When Castor then asked Yovanovitch if she could see why Trump might have seen the publication of records damaging Manafort by a Ukrainian lawmaker as an attack on him, the former ambassador replied that Leshchenko is an investigative journalist, “and he got access to the black ledger and he published it as I think journalists would do.”

“I don’t have any information to suggest that that was targeting President Trump,” she added.

But if there is no credible evidence that the payment records incriminating Manafort were fake, how did the president’s defenders on cable news and in the House impeachment inquiry get this idea? In an interview with CNN in September, Giuliani referred to the ledger as “a completely fraudulent document that was produced in order to begin the investigation of Manafort.” People in Ukraine who knew about this plot, he claimed, “were trying to get to us, but they were being blocked by the ambassador, who was a Obama appointee, in Ukraine, who was holding back this information.”

That was a reference to extremely dubious reporting from Washington by Solomon, who relied on the word of a disgraced Ukrainian prosecutor, Nazar Kholodnytsky. Last year, Kholodnytsky was wiretapped by Ukraine’s independent anti-corruption bureau and caught on tape advising suspects in a corruption probe on how not to get caught. Kholodnytsky told Solomon that the ledger “was not authenticated.”

After Kholodnytsky was caught in that sting operation, Ambassador Yovanovitch, who was the top American diplomat in Ukraine until May, called for him to be fired. Kholodnytsky retaliated by helping Solomon and other right-wing pundits smear Yovanovitch as an anti-Trump, deep-state plotter, prompting the State Department to recall her from Kyiv.

Solomon’s other main source for the claim that the ledger was false turns out to have been Konstantin Kilimnik, Manafort’s former Ukrainian business partner, who has been linked to Russian intelligence and was indicted last year and charged with obstruction of justice by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Despite the questionable nature of his sources, Solomon’s reporting that the black ledger records were fake has been accepted as fact by the president and his surrogates. In June, two years after the bank records of payments to Manafort’s firm had been revealed, Solomon appeared on Fox Business Network, telling Lou Dobbs that the black ledger “was likely false, likely fake, a fraud.”

Solomon seems to have concluded that the black ledger records were fake by screening out all evidence to the contrary. That technique was on full display in a long Skype interview he conducted with Leshchenko in July, in which he essentially ignored the Ukrainian’s clear explanation that Manafort’s bank records suggested the ledger was real.

Later in that interview — which was posted on YouTube in two parts (1 and 2) — Leshchenko told Solomon that the ledger was not introduced as evidence in criminal proceedings because the chain of custody for the records was unclear (the pages in his possession had come to him in an email from an anonymous source).

Solomon responded by claiming that the ledger must be fake because the former accountant for the corrupt former president Yanukovych’s party insisted that it “was not an accurate representation of his books, and that his books, the official books of the party, burned during a looting” of the party’s headquarters in 2014.

Treating the accountant’s claim as undisputed fact, Solomon then asked Leshchenko if he had any regrets about releasing some of the ledger, “knowing that it turned out to be not an accurate representation,” of the truth. “No,” Leshchenko replied, since “we have no proof that the black ledger is a fake document.”

The smearing of Leshchenko by Solomon’s fans in Congress comes as other anti-corruption activists, like Daria Kaleniuk of Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center, known as Anatc, have also found themselves condemned by the president’s allies based on misleading reports from the same journalist. The unhinged accusation against Kaleniuk is that her group is supposedly collaborating in a plot secretly orchestrated by George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist who has funded civil society groups in post-Soviet Eastern Europe.

In his CNN interview in September, Giuliani referred to Kaleniuk’s group as “Soros’s charity or whatever the hell it was, Antac,” and claimed falsely that the activists had “developed all of the dirty information that ended up being a false document that was created in order to incriminate Manafort.”

In fact, Antac, which has received less than 20 percent of its funding from Soros’s Open Society Foundations, played no role in the publication of the ledger.

Behind all these lies there is an ugly truth. Under the guise of fighting corruption, the Trump administration and its Republican allies have thrown the full force of the United States government, and Fox News, into supporting what amounts to a counter-revolution in Ukraine. In a stunning reversal, Trump and his supporters have taken the side of the corrupt oligarchs and former officials ousted in 2014, as they seek to claw back power by undermining the reformers and anti-corruption activists supported by the Obama administration, under the leadership of former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and former Vice President Joe Biden.

In a column for the Kyiv Post published during Tuesday’s impeachment hearings, Leshchenko urged Republicans to stop lying about him to the American public. The former lawmaker wrote that it was absurd to argue that he had “tried to undermine Trump’s candidacy in 2016 by targeting his then-campaign manager Paul Manafort,” given that the 22 pages from the black ledger he published in May of that year included no reference to Manafort.

“I was not the original source of information about Manafort’s shady payments in Ukraine,” Leshchenko explained, contradicting the story told repeatedly by Republicans at the hearings. “I found out about it the same way that everyone else did — from a New York Times article.”

“I have been openly critical of Manafort since the time he worked as a political mentor to Yanukovych. And, of course, the fact of Manafort’s involvement in Trump’s presidential campaign, along with the change of the Republican Party’s attitudes towards Ukraine on the eve of the American elections in 2016, could not but cause a critical reaction from Ukrainians,” Leshchenko wrote.

“Many Ukrainian politicians and journalists have spoken out against Trump on social media. However, such criticism has always been made openly and published on personal accounts,” he added. “And such criticism has nothing to do with the whole set of measures to undermine American democracy on Russia’s part in 2016, which were established by the U.S. investigation. Now it appears that Russia, using some U.S. politicians as well as its agents of influence in Ukraine, is trying to shift the responsibility for interfering in the 2016 elections to my country.”

Speaking by telephone from Kyiv on Tuesday, Leshchenko told me that the conspiracy theory about him interfering in the 2016 election against Trump had originated in Ukraine. “I believe in the beginning it was crafted by Lutsenko,” he said, referring to Ukraine’s former chief prosecutor, who met several times with Giuliani and was a source for Solomon. “But now,” Leshchenko said, the conspiracy theory has mutated in the collective Republican imagination and “it lives its own separate life.”

Updated: Tuesday, Nov. 19, 6:07 p.m. ET
This article was updated to add new comments from Sergii Leshchenko, a journalist and former lawmaker, who published a column on Tuesday and spoke to The Intercept by Skype.