Some are insane; some are useful tools

[Andriy Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat who has alleged Ukraine’s government conspired with Democrats in 2016, an] associate traveling with Rudy Giuliani in Ukraine this week [Andriy Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat who has alleged Ukraine’s government conspired with Democrats in 2016 has voiced an unusual theory for why he may not be able to return to the United States: “Soros people,” he says, are working to discredit him and may block his visa.

[...]

He did not name any individually or provide proof other than to say some were writing about him online.

It was far from the first time that [George Soros, Hungarian American and a Holocaust survivor], a billionaire philanthropist and a frequent target of conspiracies about Jews controlling the world, has popped up as part of a conspiracy theory portraying Soros as using Ukraine as a playing field to undermine Trump’s campaign.

[...]

When Fiona Hill, then a National Security Council official, started hearing early in 2019 about a smear campaign against a colleague in Ukraine invoking Soros, she had a sinking feeling: She’d heard this before.

A similar conspiracy theory about Soros had been lobbed against Hill during her first year as Trump’s top adviser on Russia and Europe. That’s when Hill says a former Republican congressman from Florida tried to get the vice president’s office to get rid of her — “to have me fired for being a Soros mole in the White House,” she told Congress.

That former congressman, Connie Mack IV, now a lobbyist, confirms he met in 2017 with the vice president’s national security adviser about Hill’s “conflict of interest” stemming from what he alleged are her ties to Soros.

[...]

In an interview, Mack said he’d found a book on the internet that said that Hill had attended Soros’ wedding, although he couldn’t recall the name of the book offhand and an internet search did not turn one up. Hill’s attorney said the assertion was false

[...]

Hill said she starting getting death threats when Mack’s allegations made it to Roger Stone, a Trump associate who was convicted last month of lying to Congress, as well as the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his far-right channel, InfoWars. In lobbying documents about Hill, Mack said he was shining “a light on the far-reaching network of George Soros in order to continually degrade his international influence.”

“There is clearly a conflict of interest,” Mack said. Orban, his client, had been working to oust a Soros-founded university from Budapest.

[...]

Lee Wolosky, Hill’s attorney, said any work Hill had done at Soros-linked entities had been promoting a “fundamentally American” interest: advancing democracy and civil society in the former Soviet Union.

[...]

Mack said he made that case to Vice President Mike Pence’s national security adviser at the time, Andrea Thompson.

[...]

In 2017, Mack’s client was Viktor Orban, Hungary’s nationalist prime minister who has vilified Soros as part of his bid to stifle dissent.

  NBC

Viktor Orban - "nationalist" is bowdlerizing it.

Hill, in her testimony, compared the smear campaign to “the new Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

[...]

A successful campaign to oust Marie Yovanovitch as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine by Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and two now-indicted associates was galvanized by accusations that Yovanovitch protected Soros’ efforts. Those accusations originated in an opinion article by John Solomon in the “The Hill,” which, according to documents given to Congress, he coordinated with one of the indicted Giuliani associates and with two pro-Trump lawyers, Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova.

Solomon got booted out of that job and is now a Fox News commentator.

Last month, as the impeachment probe unfolded, diGenova told Fox News that Soros “wants to run Ukraine” and “controls a very large part” of the U.S. diplomatic corps, along with FBI agents in Ukraine and elsewhere. Giuliani falsely told The Washington Post in September that Yovanovitch was “now working for Soros.” In fact, she is still a U.S. government employee.

I don't think the two would be mutually exclusive in Rudy's telling.

Giuliani also told CNN that month that an anti-corruption nonprofit in Ukraine that took funding from a Soros philanthropy had fabricated evidence against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. He later told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that the Ukrainians had “brought me substantial evidence of Ukrainian collusion with Hillary Clinton, the D.N.C., George Soros, George Soros' company.”

[...]

And last month, a photo that purportedly showed the whistleblower who outed Trump’s call with the Ukrainian leader went viral, tweeted out by Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa. It turned out to be a photo of Soros’ son.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.