Quixotic mission

‘I’m the real whistleblower’: Giuliani’s quixotic mission to help Trump in Ukraine

The former New York mayor collided with Kiev’s feuding political factions, and the resulting scandal is roiling Washington — and threatening to end a presidency.

By BEN SCHRECKINGER

The scandal unfolding this week in Washington can be traced back to November, when a private investigator approached Rudy Giuliani claiming to have information about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election, according to an account provided by the former New York mayor.

Giuliani declined to give POLITICO the name of the investigator but said he was an American citizen, the head of “a very, very large investigative agency,” and a former colleague of Giuliani’s at the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York. Giuliani said the investigator approached him on behalf of a client who wanted to relay damning allegations he had heard.

Giuliani, a personal lawyer for President Donald Trump, also declined to name the investigator’s client, but said he was also a U.S. citizen, and one he had met before. “I actually know the guy vaguely from years ago,” Giuliani said.

The approach, he said, sent Giuliani on a months-long hunt for information from Ukraine that would be damaging to the enemies of his client. That effort culminated on Thursday with the release of a whistleblower’s complaint about those efforts, followed by a furious attempt to discredit the complaint.

“I’m the real whistleblower,” declared Giuliani, who claimed to possess more damaging information and insisted that he, too, should be entitled to whistleblower protections. “If I get killed now,” he warned, “You won’t get the rest of the story.”

The rest of the story goes back even further, to a long-running geopolitical saga and a bureaucratic turf war in Kiev. There, a group of Ukrainian prosecutors with grudges against Western-backed anti-corruption efforts found common cause with a network of President Trump’s allies with a long history of digging up dirt on Democrats.

Over several months, that volatile combination set off a chain reaction that is now roiling both capitals. It threatens to bring about Trump’s impeachment and inflict collateral damage on the presidential campaign of Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden.

Prologue

For years, Ukraine has found itself caught in a tug-of-war between the West, which wants it to embrace the rule of law, liberal democracy and a market economy, and Russia, which wants to reassert dominance over its former imperial possession.

In that contest, the toppling of Russia-aligned President Viktor Yanukovich in February 2014 was a blow to Moscow. It would also create problems for the ousted leader’s American consigliere, Paul Manafort, and for Mykola Zlochevsky, a natural gas baron who had served in his cabinet.

The following month, Moscow responded by annexing Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. Zlochevsky, meanwhile, found himself on the outs with the new regime and facing investigations at home and in the West. In April, he responded by putting Hunter Biden, whose father oversaw U.S. policy in Ukraine, on the board of his natural gas company, Burisma Holdings.

In September 2014, Ukraine’s new president, businessman Petro Poroshenko, came to Washington to appeal for help repelling Russian incursions into eastern Ukraine, which had escalated in August. He warned a joint session of Congress that “blankets [and] night vision goggles are also important. But one cannot win a war with blankets … and cannot keep the peace with blankets.”

In October, as it sought to ingratiate itself with the West, Ukraine established the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, or NABU, pledging to clean up its notoriously dirty political culture.

But while Ukraine’s new leaders were dependent on the West’s military support and eager for access to its rich economies, they did not all share the West’s enthusiasm for rooting out the country’s endemic corruption.

As NABU sought to fulfill its anti-corruption mandate, it found itself clashing with other parts of the bureaucracy, including Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin.

By 2016, Western governments and institutions like the World Bank were fed up with Shokin, who they believed was impeding corruption investigations, including those into Zlochevsky and his firm, Burisma.

After a months-long pressure campaign, it fell to Vice President Joe Biden to seal Shokin’s removal. In a March 2016 trip to Kiev, he told the country’s leaders that the U.S. would withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees unless Shokin got the boot. It worked.

Biden spoke on behalf of other Western leaders, and Shokin had in fact been accused of improperly helping Burisma’s owner. But the vice president’s role in the firing while Shokin’s office had an open investigation of a firm whose board his son sat on has raised concerns from ethics experts and become fodder for his critics -- chief among them Donald Trump, who told Ukraine’s current president in July, according to the White House record of their conversation, “Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it... It sounds horrible to me.”

After the Ukrainian parliament accepted Shokin’s resignation, it installed as its top prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko, who did not have a law degree but did possess a credential that was more relevant in post-revolution Ukraine: He had been imprisoned under the previous regime.

2016 election

Manafort, who had remade Yanukovich into a slick Western-style politician only to watch his client be overthrown by a popular revolt, had been laying low since Ukraine’s regime change. In March 2016, he resurfaced in the U.S. as a top adviser to Trump’s insurgent primary campaign. Soon attention turned to his work advising foreign despots, including in Ukraine.

In August 2016, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau published the “black ledger,” a document that allegedly recorded illegal off-the-books payments made by Yanukovich’s Russia-backed Party of Regions to its cronies, including millions of dollars to Manafort. A lawyer for Manafort denied he had received “any such cash payments,” but within days he resigned as chairman of Trump’s campaign.

Even after Shokin’s firing, the general prosecutor’s office, under Lutsenko, continued to clash with the anti-corruption bureau.

Also in August, employees of Lutsenko’s office allegedly detained two NABU detectives in a basement for several hours and tortured them, seeking information on NABU’s investigations of Ukrainian prosecutors, according to AntAC, an anti-corruption nonprofit in Kiev that receives funding from the liberal American financier George Soros.

In October 2016, NABU indicted a deputy to Lutsenko, Kostiantyn Kulyk, on corruption charges. Instead of getting fired, Kulyk was promoted.

Payback

Trump’s upset presidential win the next month prompted two reactions in Kiev: Consternation over the government’s role in implicating his campaign chairman and hope that a Trump administration would ease pressure on the government to clean up corruption.

But to the chagrin of Poroshenko’s government the U.S. Embassy in Kiev continued to prioritize corruption.

For this, Ukrainian officials blamed Soros, who finances the watchdog AntAC group, and the U.S. ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, a career diplomat appointed to that post by President Barack Obama.

As investigations of suspected Trump campaign collusion with Russia dominated U.S. politics and led to the imprisonment of Manafort on charges unrelated to collusion, efforts against Yovanovitch ramped up.

Two Florida businessmen from the former Soviet Union, Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas, were donating big money to Republicans while also gunning for Yovanovitch. Around May of 2018, they met with then-Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas, telling the Republican congressman that Yovanovitch was disloyal to Trump, according to an investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, which found that Sessions wrote a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urging her firing on the same day that Parnas posted photos online of a meeting with Sessions.

Around the same time, according to people familiar with the effort, the Ukrainian prosecutors, including Shokin and Lutsenko, were reaching out to U.S. officials, trying to pass them information that they said instead pointed to Ukrainian meddling on behalf of Hillary Clinton.

But the Ukrainian prosecutors were rebuffed in their attempts to reach current and former Justice Department officials, according to Parnas.

“They went through every channel,” Parnas said in an interview. “They were going through official channels. To their frustration they felt like they were getting blocked.”

Kulyk, the Lutsenko deputy, later told the New York Times that Yovanovitch had blocked him from getting a visa to go to the U.S.

In November 2018, Giuliani said, he was approached by the unnamed former colleague who ran an investigative firm. Giuliani began working Fruman and Parnas, and spoke by Skype with Shokin. The former mayor reportedly met with Lutsenko in New York January and in Warsaw in February.

“Giuliani was moving towards these guys because he wanted to be useful for his clients, and they meet in the middle, and they decided to combine efforts, to establish this conspiracy,” said Serhiy Leshchenko, a reform-minded politician and journalist who was instrumental in publicizing the black ledger. “Lutsenko and Kulyk misled Giuliani, and Giuliani was happy to be misled.”

Giuliani, for his part, defended his association with prosecutors accused of corruption, arguing that bribery is widespread in Ukrainian society. “A large number of prosecutors in Ukraine, a lot of them could be considered corrupt,” he said. “I’m not going to tell you that Shokin wasn’t corrupt, that he didn’t take bribes here and there, but he wasn’t good at it.” Giuliani went on to argue that Shokin could not be too corrupt because he is not rich, and said that Shokin has gone into hiding.

In early March, Yovanovitch gave a speech that called out corruption, which some observers saw as tacitly condemning Poroshenko and Lutsenko, while signalling support for Poroshenko’s upstart challenger in upcoming elections, a comedian named Volodymyr Zelensky.

Days later, Lutsenko struck back, telling conservative journalist John Solomon that she had given him a “do not prosecute” list to shield politically sensitive targets for a piece in the Hill. Other pieces followed in the Hill reporting allegations that NABU intervened to help Democrats in 2016 and that Biden’s firing of Shokin was corrupt.

The State Department called the claim an “ outright fabrication,” and a month later, Lutsenko changed his story. But in May, Yovanovitch was recalled from her post.

Giuliani, by this time. had set his sights on the Bidens. In a late April interview with POLITICO, he turned unprompted to the subject of Burisma. “Biden does have a lot of baggage, and I’m not talking about smelling women’s hair,” he said. “I’m talking about Ukraine. And Hunter Biden pulling down millions, on the board of a crooked company, a Russian-oriented crooked company.”

Zelensky became president in May, and Giuliani and Trump made it a priority to ensure Zelensky’s new administration would pursue “corruption,” understood by Ukrainian officials, according to news accounts, to mean investigations of the black ledger and the Bidens.

In May, the Times reported that Giuliani planned to travel to Kiev to push those matters as Zelensky formed his government. The trip was cancelled amid the resulting uproar.

But inside the Trump administration, consternation was growing among U.S. officials over Giuliani’s efforts, which the former mayor maintains were encouraged by the State Department. The anonymous whistleblower was beginning to hear from colleagues who were alarmed by what they saw as a bizarre and troubling departure from normal diplomacy.

In July, Trump ordered that roughly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine be withheld. Later that month, he spoke with Zelensky by phone, pushing him to investigate alleged Ukrainian election interference and the Bidens. That July 25 phone call — in which Trump said, “do us a favor” and asked for scrutiny of the Bidens and alleged Ukrainian election interference — became a key basis for the whistleblower complaint to the intelligence community’s inspector general.

About a week later, Giuliani met with a Zelensky aide, Andry Yermak in Madrid, where they reportedly discussed the desired investigations and the possibility of a summit with Trump for Yermak’s boss.

Michele Flournoy, who served as the under secretary of defense for policy under Obama, said that withdrawing assistance would provide serious leverage over Ukraine.

“They’re counting on the U.S. to continue to support them in all kinds of ways – sanctions, diplomacy, military assistance, training and advising, putting pressure on Putin,” she said. “So any sign that the U.S. is pulling back from Ukraine sends a signal that can be disproportionate.”

For months, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had been pushing for the release of the funds intended for Ukraine. He raised the issue personally with Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, he said on Monday, as well as with Pompeo. Meanwhile, his staff was pressing senior officials at the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House for answers on why the money was on hold.

In late August, as Democrats on Capitol Hill and officials inside the Pentagon began speaking out, POLITICO reported that the military aid was being withheld. At the time, the reason for the president’s unusually personal interest in financial assistance to Ukraine was not yet known. But for lawmakers backing the aid package, the matter was urgent: The appropriation was due to expire by the end of September, the close of the fiscal year.

By early September, an administration official told POLITICO, Pompeo had ordered his staff to ignore the White House directive and send the money. The State Department told Congress it would do just that around Sept. 11, near the same time the White House decided to drop its objections.

Fallout

Meanwhile, word emerged of a mysterious whistleblower complaint that was meant to reach Congress after Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, sent a sharply worded letter on Sept. 10 to the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, demanding the release of the disclosure.

Washington buzzed with speculation about Schiff’s arresting, but obliquely worded rocket. News accounts, notably in the Washington Post and the New York Times, soon revealed that the subject of the complaint was none other than the president of the United States. Democrats erupted in fury; some Republicans expressed concern.

As more details emerged about the alleged efforts to pressure Ukraine’s government, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi decided to act: After months of arguing publicly and privately that impeachment would be politically unwise, she announced her support for an inquiry intended to drive President Trump from office. Democrats also set a deadline for the administration to cough up all the documents connected to the whistleblower’s complaint, and demanded that Maguire come to Capitol Hill to explain himself in person.

Pelosi’s change of heart pressured Trump, convinced that the record of his call with Zelensky would show that he had done nothing wrong, into releasing a memorandum documenting their conversation. It proved to be more explosive than he expected, lending support to Democrats’ allegations that the president had threatened to withhold foreign aid in exchange for political dirt on Biden. On Thursday, the White House subsequently released the whistleblower’s complaint and other related documents -- and Democrats swiftly escalated their demands for more information, while redoubling their impeachment push.

For his part, Giuliani rejects any focus on the story behind the allegations he was pushing, defending the means by which he has gone about investigating his client’s adversaries. “The process is clean,” Giuliani said. But, he added, “Even if the process were dirty, and the facts were clean ... we uncovered a crime of vast magnitude.”

As Washington sorts through the mess, figures on both sides insist that there is more to the story, and that the efforts of their antagonists are being coordinated by a hidden hand.

“All these prosecutors played their role in this scenario, but the actually scenario was developed and planned by someone else,” said Daria Kaleniuk, of AntAC, who suggested a Ukrainian oligarch could be financing the effort to discredit NABU and the Bidens.

For his part, Giuliani said the real story was anti-Trump election interference and pointed the finger at AntAC’s funder. “Everybody,” he said, “thinks Soros is at the bottom of it.”

Asked on Wednesday about Giuliani’s project, a spokeswoman for Soros’ philanthropy, the Open Society Foundation, responded with laughter.