President Trump engaged in a systematic campaign aimed at pressuring Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky into launching an investigation into Democratic rival Joe Biden, and also directed aides to lock down records of a July 25 phone call between the two in which this and related matters were discussed.
A redacted version of a whistleblower complaint released Thursday spells out in great detail the effort led by Trump to use Ukraine to smear Biden, including but not limited to the July 25 phone call in which Trump asked Zelensky for a favor, then detailed what he considered would be the favor: an investigation into whether Biden had somehow intervened to have a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating an energy company, Burisma Holdings, removed from office to end the investigation because his son, Hunter, served on the company’s board of directors.
Trump has repeatedly raised this claim, despite the fact that the prosecutor who was ultimately removed from office by Ukraine’s Parliament, Viktor Shokin, was viewed by members of Parliament, the U.S. and Western allies as being a main hindrance to more aggressive investigations and prosecutions of corruption in Ukrainian government.
The White House tried to head off the controversy by releasing a memo that included a partial transcript of the July 25 phone call on Wednesday, but all the memo did was add fuel to the fire.
“I would like you to do us a favor,” Trump said to Zelensky, according to the memo, after the two had talked about the relationship of the U.S. and Ukraine, and Trump made clear that he didn’t feel that Ukraine had been “reciprocal” on its side of the relationship.
Trump then pressed Zelensky, who was elected in April, to have his top prosecutor investigate the Bidens, and also track down a conspiracy theory popular on the right that Ukrainians had had some murky role in emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee in 2016, the idea being that conjuring up some proof of this would exonerate Russia and thus discredit the two-year investigation headed up by former FBI director Robert Mueller into 2016 election interference.
What we learned Thursday with the release of the redacted whistleblower complaint is much more extensive than that one phone call, and that in fact the push from Trump dates back to the spring.
The president has used, as a sort of ace in the hole, claims raised by another former top Ukrainian prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, that seemed to corroborate the claims that there was Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, and that Biden had pressured then-President Petro Poroshenko to quash a purported criminal probe into Burisma Holdings.
The allegations from Lutsenko came on the eve of the first round of the Ukrainian presidential election, on March 31, at a time when Poroshenko trailed Zelensky badly in the polls and appeared on the path to defeat.
The Hail Mary from Lutsenko ultimately fell short of influencing Ukrainian voters, and Zelenky defeated Poroshenko in the April 21 runoff in a landslide.
Following the runoff, Lutsenko walked back the claims related to the Bidens, telling Bloomberg on May 16 that the Bidens were not subject to any current Ukrainian investigation, and that he had no evidence against them, apparently an effort on the part of Lutsenko to keep his job as top prosecutor.
Trump, though, had already taken the ball and run with it at that point. The president told Fox News in an April 25 interview that Lutsenko’s claims were “big” and “incredible” and that Attorney General William Barr “would want to see this.”
Around this same time, according to the whistleblower complaint, associates of Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who is now President Trump’s personal attorney, were trying to make contact with the Zelensky transition team.
Then, on May 6, the State Department announced that the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, was ending her assignment in the country, reportedly “as planned,” though she had been suddenly recalled to Washington for “consultations” a week earlier, on April 29, after coming under fire from those close to Trump because she had publicly criticized Lutsenko for his poor record on fighting corruption in Ukraine.
On May 9, The New York Times reported that Giuliani was being sent to Ukraine to press the government to pursue the investigations that the Trump team felt would help the president’s 2020 re-election bid. Giuliani subsequently made multiple public statements confirmed that he was planning to travel to Ukraine to pursue investigations into alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and alleged wrongdoing by the Biden family.
Trump told Politico a day later that he planned to speak to Giuliani about the trip, and a few hours after that statement, Giuliani made public that he had canceled his trip, saying he was doing so because Zelensky was “surrounded by enemies of the (U.S.) president … and of the United States.”
On May 11, Lutsenko met with Zelensky, and publicly stated that he wished to remain in the position of prosecutor general in the Zelensky regime.
He was ultimately replaced in the office by Zelensky’s former deputy chief of staff, Ruslan Riaboshapka.
A planned May 20 trip for Vice President Mike Pence to Ukraine for the Zelensky inauguration was scuttled, and it was made clear that the reason was because Trump didn’t want to meet or deal with Zelensky until he saw how Zelensky “chose to act” in office.
In essence, according to the complaint, Ukrainian leadership was being told that any chance of a future meeting or phone call between Trump and Zelensky would be dependent on whether Zelensky showed willingness to “play ball” on the issues that had been publicly aired (and, left unsaid, then retracted) by Lutsenko.
Fast forward to June 21, and a tweet from Rudy Giuliani, that Zelensky was “still silent on investigation of Ukrainian interference in 2016 and alleged Biden bribery of Poroshenko. Time for leadership and investigate both if you want to purge how Ukraine was abused by Hillary and Clinton people.”
Which gets us to the July 25 phone call, and then this bombshell from the still-unnamed whistleblower: not only was it made clear to the whistleblower that White House officials had directed that the transcript of the call be placed into standalone computer system reserved for codeword-level intelligence information, an abuse of the system, because the information in this phone call would not need to be classified because it did not concern national security, but also, this was “not the first time” that the Trump administration placed a presidential transcript into this codeword-level system for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive information.
Story by Chris Graham
Share
Contributors
