While BuzzFeed went down to Florida to look into #Fruman and #Parnas,
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.

-- Aubrey Belford,
OCCRP

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https://www.occrp.org/en/feature/investigative-reporting-is-free-speech-not-treason