Trump's Ukraine obsession? Cui bono?

It was not a country that would naturally have seemed high on the priority list of a president who came to office relishing a trade clash with China, promising to reorder the Middle East and haranguing European allies to spend more on NATO.

But for President Trump, Ukraine has been an obsession since the 2016 campaign.

Long before the July 25 call with the new Ukrainian president that helped spur the formal start of impeachment proceedings against him in the House, Mr. Trump fretted and fulminated about the former Soviet state, angry over what he sees as Ukraine’s role in the origins of the investigations into Russian influence on his 2016 campaign.

His fixation was only intensified by his hope that he could employ the Ukrainian government to undermine his most prominent potential Democratic rival in 2020, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

His personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, has undertaken a nearly yearlong, free-ranging effort to unearth information helpful to Mr. Trump and harmful to Mr. Biden.

And Mr. Trump has put the powers of his office behind his agenda: He has dispatched Vice President Mike Pence and top administration officials with thinly veiled messages about heeding his demands about confronting corruption, which Ukrainian and former American officials say is understood as code for the Bidens and Ukrainians who released damaging information about the Trump campaign in 2016. This summer he froze a package of military assistance to Ukraine even as the country, eager to build closer relations with Washington, continued to be menaced by its aggressive neighbor Russia.

When Ukraine elected its new leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, on April 21, Mr. Trump seized on the moment as an opportunity to press his case. Within hours of Mr. Zelensky’s victory, Mr. Trump placed a congratulatory call as he was en route from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida to Washington.

He urged Mr. Zelensky to coordinate with Mr. Giuliani and to pursue investigations of “corruption,” according to people familiar with the call, the details of which have not previously been reported. On Wednesday night, a spokesman for Mr. Trump declined to respond to questions about the call and whether Mr. Trump mentioned Mr. Giuliani. Officials at the National Security Council declined to comment.
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Four days after that call, Mr. Trump said on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program that he “would imagine” that Attorney General William P. Barr would like to review information about Ukraine’s actions in the 2016 election.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department said that the official named to review the origins of the counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Trump’s campaign, John H. Durham, is looking into the role of Ukraine, among other countries. “While the attorney general has yet to contact Ukraine in connection with this investigation, certain Ukrainians who are not members of the government have volunteered information to Mr. Durham, which he is evaluating,” the Justice Department said in a statement.

When the American delegation dispatched to Mr. Zelensky’s inauguration — including Energy Secretary Rick Perry — reported back favorably in May about the new leader, Mr. Trump was dismissive. “They’re terrible people,” he said of Ukrainian politicians, according to people familiar with the meeting. “They’re all corrupt and they tried to take me down.”
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Mr. Trump’s focus on Ukraine started after a law enforcement organization, the National Anticorruption Bureau of Ukraine, released damaging information about cash payments earmarked to his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, by the Russia-aligned political party of Ukraine’s ousted former president.

Even after Mr. Manafort stepped down from the Trump campaign under pressure, he insisted to Mr. Trump’s aides that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign was behind the surfacing of the documents revealing the payments, and questioned the authenticity of the documents.

Mr. Manafort remained in contact with Mr. Trump’s aides through the election. And during the presidential transition, Mr. Manafort told people that he was discussing possible investigations with the president-elect’s team into whether Ukrainians tried to undermine the Trump campaign through the release of damaging information about Mr. Manafort.

Mr. Trump was briefed on the subject, and would consider pursuing investigations “if the Democrats keep pushing” investigations into Russian meddling on Mr. Trump’s behalf, Mr. Manafort told people in the days before the inauguration.

Mr. Manafort told the people that the Ukrainians who released the damaging information about him were working with the Clinton campaign to mount a “politically motivated attack on me.”

The issue continued to fester with Mr. Trump. He tweeted six months after his inauguration about “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump campaign” and to “boost Clinton,” and asked, “where is the investigation?”
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With Mr. Trump’s blessing, Mr. Giuliani has worked for months with current and former Ukrainian prosecutors to seek information and push for investigations into matters that he admitted would be of political benefit to Mr. Trump.

One involves the overlap between Mr. Biden’s diplomacy in Ukraine as vice president and his son Hunter’s position on the board of a Ukrainian energy company owned by an oligarch who had been accused of corruption.

A second involves the claim that Ukrainian officials sought to damage Mr. Manafort and Mr. Trump’s campaign in 2016. Mixed in with the issues related to Mr. Manafort is the unsubstantiated theory that the hack of Democratic National Committee emails in 2016 could have been carried out by Ukrainians who in turn pinned the blame on Russia — something that Mr. Trump brought up in general terms with Mr. Zelensky on the July 25 call.

Throughout Mr. Giuliani’s efforts he would brief Mr. Trump, keeping the president abreast of his work. But Mr. Giuliani also decided he would talk publicly about what he found.

“I decided because I couldn’t get law enforcement agencies interested in doing their job, I would just put it out publicly and I would see if anyone was interested in it,” Mr. Giuliani said in an interview on Wednesday.

The effort by President Trump to pressure the government of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son had its origins in an earlier endeavor to obtain information that might provide a pretext and political cover for the president to pardon his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, according to previously undisclosed records.

These records indicate that attorneys representing Trump and Manafort respectively had at least nine conversations relating to this effort, beginning in the early days of the Trump administration, and lasting until as recently as May of this year. Through these deliberations carried on by his attorneys, Manafort exhorted the White House to press Ukrainian officials to investigate and discredit individuals, both in the US and in Ukraine, who he believed had published damning information about his political consulting work in the Ukraine. A person who participated in the joint defense agreement between President Trump and others under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, including Manafort, allowed me to review extensive handwritten notes that memorialized conversations relating to Manafort and Ukraine between Manafort’s and Trump’s legal teams, including Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.