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It’s fairly common for investigative journalists to be accused of being paid shills, or agents of a foreign power. Foreign dictators and kleptocrats do it daily. But becoming the target of a “deep state” conspiracy theory endorsed by the world’s richest man and supporters of the president of the United States is something else entirely.
That’s what happened to me last week. It began because of this story, which a colleague and I wrote in collaboration with BuzzFeed News in July 2019. It shed light on Rudy Giuliani's attempts to dig up negative information on Donald Trump’s political opponents in Ukraine, where I was based at the time.
The story made a small splash when it was published, mostly among politicos and Ukraine-watchers, but didn’t get a lot of traction. That was fine with me. As an Australian journalist working in Eastern Europe, I was just glad that I had published an interesting story that pushed forward what was known about Giuliani’s dealings in Ukraine. But that September, it was cited in the footnotes of a report by a CIA whistleblower that sparked Trump’s first impeachment.
This citation is now at the center of absurd claims that we, as professional reporters, were part of a “deep state” plot to bring down the president of the United States. The pretext for this is that, like scores of independent media outlets around the world, OCCRP had received grants from USAID, the United States’ foreign development agency, which has recently come under the crosshairs of the new Trump administration. (As with all of our donors, USAID is contractually obligated to stay out of editorial work.)
One particularly excitable writer, Michael Shellenberger, who identifies himself as a free speech advocate, has gone so far as to label our story “highly illegal and even treasonous.”
The irony of it all? The story started as an investigation into the same target that Giuliani was after: Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian gas company he worked for, Burisma. But the thing about objective reporting is that it can lead you to unexpected places.
Here’s how it began.
It was the middle of 2019, and I was relatively new to Ukraine, having moved there to live with my now-wife and work as an OCCRP editor helping local journalists with their investigations. I asked my Ukrainian colleagues what they thought we should be reporting on. They suggested we look into Hunter Biden and Burisma.
There had already been a fair bit of reporting on the younger Biden's questionable relationship with the company. As an investigative reporter, I wondered if we could find something new to say about the situation.
I came across a series of articles written for The Hill by John Solomon, a conservative journalist, in which he made the explosive allegation that Joe Biden had pressured Ukraine to fire its former chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, in order to bury a case against Burisma.
To check this, I called up some anti-corruption experts in Ukraine who had been part of the effort to go after Burisma. They were friendly enough, but it was clear they thought I was a bit wet behind the ears.
They explained that I had the story backwards. Ukrainians, they said, had been out on the streets protesting against Shokin because he was the one protecting Burisma from investigation, not the other way around. In fact, Biden had called for Shokin’s firing even though Burisma was paying his son. This didn’t absolve Hunter of wrongdoing — but it showed that, while making a handsome salary, he had failed to deliver the level of insider access Burisma may have hoped for.
My original story idea was dead, though I did ultimately work on another investigation that cast scrutiny on Hunter Biden’s business partner the following year. (Strangely, our detractors seem to overlook that one.)
Meanwhile, I had a new mystery to unravel: how it came to be that a distorted version of the Hunter Biden/Burisma story had gained traction in the United States. I don’t usually cover the U.S., and I felt a little out of my depth. So my Ukrainian colleagues and I reached out to BuzzFeed News to collaborate.
We scoured the internet and started making calls on both sides of the Atlantic. The upside-down story being told by Solomon (and Giuliani) had clearly come from the former prosecutor Shokin, and his successor, Yuriy Lutsenko.
We thought the answer might lie with two mysterious Ukraine-linked figures who had grown close to Giuliani, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. Both born in the Soviet Union, the men pursued a colorful life in South Florida. Fruman was a businessman with ties back in the Ukrainian city of Odesa to a well-known gangster, known as “The Lightbulb.” Parnas was a former stockbroker with a history of unpaid debts.
While BuzzFeed went down to Florida to look into them, my colleagues and I started talking to people in Ukraine about what they knew.
The story turned out to be pretty simple. With Parnas and Fruman’s help, Ukrainian prosecutors and businessmen had convinced Giuliani that they could furnish him with false but useful political information about Biden. In return, they wanted the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who had crossed some of these prosecutors, to be fired.
We published the story on July 22, 2019 and that was that. Then, two months later, while recovering from shoulder surgery, I received a flurry of messages. A CIA whistleblower’s report that Trump had pressured Ukraine’s president to open an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden was in the papers, and keen-eyed colleagues had noticed our story mentioned in the footnotes.
How did this CIA employee know about my story? My wildest guess is they found it where everyone else did: on the internet.
It hurt my ego a little, but few journalists or political operatives actually seemed very interested in my story at the time, despite its appearance in the whistleblower’s report. They probably correctly assessed that it had played a minor role in the impeachment.
I moved back to Australia just before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, and didn’t give much further thought to the story — until it became the target of a whirlwind of online outrage in the aftermath of the dismantling of USAID by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
The trigger seems to have been a February 3 post on X by Mike Benz, a former State Department employee. (Benz was unmasked by NBC News in 2023 as “Frame Game,” an anonymous online influencer whose previous writings included the statement, “holy shit, Hitler actually had some decent points.”)
Benz’s false claim that USAID had paid “$20 million to hit piece journalists to dig up dirt on Rudy Giuliani and use that dirt as the basis to impeach the sitting US President in 2019” was quickly reposted by X’s owner, Elon Musk.
After that came Shellenberger, a former public relations expert whose clients included Venezuela’s late petro-dictator, Hugo Chavez. In his own attack on OCCRP’s “treasonous” work, he added more detail from a widely-criticized story on our organization published last year.
Investigative journalism is difficult work. It requires finding patterns in large amounts of noisy information, putting together a complex puzzle, and painstakingly stress-testing it so that it can stand up to any challenge. My 2019 story was carefully fact-checked and its accuracy has never been disputed — not even by its current critics.
Conspiracy-theorism is, by contrast, a grotesque imitation of what real journalists do. It’s a pastiche of barely-connected facts, glued together with innuendo and pure fantasy.
Conspiracy theories can also be used to cover up uncomfortable truths. Truths like the fact that humanitarian workers are currently warning that the gutting of billions of dollars from USAID could lead to an explosion in disease and hunger around the world.
As one Georgia manufacturer of high-nutrition food for starving children put it last week: “It is not hype or conjecture or hand wringing or even contested use of stats to say that hundreds of thousands of malnourished children could die without USAID."
Some people would prefer to change the subject, and distract us with McCarthyist attacks on free speech and the free press. But the truth is more powerful in the end.
