The media made a giant mistake and almost missed Trump’s biggest scandal yet

With a damning record of his extortionate call with the Ukrainian president public for all to see, President Donald Trump is facing the strongest political headwinds he has seen and staring down the barrel of a daunting and potent impeachment inquiry.

But for all the furor surrounding the Ukraine scandal now, much of the media almost missed the story entirely or gave it inadequate weight and botched framing in light of what it deserved.

To understand the Ukraine story, we must go back all the way back to March 2018, when, according to Lawfare's timeline of events, conservative author Peter Schweizer published a book lobbing accusations of corruption at Vice President Joe Biden based on his son Hunter Biden's work for the Ukraine oil company Burisma. That's when the story entered the conservative media bloodstream, eventually making its way to the heart of the right-wing universe inside the Oval Office. It's important realize, though, that before this story became twisted by conservative media, Biden's role as vice president advocating for reform in Ukraine drew little to no criticism at the time it happened from Republicans, who had no limit on their desire to sling mud at the Obama administration.

The new attack on Biden, driven by his perceived strengths as a 2020 competitor to Trump, was that he corruptly ousted a Ukrainian prosecutor who was targeting his son's employer in 2016 by threatening to withhold aid. And when the mainstream media picked up on the story on May 1, 2019, in the form of a New York Times article, it was framed to take this allegation seriously.

"Biden Faces Conflict of Interest Questions That Are Being Promoted by Trump and Allies," read the Times' headline on a story written by Ken Vogel and Iuliia Mendel (who would curiously soon become the new Ukrainian president's press secretary).

But this article actually broke the central story of the impeachment inquiry that now threatens to bring down Trump himself, not Biden. This fact, though, was easy to miss at the time.

In the typical style of supposedly neutral journalism, the report broadly referred to "questions" about Biden's supposed corruption or the "issue" being "in the spotlight" while dancing around what the questions were, what the specific issue was, and whether the allegations had any merit. Vogel and Mendel wrote:

The broad outlines of how the Bidens’ roles intersected in Ukraine have been known for some time. The former vice president’s campaign said that he had always acted to carry out United States policy without regard to any activities of his son, that he had never discussed the matter with Hunter Biden and that he learned of his son’s role with the Ukrainian energy company from news reports.

But new details about Hunter Biden’s involvement, and a decision this year by the current Ukrainian prosecutor general to reverse himself and reopen an investigation into Burisma, have pushed the issue back into the spotlight just as the senior Mr. Biden is beginning his 2020 presidential campaign.

Only after casting suspicious light on Biden did the story move on to what would prove to be the real bombshell:

But the renewed scrutiny of Hunter Biden’s experience in Ukraine has also been fanned by allies of Mr. Trump. They have been eager to publicize and even encourage the investigation, as well as other Ukrainian inquiries that serve Mr. Trump’s political ends, underscoring the Trump campaign’s concern about the electoral threat from the former vice president’s presidential campaign.

The Trump team’s efforts to draw attention to the Bidens’ work in Ukraine, which is already yielding coverage in conservative media, has been led partly by Rudolph W. Giuliani, who served as a lawyer for Mr. Trump in the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. Giuliani’s involvement raises questions about whether Mr. Trump is endorsing an effort to push a foreign government to proceed with a case that could hurt a political opponent at home.

Mr. Giuliani has discussed the Burisma investigation, and its intersection with the Bidens, with the ousted Ukrainian prosecutor general and the current prosecutor. He met with the current prosecutor multiple times in New York this year. The current prosecutor general later told associates that, during one of the meetings, Mr. Giuliani called Mr. Trump excitedly to brief him on his findings, according to people familiar with the conversations.

In the above passage, we get the broad outlines of the story that finally pushed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with a majority of the House lawmakers, to vocally support an impeachment inquiry. Outside of normal channels, Giuliani — on Trump's behalf and with his consent — was pressuring foreign officials to investigate the president's potential 2020 opponent with the weight of the U.S. government behind him. The delayed military aid as likely extortion wasn't in the picture yet, but that doesn't change the fundamental matter when the president is pressuring a foreign ally to investigate an opponent, because an implicit threat is always there. Mirroring their "neutral journalism" framing of the Biden corruption allegations, Vogel and Mendel wrote that Giuliani's "action raises questions about whether Mr. Trump is endorsing an effort to push a foreign government to proceed with a case that could hurt a political opponent at home." But the reporting doesn't raise that question, it answers it: Giuliani was "excitedly" briefing Trump — his client — on his efforts. Trump was already attempting to solicit foreign influence in the 2020 election; had such contacts been reported about a Trump employee with Russia in 2016, the president would already have been toast.

At the same time, the story contains pretty much all the information that is needed to exonerate Biden. Yuriy Lutsenko, the prosecutor who replaced the one Biden and Obama forced out, "initially took a hard line against Burisma." Biden's efforts to oust Viktor Shokin, the former prosecutor, were the aim of the Obama administration (and many European countries, as well), not Biden's personally. There were indeed concerns among Obama people that the role of Biden's son could "complicate" his diplomacy. But since Biden's diplomacy helped achieve the removal of Shokin — which was, again, Obama's goal — it actually turned out that the vice president was able to act neutrally, even if the concerns about the conflict of interest were legitimate before the events unfolded.

So the Times had enough information to conclude that Trump was trying to collude with a foreign government to win re-election and that the accusations against Biden were largely specious. For whatever reason, it decided to frame the story around "questions" about Biden's conflict of interest.

On Twitter at the time, Vogel was even more egregious, promoting the story in a series of tweets claiming, "The BIDENS are entangled in a Ukrainian corruption scandal" — a series that never once mentioned Giuliani's efforts to influence Ukrainian policy:

To defend the reporting, Vogel claimed the Times had been "investigating the intersection of @JoeBiden & HUNTER BIDEN in Ukraine well before @RudyGiuliani seized on it." He cited a report from 2015 in the Times by James Risen, who did indeed cover the story. But in a new piece for The Intercept, Risen said the right wing's use of his reporting "turned the story upside down." He explained: