The person now claiming to have more tapes is OAN’s Chanel Rion, the on-air personality who went with Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, on his December trip to Ukraine in part to find information on Biden to help Trump. OAN lends his efforts a veneer, however thin, of journalistic legitimacy. Andriy Derkach, who released the Biden tapes that have already come out, is a former member of a pro-Russian political party who graduated from a KGB-run academy in Moscow. Some outlets learned a lesson from that episode, and have treated new Biden recordings out of Ukraine with care. In 2016, Russian intelligence agents hacked the emails of Democratic National Committee staffers and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and delivered them to WikiLeaks, as a way to get them into the American media. “When it feels like nobody’s telling the truth and there is no truth, the reaction to that is despondency and demobilization.” It’s to convince you that there is no truth,” he said. “It’s not to convince you of a different point of view. McFaul said what he’s seeing now reminds him of tactics the Kremlin has used against its domestic political opponents. Read Putin is well on his way to stealing the next election Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul-who has recalled being secretly recorded himself, among other forms of harassment, when he was posted in Moscow-told me, "There’s never been a moment like this in American history.” As my colleague Franklin Foer wrote recently, “Russia’s interference in 2016 might be remembered as the experimental prelude that foreshadowed the attack of 2020.” That OAN is now a player in such interference suggests an escalation that the Biden campaign has been bracing for. Russian interference in the 2016 election has been closely studied over the past four years, and America’s vulnerabilities have only worsened in that time. What is most remarkable here is that none of this is particularly surprising. Conspiracists have alleged that this was intended to help his son Hunter escape charges of corruption, but an audit by Ukraine’s former top prosecutor released last week found no evidence of illegal activity by Hunter in his capacity as an energy-company board member. In the audio that has been released elsewhere so far, Biden is heard dangling the promise of financial aid to Ukraine if its government ousted a prosecutor who was seen as corrupt-which Biden has previously said publicly was his goal, as part of a push for widespread reforms. The OAN employee who claims to have the tapes would not say what was on them, other than suggesting that they will be revelatory. ambassadors to Ukraine and a former ambassador to Russia told me. If such recordings exist, they’re likely linked to pro-Russian interests in Ukraine and a Russian intelligence operation, two former U.S. I n what appears to be a signal of intensifying political warfare ahead of the November election, One America News Network, the Trump-supporting cable channel that has been promoting anti-Biden conspiracies for several months, says it has obtained several hours of secret recordings of then–Vice President Biden’s conversations with Ukrainian officials.
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