BuzzFeed reports:

In his July 2019 call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, President Donald Trump referenced a conspiracy theory that Ukraine was involved in hacking the Democratic National Committee in 2016, and asked for the “favor” of help investigating it.

Trump’s own campaign was floating the theory that Ukraine, and not Russia, hacked the DNC as early as the summer of 2016, according to new documents obtained by BuzzFeed News from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Three years later, Trump’s call with Zelensky, where he also asked for help finding damaging information about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and Biden’s family, is at the heart of Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.

In an April 2018 interview with Mueller’s office, Rick Gates — who had served as Trump’s deputy campaign chair in 2016 and was the longtime right-hand man of former campaign chair Paul Manafort — told investigators that sometime after the campaign learned in June 2016 that WikiLeaks had the hacked DNC emails, Manafort had said that the hack was “likely carried by the Ukrainians, not the Russians,” according to FBI notes.

The idea that Ukraine, and not Russia, was involved in stealing emails from the DNC that were released by WikiLeaks in 2016 has long percolated in conservative circles and been pushed by Russian news outlets. It contradicts the US Intelligence Community’s own findings that Russia was involved in hacking the DNC and orchestrating the release of documents through WikiLeaks. [Continue reading…]