The U.S. House of Representatives’ Intelligence Committee has released the full transcript of the Oct. 15 testimony of George Kent, deputy assistant secretary of state for Eastern Europe, which was conducted during the impeachment probe into U.S. President Donald Trump.
Kent also served as deputy head of mission at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv from 2015 to 2018.
Read excerpts here and the full transcript here.
The 355-page document offers striking insights into Ukraine.
Kent explains the relationships between the State Department and the Ukrainian government and law enforcement, describes the characters of top Ukrainian officials, shares anecdotes and gives a spot-on diagnosis of the country’s ills.
His testimony largely corroborates the timeline provided by other U.S. diplomats of Trump’s attempt to extort Ukraine into a public pledge to investigate his likely Democratic rival in the 2020 election, former Vice President Joseph Biden, and unfounded allegations of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election in exchange for U.S. military aid.
The Kyiv Post has selected some of the most interesting parts of Kent’s testimony.
On giving up on some Ukrainian prosecutors
Kent corroborated that U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was removed from office as a result of a covert smear campaign led by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani; two vengeful Ukrainian prosecutors, former prosecutors general Viktor Shokin and Yuriy Lutsenko; sitting anti-corruption prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky and deputy prosecutor general Kostiantyn Kulyk.
Shokin, Lutsenko and Kholodnytsky had their reasons to hold a grudge against the U.S. ambassador, and Kent explains why the U.S. was disappointed in them: They sabotaged important cases and blocked law enforcement reform.
Kent describes Viktor Shokin, who served as prosecutor general in 2015-2016, as “a typical Ukraine prosecutor who lived a lifestyle in excess of his government salary, who never prosecuted anybody known for having committed a crime and who covered up crimes that were known to have been committed.”
He was fired under pressure from the U.S. State Department, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. His removal, Kent says, became a condition for an IMF loan guarantee.
The last straw was Shokin’s obstruction of the so-called “diamond prosecutors case” into two prosecutors who extorted money from local businessmen.
One of them turned out to be Shokin’s former driver. Shokin had everyone involved in the case fired, including detectives, judges and even security officials, and destroyed the special unit that was supposed to investigate corruption within the prosecutor’s office.
“Shokin went to war… protecting his associate,” Kent recalled in his testimony. “He eventually managed to force out everybody associated with that (case).”
Later, a resentful Shokin fed Giuliani the lie that he had been dismissed under pressure from then-Vice President Biden, who allegedly wanted to block an investigation into corruption by the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where his son Hunter was on the board of directors.
However, Kent said, it was the State Department’s idea to engage Vice President Biden to push Poroshenko to remove Shokin. Similarly, former Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk had been pressured to have one of his corrupt allies, lawmaker Mykola Martynenko, resign, Kent said.
Shokin’s successor in office was Yuriy Lutsenko, a prosecutor general appointed by Poroshenko despite the absence of a law degree. And he was “not any more serious about reforming the corrupt prosecutorial service than Shokin had been.”
Lutsenko spearheaded the disinformation campaign against Yovanovitch by spreading lies about her and the U.S. embassy through Giuliani and the controversial writer John Solomon, who was the first to publicize the prosecutor general’s false claims.
Kent actually shared a story in which a drunk Lutsenko told the deputy head of NABU, Gizo Uglava, about his slanderous interviews to Solomon before they were published.
Kent said Lutsenko’s unwillingness to do anything started within several months into his term, but the breaking point came in late 2017. He undermined an investigation into a ring of migration service officials who sold Ukrainian biometric passports by exposing the undercover agents working on the case.
Some of the holders of those illegally obtained passports applied for U.S. visas, and the embassy was angry because the scheme threatened U.S. security as well as Ukraine’s visa-free regime with the EU, Kent said.
Both the diamond prosecutors and the passport cases are well known in Ukraine as well as Lutsenko’s harrassment of anti-corruption activists.
Finally, there was Nazar Kholodnytsky, head of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s office, who was handpicked by Shokin and, in the view of U.S. diplomats, was the weakest of candidates.
Kholodnytsky chaired a new unit that the U.S. State Department supported by providing U.S. prosecutors and FBI agents as mentors.
However, Kholodnytsky broke their trust too, and wiretapping in his office caught him trying to train a witness to lie and obstruct justice in a bribery case. The U.S. embassy confronted him, he refused to resign quietly and they stopped cooperating with him, Kent said.
On Burisma, Zlochevsky and Ukrainian oligarchs
Before Shokin, Lutsenko and Kholodnytsky, there was another corrupt and ineffective prosecutor, who took a bribe and closed a criminal case that was the basis for a British court’s freeze on $23 million in assets belonging to Mykola Zlochevsky, the former minister of ecology and natural resources. At the time, Zlochevsky was being investigated by Britain’s serious crimes unit for money laundering.
Kent said he was tasked with finding out who that prosecutor was, because the U.S. and the U.K. had committed to helping Ukraine return roughly $40 billion stolen by former President Viktor Yanukovych and his cronies. The FBI was involved, and the State Department spent some half a million dollars to help with the investigation. They were angry that their money and effort were wasted.
Kent met with then-deputy Prosecutor General Anatoly Danylenko, who told him the bribe was $7 million. He did not name the suspect but said Zlochevsky was his old friend and was in Dubai.
During his term as minister of ecology and natural resources, Zlochevsky awarded licenses for gas extraction to his own company, Burisma Holdings. Kent described Burisma as a company lacking ethical commitments.
But “there are many companies in Ukraine that might fall into that category,” he told lawmakers.
“If you took the roster of the richest Ukrainians, they didn’t build value, they largely stole it,” Kent said. “So we could go down the richest 20 Ukrainians and have a long conversation about the structure of the Ukrainian economy, and certainly most of the billionaires in the country became billionaires because they acquired state assets for largely undervalued prices and engaged in predatory competition.”
Kent said that, in early 2015, he found out that Hunter Biden had been on the board of Burisma for almost a year by that time. He then raised his concerns with Vice President Biden’s staff that it could be perceived as a conflict of interest. The person on the other end said that “Biden’s other son Beau was dying from cancer, and there was no further bandwidth to deal with family-related issues at that time,” Kent recalled in his testimony.
On Poroshenko and internet trolls
Cutting failed top prosecutors so much slack could not happen without then-President Petro Poroshenko’s knowledge.
“Ukraine has a serious problem with corruption,” Kent said in a testimony. “But without political will, the problem will stick with Ukraine.”
Moreover, according to Kent, Poroshenko authorized his ally Lutsenko to attack Yovanovitch and share the lies about her with Giuliani.
In March, when the attacks went public, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, urged Poroshenko to back off the attacks on Yovanovitch, Kent recalled.
Poroshenko felt resentful because he thought Yovanovitch didn’t like him, Kent said.
Around the same time, Kent and Yovanovitch came under attack from internet trolls associated with Poroshenko’s supporters. The trolls were colloquially known as ‘porokhobots’ and targeted those who were viewed as the president’s opponents. They amplified Lutsenko’s claims about alleged corruption in the U.S. embassy.
“And 10 days before the election, rather than attacking Russia or attacking his (Poroshenko’s) political opponents, as they normally did, they were attacking Yovanovitch and me by name.”
On Putin and Orban
The testimonies already heard in the impeachment hearing show that Trump has a deeply negative bias against Ukraine originating from conspiracy theories that Ukraine teamed up with the Democrats against him.
Trump called Ukraine corrupt and Ukrainians terrible people, according to accounts by former Special Envoy Kurt Volker and others.
His main sources of information were his former campaign manager Paul Manafort, now in prison, and his attorney Giuliani.
Read more: The president who hates Ukraine
It appears that Trump’s views on Ukraine might have been influenced by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
In his testimony, Kent recalled talking with former National Security Council Aide Fiona Hill about the change of attitude and approach toward Ukraine in Washington after Trump’s meeting with the two authoritarian leaders in May.
“Both leaders extensively talked Ukraine down, said it was corrupt, said Zelensky was in the thrall of oligarchs, specifically mentioning oligarch (Ihor) Kolomoisky, negatively shaping a picture of Ukraine and even President Zelensky personally,” Kent recalled.
Asked by an American lawmaker whether both the Russian and Hungarian leaders would be interested in diminished U.S. support for Ukraine, Kent said:
“I would say that’s Putin’s position… He denies the existence of Ukraine as a nation and a country, invaded and occupied seven percent of its territory… I think Orban is just happy to jam Ukraine… His beef is derived in part to his vision of a greater Hungary. There are about 130,000 ethnic Hungarians living in the Transcarpathian region of Ukraine.”
