“It was in this uncertain moment that Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani said he had the idea to focus on Ukraine,” the Post continues. “That November, he received a tip from a former colleague that it was the Ukrainians who had conspired to help Democrats in 2016, Giuliani said in recent interviews.”

As the Post highlights, Giuliani has openly explained this rationale, including in a recent interview with Glenn Beck. “I knew they were hot and heavy on this Russian collusion thing, even though I knew 100 percent that it was false,” said Giuliani. “I said to myself, ‘Hallelujah.’ I’ve got what a defense lawyer always wants: I can go prove someone else committed this crime.”

Giuliani made a similar statement in a tweet last month. “The investigation I conducted concerning 2016 Ukrainian collusion and corruption, was done solely as a defense attorney to defend my client against false charges, that kept changing as one after another were disproved,” he wrote.

“Giuliani’s efforts to undermine the special counsel probe eventually snowballed into the current impeachment crisis gripping the capital — highlighting how the pressure Trump and his allies put on Ukraine originated as an effort to sow doubts about the Russia investigation,” the Post explains.

While the Post does its best to make Trump’s attempts to “sow doubts” about the Russian investigation sound insidious, as Mueller himself was forced to admit in the final report, the Democrat-pushed narrative that Trump’s campaign somehow “colluded” with the Russians turned out to be baseless. After a two-year investigation costing over $30 million, the special counsel revealed in its final report that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

The Post’s report on team Trump’s belief that Ukraine was really the culprit in 2016 election meddling aligns with other evidence, including Mueller investigation documents released in early November focusing on the special counsel’s interview in May 2018 with former Trump deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates. Trump advisers, said Gates, believed the hacking of the Democratic emails ultimately published by WikiLeaks was “likely carried about by the Ukrainians, not the Russians,” and that “the Democrats were pushing the Russia narrative” presumably for political purposes.

Trump has reiterated both publicly and privately his belief that corruption has plagued Ukraine. In a recent tweet, Trump explained his rationale for delaying U.S. security aid. “I held back the money from Ukraine because it is considered a corrupt country, [and] I wanted to know why nearby European countries weren’t putting up money also,” Trump tweeted last week.

Fueled by this belief that Ukraine was corrupt and in part by his desire to undermine the premises of the Mueller investigation, Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25 — “the very day after Mueller testified before Congress,” as the Post notes — to investigate alleged Ukrainian meddling.

“I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it,” Trump told Zelensky, as revealed in the transcript of the famous July 25 call. “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike… I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.”

As almost an afterthought, Trump also asked Zelensky to “look into” allegations of corruption involving former Vice President Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden, and Ukrainian-based energy company Burisma Holdings.

“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that,” Trump said. “So whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it … It sounds horrible to me.”