BUBBLE BOYS:

While Giuliani's fixation on Ukraine dates back to 2017 and he spent the spring of 2018 using Spygate talking points to discredit the former FBI director Robert Mueller's probe, he didn't really start his anti-Ukraine social media campaign until March 22 of this year -- the day Mueller submitted his report on Russian interference in the 2016 election to Attorney General Bill Barr. Giuliani most likely resurrected it as a tool to disparage Mueller's resulting report. This time, he began to focus heavily on a Ukrainian connection.

"Pay attention to [Dan Bongino] for an analysis of some real collusion between Hillary, Kerry and Biden people colluding with Ukrainian operatives to make money and affect 2016 election," Giuliani tweeted.

Bongino, a far-right radio host and former secret service agent, made a name for himself as a conservative commentator around Spygate. He wrote a book about the conspiracy in October 2018 and has made it the focus of his website, podcast, and Twitter account. In September 2018, Matt Palumbo, a writer who works with Bongino, created a Spygate "character" chart, which spread across Reddit and 4chan.

About a week after he name-dropped Bongino, Giuliani shared an article on Twitter from Fox News contributor Sara Carter. It was an aggregation of an opinion piece written by the Hill's John Solomon, which has gone on to shape much of the conservative news coverage -- and rattled his now-former colleagues. The Hill piece centered around allegations made by Kostiantyn Kulyk, the deputy head of Ukraine's prosecutor general's International Legal Cooperation Department, that claimed Ukrainian law enforcement had evidence that Democrats attempted to interfere in the 2016 election. Kulyk's allegations, collected in a seven-page dossier, ricocheted across US media and together with lines from interviews by Ukraine's then-prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, a bedrock of the Spygate conspiracy began to take shape.

Even though Giuliani had waited until shortly before the Mueller report's release to start beating the Spygate drum publicly, according to notes submitted to Congress by Lutsenko this week, the two had actually already met months before, in January, when Giuliani had asked Lutsenko to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden's connections to Ukraine.

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