How I Won a Disinformation Battle — But Lost the War
Let me tell you a story that has profoundly shaped the way I think about disinformation. It’s a firsthand experience in which I learned the hard way what not to do when staring down a sophisticated disinformation operation.
It taught me lessons that are more important than ever before, as American politics enters a dangerous new phase during the Trump prosecutions—in which the stakes are ever higher, the risks of violence ever greater, and the lies ever crazier.
It involves a showdown between me and a strange British right-wing provocateur on the airwaves, in which I mopped the floor with him on the facts, but he beat me on what really mattered: the disinformation narrative.
Here’s what happened…
In late 2019, news broke that Donald Trump had tried to extort Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in a disturbing quid pro quo deal. The gist of it was this: Trump effectively said “I’ll give you weapons if you give me dirt on Joe Biden.” The scandal culminated in Trump’s first impeachment.
The Trump transcript was so damning that the Republican strategy was, as it often is these days, to deflect with whataboutism. Sure enough, right-wing disinformation machines fired into gear and belched out a lie that had just enough of a veneer of truth to it that it sounded plausible to the uninformed.
The lie wasn’t just untrue. It was an inversion of the truth.
Here’s what happened: in 2015, Ukraine got a new Prosecutor General named Viktor Shokin. Shokin was tasked with, among other things, investigating alleged corruption at Burisma, a company that developed ties with Hunter Biden (which was, let’s be honest, a serious error of judgment on Hunter Biden’s part).
But there was a problem. Shokin was, himself, corrupt. He wasn’t doing his job—and wasn’t cracking down on corruption. In fact, he wasn’t investigating Burisma aggressively enough.
As a result, a chorus of voices called for Shokin to be replaced. These voices came not just from the Obama administration, but also from the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and a bipartisan group of US Senators—including several senior Republicans, who sent a letter urging Shokin to be replaced. Everyone agreed: Shokin needed to go.
But when Trump got into hot water, the right-wing narrative shifted. They rewrote history and lied about it: Shokin, they claimed, had been fired to protect Hunter Biden. The opposite was true: he was fired because he wasn’t investigating Burisma enough.
I knew the lies, I knew how bogus they were, and I prepared to face them down live on the airwaves.
