The 2019 Ukraine Scandal
To understand how the Ukraine scandal connects to the Russia investigation, it’s necessary to know a bit about the recent history of Ukraine.
Recent History
Ukraine was part of the USSR until 1991, and Russian influence remained powerful in the country after its independence. In 2004, a Russian-backed politician named Viktor Yanukovych claimed to have been elected president of Ukraine. But Yanukovych was rumored to have ties to organized crime, and the election was tainted by apparent fraud and the poisoning of a key rival. Protestors took to the streets for massive demonstrations that became known as the “Orange Revolution.” The Ukrainian Supreme Court voided the election and ordered a new vote, which Yanukovych lost. Yanukovych, determined to stage a comeback, hired American political consultant Paul Manafort. Manafort spent nearly a decade as a consultant for Yanukovych and his party in Ukraine. Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Manafort from Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party. Manafort later admitted to money laundering in connection with these payments.
Yanukovych went on to win Ukraine’s 2010 election, and become President of Ukraine. His opponent in that election, Yulia Tymoshenko, was imprisoned in 2011.
A large amount of funding for Yanukovych’s party, and thus for Manafort, came from a man named Dmitry Firtash (who also once partnered with Manafort’s firm on a hotel project.) Firtash’s wealth, in turn, derives from favorable deals with Russia's state owned gas company and loan guarantees from Russian banks, obtainable only with the approval of Vladimir Putin. Putin helped make Firtash wealthy, and Firstash used that wealth to help Yanukovych’s pro-Russia political party win power in Ukraine.
In 2013, Yanukovych was ousted by protests against his close ties to Putin. In 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine. It’s a conflict that is still ongoing and has so far claimed 13,000 Ukrainian lives. Yanukovych fled to Russia, and was later convicted of treason, for his violent crackdown on protesters and for inviting Russia to invade. The U.S. government, believing that Americans are safest in a world where national borders are stable, responded to the invasion by imposing sanctions on Russia and offering military aid to Ukraine. Firtash was indicted in 2014 by the US Government on unrelated corruption charges, but has still not been extradited to face arrest.
In July 2016, at the Republican National Convention the Trump campaign insisted on removing explicit support for military aid to Ukraine from the party platform. This was the only change the Trump campaign made to that platform. At the time of the Republican National Convention, the chairman of the Trump Campaign was Paul Manafort — the same man who had staged Yanukovych’s rise to power.
Burisma
Just two months after Yanukovych was ousted from Ukraine, Hunter Biden, the son of then-U.S.-Vice-President Joe Biden, joined the board of a Ukrainian oil and gas company called Burisma. Hunter Biden’s decision to join the company raised eyebrows: the owner was an ally of Yanukovych. Joe Biden and the U.S. government had supported the protests that ousted Yanukovych. Other politically connected and pro-Western figures were hired for the board at the same time, perhaps in an attempt to ingratiate the company with the West and with the new U.S.-friendly government of Ukraine.
That new government posed a threat to Burisma Holdings and its owner, who were accused of committing money laundering, illegal enrichment, and fraud before Yanukovych’s ouster. But despite popular support and international pressure to pursue investigations of Burisma’s owner and other Yanukovych cronies, the prosecutors general of the post-Yanukovych government let most cases drop. The Kyiv Post says: “As Yanukovych and his allies fled Ukraine in 2014, the new authorities launched investigations into their wrongdoings. Almost none of the investigations brought any results, and many were eventually closed.” This was disappointing to Western politicians, many of whom pressed, in 2015 and 2016, for the firing of the prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, who was failing to pursue Yanukovych-era corruption cases such as the ones against Burisma. The Western politicians pressing for this included Joe Biden among other Obama Administration officials and Republican members of Congress in the U.S. These calls echoed those of anti-graft activists, non-profit government watchdogs, and top members of the ruling coalition in parliament in Ukraine. Shokin was eventually removed.
In March 2019, Shokin’s replacement as prosecutor general of Ukraine, Yuri Lutsenko, implied in an interview that Biden had pressured the Ukrainian government to fire Shokin to protect Burisma Holdings because of Hunter Biden’s involvement with it. This was a strange claim because Shokin was actually fired for NOT pursuing prosecutions of Yanukovych cronies like Burisma’s owner. In any case, Lutsenko later walked back these claims, saying that “From the perspective of Ukrainian legislation, [Hunter Biden] did not violate anything.” A later audit of thousands of old case files by Ukrainian prosecutors indeed found no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Hunter Biden.
Rudy Giuliani and Paul Manafort
Lutsenko originally reached out to American officials in 2018 to allege that the financial records which implicated Manafort were falsified — and passed on, in the same message, the same allegations about the Bidens he would later repeat publicly. In May of 2019, the New York Times reported that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani — who had business ties and connections his own to Ukraine — was planning a trip to Ukraine to urge officials “to pursue inquiries that allies of the White House contend could yield new information about two matters of intense interest to Mr. Trump”: the “origin of the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election” and the “involvement of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son in a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch.”
Rudy Giuliani consulted with Paul Manafort about these “matters of intense interest.” Manafort was by this time in prison for crimes related to his own activities in Ukraine during the Yanukovych years. (In a sort of mirror image of the accusation Guiliani was leveling about Hunter Biden, four cases involving Paul Manafort which had been under investigation by Ukrainian authorities had been dropped in 2018, with a member of the Ukrainian parliament saying: “In every possible way, we will avoid irritating the top American officials. We shouldn’t spoil relations with the [Trump] administration.” A draft indictment against Manafort for embezzling state funds was abandoned. The same prosecutor general whose comment about Biden to The Hill had launched Giuliani’s investigation, also allowed a witness against Manafort to leave Ukraine for Russia, beyond the reach of US law enforcement.)
Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, Lev Parnas and Dmitry Firtash
Rudy Giuliani was not acting alone. He had help in urging officials to pursue his allegations from two American lawyers who had represented Dmitry Firtash, and from a former employee of Firtash. (As described in the “Recent History” section above, Dmitry Firtash is a Ukrainian oligarch whose money comes from Russian government contracts. He had previously done business with Paul Manafort, and funded the pro-Russian political party which employed Manafort.)
High-profile Washington lawyers Joe diGenova and his wife Victoria Toensing had defended Dmitry Firtash against allegations of corruption in American courts, and put forward some counter-allegations against American officials as a part of Firtash’s legal defense. They met with the American attorney general in an attempt to get the charges against Firtash dropped. They billed Firtash about $1 million for their work, including costs billed on behalf of a Ukrainian-born American named Lev Parnas who had “worked in an unspecified capacity for Firtash before [he] joined the Ukrainian’s legal team.”
Lev Parnas’ company, co-founded by a longtime friend of Paul Manafort, in turn, paid Rudy Giuliani $500,000 in consulting fees. In private conversations with would-be business associates, Parnas boasted that his luxurious lifestyle was bankrolled by Firtash.
Toensing and deGenova were working with Giuliani off the books on his project of launching an investigation against Hunter Biden. They traveled to Ukraine and signed retainer agreements with the fired Ukrainian prosecutor and several other Ukrainians.
Parnas too was working with Guiliani and was also in Ukraine in the first half of 2019, also attempting to convince Ukrainians to open investigations.
Parnas was arrested in October 2019 , along with several associates while trying to leave the US on a one way ticket. Parnas and three men who were working with him were accused of conspiring to violate campaign finance laws by funneling money from foreign donors to American political campaigns.
When arrested, Parnas was on his way to Vienna, where Dmitry Firtash resides. Parnas had eaten lunch with Giuliani who was also on his way to Vienna, earlier that day. Parnas was planning to meet with Giuliani and the fired former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was reportedly scheduled for an interview with Sean Hannity in Vienna the next day.
Parnas had direct interactions with Donald Trump, including posing for pictures with him, and being recorded discussing US policy in Ukraine and the firing of the US ambassador to Ukraine. And according to two of Parnas’ associates, Parnas said that "the big guy," as he sometimes referred to the President in conversation, talked about tasking him with what Parnas described as "a secret mission" to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. And according to Parnas’ lawyer, Parnas did just that, telling a Ukrainian official in May of 2019 that they had to announce an investigation into Joe Biden and his son, or else Vice President Mike Pence would not attend the swearing-in of the new president, and the United States would freeze aid.
After his arrest, Parnas claimed that Trump and his legal team had offered to have federal foreign bribery charges against Firtash dropped if Firtash helped Trump discredit the Mueller investigation and Joe Biden. He turned over materials to the House Intelligence Committee showing that Ukraine’s top prosecutor offered damaging information related to Biden in exchange for the firing of the US Ambassador to Ukraine, and that one of Parnas’s associates had the ambassador under surveillance. Parnas offered to testify under oath to these facts .
The financial and political connections between Firtash and the Russian government are well known, and the connections between Firtash and his lawyers and former employee are also clearly documented. These links constitute an indirect connection between Russian interests and the Ukraine scandal. In addition, both Lev Parnas and Dmitry Firtash have connections to individuals involved in Russian organized crime. But Russian individuals may have been more directly involved as well. Just weeks before his arrest, a bank account held in the name of Parnas’ wife, Svetlana Parnas, received a $1 million transfer from a Russian bank account.
The Phone Call
The Washington Post reports on the upshot of all these efforts by Giuliani and his associates:
“[A]head of a July 25 phone call that is now the subject of a whistleblower complaint and a congressional impeachment inquiry [Trump] turned up the heat. Facing doubt about [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky’s willingness to work with Giuliani, Trump suspended military aid to Ukraine on July 18. Days later, Zelensky’s party swept Ukraine’s parliamentary elections, ushering in political newcomers and upping the uncertainty about whether Giuliani’s efforts would come undone.
In the meantime, Trump was withholding a date for a coveted bilateral summit with Zelensky. A congratulatory call with the comedian landed on the books — a chance for Trump to make his wishes clear.
“I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it,” Trump said after Zelensky raised the matter of military aid, according to a rough transcript of the call released by the White House.”
According to that transcript, Trump then asked: “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike ... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it.” This is a reference to a conspiracy theory which blames Ukraine, not Russia, for hacking the DNC in 2016. He went on: “As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller.”
Trump then brought up the accusations leveled by Giuliani against Biden. “There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you ·can look into it ... It sounds horrible to me.”
Military Aid
At the time of the phone call (July 25th, 2019), Ukraine had been expecting the Congressionally approved military aid to be delivered for months. The Trump administration initially told Congress it was releasing the aid to Ukraine on February 28. Again the disbursement of aid was announced to Congress on May 23, but no money was sent to Ukraine. On June 18, the Pentagon publicly announced it would release its portion of the money: $250 million. By July 18th, President Trump had explicitly told his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to hold back the aid according to three senior administration officials in the White House Office of Management and Budget. Officials in that office believed that President Trump’s direction to withhold assistance to Ukraine that Congress had already appropriated was possibly illegal. Two OMB career officials, including one of its legal counsels, would resign after expressing concerns regarding the hold. Mulvaney later seemed to confirm that aid was conditioned on investigations in a press conference, though he denied that he had meant to do so.
Ukraine's former deputy foreign minister Olena Zerkal told the New York Times that some people in Ukraine's government were aware of the Trump administration's decision to freeze military aid in July. By July 25, the date of President Trump’s call with President Zelensky, the Department of Defense was receiving inquiries from Ukrainian officials about the status of the security assistance. Just 91 minutes after the Trump/Zelensky call ended, Michael Duffey, a political appointee at the Office of Management and Budget, sent an email to Pentagon officials telling them that all aid to Ukraine should be halted.
According to the New York Times, word of the aid freeze had gotten up to high-level Ukrainian officials by the first week in August. The problem was not bureaucratic, the Ukrainians were told. To address it, they were advised, they should reach out to Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff. Various contacts between the Trump administration and the Ukrainian government ensued. Meanwhile, the White House was blocking cooperation with Ukraine on other issues as well.
Without official, public confirmation of the reason for the delay, Ukraine was still checking its bank account for U.S. aid in late August. Zelensky, who is still reliant on American aid for the future, says he did not feel pressured during the phone call with Trump, and that no one explained to him why $250 million in US military aid to his country was delayed. However, the Associated Press has three sources who say Zelensky gathered a small group of advisers in May, before taking office, and discussed how to navigate the insistence from Trump and Giuliani for a probe and how to avoid becoming entangled in the American elections.
Members of Congress, aware that the aid had not been sent, spent several weeks in August and into September looking for answers about the reason. With a deadline for spending looming, the State Department determined that it had the authority to spend the money regardless of what Trump was saying, and would start the process by September 7. National Security Advisor John Bolton relayed a message to the State Department that the funding could go ahead (Bolton resigned a week later), and on September 9, the State Department’s Legislative Affairs informed members of Congress that there was no hold on the bulk of the aid. Notice to Congress that $141 million was being released was sent early on September 11, hours before Trump said he personally made the decision to lift the freeze. The money was eventually mostly paid out just before the September 30th end of the government fiscal year in which it was supposed to be spent.
The Whistleblowers and the Text Messages
A C.I.A. officer detailed to the White House heard about the content of the Trump/Zelensky phone call from the participants and filed a whistleblower report. The law called for this report to be turned over to the House Intelligence Committee, and it eventually was. By the time Trump said he had released the aid, the Intelligence Committee had the report, and Trump was aware of it. In the interim however, rumors about the content caused committee members to demand the release of the rough transcript of the call between Trump and Zelensky. A second intelligence official later confirmed the first whistleblower’s reports. And the House Foreign Affairs committee obtained copies of text messages from Ambassador Kurt Volker (the former Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations) who shared messages he had exchanged with Bill Taylor (the Charge d'Affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine) and Gordon Sondland (the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union.) Some are quoted below:
[7/25/ 19, 8:36:45] Kurt Volker: Good lunch - thanks. Heard from White House--assuming President convinces trump he will investigate/"get to the bottom of what happened" in 2016, we will nail down date for Visit to Washington. Good luck! See you tomorrow- kurt
_________
[9/1/ 19, 12:08:57] Bill Taylor: Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?
[9/1/19, 12:42:29] Gordon Sondland: Call me
___________
[9/8/19, 12:37:28 Bill Taylor: The nightmare is they [Ukraine] give the interview and don't get the security assistance. The Russians love it. (And I quit.)
___________
[9/9/19, 12:31:06 AM] Bill Taylor: The message to the Ukrainians (and Russians) we send with the decision on security assistance is key. With the hold, we have already shaken their faith in us. Thus my nightmare scenario.
[…]
[9/9/19, 12:47:11 AM] Bill Taylor: As I said on the phone, I think it's crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.
Reportedly, Gordon Sondland spoke with President Trump and then replied to Taylor’s message insisting that the president intended there to be “no quid pro quo’s of any kind.” But Sondland expressed something different to Republican Senator Ron Johnson. From the Wall Street Journal: “Under the arrangement, Mr. Johnson said Mr. Sondland told him, Ukraine would appoint a strong prosecutor general and move to ‘get to the bottom of what happened in 2016—if President Trump has that confidence, then he’ll release the military spending,’ recounted Mr. Johnson.” In his public Congressional testimony, Sondland summarized the situation as follows: “President Trump directed us to ‘talk with Rudy.’ […] Mr. Giuliani’s requests were a quid pro quo for arranging a White House visit for President Zelensky. Mr. Giuliani demanded that Ukraine make a public statement […] Mr Giuliani was expressing the desires of the President of the United States. […] In the absence of any credible explanation for the suspension of aid, I later came to believe that the resumption of security aid would not occur until there was a public statement from Ukraine committing to the investigations of the 2016 elections and Burisma, as Mr. Giuliani had demanded.”
The Witnesses
National Security Advisor John Bolton reportedly heard of the aid-for-investigations arrangement directly from President Trump. In May of 2019, Trump told Bolton to call Zelensky to ensure Mr. Zelensky would meet with Giuliani. And then, according to a description obtained by the New York Times of a manuscript Bolton has written: “In his August 2019 discussion with Mr. Bolton, the president appeared focused on the theories Mr. Giuliani had shared with him, replying to Mr. Bolton’s question that he preferred sending no assistance to Ukraine until officials had turned over all materials they had about the Russia investigation that related to Mr. Biden and supporters of Mrs. Clinton in Ukraine.” Lev Parnas, after his arrest, similarly claimed: “The message was, it wasn’t just military aid, it was all aid. Basically their relationships would be sour, that he would – that we would stop giving them any kind of aid […] – unless that there was announcement made – it was several things. There were several demands at that point. A, the most important was the announcement of the Biden investigation.” And that “President Trump knew exactly what was going on. He was aware of all my movements. He – I wouldn’t do anything without the consent of Rudy Giuliani or the president.”
Two U.S. Embassy staffers in Kyiv overheard a cellphone call between Sondland and Trump discussing a need for Ukrainian officials to pursue “investigations.” On that call Sondland told Trump that Zelensky 'loves your ass,' " according to David Holmes, a State Dept aide who overheard the call. He testified: "I then heard President Trump ask, 'So, he's gonna do the investigation?' Ambassador Sondland replied that 'he's gonna do it,' adding that President Zelensky will do 'anything you ask him to.'" Holmes also testified that he had asked Sondland "if it was true that the President did not 'give a s--- about Ukraine,” and Sondland responded that Trump cares only about "big stuff." When Holmes said that the Ukraine war was big, Sondland responded, " 'Big stuff' that benefits the President, like the Biden investigation that Mr. Giuliani was pushing," Holmes said.
Special Representative Kurt Volker testified that, consulting with Giuliani and Sondland, he worked on drafting a statement announcing that Ukraine would be investigating the Biden family, an announcement that Trump wanted to see before a meeting between Zelensky and Trump could be scheduled. A text message turned over by Volker from an aide to president Zelensky read “Once we have a date, will call for a press briefing, announcing upcoming visit and outlining vision for the reboot of US-UKRAINE relationship, including among other things Burisma and election meddling in investigations.”
The New York Times has reported that Zelensky’s staff planned for him to announce the investigations Trump had requested on CNN on Sept. 13th. The aid was released by the State Department in response to Congressional pressure before that date, and the interview was canceled.
2020 Presidential Campaign
In Septempter of 2020, one of Giuliani’s Ukrainian sources was sanctioned by the Treasury Department for running an “influence campaign” against former vice president Joe Biden.” The sanctions labeled this source “an active Russian agent for over a decade” who has maintained “close connections with Russian intelligence services.”
In October of 2020, Lev Parnas said that Giuliani was told in a May, 2019 meeting that the founder of Burisma had allegedly derogatory information from devices belonging to Hunter Biden which were compromised on a trip he took to Kazakhstan. The Burisma founder was willing to give it to Giuliani if he could help curry favor with the Justice Department. Parnas was told that Russian security services had this information, too.
Also in October of 2020, President Trump urged Attorney General William Barr to initiate an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
The same week, more than 50 former senior US intelligence officials signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Some officials commented that Hunter Biden email controversy shows how “exploitable” and “grotesquely vulnerable” Trump and Giuliani are to Russian intelligence.
The next week, twenty former U.S. attorneys — all of them Republicans — put out an open letter saying “The President has clearly conveyed that he expects his Justice Department appointees and prosecutors to serve his personal and political interests.” Two of the signers commented that he had soiled the department’s prized attributes: independence and a commitment to equal justice under the law.
Another open letter signed by about 1,600 former Justice Department employees, mentioning other ways in which Trump had urged Barr to intervene in politically fraught cases, stated "We fear that Attorney General Barr intends to use the DOJ's vast law enforcement powers to undermine our most fundamental democratic value: free and fair elections."
In November of 2020, a Ukrainian businessman said he was asked to lie about Hunter Biden’s business dealings to damage Joe Biden’s reputation. In return, he was promised a US visa and legal immunity.
Connections to Putin
The attempts to blame Ukraine for hacking the DNC (to exonerate Russia), and the involvement of Manafort and connection to Firtash (each closely linked to Putin through Yanukovych), connect the Ukraine scandal to the Russia scandal.
“I knew they were hot and heavy on this Russian collusion thing, even though I knew 100 percent that it was false,” Rudy Giuliani told conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck. “I said to myself, ‘Hallelujah.’ I’ve got what a defense lawyer always wants: I can go prove someone else committed this crime.” The theory that Ukraine rather than Russia hacked the DNC has been promoted for several years by Russian operatives.
But more fundamentally, in withholding military aid and weapons from Ukraine, Trump was not just extorting political help from a foreign government. He was serving the purposes of Putin against whom that aid, once awarded, would be used. Pavlo Klimkin, who served as foreign minister of Ukraine until June, told BuzzFeed News, “it was the wrong decision in the wrong time, because it weakened our position” as Zelensky was engaged in fresh negotiations with Russia over the war in eastern Ukraine and major prisoner exchanges. “Fundamentally, I believe it was very damaging,” he said. In February, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine again, attempting to capture its capital city and depose its president.
Trump had been telling aides since taking office that Ukraine had tried to stop him from winning the White House, and reportedly grew more insistent about it after meeting privately in July 2017 with Russian President Vladimir Putin. And in November of 2019, Russian military intelligence (the GRU) succeeded in hacking the e-mail servers of Burisma Holdings and several subsidiaries and partners. The CEO of the cybersecurity firm which detected the hacking commented that: “The timing of the GRU’s campaign in relation to the 2020 U.S. elections raises the specter that this is an early warning of what we have anticipated since the successful cyberattacks undertaken during the 2016 U.S. elections.”
In requesting political favors in return for official acts like a White House meeting or the disbursement of aid, President Trump appears to have been soliciting a bribe, but the “nightmare scenario” Bill Taylor worried about was also possible: that Trump would not have released the aid even if the favor had been completed as agreed to.
Either way, the aid was not the president’s money to withhold or pay out as it pleased him. Ultimately the Constitution gives the power of the purse to Congress, and the executive branch does not have the authority to withhold those funds. The Government Accountability Office has determined that in withholding those funds, the Trump administration violated the Impoundment Control Act.
In addition, in asking a foreign government to investigate an American politician (rather than leaving that judgment to American law enforcement), Trump was potentially also allowing a foreign government to obtain information which could be used as leverage against American leaders, and giving foreign governments powerful propaganda messages.
But the core of the scandal relates to the violation of the principle that law enforcement investigations should be independent and untainted by political interference. Investigations requiring international cooperation are governed by treaties describing a clear process for law enforcement collaboration independent of political considerations, a process which was not followed in this case. Demanding that an investigation be opened as a political favor is abuse of power.
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Closed-session Congressional testimony released by the House Intelligence Committee
Report by the House Intelligence Committee
Summaries of testimony by journalists: NPR, CNN, Washington Post, Slate
House Judiciary Committee Report on Constitutional Grounds for Impeachment
Draft Articles of Impeachment from the House Judiciary Committee
Public Document Clearinghouse: Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry (Just Security)
Office of Management and Budget Release of 192 pages of Ukraine-related documents
Last updated December 5, 2022