All information taken from the Whistleblower Complaint.
For purposes of this post, I will assume everything can and will be corroborated. Note: Many of the events described here are easily corroborated by contemporaneous reporting.
Timeline:
Late 2018: Giuliani spoke via Skype with Shokin (former Ukrainian Prosecutor General).
January 2019: Giuliani met Lutsenko ( Ukrainian Prosecutor from May 2016 until August 2019) in N.Y.
February 2019: Giuliani met Lutsenko in Warsaw.
[Q: Why is Giuliani meeting with past and current Ukranian prosecutors?]
March 2019: Lutsenko publicly made allegations about:
- The Bidens in Ukraine (namely that Biden pressured former president Poroshenko to fire Prosecutor Shokin to quash a purported criminal probe involving a company on whose board his son sat.)
- That Ukrainian officials “interfered” in the 2016 U.S. elections in collaboration with the U.S. embassy and the DNC.
- He also criticized U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch (who had criticized Lutensko’s poor record combatting corruption).
Lutsenko also stated that he wished to communicate directly with Attorney General Barr on these matters.
Lutsenko supported Poroshenko in the Ukranian presidental election.
April 21, 2019: Zelenskyy was elected president of Ukraine. He said he planned to replace Lutsenko as Prosecutor.
April 25: Biden announced his campaign for president.
April 25, in an interview with Fox News, Trump called Lutsenko’s claims “big” and “incredible” and said that the Attorney General “would want to see this.”
April 29, the Trump administration recalled Ambassador to Ukraine, Maria Yovanovitch, who had previously criticized Lutensko for not doing enough to stop corruption.
Meanwhile, Giuliani was trying to make contact with the incoming Zelenskyy team.
May 6: The State Department announced that Ambassador Yovanovitch would be ending her assignment in Kyiv “as planned.”
May 9: The New York Times reported that Giuliani planned to travel to Ukraine to press the Ukrainian government to pursue investigations that would help Trump in his 2020 reelection bid.
Giuliani confirmed to reporters that he was encouraging Ukrainian authorities to investigate alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and alleged wrongdoing by the Biden family.
May 10: Trump said in an interview in Politico that he planned to speak with Giuliani about the trip.
May 10: a few hours later: Giuliani publicly canceled his trip, claiming that Zelenskyy was “surrounded by enemies of the [U.S.] President… and of the United States.”
May 11: Lutsenko met for two hours with President-elect Zelenskyy, according to a public account given several days later by Lutsenko. Lutsenko publicly stated that he had told Zelenskyy that he wished to remain as Prosecutor General.
Mid-May: U.S. officials (including Volker and Sondler) were concerned that Giuliani circumvented of national security decision-making, engaged with Ukrainian officials and relayed messages back and forth between Kyiv and Trump.
Department officials, including Volker and Sondland spoke with Giuliani to “contain the damage” to U.S. national security;
Volker (U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations) and Sondland (U.S. Ambassador to the European Union) met with members of the new Ukrainian administration and sought to help them understand and respond to the differing messages they were receiving from official U.S. channels on the-one-hand, and from Giuliani on the other.
May 14: Trump told Pence to cancel his planned travel to attend Zelensky’s inauguration on May 20 and sent Rick Perry instead. It was ‘made clear’ that Trump didn’t want to meet with Zelensky until he saw how Zelenskyy “chose to act” in office.
Ukrainian leadership was led to believe (the whistleblower wasn’t sure how) that a meeting or phone call between Trump and Zelenskyy depended on whether Zelenskyy showed willingness to ” play ball” on the issues that had been publicly aired by Lutsenko and Giuliani.
Shortly after Zelenskyy’ s inauguration, Giuliani met with two other Ukrainian officials: Ukraine’s Special Anticorruption Prosecutor, Nazar Kholodnytskyy, and a former Ukrainian diplomat named Andriy Telizhenko.
Both Kholodnytskyy and Telizhenko are allies of Lutsenko and made similar allegations against the Biden family.
June 13: Trump told ABC’ s Stephanopoulos that he would accept damaging information on his political rivals from a foreign government.
June 21: Giuliani tweeted this:
July 18: An Office of Management and Budget (0MB) official informed Departments and Agencies that Trump “earlier that month” had issued instructions to suspend all U.S. security assistance to Ukraine.
Staff didn’t know why the instruction had been issued.
Some Ukrainian officials were aware that U.S. aid might be in jeopardy.
July 23-July 26: During interagency meetings, Office of Management and Budget stated explicitly that the instruction to suspend this assistance came directly from Trump, but they still were unaware of a policy rationale.
The July 25 phone call is here. I analyzed it here.
Note: During the phone call: Trump praised Lutsenko and dissed Maria Yovanovitch, who had served as U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine until recalled by the Trump administration.
On the evening of 25 July, a readout was posted on the website of the Ukrainian President that contained the following line (translation from original Russian-language readout):
“Donald Trump expressed his conviction that the new Ukrainian government will be able to quickly improve Ukraine’s image and complete the investigation of corruption cases that have held back cooperation between Ukraine and the United States.”
After the phone call, senior White House officials intervened to “lock down” all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced — as is customary — by the White House Situation Room.
White House officials told the whistleblower that they were “directed” by White House lawyers to load the transcript from the call into a separate electronic system used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature.
July 26: Volker (Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations) and Sondland (and U.S. Ambassador to the European Union) visited Kyiv and met with Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian political figures.
Volker and Sandland gave advice to Ukranian officials on how to “navigate” the demands that Trump made of Zelenskyy.
August 2: Giuliani reportedly traveled to Madrid to meet with one of President Zelenskyy’ s advisers, Andriy Yermak in a “direct follow-up” to the President’s call with Zelenskyy about the “cases” they had discussed.
Giuliani reportedly reached out to a variety of other Zelenskyy advisers, including Chief of Staff Andriy Bohdan and Acting Chairman of the Security Service of Ukraine Ivan Bakanov. (Wasn’t clear Giuliani talked to them).
August 9: Trump told reporters: “I think [Zelenskyy] is going to make a deal with President Putin, and he will be invited to the White House. . . . He’s a very reasonable guy. He wants to see peace in Ukraine, and I think he will be coming very soon, actually.”
OK, so what the heck happened?
If you want to label what Trump did a crime, it’s much closer to extortion than bribery.
Recall that the leaked White House talking points instructed surrogates to say “no quid pro quo.”
Yesterday, I cautioned people against falling into the “No Collusion / No Quid Pro Quo” trap.
What was really happening was this: The President used the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 election.
It’s pure corruption and abuse of power.
Calling it extortion, though, will lead us into the same trap. Behavior does not have to be a statutory crime to be impeachable.
What Trump did in this incident was a microcosm of what he’s been doing all his life: Corruptly consolidating wealth and power.
He also creates a story (he invents a plot) and then forces everyone to become actors in the show. In this case, the plot was: “The real corruption is Biden and the DNC.”
He didn’t merely say, “Ukraine, if you’re listening . . .”
As President, he signaled to Ukraine that to keep the good will of the U.S. (and get the aid) they needed to manufacture evidence against Trump’s political opponent.
It is an easy to understand sequence of corruption and abuse of power.
There is no need to connect hundreds of dots.
And he got caught red-handed.
