is always talking about. As it becomes ever more obvious that Trump's conspiracy theories drive much of his foreign relations, we thought it timely to connect the dots of his world view. So let's begin at the beginning with a low level foreign policy adviser in the Trump campaign named George Papadopoulos.

ALEX WARD We might remember that the entire reason the FBI launched a counterintelligence investigation at the Trump campaign was because Papadopoulos drunkenly told the Australian ambassador to the UK that he had learned that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton.

BOB GARFIELD Vox Staff Writer Alex Ward will guide us through this dark terrain. He pays the theories origins to April 2016 when Papadopoulos gets a tip from a Maltese professor named Joseph Mifsud about Russia's nasty intelligence on Hillary Clinton. The next turn comes a few months later when a drunken Papadopoulos tells an Australian diplomat about the tip. That diplomat tells Australian authorities who passed the information to the FBI, which opens an investigation into Trump's campaign. From connecting such dots, the shape of a great fake conspiracy emerges. Team Trump claims that Mifsud was, in fact, a Western agent sent to mess with the Trump campaign–so says the president's lawyer an emissary Rudy Giuliani.

[CLIP]

RUDY GIULIANI Mifsud, the diplomat from Malta who has a counter-intelligence background who planted--this information--[END CLIP].

BOB GARFIELD Thus conspiracy theory number one, Mifsud is an Italian or at least Western agent whose mission was to send the Trump team off on a wild goose chase and that's why the attorney general went to Italy last week to prove it.

[CLIP]

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT Bill Barr went to Italy last week to meet with senior intelligence officials there as part of the Justice Department's investigation into the origins of the Russia probe.[END CLIP]

BOB GARFIELD But there will be no proof because the Mueller investigation found that Mifsud had Russian ties but no relevant Western ones. The Trump team unbowed thus conjured up more conspirators. They claim the Australian diplomat was also a spy waiting for Papadopoulos to mention the Russian based Hillary dirt to pass it on to the feds to make the Trump campaign look bad.

ALEX WARD Trump does not like that it is known that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election and did so in order to help him win or at least the Russians favorite him. And so this is a great counter narrative. We were being spied on that all of this was a conspiracy against Trump and that none of the investigation was legitimate from the beginning.

BOB GARFIELD Or no it's the British who spied. A theory Trump announced on Twitter in April.

[CLIP]

MALE CORRESPONDENT 'A former CIA analyst on the conservative One America News network accusing British intelligence of helping the Obama administration's spy.' Adding, 'Wow. It is now just a question of time before the truth comes out and when it does, it will be a beauty.' [END CLIP]

BOB GARFIELD Debunked long ago. But the Trump team fingers yet a different foreign election meddler–no matter that Mueller gathered enough evidence to charge a Russian troll farm, 12 Russian intel agents and 13 Russian nationals. According to Trump, Ukraine did it to help the Democrats. How does he know? Because the Democrats hired the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike to investigate Russian government hackers who leaked to Democratic emails to disrupt Clinton's campaign and CrowdStrike is Ukrainian. Except it isn't, it's based in California. It's not Ukrainian at all. But that's one of those inconvenient truths Trump just shakes off.

ALEX WARD We know from former Trump senior officials that actually they tried to dispel Trump of that notion repeatedly. You heard from the former top homeland security adviser Tom Bossert.

[CLIP]

TOM BOSSERT It's not only a conspiracy theory. It is completely debunked. It sticks in his mind when he hears it over and over again. Let me just repeat that it has no validity. [END CLIP].

BOB GARFIELD Nor does Trump's assertion that CrowdStrike harbors Clinton's email servers. All those delicious top secret emails.

[CLIP]

PRES. DONALD J. TRUMP Where are those servers? They’re missing. Where are they? What happened to Hillary Clinton's emails, 33000 emails gone? [END CLIP]

ALEX WARD The problem for Trump here is that there actually is no missing physical server associated with the DNC breach. So how this got into Trump's head, why he feels that Ukraine would have a physical server anyway, all of this is very unclear.

BOB GARFIELD For conspiracies all pointing to one reason, Team Trump is calling visiting and smearing Italy. Australia, the UK and Ukraine.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

BOB GARFIELD Four conspiracies, but when you boil it down, just a single theory.

ALEX WARD That the president was persecuted, that the president's team was not at fault and it was in fact a conspiracy by political enemies to tear down a campaign and then a presidency. And so if you're looking at the core, we have a president who is just unwilling to believe the facts as they are known and instead twist reality in order to attack political opponents.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Writing in The Nation this week, national affairs correspondent Jeet Heer argues that the president believes at least in the outlines of the conspiracy theory he just described. Jeet harkens back to a famous line from the 1983 movie "Scarface," advice to an aspiring drug lord.

[CLIP OF "SCARFACE"]

ELVIRA HANCOCK (MICHELLE PFEIFFER) Lesson number two, you don't get high on your own supply.

FRANK LOPEZ (ROBERT LOGGIA)That's right. Lesson number two don't get high on your own supply. [END CLIP]

JEET HEER There is a very long academic tradition going back to the great Richard Hofstadter who was one of the major 20th century American historians. He famously wrote about the paranoid style in American politics and what he said was that the paranoid style comes from the fringes, from the far-left and the far-right.

BROOKE GLADSTONE But as he notes half standards view has been challenged on the idea that conspiracy theories are the products only of people on the margins of power.

JEET HEER If you actually look at the sort of history of American paranoia and conspiracy theories you often find that they're very elite figures who believe in them. I mean things like the Red Scare were led by J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy. And if you think about it it kind of makes sense like if you have, you know, sort of powerful people high above society, it's very easy for them to try to blame any problems on outsider groups. And that has been the tradition just as much as there's also been a tradition of populist groups using conspiracy theories.

BROOKE GLADSTONE So as you pondered the possibility that Donald Trump actually may have fallen into the same trap as Scarface and become intoxicated, you concluded that, in fact, he has.

JEET HEER Yes, I should add to qualify that a little bit by saying that with Donald Trump the question of belief, I don't think applies in the same way that it does to other people. His view of truth is very instrumental. You know the philosopher Henry Frankfurter made a famous distinction between lying and B.S. The Liar knows that they're lying whereas the BS-er doesn't care what's the difference between truth and lying. So Trump, I think it's very clear from the last 50 years of his life, that he doesn't really care about the distinction between truth and lies. And that makes it all the easier for him to grab onto these emotional narratives that support what he actually feels, which is persecuted. You know, whether something is actually factually true is not at all concern. The question is, is it useful for him? And then if it is, he takes it up and it becomes part of him. The circle around him though definitely includes people who like seem to be really gung ho about this and not in a manipulative way.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Let's talk about Trump's inner circle then, especially Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr.

JEET HEER Sure. The Daily Beast had some good reporting that like last week the attorney general the United States took it upon himself to go to Italy with associates to try to find these audiotapes of this professor from Malta to see if he was involved in a deep state conspiracy to entrap one of Trump's henchmen. I mean the fact that Barr is doing this, that he's going to Italy as an American public official getting Italian intelligence and Italian law enforcement involved in this. I mean these people are acting as if these conspiracy theories have some basis of fact and that they're carrying out an investigation.

BROOKE GLADSTONE You quote Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute's tweet he wrote, 'I don't want to jump to collisions but a lot of weird aspects of this seem consistent with Barr having gone full tinfoil hat, as in the A.G. personally globetrotting to play Nancy Drew would make more sense if he decided his own subordinates are deep state agents.'

JEET HEER Sanchez is exactly right. This seems to spring from a distrust that Trump and his inner circle have of these permanent government bureaucracy, which has resisted many of Trump's illegal requests and Trump interprets that as their deep state. Like if Trump says, 'let's build a moat at the border filled with alligators and shoot migrants that are coming in.' People don't carry that out, for Trump's brain that's used to suggest treason. And unfortunately people like Barr seem to go along with this mindset. There is very much a kind of bubble created by Fox News and if you look at Barr's writing before he became attorney general where are you supporting Trump, he gave a lot of credence to a lot of the sort of Fox News view that Trump is a president that's being persecuted.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Well, you see and that's really interesting because it almost brings us back to Hofstadter in a way. I mean if we think of conspiracy theories as being the tool of those who are marginalized, oppressed, as usually being a tool of the weak against the powerful, is the continual belief in their victimization, Trump and Barr and their associates, a reason why they're resorting to the conspiracy theory?

JEET HEER That actually also explains the conspiracy theories not just of Trump but of earlier presidents and powerful figures like Richard Nixon or J. Edgar Hoover. Lyndon Johnson, we know this from audiotapes, believe that the anti-war movement was a communist conspiracy. And even beyond that he believed that the North Vietnamese were the puppets of China, which was like totally at odds with reality. But I'd say even beyond that, I think that what we're seeing is the birth of a lost cause myth among Trump-ist. That if Trump does go down, either impeachment and removal or more likely defeated in the election next year, there will be this myth just as there's a myth about how the South had a noble cause and was lost. There'll be this myth that Trump was gonna be a great president, make America great again and he was portrayed by the deep state. And this is what will keep Trump-ism alive even after he's gone.

BROOKE GLADSTONE There was a piece in New York Magazine by Ed Kilgore this week musing on the word coup.

[CLIP]

MALE CORRESPONDENT This not an impeachment, this is a coup d'etat.

MALE CORRESPONDENT This is nothing less than an attempted coup d'etat and end run around the ballot box.

MALE CORRESPONDENT Here is our president from just tonight and we quote, 'as I learn more and more each day, I'm coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment. It is a coup intended to take away the power of the people.' [END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE Nixon and Clinton's allies also said the impeachment proceedings where coups against them. And Kilgore wrote, 'one very common element of coup treatments of impeachment is the idea that presidents should only be accountable to the electorate, which makes his or her removal by Congress an effort to quote reverse election results or usurp democracy.' In this formulation any impeachment effort is a conspiracy, any effort of the Congress to enforce its function is the third branch of government.

JEET HEER Yeah, no that's a very interesting point. I mean even though impeachment is in the Constitution and it is absolutely the right of Congress, if you really believe that the president has an absolute legitimacy and, or as Nixon said, 'if the president does it it's not illegal,' then yeah, impeachment is a coup. It goes to show that the conspiracy theory comes from a position of power, of people who have power and don't like to see it challenged and therefore can only see any challenge to power as coming from dark mysterious and sometimes outside forces.

BROOKE GLADSTONE But not just people in power. I mean people who believe the moon landing was faked or--

JEET HEER Oh yeah, no I mean I think that there's a conspiracy theories of the weak and the conspiracy theories of the strong. And there's definitely a long history in America of weak and marginalized people using conspiracy theories to critique the status quo. I guess the original or novel point I want to make is that the strong also have their conspiracy theories.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Right. And so does your observation that Trump is likely getting high off his own supply that he seems to believe the crazy stuff he's saying, doesn't change the way we understand him?

JEET HEER I think Trump believes what he's saying in a very precise sense that he cannot see any challenge to himself as legitimate. His ability to believe that is strengthened by the fact that he is a BS-er more than he's a liar. The further ramification of this is that it'll make it much harder to get him to leave. Like I think Nixon was a liar and I think Nixon knew to some degree what he had done and what he had lied a vote and therefore he knew the jig was up. I think emotionally it's very hard for Trump to know that. So I would be very surprised if Trump leaves, or more importantly, if he ever gives up any of these conspiracy theories. They're too valuable to him and they're too much a part of who he is.

BROOKE GLADSTONE You noted that when Scarface doesn't obey lesson number two of drug dealing, don't get high on your own supply, well, you know.

[CLIP OF SCARFACE].

JEET HEER I think that it's actually better to be a lawyer than to be a BSer for that reason. That if you get high on your own supply, if you believe your own lies, it's harder to pull back, it's harder to be held in check by people around you, it's harder to regain grounding in reality. So I don't see that any of this going anyplace nice.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE Well thanks a lot Jeet.

JEET HEER Sorry to be a downer.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Jeet Heer is national affairs correspondent for The Nation. This week he wrote, Trump is High on His own Supply.

BOB GARFIELD This is On The Media.

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BOB GARFIELD This is On The Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Last Sunday on Fox, White House staffer Stephen Miller squared off against Fox's Chris Wallace.

[CLIP]

STEPHEN MILLER Number one.

CHRIS WALLACE How about answering my question?

STEPHEN MILLER John Durham, as you know--.

CHRIS WALLACE Wait a minute, John Durhan is investigating something completely different. Stephen, I'm asking you a direct question. Why did the president use private attorneys rather than go to the State Department? If you don't know that's an acceptable answer. But--[END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE Wallace later described the White House impeachment defenses as, 'astonishing and deeply misleading.' Elsewhere on the channel, however, the tone of the impeachment programming was somewhat different.

[CLIP]

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT Why won't the media focus--.

RUDY GIULIANI Because they are covering up for the Democrats because they are more corrupt than anyone realizes. They are covering up serious crimes committed against the United States by the Biden family. [END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE There is a long documented rift between the news channels journalists and its opinionators. What's new is the ferocity flying in both directions and what it portends for what many call State TV. Vanity Fair special correspondent Gabe Sherman dug into the seeming bedlam at Fox News. But first, I'm going to play us a little bit of the Old Rush Bo.

[CLIP]

RUSH LIMBAUGH And we've even got Never Trump-er who's now all over Fox News.

RUSH LIMBAUGH Well this phone call, very hard to defend. I wouldn't want to have to defend that.

RUSH LIMBAUGH There's nothing hard to defend about the phone call, you just don't want to defend it. You know, Fox really ought to change the name of the network from the Fox News Channel to the Fox Never Trump-er Network. [END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE What do you think Gabe?

GABE SHERMAN At Fox News what you have are isolated pockets of reality. You know, Shepard Smith hosts an afternoon news show that's one hour. Fox and Friends is on for three hours a day. You have the primetime lineup from 8:00 until 11:00, that's another three hours. So I think people like Rush Limbaugh are vastly overstating the level of anti-Trump rhetoric. The network has, by and large, stuck with the president. That is what the Fox News audience wants.

BROOKE GLADSTONE This argument within Fox has actually been playing out for quite some time. I mean it's gotten worse in the past couple of weeks. If you think about the very public eruption just a little over a week ago between Shepard Smith, Trump's not a fan, and Tucker Carlson. First, you have Fox legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano telling Shep Smith that the president committed a crime.

[CLIP]

ANDREW NAPOLITANO It is a crime for the president to solicit aid for his campaign from a foreign government.

SHEPARD SMITH So that to which the president has admitted is in and of itself a crime.

ANDREW NAPOLITANO Yes. This is the same crime--[END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE And then you have Tucker Carlson bringing on another guest, Joe diGenova.

[CLIP]

JOE DIGENOVA Well, I think Judge Napolitano is a fool. No, it is not a crime. And even if he had said, 'you're not going to get the money,' it would not be a crime. [END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE And then you have Shep calling Carlson repugnant.

GABE SHERMAN I think we should point out though, as I reported, that Fox executives communicated to Shepard Smith that he was no longer allowed to publicly go after Tucker Carlson on his show. So the winner of that fight clearly was the pro-Trump Tucker Carlson side. What I want to stress is that it's very hard to underestimate how crucial Fox News is to maintaining the president's support from the Republican base because, you know, a Fox News editorially as a network decided to stop propping up the president, he would lose his loudest megaphone.

BROOKE GLADSTONE I was reading Aaron Rupar in Vox and he noted that Trump has taken to live tweeting something called One America News Network.

[CLIP]

MALE CORRESPONDENT Your source for credible, honest, unbiased reporting from around the world. [END CLIP].

BROOKE GLADSTONE It's been reliably credulous about far-right conspiracy theories from the murder of Seth Rich--.

[CLIP]

MALE CORRESPONDENT Before his death, Seth Rich was investigating several cases involving the DNC's electoral fraud and was set to testify on the case of Hillary Clinton's email investigation. [END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE To a California bill that would ban the sale of Bibles.

[CLIP]

MALE CORRESPONDENT The California state legislature, they want to tell you how to think, what sort of books that you can read, write and purchase. [END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE Trump is saying you know I've had it with Fox, I'm done with Fox, I'm going to hang out with One America News Network.

GABE SHERMAN This has always been the challenge that Fox has faced since it became number one in the cable news ratings that we would see competitors try to outflank Fox from the right. One America has tried to do that, Sinclair Broadcasting is trying in some ways with local news to be more pro-Trump than Fox.

BROOKE GLADSTONE And Sinclair actually has extraordinary reach unlike One America News Network.

GABE SHERMAN Exactly Brooke. And I think what you've just highlighted is one of the very reasons why institutionally Fox News has not broken with Trump yet. It is such a profitable business. As every day brings new revelations about the way Trump may have abused foreign policy for his own political benefit and other abuses of power, at what point do you break.

BROOKE GLADSTONE They told Shepard Smith not to publicly chastise Tucker Carlson but we haven't heard that they've told Shepard Smith or Chris Wallace to refrain from reporting anti-Trump facts.

GABE SHERMAN Everyone wins at Fox when you have people like Chris Wallace and Shepard Smith so publicly challenging the president because it allows Fox to showcase the fact that it is not just all right-wing talking points. It's good for the network's brand to be blunt about it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE If I were a conspiracy theorist I would think that maybe all of Trump's criticism was to strengthen the Fox brand.

GABE SHERMAN I know the White House, from my own reporting, and Trump in particular did not like the idea that Fox was perceived as State TV. It diminished the credibility of anything on the airwaves. And so it helps Trump politically if he's seen to be in a skirmish with Fox News because then he can say, 'oh listen this is a standard news network. They're not just carrying water for me.' Some of this is like WWF wrestling where there's a sort of theatricality to the conflict. But I think at its core there is, you know, some real power shifts happening.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Is this just a waiting game where the intramural sniping is meant to keep everyone tight with their constituencies?

GABE SHERMAN Yes. And what I'm saying is that I think the prospect of impeachment unlike the Mueller Report, which was layered and complicated, impeachment is a very public very simple thing for the audience to understand. And so there are powerful constituencies inside Fox who are determined to cover the news wherever it takes them. What we saw over the last couple of weeks has been a real testing of the relationship. The sniping on-air between Shepard Smith and Tucker Carlson was new. But I don't think we can firmly say if this relationship's headed to divorce court yet or not.

BROOKE GLADSTONE You've said that unlike the Mueller Report this is a fairly simple story. But if you consider what Trump's mouthpieces are doing, what Giuliani alone is doing, is spouting so many things that are meant to discredit whatever is going on. I wonder, as the situation at Fox develops, is there more or less hope for the news consumer who happens to tune into Fox?

GABE SHERMAN Thursday we saw the president call for China to investigate the Biden's. You know, doubling down on using our foreign policy to benefit him politically. The more the president continues to act bizarrely, you know, Fox can't stop that from happening. Yes, people like Sean Hannity can throw sand in the viewer's eyes but these clips will still find a way onto Fox whether on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace or Shepard Smith or other news anchors who decide to cover the story in a more straightforward way.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

GABE SHERMAN What you're seeing is an attempt to cloud reality but they don't have the power to stop reality.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Gabe, thank you very much.

GABE SHERMAN Thanks for having me.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Gabe Sherman is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair.

BOB GARFIELD This is on the media.

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BROOKE GLADSTONE This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD And I'm Bob Garfield. Earlier in the show we toured through the foreign outposts of the team Trump worldview. Next stop, Ukraine, where a friend of ours from down the hall Ilya Marritz, co-host of WNYC's Trump, Inc. podcast happened to find himself just as the story began to break. In a new episode, Ilya and co-host Andrea Bernstein in New York follow a trail of corruption, investigations and faux investigations. And they'll take it from here.

[CLIP]

DARIA KALENIUK Okay. So, should I read it first and start--.

ILYA MARRITZ Yeah, yeah read it.

[TALKING OVER]

DARIA KALENIUK It's so interesting.

ILYA MARRITZ And while you read it, I read it. [END CLIP]

ILYA MARRITZ Dateline Kiev, Wednesday September 25th just after 5:00 p.m. local time. I'm at the offices of the not for profit Anti-Corruption Action Center, ANTAC. I'm with Daria Kaleniuk, ANTAC’s co-founder and executive director.

[CLIP]

DARIA KALENIUK Aww, that’s craziness. [END CLIP]

ILYA MARRITZ The White House has just released detailed notes of a call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

[CLIP].

DARIA KALENIUK Hi, I’m also going to have Attorney General call and we’ll get to the bottom of it. [sighs]

ILYA MARRITZ On that call, Trump asks Zelensky to quote, 'do us a favor. Investigate his political rival Joe Biden.'.

[CLIP]

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT Trump to investigate Joe Biden--[END CLIP]

ILYA MARRITZ With a bright orange beanbag chair and a staff of mostly young people ANTAC has the feel of a small startup. Everyone here, not just Daria, is furiously digesting the document.

[CLIP]

DARIA KALENIUK So is that, is it okay for the president of the United States to have Attorney General of the United States to call the president of Ukraine to discuss the investigation? Is that okay?

ILYA MARRITZ Well, I'm not a lawyer but I believe you are a lawyer.

DARIA KALENIUK Haha. It is actually very astonishing to me to see that something like that is happening in the United States from which we are trying to learn how to make democracy. [END CLIP]

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

ILYA MARRITZ If you google Daria Kaleniuk one of the first images that comes up is a woman holding a bullhorn surrounded by police. Her T-shirt reads [BLEEP] Corruption. Today she's wearing business attire.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

ILYA MARRITZ Throughout our hour long conversation, [inaudible] maintains a state of outraged disbelief.

[CLIP]

ILYA MARRITZ Did you ever think that Ukraine would be at the center of an impeachment proceeding against an American president?

DARIA KALENIUK I would never imagined that. [END CLIP].

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE Here's Trump, Inc. co-host Andrea Bernstein in New York.

ANDREA BERNSTEIN A little about how Ilya happened to be in Kiev right now for over a year. The Trump, Inc. crew has been talking about Ukraine, the role it plays for Trump and the people around him.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

ANDREA BERNSTEIN He's taken money from Ukrainian oligarchs. His former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, worked there for a decade and went to prison because of his work there. Michael Cohen has ties to the country and Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, has been making appearances in Ukraine for over a decade. We kept asking ourselves why? What is it about Ukraine?

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

ANDREA BERNSTEIN So Ilya planned a trip months ago. And as it turned, out he arrived right after we learned that Ukraine was the country in the mysterious whistleblower report. As the story was breaking wide open, Ilya landed in Kiev.

[CLIP]

ILYA MARRITZ So we're here. That's Paul Manafort's office, number four. [END CLIP]

ANDREA BERNSTEIN He went there to follow a trail of corruption that started with President Trump's campaign chief, Paul Manafort. And led to President Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.

[CLIP]

ILYA MARRITZ What I don't see anywhere are newspapers. Nobody's reading them. Nobody's selling them. [END CLIP]

ANDREA BERNSTEIN Before we began, a note: politicians in Ukraine routinely use prosecutions not as fact finding missions but as bludgeons to destroy opponents. Opponents like Daria Kaleniuk’s anti-corruption group, ANTAC, supported by the European Union. Rudy Giuliani mentioned ANTAC in an interview with Chris Cuomo on CNN in September that went viral.

[CLIP]

CHRIS CUOMO Do you know anything about Joe Biden?

RUDY GIULIANI The only thing I asked Joe Biden is to get to the bottom of how it was that Lutsenko, who was appointed--

CHRIS CUOMO Right.

RUDY GIULIANI --dismiss the case against ANTAC.

CHRIS CUOMO So you did ask--.

RUDY GIULIANI Not for profit called ANTAC.

RUDY GIULIANI Oh whatever the hell it was called.

RUDY GIULIANI ANTAC. [END CLIP]

ANDREA BERNSTEIN Kaleniuk told Ilya that her group is being attacked because it's fighting corruption.

[CLIP]

DARIA KALENIUK We are actually exposing grunt corruption schemes in Ukraine. We are exposing also Western enablers of Ukrainian kleptocrats. We are a pain in the ass for many powerful people here but--.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

ANDREA BERNSTEIN In the summer of 2018, the Mueller investigation was bearing down. Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, began talking about putting out a quote counter report. That never materialized. What did happen, we know from the whistleblower report, is that Rudy Giuliani began to reach out to current and former Ukrainian prosecutors in late 2018. Giuliani was developing a counter narrative to Mueller arguing it was Ukraine that interfered with the 2016 election on behalf of Hillary Clinton. While he was at it. Giuliani began encouraging Ukrainians to investigate Joe Biden–and they seemed game. In the middle of this, Attorney General William Barr released his summary of the Mueller report followed by the report itself. Days after that, a new Ukrainian president won the election in a landslide Volodymyr Zelensky.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

ANDREA BERNSTEIN A few months later, Trump short circuited the normal process and personally ordered a hold on military aid to Ukraine. And then one day after Special Counsel Robert Mueller testified before Congress, Trump got on the phone with President Zelensky. That's when he asked for that favor–looking into the Biden's. In September, we all learned of the whistleblower complaint. Then Nancy Pelosi announced an impeachment inquiry. Then we saw the documentation of that Trump Zelinsky phone call. And then we read the complaint. Then, it's now.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

ANDREA BERNSTEIN There's one more thing about Zelensky you should know.

ILYA MARRITZ Before he became US president, Donald Trump was famous from TV. Same deal with the new Ukrainian leader Voldymyr Zelensky. He starred in a popular TV show about a history teacher whose anti-corruption rant goes viral and propels him to the presidency. It's called "Servant of the People." Zelensky's is real life political party is also called Servant of the People. Here's a clip from the show. It's the moment when Zelensky character learns he's one.

[CLIP OF "SERVANT OF THE PEOPLE"]

[MUSIC UP & UNDER].

ILYA MARRITZ "Good morning Mr. President.".

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

ANDREA BERNSTEIN After communism collapsed in the Soviet Union, state owned properties like pipelines and factories were put in private hands. Everyone was supposed to benefit. Instead, a small number of businessmen hoarded assets and became the oligarchs. Their fortunes depended and still depend on keeping control of Ukraine's natural resources and building monopolies and working the government.

[CLIP]

ILYA MARRITZ This is how, how deep is this?

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT Three-hundred and seventy meters.

ILYA MARRITZ That's incredible. [END CLIP]

ANDREA BERNSTEIN One big prize for the oligarchs was the largest steel mill and iron mine in Ukraine. In a town called Kryvyi Rih. It's an overnight train ride from Kiev.

ILYA MARRITZ One machine turns solid or into glowing liquid metal at a temperature of 280 degrees Fahrenheit. Then it's lifted into a giant cauldron and poured into steel bars.

[AMBI OF STEEL MILL]

ILYA MARRITZ This place is a good example of how privatization can go wrong. In 2004, the factory was awarded at auction not to the highest bidder, a multinational company, but to two Ukrainian businessmen who put in a bid of just half as much money. One of them happened to be the son-in-law of the president. The sweetheart deal for the steel plant caused so much outrage it was later voided and reversed. In 2005, the mill was put up for auction again. This time in international steel giant offered the most and won.

ANDREA BERNSTEIN The oligarchs were unhappy. They wanted control of the natural resources and to get that, they had to control the government. And they found just the man to help them do it. A man with decades of experience supporting corrupt leaders across the globe–Paul Manafort.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

ANDREA BERNSTEIN At the time, 2005, 87 percent of Ukrainians were against the oligarchs candidate Viktor Yanukovich. Manafort turned that around.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

ILYA MARRITZ There is a term people here use for Manafort s profession, [in Ukrainian], political technologist. Manafort did polling, he tested messages. He got Yanukovich, who previously spoke hoarsely and had assault and robbery convictions in his past, to wear a good suit, get a good haircut and speak Ukrainian. Because he was from eastern Ukraine, he spoke Russian. In 2010. the oligarchs' man won the presidency.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

ILYA MARRITZ And Paul Manafort went to work for the new leader. He secretly lobbied the US government. Yanukovich locked up a political opponent, then Manafort hired a law firm to write a bogus report justifying her prosecution. All the while Yanukovich was stealing massive amounts of money from the Ukrainian people.

ANDREA BERNSTEIN The people protested. In February 2014, Ukrainians overthrew Yanukovich. He fled by helicopter to Russia. That's when Ukrainians discovered Yanukovich as otherworldly palace. The house that corruption built. Now it's a museum.

[CLIP]

TOUR GUIDE And yes, that's the main road to Mezhyhirya. [END CLIP][2.5s]

ILYA MARRITZ The road from Kiev to Mezhyhirya passes through a tangle of high rise housing estates and shopping plazas. My guide is Anastasiya Lazo, a tour guide based in Kiev.

[CLIP]

ANASTASIYA LAZO It was really pissing people off because they were getting late and--[END CLIP]

ILYA MARRITZ She learned English as a teenager in Alaska.

[CLIP]

ANASTASIYA LAZO That's the funny part. Everyone is laughing like, 'Alaska really. It's not even the United States. But, while it is. [END CLIP]

ILYA MARRITZ The grounds of the estate are vast. There's a nine hole golf course, a huge garage for Yanukovich has vintage cars and a laboratory where Lazo says the president's food was tested to make sure it wasn't poisoned. After Yanukovych fled Mezhyhirya in 2014, protesters and journalists found a trove of his financial documents dumped in the water. They dried them off in the sauna. The interior walls here look like the inside of a log cabin and almost everything else is pure opulence.

[CLIP]

ANASTASIYA LAZO There's the sports complex, there's the helipad, there's the big floating restaurant. And this is some kind of water massage. This table can cost from 50 to 100 thousand Euros. Salt usually grows in the natural conditions in the underground caves or somewhere. But guy wanted a salt cave here in his house.

ILYA MARRITZ Oh my god, look at this coat of armor.

Exactly. That's the last room. That will be the door we get out. We can see people get out like in silence. At the beginning they got excited and then as a result of it, 'Yeah OK.' [END CLIP]

ILYA MARRITZ People do look a little stunned as they emerge into the sunshine.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

ANDREA BERNSTEIN By the summer of 2016, Manafort had a new gig. After Yanukovych, he went to work running Donald Trump's campaign. Here's an interview Manafort did in the summer of 2016 with CBS News.

[CLIP]

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT So to be clear, Mr. Trump has no financial relationships with any Russian oligarchs.

PAUL MANAFORT That's what he said. That's what I--that's obviously what our position is. [END CLIP]

ANDREA BERNSTEIN Manafort was the go-to for campaign interviews. Then, in August of 2016, a story broke in The New York Times. It said Manafort was paid $12.7 million in off the books payments from Yanukovich's political party. Accounts of these payments turned up in a so-called black ledger.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

ANDREA BERNSTEIN Three years after the black ledger was made public, Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani are on a campaign to question its origins and thus vindicate their since convicted colleague Manafort and to smear their opponents and undermine the US Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller. To do that, Giuliani spoke to three current and former Ukrainian prosecutors: Viktor Shokin, Yuriy Lutsenko and Nazar Kholodnytsky. So remember those names. Shokin, Lutsenko, Kholodnytsky.

[CLIP OF AMBI]

ANDREA BERNSTEIN In Kiev, Ilya met with two journalists, Aubrey Belford and Tanya Kozareva.

[CLIP]

AUBREY BELFORD So, the way this started is, yeah, I've been based in Kiev for just over a year. I'm an investigative journalist. [END CLIP]

ANDREA BERNSTEIN This is Aubrey Belford.

AUBREY BELFORD And I read this story in The Hill by John Solomon who is a former AP reporter. It basically laid out this scandal where Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire its chief prosecutor because he was investigating a company where his son, Hunter, served on the board. And I thought, 'wow this looks like a real scandal. I'm going to investigate it.' And my investigation lasted for about 30 minutes because it soon became pretty apparent that the guy that got fired, Viktor Shokin, basically everyone wanted him fired. The State Department wanted him fired. European countries wanted him fired. The IMF want him fired. Ukrainian anti-corruption activist wanted him fired. People protesting on the streets wanted him fired. And, you know, Joe Biden did put pressure on to get him fired. But to say that he was an anti-corruption fighter, it's absurd on its face. This guy was fired for being massively corrupt and for protecting corrupt people. But when I read it, you know, two things popped into my mind, which was, firstly, this story doesn't check out. And secondly, that this story seems ideally calibrated for US politics.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

AUBREY BELFORD And then Giuliani goes on cable news and he says it. He says, 'I'm working on this.'.

[CLIP]

RUDY GIULIANI Let me tell you my interest in that, I got information about three or four months ago that a lot of the--[END CLIP].

ANDREA BERNSTEIN Giuliani was working with Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. Two men who emigrated from the Soviet Union. Now they live in Florida. Parnas has worked in real estate stocks consumer electronics–with a history of business disputes. In 2017, he was ordered by a federal judge to pay half a million dollars to investors in a movie called "Anatomy of an Assassin." To date, he hasn't paid it. Fruman, the other businessman has an export operation, owns hotels and nightclubs. He has a beach club in Odessa on the Black Sea called Mafia Rave. Recently, Parnas and Fruman started giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican causes. Their donations to a Republican superPAC in 2018 are the subject of a complaint before the Federal Election Commission. It was Panas and Fruman who connected Giuliani with his sources in Ukraine. Those prosecutors we mentioned.

[CLIP]

AUBREY BELFORD The ex-General Prosecutor Shokin and Shokin's successor Yuriy Lutsenko.

ILYA MARRITZ Can you talk about, like, what the general prosecutor is and does in Ukraine? Is it like a rough equivalent of our attorney general in the United States?

AUBREY BELFORD Prosecutors in Ukraine often act like a protection racket. Prosecutors routinely will bring falsified or drummed up cases against people and then drop them for money. We learn, as journalists, pretty early on to know which prosecutors you can trust and which ones are, frankly, serial liars. The guys that Giuliani is relying on have very bad reputations.

ILYA MARRITZ Can you give me any examples?

AUBREY BELFORD Well, I mean Shokin was dismissed by Parliament after a massive public outcry because he was strangling off anti-corruption efforts here. Lutsenko--

ILYA MARRITZ His successor.

TANYA KOZAREVA He's not a lawyer.

ANDREA BERNSTEIN Tanya Kozareva.

ILYA MARRITZ He's not a lawyer?

TANYA KOZAREVA No. He's a politician who just got into the office. [END CLIP]

ANDREA BERNSTEIN Luiz Sankoh has been widely accused of slow walking corruption cases and cooking up cases against innocent parties who are out of favor with Ukraine's moneyed class. He denies this.

[CLIP]

AUBREY BELFORD Giuliani's third prosecutor source is the special anti-corruption prosecutor, Nazar Kholodnytsky, who has himself been investigated for--

TANYA KOZAREVA Collaborating.

AUBREY BELFORD --yeah, collaborating with people under investigation of corruption. Telling them what the investigation has and what to anticipate. [END CLIP]

ANDREA BERNSTEIN Kholodnytsky was recorded tipping off suspects ahead of searches. Giuliani spoke with these current and former prosecutors, Lutsenko, Kholodnytsky and Shokin, about a dozen times. Giuliani collected the information they gave him about Trump's political opponents and passed it along, widely discredited though it was, to the American president. We reached out to the White House, Giuliani the three Ukrainian prosecutors, Parnas and Fruman. The only one who commented was Lutsenko who said, without elaboration, that the whistleblower's allegations about him are false. Giuliani has been subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee. Among the associations they are examining, Parnas, Fruman, the three prosecutors and Giuliani's business partners in Ukraine.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

ANDREA BERNSTEIN There was someone trying to focus attention on the corruption of Ukrainian prosecutors. The American ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. She called for Kholodnytsky to be fired. She said, nobody who has been recorded coaching suspects on how to avoid corruption charges can be trusted to prosecute those very same cases.' In May, Trump abruptly recalled Yovanovitch. There is now no US ambassador to Ukraine.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

ANDREA BERNSTEIN This brings us to the central subject of Giuliani's campaign. It's the idea that the Democrats and some Ukrainians interfered in the 2016 election in Hillary Clinton's favor. They did this, in Giuliani's version of events, by forging a document, the so-called black ledger, that showed secret payments from Yanukovich his party to Paul Manafort. Remember, Manafort is serving prison time because of the trail of corruption Robert Mueller uncovered–beginning with those payments he took from Yanukovich, bank fraud, tax fraud, money laundering, conspiracy against the United States. But Giuliani says the black ledger is a fake. Here's Giuliani in a May 2019 interview on Fox News pointing a finger at a man named Sergei Leshchenko. He's not the prosecutor Lutsenko.

[CLIP]

RUDY GIULIANI --found to be involved in assisting the Democrats with the 2016 election.

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT Ok, so let me ask--.

RUDY GIULIANI The gentlemen, I'll give you his name.

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT You're decision not to go.

RUDY GIULIANI Let me, let, let me finish.

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT Ok.

RUDY GIULIANI A gentleman by the name of Leshchenko.

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT Yes.

RUDY GIULIANI Who supplied a black book that was found to be fraudulent and never used. Because it was a fraudulent incriminating statement that was totally untrue. [END CLIP]

[CLIP]

SERGEI LESCHCHENKO Of course it's not fraud. It's a real document and of course, I'm not enemy of American government. I never interfere in American elections. [END CLIP]

ILYA MARRITZ In Kiev, I spoke to the man who helped to bring the black ledger to light, Sergei Leshchenko, an investigative journalist and former member of parliament. I met him in a cafe in a hip part of the city.

[CLIP]

SERGEI LESCHCHENKO It is part of conspiracy created by Giuliani, conspiracy theory, which is not based on relevant and real information because black ledger went through expertized as in Ukraine and experts proved that its real documents and signatures of people sign of this book, real. But to construct the conspiracy theory, Giuliani, he decided to spin that it's fake and fake black ledger and so on. [END CLIP]

ILYA MARRITZ Leshchenko is extremely tall with thick framed glasses. He turns 40 next year. Leshchenko says to promote his theory, Rudy Giuliani seized on the fact that an administrative court found Leshchenko acted illegally in publicizing the black ledger. Giuliani ignored the fact that the ruling was overturned on appeal.

[CLIP]

SERGEI LESCHCHENKO But it did not stop Giuliani. And he continues saying this fraud [END CLIP].

ILYA MARRITZ By casting doubt on the black ledger, Rudy Giuliani is trying to rewrite history. Paul Manafort, in Rudy's telling, is transformed from a political technologist who profited from a corrupt system and cheated on his taxes into the victim of a sinister anti-Trump plot. A plot that eventually led to Robert Mueller's investigation. But if Paul Manafort s actions are obscured in America, if he's seen as a victim, Leschenko says that will have a chilling effect on the people who are pushing to make Ukraine more democratic, open and fair.

[CLIP]

SERGEI LESCHCHENKO Whistleblowers or anti-corruption activists who are ready to fight against the system to provide this information now will remember what happened was people like me or like ANTAC leaders who were under pressure for the last four years. And they will decides twice or triple, should they start this anti-corruption activity or it's better to keep silence, to keep eyes blind. [END CLIP]

ILYA MARRITZ When we started our interview the Leshchenko was rubbing his eyes and glancing at his phone. He's been doing back to back news interviews for days. Suddenly, it seems the world is interested in what he has to say about graft and disinformation.

[CLIP]

SERGEI LESCHCHENKO For me, it's another evidence that corruption is not just Ukrainian problem but it's a global problem. And sometimes corruption, It's like a butterfly effect. Something's happened in Ukraine and tsunami happened in US. [END CLIP]

ILYA MARRITZ Leshchenko has offered to testify before Congress about his experience with the black ledger and the disinformation campaign.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

ANDREA BERNSTEIN Aubrey Belford, the reporter we spoke with earlier, says Giuliani's Ukrainian partners have been adept at mixing truth with falsehood. The result is facts that are not really factual.

[CLIP]

AUBREY BELFORD And Americans have picked it up and run with them. Whether this is a disinformation campaign that was all designed to turn out exactly as it has, I think is a little bit farfetched. But what it does show is that this kind of stuff is currency, it's very potent currency. And, you know, I mean it worked. They wanted to create a splash with this and they have.

ILYA MARRITZ What's it like living in a place where nobody knows what's true?

AUBREY BELFORD You know, this is a part of the world where disinformation is really part of life and, you know, I mean you guys are gonna know what it's like soon enough.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz are co-hosts of the Trump, Inc. podcast, a co-production of WNYC and ProPublica.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

BOB GARFIELD That's it for this week's show. On The Media is produced by Alana Casanova-Burgess, Micah Loewinger, Leah Feder, Jon Hanrahan and Asthaa Chaturverdi. We had more help from Charlotte Gartenberg and our sow was edited by Brooke. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week with Sam Bair and Josh Han.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On The Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD And I'm Bob Garfield.

UNDERWRITING On The Media is supported by the Ford Foundation The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the listeners of WNYC Radio.