Since 2016, 45th and 47th President of the United States
Donald Trump
Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who is the 47th president of the United States. A member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party, he served as the 45 ...
and his allies have promoted several
conspiracy theories
A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that asserts the existence of a conspiracy (generally by powerful sinister groups, often political in motivation), when other explanations are more probable.Additional sources:
*
...
related to the
Trump–Ukraine scandal. One such theory seeks to blame
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the List of European countries by area, second-largest country in Europe after Russia, which Russia–Ukraine border, borders it to the east and northeast. Ukraine also borders Belarus to the nor ...
, instead of Russia, for
interference in the 2016 United States presidential election.
Also among the conspiracy theories are accusations against
Joe Biden
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. (born November 20, 1942) is an American politician who was the 46th president of the United States from 2021 to 2025. A member of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, he served as the 47th vice p ...
and his son
Hunter Biden,
and several elements of the right-wing
Russia investigation origins conspiracy theory.
American intelligence agencies believe that Russia engaged in a years-long campaign to frame Ukraine for the 2016 election interference,
that the Kremlin is the driving force behind the promotion of the fictitious alternative narratives, and that these conspiracy theories are harmful to the United States. FBI director
Christopher A. Wray stated to ABC News that "We have no information that indicates that Ukraine interfered with the 2016 presidential election" and that "as far as
the election">020election itself goes, we think Russia represents the most significant threat."
On August 18, 2020, the Republican-controlled
Senate Intelligence Committee released its
final report on Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, finding that while he was Trump's campaign manager,
Paul Manafort
Paul John Manafort Jr. (; born April 1, 1949) is an American former lobbyist, political consultant, and attorney. A long-time Republican Party campaign consultant, he chaired the Trump presidential campaign from June to August 2016. Manafo ...
worked with a close associate, who was a Russian intelligence officer, "on narratives that sought to undermine evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election" and to direct such suspicions toward Ukraine.
Background
According to FBI witness interview notes released in October 2019, upon hearing news of a hack of a Democratic National Committee server in June 2016, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort speculated that Ukraine rather than Russia was culpable, a narrative that was also promoted by
Konstantin Kilimnik, thought to be a Russian intelligence asset with whom Manafort was working along with
Lev Parnas
Lev Parnas (born February 6, 1972) is a Soviet-born American businessman and former associate of Rudy Giuliani. Parnas, Giuliani, Igor Fruman, John Solomon, Yuriy Lutsenko, Dmytro Firtash and his allies, Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenov ...
and
Igor Fruman.
The Republican-controlled
Senate Intelligence Committee report concluded in August 2020 that during the campaign Manafort actively worked with Kilimnik, whom the report called a "Russian intelligence officer," to deflect interference suspicions from Russia onto Ukraine, characterizing Manafort's activities as a "grave counterintelligence threat".
The ''
New Yorker'' found that reporting of the conspiracy in the
right-wing media was initiated by
Peter Schweizer
Peter Franz Schweizer (born November 24, 1964) is an American political consultant and writer. He is the president of the Government Accountability Institute (GAI), senior editor-at-large of far-right media organization '' Breitbart News'', and ...
, a former ''
Breitbart News
''Breitbart News Network'' (; known commonly as ''Breitbart News'', ''Breitbart'', or ''Breitbart.com'') is an Radical right (United States), American far-rightMultiple sources:
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
* syndicated news, opinion, and commentar ...
'' contributor and president of the
Government Accountability Institute, "a self-styled corruption watchdog group chaired and funded by conservative mega-donor
Rebekah Mercer"
and founded by
Steve Bannon
Stephen Kevin Bannon (born November 27, 1953) is an American media executive, political strategist, and former investment banker. He served as the White House's chief strategist for the first seven months of president Donald Trump's first ...
.
Adoption by Trump
President Trump had long felt that the conclusion of the
United States Intelligence Community
The United States Intelligence Community (IC) is a group of separate US federal government, U.S. federal government intelligence agencies and subordinate organizations that work to conduct Intelligence assessment, intelligence activities which ...
and the
Mueller Report – that the Russian government had interfered in the 2016 election to benefit him – might undermine the legitimacy of his election as president.
Trump and his alliesmost notably his personal attorney
Rudy Giuliani
Rudolph William Louis Giuliani ( , ; born May 28, 1944) is an American politician and Disbarment, disbarred lawyer who served as the 107th mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001. He previously served as the United States Associate Attorney ...
promoted the alternative narrative that the Ukrainian government, not Russia, had interfered to benefit
Hillary Clinton
Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton ( Rodham; born October 26, 1947) is an American politician, lawyer and diplomat. She was the 67th United States secretary of state in the administration of Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, a U.S. senator represent ...
, in coordination with
Democrats, the
digital forensics
Digital forensics (sometimes known as digital forensic science) is a branch of forensic science encompassing the recovery, investigation, examination, and analysis of material found in digital devices, often in relation to mobile devices and com ...
company
CrowdStrike
CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. is an American cybersecurity technology company based in Austin, Texas. It provides endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services.
The company has been involved in investigations of seve ...
, and the FBI, and asserted that the Russian government had been framed.
Trump also sought to use
Julian Assange
Julian Paul Assange ( ; Hawkins; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. He came to international attention in 2010 after WikiLeaks published a series of News leak, leaks from Chels ...
and
WikiLeaks
WikiLeaks () is a non-profit media organisation and publisher of leaked documents. It is funded by donations and media partnerships. It has published classified documents and other media provided by anonymous sources. It was founded in 2006 by ...
to promote the idea that Russia was innocent. On 16 August 2017,
U.S. Republican congressman
Dana Rohrabacher
Dana Tyrone Rohrabacher ( ; born June 21, 1947) is an American former politician who served in the United States House of Representatives, U.S. House of Representatives from 1989 to 2019. Representing for the last three terms of his House tenure ...
visited Assange and told him that Trump would pardon him on condition that he would agree to say that Russia was not involved in the
2016 Democratic National Committee email leak
The 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak is a collection of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails Democratic National Committee cyber attacks, stolen by one or more hackers operating under the pseudonym "Guccifer 2.0" who are allege ...
s.
At his extradition hearings in 2020, Assange's defence team alleged in court that this offer was made "on instructions from the president". Trump and Rohrabacher subsequently said they had never spoken about the offer and Rohrabacher said he had made the offer on his own initiative.
''The New York Times'' reported in November 2019 that American intelligence determined Russia conducted a years-long campaign to frame Ukraine for the 2016 election interference.
Contrary to Trump's allegations, it is the consensus judgment of the American intelligence community and the
Senate Intelligence Committee that it was Russia, not Ukraine, that interfered in the 2016 elections.
Trump also falsely asserted that CrowdStrike, a publicly owned
American company, was owned by an unnamed wealthy
Ukrainian oligarch
Ukrainian oligarchs () are business oligarchs who emerged on the economic and political scene of Ukraine after the 1991 Ukrainian independence referendum. This period saw Ukraine transitioning to a market economy, with the rapid privatization of s ...
.
The conspiracy theory claimed that the company — which had investigated
a hack of a
Democratic National Committee
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is the principal executive leadership board of the United States's Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party. According to the party charter, it has "general responsibility for the affairs of the ...
(DNC) server — had planted evidence on the server to implicate Russia, and that the FBI had failed to take possession of the server to verify that claim. Although the FBI did not take possession of the server, CrowdStrike had provided the FBI with an exact
disk image
A disk image is a snapshot of a storage device's content typically stored in a file on another storage device.
Traditionally, a disk image was relatively large because it was a bit-by-bit copy of every storage location of a device (i.e. every ...
and
traffic logs of the server to conduct its own analysis, which led the Mueller Report to concur with the intelligence community that the server had been hacked by
Russian intelligence.
Two weeks prior to taking office, Trump was briefed by top American intelligence officials that American, British and Dutch intelligence had attributed the DNC hack to Russia by hacking into Russian intelligence networks and observing stolen DNC emails there. Trump was also told at that meeting that a Russian
mole the CIA had cultivated for decades and who had reached the highest levels of the Kremlin told the CIA that
Putin
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (born 7 October 1952) is a Russian politician and former intelligence officer who has served as President of Russia since 2012, having previously served from 2000 to 2008. Putin also served as Prime Minister of Ru ...
personally ordered and orchestrated the Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Trump also asserted without evidence that Ukraine was in possession of the DNC server,
as well as Hillary Clinton's deleted emails.
Trump and Giuliani falsely asserted that Ukraine's involvement also included the
Steele dossier
The Steele dossier, also known as the Trump–Russia dossier, is a controversial political opposition research report on the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign, 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump compiled by counterintelligen ...
, which was echoed by congressman
Devin Nunes
Devin Gerald Nunes (; born October 1, 1973) is an American businessman and politician who serves as the Chair of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board since January 20, 2025, and as chief executive officer of the Trump Media & Technolog ...
, a staunch Trump defender, during an impeachment inquiry hearing in September 2019.
One former senior White House official said Trump explicitly stated Ukraine was culpable because "Putin told me."
The conspiracy theory later evolved to include baseless allegations of corruption by Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden in their activities in Ukraine.
In November 2019, Trump ally senator
Rand Paul
Randal Howard Paul (born January 7, 1963) is an American politician serving as the Seniority in the United States Senate, junior United States senator from Kentucky since 2011.
A member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican ...
extended the conspiracy theory by asserting without evidence that the anonymous whistleblower who had triggered the
Trump-Ukraine scandal "is a material witness to the possible corruption of Hunter Biden and Joe Biden," adding, "
he whistleblowermight have traveled with Joe Biden to Ukraine for all we know."
''Bloomberg News'' reported in January 2020 that American intelligence and law enforcement were examining whether Russia was involved in promoting disinformation to undermine Biden as part of a campaign to disrupt the 2020 election. In August 2020, CNN reported that intelligence officials had briefed senators, representatives and both the Biden and Trump campaigns with information "indicating Russia is behind an ongoing disinformation push targeting" Biden.
This led Trump to pressure Ukrainian president
Volodymyr Zelensky
Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy (born 25 January 1978) is a Ukrainian politician and former entertainer who has served as the sixth and current president of Ukraine since 2019. He took office five years after the start of the Russo-Ukraini ...
to open an investigation into the matters, which triggered the
Trump–Ukraine scandal, which in turn led to the opening of an
impeachment inquiry into Trump. During an October 16, 2019, press meeting in the Oval Office, Trump asked about the DNC server eight times in rapid succession, which "they say, is held by a company whose primary ownership, individual, is from Ukraine."
His staff had repeatedly attempted to persuade Trump that the conspiracy theory had no merit, including his former homeland security advisor
Tom Bossert, who later remarked, "the DNC server and that conspiracy theory has got to go...If he continues to focus on that white whale, it's going to bring him down."
During November 2019 hearings for the
impeachment inquiry,
Fiona Hill — until August 2019 the top Russia expert on the National Security Council — criticized Republicans for promulgating a "fictional narrative":
As Trump and other Republicans used the hearings to promote the Ukraine interference conspiracy theory, Russian president Vladimir Putin remarked, "We see what is going on there in the U.S. now. Thank God nobody is accusing us anymore of interfering in the U.S. elections. Now they're accusing Ukraine."
During the weeks leading to Hill's testimony, American intelligence officials had briefed senators and their staffs about a yearslong campaign by Russia to frame Ukraine for the 2016 election interference.
Propagators among Republican members of Congress
Republican representatives and senators
who have promoted the idea that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election despite conclusions that there is no evidence of this from the Senate Intelligence Committee
and U.S. intelligence agencies
include the following:
Representatives
*
Devin Nunes
Devin Gerald Nunes (; born October 1, 1973) is an American businessman and politician who serves as the Chair of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board since January 20, 2025, and as chief executive officer of the Trump Media & Technolog ...
(R-CA)
*
Jim Jordan
James Daniel Jordan (born February 17, 1964) is an American politician who has served in the U.S. House of Representatives as the representative for since 2007. He is a member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party.
...
(R-Ohio)
*
Matt Gaetz (R-Florida)
*
Louie Gohmert (R-Texas)
Senators
*
Chuck Grassley
Charles Ernest Grassley (born September 17, 1933) is an American politician serving as the president pro tempore of the United States Senate since 2025, a role he also held from 2019 to 2021. A member of the Republican Party (United States), Re ...
(R-IA)
*
John Kennedy (R-LA)
*
Richard Burr
Richard Mauze Burr (born November 30, 1955) is an American businessman and politician who served as a United States senator from North Carolina from 2005 to 2023. A member of the Republican Party, Burr was previously a member of the United Stat ...
(R-NC)
*
Lindsey Graham
Lindsey Olin Graham (; born July 9, 1955) is an American politician and attorney serving as the Seniority in the United States Senate, senior United States Senate, United States senator from South Carolina, a seat he has held since 2003. A membe ...
(R-SC)
*
Ted Cruz
Rafael Edward Cruz (; born December 22, 1970) is an American politician and attorney serving as the junior United States senator from Texas since 2013. A member of the Republican Party, Cruz was the solicitor general of Texas from 2003 ...
(R-TX)
*
Ron Johnson
Ronald Harold Johnson (born April 8, 1955) is an American businessman and politician serving as the Seniority in the United States Senate, senior United States Senate, United States senator from Wisconsin, a seat he has held since 2011. A Rep ...
(R-WI)
*
John Barrasso
John Anthony Barrasso III ( ; born July 21, 1952) is an American physician and politician serving as the Seniority in the United States Senate, senior United States Senate, United States senator from Wyoming, a seat he has held since 2007. A mem ...
(R-WY)
In response to these statements by Republican senators, as well as making other unsubstantiated claims including about the Mueller investigation, Senate minority leader
Chuck Schumer
Charles Ellis Schumer ( ; born November 23, 1950) is an American politician serving as the Seniority in the United States Senate, senior United States Senate, United States senator from New York (state), New York, a seat he has held since 1999. ...
(D-NY) said on December 10, 2019, that the Senate GOP is becoming the "conspiracy caucus".
Schumer said that Trump, Attorney General William Barr and GOP lawmakers should stop "pushing baseless conspiracy theories and instead work in a bipartisan fashion to ensure the FBI and the Intelligence Community have the full support and resources necessary to stop Putin and any other foreign adversary from interfering in the 2020 elections."
On December 20, 2019, former Senator
Jeff Flake
Jeffry Lane Flake (born December 31, 1962) is an American politician and diplomat who served as a United States senator from Arizona from 2013 to 2019. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served in the United States House of Repr ...
(R-AZ), an ardent critic of President Trump, published an opinion piece in ''The Washington Post'' admonishing House and Senate Republicans for "attempting to shift blame with the promotion of bizarre and debunked conspiracy theories", and asked them to administer impartial justice in the upcoming
Impeachment trial of Donald Trump.
Statements by Cabinet-level officials
Appearing to support conspiracy theories
= Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
=
On November 26, 2019, Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo
Michael Richard Pompeo (; born December 30, 1963) is an American retired politician who served in the First presidency of Donald Trump#Administration, first administration of Donald Trump as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) fr ...
appeared to grant legitimacy to the notion that Ukraine, rather than or in addition to Russia, was behind interference in the 2016 United States elections.
He had been asked by a reporter "Do you believe that the U.S. and Ukraine should investigate the theory that it was Ukraine and not Russia that hacked the DNC emails in 2016?"
Pompeo responded "Any time there is information that indicates any country has messed with American elections, we not only have a right but a duty to make sure we chase that down," adding, "to protect our elections, America should leave no stone unturned."
This is despite Pompeo's former role personally briefing President Trump as CIA director that
Russia was behind the interference, as well as his May 2017 testimony to the Senate.
= Attorney General William Barr
=
On December 10, 2019, the day following the publication of a Justice Department inspector general report on the origins of the Mueller investigation, Barr claimed in an interview with NBC news that the Russia investigation was "completely baseless" and said he believed the FBI's investigation was conducted in "bad faith".
Unlike FBI Director
Christopher Wray's remarks the day prior, Barr refused to refute the conspiracy theory of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.
Barr again asserted the FBI investigation was opened "without any basis" in April 2020.
Denying conspiracy theories
= FBI Director Christopher A. Wray
=
On December 9, 2019, following the release of the DoJ inspector general's report into the origins of the
FBI-Mueller Russia investigation, FBI Director
Christopher A. Wray was interviewed by ABC News. In the interview, Wray pushed back on the conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election, stating "We have no information that indicates that Ukraine interfered with the 2016 presidential election" and "as far as
the election">020election itself goes, we think
Russia
Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...
represents the most significant threat." Wray added, "there's all kinds of people saying all kinds of things out there. I think it's important for the American people to be thoughtful consumers of information and to think about the sources of it and to think about the support and predication for what they hear."
Distraction using Russian interference investigation
President Trump directed
attorney general
In most common law jurisdictions, the attorney general (: attorneys general) or attorney-general (AG or Atty.-Gen) is the main legal advisor to the government. In some jurisdictions, attorneys general also have executive responsibility for law enf ...
Bill Barr to "investigate the investigators" who opened the FBI investigation into Russian interference, supposedly for partisan political motives to harm Trump; allied intelligence services are alleged to have been part of the scheme. That FBI investigation led to the
Mueller investigation, resulting in convictions of some
2016 Trump campaign associates. In September 2019 it was reported that Barr has been contacting foreign governments to ask for help in this inquiry. He personally traveled to the United Kingdom and Italy to seek information, and at Barr's request Trump phoned the prime minister of Australia to request his cooperation.
One British official with knowledge of Barr's requests observed, "it is like nothing we have come across before, they are basically asking, in quite robust terms, for help in doing a hatchet job on their own intelligence services."
Barr sought information related to a conspiracy theory that had circulated among Trump allies in conservative media claiming that
Joseph Mifsud was a Western intelligence operative who was supposedly directed to
entrap
Entrapment is a practice in which a law enforcement agent or an agent of the state induces a person to commit a crime that the person would have otherwise been unlikely or unwilling to commit.''Sloane'' (1990) 49 A Crim R 270. See also agent prov ...
Trump campaign advisor
George Papadopoulos in order to establish a false predicate for the FBI to open its investigation. That investigation was initiated after the Australian government notified American authorities in July 2016 that its diplomat
Alexander Downer had had a chance encounter with Papadopoulos in May 2016 – two months before the DNC website hacking became known – and that Papadopoulos told him that the Russian government had "dirt" on Clinton in the form of emails.
On October 2, 2019, Senator
Lindsey Graham
Lindsey Olin Graham (; born July 9, 1955) is an American politician and attorney serving as the Seniority in the United States Senate, senior United States Senate, United States senator from South Carolina, a seat he has held since 2003. A membe ...
, a staunch Trump supporter and chairman of the
Senate Judiciary Committee
The United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, informally known as the Senate Judiciary Committee, is a Standing committee (United States Congress), standing committee of 22 U.S. senators whose role is to oversee the United States Departm ...
, wrote a letter to the leaders of Britain, Australia and Italy, asserting as fact that both Mifsud and Downer had been directed to contact Papadopoulos.
Joe Hockey
Joseph Benedict Hockey (born 2 August 1965) is an Australian former politician and diplomat. He was the Member of Parliament for Division of North Sydney, North Sydney from 1996 Australian federal election, 1996 until 2015. He was the Treasurer ...
, the Australian ambassador to the United States, sharply rejected Graham's characterization of Downer.
A former Italian government official told ''The Washington Post'' in October 2019 that during a meeting the previous month,
Italian intelligence services told Barr they had "no connections, no activities, no interference" in the matter; Italian prime minister
Giuseppe Conte
Giuseppe Conte (; born 8 August 1964) is an Italian jurist, academic, and politician who served as Prime Minister of Italy, prime minister of Italy from June 2018 to February 2021. He has been the president of the Five Star Movement (M5S) sin ...
later affirmed this.
''The Washington Post'' reported on November 22, 2019, that the Justice Department inspector general had aggressively investigated the allegation that Mifsud had been directed to entrap Papadopoulos, but found it was without merit.
American law enforcement believes Mifsud is connected to Russian intelligence.
''The New York Times'' reported in December 2019 that Barr's designated investigator
John Durham was examining the role of former CIA director
John Brennan in assessing Russian interference in 2016, requesting emails, call logs and other documents. Brennan had been a vocal critic of Trump and a target of the president's accusations of improper activities toward him. ''The Times'' reported Durham was specifically examining Brennan's views of the
Steele dossier
The Steele dossier, also known as the Trump–Russia dossier, is a controversial political opposition research report on the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign, 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump compiled by counterintelligen ...
and what he said about it to the FBI and other intelligence agencies. Brennan and former director of national intelligence
James Clapper
James Robert Clapper Jr. (born March 14, 1941) is a retired lieutenant general in the United States Air Force and former Director of National Intelligence. Clapper has held several key positions within the United States Intelligence Community. ...
had testified to Congress that the CIA and other intelligence agencies did not rely on the dossier in preparing the January 2017
intelligence community assessment of Russian interference, and allies of Brennan said he disagreed with the FBI view that the dossier should be given significant weight, as the CIA characterized it as "internet rumor." ''Politico'' reported in July 2019 that after becoming CIA director in 2017, Trump loyalist
Mike Pompeo
Michael Richard Pompeo (; born December 30, 1963) is an American retired politician who served in the First presidency of Donald Trump#Administration, first administration of Donald Trump as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) fr ...
intensely challenged CIA analysts on their findings that Russian interference was designed to help Trump, but he found no evidence to dispute it. The ''Times'' reported in February 2020 that Durham was examining whether intelligence community officials, and specifically Brennan, had concealed or manipulated evidence of Russian interference to achieve a desired result. FBI and NSA officials told Durham that his pursuit of this line of inquiry was due to his misunderstanding of how the intelligence community functions.
CrowdStrike
Numerous conspiracy theories falsely assert that
CrowdStrike
CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. is an American cybersecurity technology company based in Austin, Texas. It provides endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services.
The company has been involved in investigations of seve ...
is actually owned by a wealthy
Ukrainian oligarch
Ukrainian oligarchs () are business oligarchs who emerged on the economic and political scene of Ukraine after the 1991 Ukrainian independence referendum. This period saw Ukraine transitioning to a market economy, with the rapid privatization of s ...
.
In fact, CrowdStrike is not owned by a wealthy Ukrainian oligarch, but is a publicly traded company
headquartered in California, and the DNC server is actually 140 individual servers, decommissioned and located in the United States, rather than being in Ukraine, as Trump has claimed.
The conspiracy theory additionally falsely asserts that FBI agents were not allowed to examine the server because such action would expose the DNC plot,
when in fact (and as documented in the
Mueller Report),
system image
{{Refimprove, date=December 2013
In computing, a system image is a serialized copy of the entire state of a computer system stored in some non-volatile form, such as a binary executable file.
If a system has all its state written to a disk (i ...
s and
traffic logs of the DNC servers were provided to the FBI, making it unnecessary for them to actually possess the 140 physical servers.
This conspiracy theory, that originated from a "GRU
Gru is a fictional character and the main protagonist of the ''Despicable Me'' film series.
Gru or GRU may also refer to:
Arts and entertainment
* Gru (rapper), Serbian rapper
* Gru, an antagonist in '' The Kine Saga''
Organizations Georgia (c ...
(''Glavnoye razvedyvatel'noye upravleniye''; 'Main Intelligence Directorate') persona, ' Guccifer 2.0'", was created "to cast doubt on Russia's culpability in the DNC ntrusion.
Political ''quid pro quo''
During a White House press briefing on October 17, 2019, acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney linked the DNC server conspiracy theory to the Barr inquiry, as well as to a ''quid pro quo
''Quid pro quo'' (Latin: "something for something") is a Latin phrase used in English to mean an exchange of goods or services, in which one transfer is contingent upon the other; "a favor for a favor". Phrases with similar meanings include: " ...
'' for the withholding of military aid to Ukraine, stating, "Did rumpalso mention to me in passing the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely. No question about that. But that's it, and that's why we held up the money." While the Justice Department had previously indicated that the Barr inquiry was examining whether Ukraine played any role in the opening of the 2016 FBI investigation into Russian interference, a department official declined to comment on whether that included the DNC server theory. ''The New York Times'' reported Justice Department officials were confused and angered by Mulvaney's linkage of the DNC server, a possible ''quid pro quo'', with Ukraine and the Barr inquiry. Hours later, Mulvaney released a statement denying he had made any suggestion of a ''quid pro quo''.
See also
* List of conspiracy theories
This is a list of notable Conspiracy theory, conspiracy theories. Many conspiracy theories relate to supposed clandestine government plans and elaborate murder plots. They usually deny consensus opinion and cannot be proven using Historical me ...
* Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory
* Russia investigation origins conspiracy theory
* Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections
The Russian government conducted Foreign electoral intervention, foreign electoral interference in the 2016 United States elections with the goals of sabotaging the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign, presidential campaign of Hillar ...
* Ukraine biolabs conspiracy theory
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Conspiracy theories related to the Trump-Ukraine scandal
*
2019 controversies in the United States
2019 in American politics
2019 in international relations
2019 in Ukraine
Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign
First presidency of Donald Trump
Rudy Giuliani
Ukraine–United States relations
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Conspiracy theories promoted by Donald Trump
Conspiracy theories in the United States