Sure, it’s a partisan political theater in the United States, but Democrats in the House of Representatives are on to something useful: They are launching an investigation that promises to expose more of the corruption of U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s administration.
And again, Ukraine is at the center of the storm.
It is believable and even likely that Trump put a hold on an Oval Office visit with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, $250 million in military aid, and perhaps other items unless Ukraine’s leaders agree to become attack dogs against Trump’s Democratic opposition to his 2020 re-election campaign. There is talk that Trump might meet Zelensky on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York on Sept. 23, but that would be little consolation.
Specifically, Trump wants two investigations, both completely bogus for those of us on the ground in Ukraine who know the facts.
One investigation that Trump wants is into whether Joseph Biden, as U.S. vice president, pressured ex-President Petro Poroshenko’s prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, to drop a corruption investigation into Burisma, the energy company on which Biden’s son, Hunter, was a board member.
The other one is into whether Poroshenko interfered on Hillary Clinton’s behalf in her losing bid to Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
Trump’s willingness to abandon an American ally is motivated by two of his five priorities in life: Getting a second four-year term in office and doing the bidding of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who has waged relentless war on Ukraine for more than five years because Ukrainians have the temerity, in his warped view, of insisting on a democratic future for their independent nation. Trump’s other three priorities, in no particular order, are: money, golf and grabbing women by their private parts or paying them off for staying silent about their sexual affairs with him.
Putin has killed 13,000 Ukrainians since taking over Crimea and the eastern Donbas and served as an accomplice in killing 500,000 Syrians.
In the mob world, Trump’s threats to Ukraine amount to extortion and blackmail, which are crimes. There was a time when Trump’s lapdog lawyer, Rudolph Guiliani, would have prosecuted such organized crime. But now he’s the leading cheerleader for the Godfather in the White House, whose time in office mercifully coming to an end.
In letters to the White House and the State Department, the three Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives — Eliot L. Engel of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Adam B. Schiff of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Elijah E. Cummings of the Committee on Oversight and Reform — demanded records relating to the attempts by Trump and Giuliani attempts to manipulate the Ukrainian justice system to benefit the president’s re-election campaign and target a possible political opponent.
“A growing public record indicates that, for nearly two years, the president and his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, appear to have acted outside legitimate law enforcement and diplomatic channels to coerce the Ukrainian government into pursuing two politically-motivated investigations under the guise of anti-corruption activity,” wrote the committee chairmen. “As the 2020 election draws closer, President Trump and his personal attorney appear to have increased pressure on the Ukrainian government and its justice system in service of President Trump’s re-election campaign, and the White House and the State Department may be abetting this scheme.”
They went on to write that “the Trump administration’s decision to withhold vital security assistance to Ukraine is only the latest in a series of actions in which President Trump appears to undermine U.S. foreign policy to placate Russia and place his personal interests above the national interest.”
Not surprisingly, (nothing surprises me anymore about the America’s commander-in-chief), the members of Congress wrote that “according to the Ukrainian government, in a July 25, 2019, call with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, President Trump apparently focused on these investigations, telling President Zelensky that he is ‘convinced the new Ukrainian government will be able to quickly improve the image of Ukraine, and complete the investigation of corruption cases, which inhibited the interaction between Ukraine and the USA.”
The next day, according to the members of Congress, U.S. Special Representative to Ukraine Kurt Volker, “was dispatched” to meet with Zelensky. Then Giuliani met with Andriy Yermak, an aide to Zelensky. “The State Department subsequently acknowledged that Ambassador Volker used his office to facilitate the meeting between the two,” the congressmen wrote
The Democrats are right to be morally outraged. Trump’s partisan attacks on Ukraine threaten what has been one of the nation’s most prized achievements: bipartisan support in America.
“Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity are under assault from Russia and its proxies in illegally-occupied Ukrainian territory. If the president is trying to pressuring Ukraine into choosing between defending itself from Russian aggression without U.S. assistance or leveraging its judicial system to serve the ends of the Trump campaign, this would represent a staggering abuse of power, a boon to Moscow and a betrayal of the public trust. That the State Department has apparently acted as a broker between President Trump’s personal attorney and Ukrainian officials raises serious concern that the department is complicit in a corrupt scheme that undercuts U.S. foreign policy and national security interests in favor of the president’s personal agenda.”
The members of Congress gave the White House until Sept. 16 to comply with their request for documents and records.
Among the records they are seeking: Any related to investigations involving Paul Manafort, Trump’s imprisoned former campaign manager who made millions of dollars as Kremlin-backed President Viktor Yanukovych’s political consultant; ex-lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko, the former investigative journalist who exposed the “black ledger” payments to Manafort; Hunter Biden and Burisma, ex-Prosecutor General Yuriy Yutsenko and Zelensky aide Yermak.
They are also asking for a transcript of Trump’s July 25 telephone call with Zelensky.
I can only personally applaud this call for transparency and accountability and I hope the House Democrats get what they want and make the findings public.
While they have very different motivations, both Trump and Zelensky both share contempt for journalists. The ever-cagey Volker plays a tricky game of keeping his position in the Trump administration, while, I believe, trying to do what’s right by Ukraine. He and other government bureaucrats seldom openly criticize Trump’s immorality, but it’s good that independent journalists and opposition politicians still exist to do so.
The New York Times reported on Sept. 9 that U.S. Senator Christopher S. Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat who serves on the Foreign Relations Committee and met with Zelensky earlier this week, said he doesn’t know why Trump is withholding the assistance but urged him not to agree to Giuliani’s requests for investigations regarded by Democrats as politically motivated. Doing so, the newspaper reported, would threaten Ukraine’s “most important asset:” bipartisan support.
To recap, here’s why Trump’s requests are politically motivated, certainly in my view and the view of many of us in Ukraine.
With respect to Burisma, one of the two criminal investigations that Trump wants Ukraine to launch, the U.S. policy when Biden was vice president was actually to press for a criminal investigation of the energy company. Its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, was a former Yanukovych-era ecology minister whose company wound up with a huge share of gas and oil exploration licenses when he ran the ministry. Such blatant corruption doesn’t come much clearer.
But because Poroshenko kept in place the corrupt, oligarch-subservient law enforcement system – replete with prosecutors who took bribes to open and close criminal cases – nothing was done in his five-year tenure to take anybody to trial for corruption in Ukraine. His decision to entrench corruption rather than fight it was the main reason he lost in a landslide to Zelensky on April 21.
Geoffrey R. Pyatt, the able U.S. ambassador to Ukraine at the time, took a strong stance on the need to fire Shokin, with prosecutors’ sabotage of the Zlochevsky case factoring high in the reasoning of U.S. policy. In his landmark speech against Ukraine’s corrupt prosecutors at the Odesa Financial Forum on Sept. 24, 2015, Pyatt cited the case:
“For example, in the case of former Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky, the U.K. authorities had seized $23 million in illicit assets that belonged to the Ukrainian people. Officials at the PGO’s office were asked by the U.K to send documents supporting the seizure. Instead, they sent letters to Zlochevsky’s attorneys attesting that there was no case against him. As a result, the money was freed by the U.K. court and shortly thereafter the money was moved to Cyprus. The misconduct by the PGO officials who wrote those letters should be investigated, and those responsible for subverting the case by authorizing those letters should – at a minimum – be summarily terminated.”
Had the U.S. gotten its way, Zlochevsky may have wound up in prison and Ukraine’s state treasury $23 million richer on the money he allegedly embezzled. And Ukrainian oligarchs may not have monopolized oil-and-gas licenses that many of them are sitting on instead of exploring to help Ukraine become energy independent.
So what was Biden’s position on Shokin? He wanted Shokin, the prosecutor who sabotaged the Zlochevsky case and other ones, fired. He outlined his position – and U.S. policy – in his book called “Promise Me, Dad.” While Shokin’s many critics finally forced Poroshenko to fire him, Lutsenko as a replacement was a disaster. Mercifully, the prosecutor’s office is run now by one of Zelensky’s appointments. We’ll see how Ruslan Ryaboshapka performs.
As for Ukraine’s interference in the U.S. presidential election, please. Ukraine, one-third the size of Russia in population with one-tenth the economy, has very little leverage in America’s presidential politics. If truth be told, probably the majority of Ukrainian-American voters have tended to favor Republicans, a party they associate with a tough Cold War stance during the Soviet Union.
But Trump and Giuliani are grasping at straws and they found a pretty good one in Leshchenko’s leak of the “black ledger,” showing millions of dollars in payments to Manafort, leaked at the exact right time: when he was riding high again as Trump’s campaign manager. The revelations led Trump to dump him quickly, while U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigations led to Manafort’s convictions and prison sentence, partly for the unpaid taxes from those millions of dollars received from Yanukovych.
There are two ways to look at the leak: An attempt to sabotage Trump’s campaign or a rare spotlight shined on the corrupt practices of American lobbyists in Ukraine. While the motivation may have been to sabotage Trump’s campaign, the only bad legacy I see is that no one in Ukraine pursued any criminal cases based on the “black ledgers” of mysterious origin and providence.
Compared to Russia’s wholesale interference, with far greater weapons, and Trump’s subservience to the Kremlin, anything Ukraine did amounted to an expression of political preference for Clinton.
Ukraine had every reason to hope Clinton would beat Trump, and Trump’s performance to date has not altered the soundness of this position.
During the campaign, remember that Trump praised his boss Putin’s military takeover of Crimea and suggested that he might recognize the Kremlin’s illegal takeover of the Ukrainian peninsula. That American public opinion and policymakers stopped him doesn’t excuse Trump’s apologies to Putin.
“The people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were,” Trump said, displaying his ignorance of what happened.
And then there was the Republican Party’s removal of a party platform to supply lethal weapons to Ukraine. While Trump did eventually supply some Javelins, he’s now held up military aid.
Trump, remember, has never released his tax records and has received millions upon millions of shady dollars from Russian oligarchs in real estate transactions and in loans from Deutsche Bank, a known money launderer for Russian oligarchs.
Given Trump’s campaign rhetoric and performance during his first three years in office, opposing him was the natural patriotic response for Ukrainians and their global supporters.
