TRUMP, GIULIANI AND UKRAINE, Part Two, What Happened Was

In March 2019 and Trump had a serious problem. The trade deficit, the ballooning national debt, the rising number of uninsured? No, this was serious, there was rampant speculation that Joe Biden was going to enter the presidential race and Fox News had just aired a poll showing Biden 7 points ahead if he entered the race. Up until now the Democrats hadn’t been that much of a concern, a bunch of 2nd tier losers and leftist socialists, no one to really be concerned about. But Biden is respected, Biden has name recognition, Biden can appeal to middle America, Biden is a serious problem. Trump needed to come up with a plan. He couldn’t go down in history as a loser one–term president like Carter and Bush, Trumps don’t lose. But then on the 21st of April, just days after Biden leaked the fact that he’s going to run, a ray of hope opened up. News broke that Volodymyr Zelensky, a young, political novice had just won the presidency in Ukraine. 

This was perfect. This was the thing that was going to propel Trump to a second term. There had been a right-wing conspiracy theory bouncing around conservative websites for a couple of years. They claimed that the then Vice President Joe Biden used his influence to fire the Ukrainian prosecutor that was investigating the corrupt company Burisma, that Biden’s son Hunter worked for. This theory had been debunked, but contained enough elements of truth to be believable, which was all that mattered. Vice President Biden had led American actions in Ukraine and he (along with our European allies) had pressured Ukraine to fire the prosecutor, and Hunter Biden did work for Burisma, which was guilty of being corrupt. The truth was the Vice President had pressured Ukraine to fire the prosecutor for refusing to go after the rampant corruption, instead using the position to enrich himself. Hunter Biden may have got the job because his last name was Biden, but he had never been accused of any wrongdoing.  But those were unimportant details, he just needed to create enough smoke to make people believe there was a fire. 

This story had a lot of elements Trump could use to try and taint the Biden campaign, but it needed a little more to make it a legitimate issue. Trump’s supporters would buy into it wholeheartedly, but Biden could counter that neither he nor his son had ever been accused of doing anything wrong. He needed something to make it an issue for independents and swing voters to ensure his reelection. 

That’s where the election of President Zelensky becomes important. Ukraine was currently involved in a war with Russia over the eastern parts of Ukraine and they were dependent on American military assistance in this conflict. Congress had appropriated nearly $400 million in assistance to Ukraine that was scheduled to be paid out in the coming months. Trump and his long-time friend, and personal attorney, Rudolph Giuliani devised a plan to use this leverage. He could use the threat of withholding the military assistance to force Ukraine’s young and inexperienced president to publicly announce an investigation into Burisma and more importantly the Bidens. 

An active investigation linking Joe Biden to Ukrainian corruption would be the exact thing he needed to put some meat on the bones of the scandal. The investigation itself was irrelevant, Trump needed the headline to sink the Biden campaign before it got started. But for it to work, he needed the headline. A press release from a prosecutor wasn’t going to be enough, he needed Zelensky on American television formally announcing the investigation. Getting a foreign President to engage in such an activity usually would be a hard sell, but the Ukrainians were desperate, and Trump is accustomed to forcing his will on desperate people. I suspect he thought it would be quick and easy. The threat of losing military assistance in the middle of a war would force the Ukrainians to play ball. They even started sending some not too subtle signals of Trump’s dissatisfaction with Ukraine to help sell the threat. 

The plan was nearly perfect, but there was a potential roadblock, American Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. You see, this wasn’t Trump and Giuliani’s first attempt to get an investigation into the Bidens. Former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko has stated that through Giuliani, Trump had repeatedly pressured him to open an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden. Eventually they stopped making the requests after being repeatedly told no because there were no grounds for an investigation. The election of President Zelensky represented a new opportunity, and with the campaign season warming up there was mounting pressure on Trump to get the investigation announced, sooner rather than later. However, Ambassador Yovanovitch had proven to be an obstacle in his earlier attempts to get an investigation, she had to go. So only two months after receiving an extension to stay in Ukraine, Yovanovitch was recalled on May 6th, less than two weeks after Biden officially announced his run for the Presidency. 

With the Ambassador out of the way, he assembled his team that would actually carry out the deed. On May 23rd Trump met with his Ukrainian policy triumvirate of Rick Perry, Gordon Sondland and Kurt Volker (who have become known as the three amigos) and directed them to coordinate their actions with Giuliani. The plan was now set, sometime in late June or early July Trump ordered the Office of Management and Budget to put a hold on the $391 million of military assistance to Ukraine. Then shortly after the aid should have been paid, Trump arranges a call to President Zelensky and ask him to investigate the Bidens as a “favor.” 

Defenders of the President have tried to say that Trump only wanted Ukraine to investigate corruption and it’s just a coincidence that Trump’s political rival Joe Biden has Ukrainian ties. However, on the call Trump never mentions investigating corruption generally or even Burisma, he specifically wants an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden. Trump also asked Zelensky to work with his personal lawyer Giuliani, who had been a part of the scheme from the beginning. The very next day Trump asks Sondland if Zelensky is going to do the investigation, Sondland assures him that everything is going to plan. Just in case there is any confusion about this, on Oct 3rd, responding to questions from reporters, Trump said, “they should investigate the Bidens,” then, “I would recommend that they start an investigation into the Bidens.” Again, no mention of general corruption or even Burisma, Trump is only interested in an investigation of the Bidens. 

Over the course of the next month, behind the scenes negotiations take place concerning the exact wording and venue for the announcement of an investigation. It appears they were waiting for Zelensky’s new Prosecutor General to take office on the 29th of August since he’d be charged with carrying out the investigation. However, unbeknownst to the Trump administration, even as the plan was about to reach its fruition the seeds of its ultimate demise had just been sown. On August 12th an anonymous whistleblower filed an IG report basically detailing the entire game plan. On August 26th the complaint was forwarded to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), who on advice of the Justice Department decided not to forward the complaint to Congress. It seems nearly certain the President learned of the complaint sometime in late August. It’s unknown if the President was involved in the decision to bury the complaint, but with the DNI decision to sit on the IG complaint it’s likely the conspirators felt they could move forward with the plan. 

Up to this point, the fact that the military aid was on hold was a closely guarded secret, presumably because the White House doesn’t have the legal authority to unilaterally decide to withhold Congressionally appropriated funds without justifying why. That all changed on August 28th when Politico published an article detailing the hold on the aid. Over the next week there’s a scramble among career State Department diplomats, who weren’t aware of the White House's “aid for investigations” scheme, to figure out what was going on. The Ukrainians up to this point certainly knew that there was an unusual delay in receiving the military aid but it’s not entirely clear if it was just implied that the aid was contingent on a public statement on a Biden investigation or if it had been expressly states as such. After this time though the link between a public statement from Zelensky and the delivery of the aid wasn’t in doubt. 

Despite the Politico article the plotters were pushing full steam ahead with the plan, probably hoping to get the Zelensky statement and the aid released before for anyone in Congress was able to realize the link between the two seemingly unrelated events. Finally on September 8th, after Gordon Sondland told President Zelensky they were at a stalemate without a public statement concerning the investigations, a final agreement was made that Selensky would use his already scheduled interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on September 13th to announce the investigation into the Bidens, presumably the President would lift the hold on the military aid soon after that. 

The very next day though, just as the final act of this drama was about to play out, all of Donald Trump’s and Rudolph Giuliani’s plans came undone. In a surprise move, the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community sent a message to the House Intelligence Committee informing them of an “urgent concern” that had been overruled by the DNI. This message led to the formation of Congressional investigations and the ultimate release of the whistleblower complaint. The news of the existence of a whistleblower complaint sent a shockwave through the Trump administration, the State Department and the Ukrainian government. The combination of the Politico article, the revelation of the whistleblower complaint, Congressional threats to put a hold on $5 billion in defense spending and a legal decision from State Department lawyers forced Trump to release the $391 million in Ukrainian aid on September 11th and President Zelensky cancels his interview with Fareed Zakaria. The argument that there couldn’t have been a quid pro quo because the aid was delivered without a public statement from President Zelensky just doesn’t hold water. The final deal had been struck and it was only the public revelation of the whistleblower complaint that caused it to fall apart at the last second. 

The basic facts in this story aren’t in any serious dispute, we know what happened. The only question is, does this rise to an impeachable offense? Frankly, the fact that anyone is seriously asking this question is unbelievable. The President of the United States used taxpayer dollars to extort a political favor from the head of a foreign nation, in the process damaging American security interests and emboldening the Russians. This is both a criminal offense and an impeachable offense. His refusal to turn over documents or allow Executive branch personnel to testify is an obstruction of Congress. The definition of bribery is, “money or favor given or promised in order to influence the judgment or conduct of a person in a position of trust,” this clearly applies to this situation. The definition of extortion is “the practice of obtaining something of value through force or threats,” this also applies. The solicitation of something of value for a political campaign without reporting it is a felony campaign finance violation. President Trump’s actions are a textbook example of impeachable conduct.