Thread by @thomasafine

THREAD: How the arrest of Fruman and Parnas destroyed a carefully orchestrated attempt to end Biden's candidacy during the primary debate season.

In late 2018, Rudy Giuliani and his team began creating propaganda to ensure that Biden would not be the Presidential candidate.

Rudy's team included, Igor Fruman, @levparnas , Victoria Toensing, Joseph di Genova, John Solomon, Dmytro Firtash, Devin Nunes, and Derek Harvey.

There were multiple known Skype calls and meetings in Vienna and New York with now disgraced former Ukraine Prosecutor General Victor Shokin and then current PG Yuriy Lutsenko (both now disgraced ex-prosecutors).

A key early effort was a March 20th "interview" of Lutsenko by now disgraced reporter Solomon, which I believe was more likely a propaganda planning session than an interview.

I say this because this "interview" led to several stories that were either announced by Solomon or Lutsenko or both more or less at the same time about bogus investigations and stories.

This included a bogus story about the Manafort ledger, a bogus story about ambassador Yovanovitch, Lutsenko made a bogus claim about a dropped investigation into Burisma, and a really crazy story involving the Clintons and Soros.

In April we have Hunter allegedly dropping off his laptop for data recovery, just a few days before Zelensky wins the election for President in Ukraine.

This is a few days before Biden announces his campaign for the Presidency.

A few days later Trump recalls Yovanovitch. She had been vocal about Lutsenko's failure to fight corruption (as she had been previously about Shokin's failure).

Of course Trump wanted Lutsenko to stay because they had this whole propaganda effort going at this point.

In May we got our first real glimpse into this propaganda conspiracy, when Ihor Kolomoisky stated in an interview that Giuliani was orchestrating a conspiracy against Biden. But it was not widely reported in the U.S until October 2019.
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/…

In July was the Trump phone call that got him impeached, in which he tried to convince Zelensky to help him create the very same propaganda that Team Rudy had been working on for months.

Note that this wasn't the first Trump-Zelensky phone call, and also note that Trump halted U.S. security assistance to Ukraine in July. So there was a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes we still don't know about.

Things kind of simmered over the summer, with people trying to get meetings with Zelensky; Zelensky trying to get rid of Lutsenko; and Lutsenko trying to keep his job.

Ultimately this failed, and he was out in August.

Also in August, the whistleblower thing happens, though we don't find out until September.

But in September the propaganda effort picks up again full steam. On September 4 Toensing and di Genova get a bogus affidavit out of Shokin that is to be the centerpiece in their efforts.

The whistleblower story breaks on the 18th. On the 26th, Solomon publishes the bogus affidavit. On the 29th, one of the two laptop email PDFs is created.

On October 8th, Fruman and Parnas book flights to Vienna to meet with Shokin about an upcoming remote interview on Hannity (planned for Oct 10).

On October 9th, Trump tweets a video about Biden.

It is a preview of their planned propaganda. Published in advance of the Hannity interview.

The video contains clips from the bogus affidavit.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1181995834369544198

On the 9th Fruman and Parnas are arrested on the way to the airport.

That evening Barr has his sudden unexplained meeting with Murdoch just a few hours after Fruman and Parnas are arrested.

The second email PDF allegedly from Hunter is created early the next morning.

But the Shokin remote interview on Hannity is cancelled the next day.

The propaganda that had been in the works for months was now going to serve dual purposes. To end Biden's campaign, and to make the Ukraine phone call scandal go away for Trump.

The arrest of Fruman and @levparnas brought this plan to a screeching halt.

I don't think Shokin was planning to use the alleged Hunter emails during his interview. I think those were going to roll out later that week.

The arrest of Fruman and @levparnas may just possibly have saved our democracy.

(And the day after all this happened, Shep Smith quit Fox News with no warning to anyone, live on the air.)

So what we're seeing now is a desperate revival of propaganda that they had hoped to use exactly a year ago.

I expect there may be more.