One week before the inauguration of U. S. President Donald J. Trump in 2017, an article was released in U.S. political website Politico suggesting that “Kyiv officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton.”

At the center of the story was a man named Andrii Telizhenko, a former diplomat at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington who claimed that a Democratic Party operative had met with him seeking compromising information on the Trump campaign.