Ukraine, China, Syria, and More
Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence … the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake.
—GEORGE WASHINGTON, FAREWELL ADDRESS
You can’t impeach a president for doing a great job.
—DONALD TRUMP
MANY OF OUR FOUNDERS, INCLUDING GEORGE WASHington and James Madison, feared a president who might “betray his trust to foreign powers.”
In The Federalist Papers No. 68, Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1788 that the election of the president was a particular worry for the framers of the Constitution.
Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.
As explained in Volume I of the 2019 Mueller Report (the publicly available version is heavily redacted), and as we have already discussed in detail in this book, improper foreign influence on the election of the president is exactly what happened in 2016. There was abundant “cabal, intrigue, and corruption.” We now face the very real prospect that it will happen again in 2020.
A “hoax” was how Trump described the Mueller Report, which concluded that the Kremlin not only sought to help elect Trump, but that Trump welcomed Russia’s help.
Said Trump during the 2016 campaign, “Russia, if you are listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand [Hillary Clinton] emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
Despite the findings of the Mueller Report, Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, did not deem Trump’s dangerous behavior sufficient to launch an impeachment inquiry, even though federal law expressly states that it is illegal for “a person to solicit, accept, or receive” anything of value from a foreign national in connection with a federal election.
President Trump, unpunished and unrepentant for inviting a foreign power to interfere in a US election, figured he could get away with it again. This time he sought to get foreign governments to go after his likely opponents in 2020, including Joe Biden, who was for much of 2019 the top-polling Democratic candidate for president.
Trump’s actions were so alarming that in late September of 2019, a whistle-blower from an intelligence agency came forward to reveal that, during the summer, Trump had made a phone call to the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, asking him to investigate whether Ukraine, and not Russia, had been responsible for meddling in the 2016 election. He also wanted Zelensky to investigate the “corruption” of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. If Zelensky would do him that favor, if and only then would Ukraine get the $391 million in aid that Congress had voted for Ukraine’s missile defense against threats from Russia. The whistle-blower also charged that Trump, aware of the illegality of arm-twisting a foreign power in order to interfere in an American election, hid all records of the phone call, especially the word-for-word transcript of the conversation produced by the White House situation room, by locking them down in a secret server. Lawyers from the White House counsel’s office apparently participated in this cover-up.
There was more. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, and William Barr, the attorney general, were actively pushing Trump’s false narrative, acting as shadow diplomats, approaching Ukrainian officials and demanding they look into Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election and investigate Biden and his son. Top US intelligence officials and diplomats were circumvented—and shocked when they learned about it.
What was made clear to Zelensky was that Trump would not give him the $391 million voted by Congress until Trump saw that the Ukrainian president had done what he had asked. Quid pro quo.
For Zelensky, the requests had to have been bizarre and troubling, because there was no evidence of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 US election or of corruption in Ukraine on the part of Joe Biden and his son. Both were figments of Donald Trump’s conspiracy-fed imagination.
Hunter Biden had been on the board of Burisma Holdings, the largest Ukrainian natural gas company, while Joe Biden was vice president, but investigations determined that, though Hunter may have benefited professionally from the prestige of his father’s position, neither he nor his father had done anything illegal. His father had not violated any federal ethics rules. The notion that there was something illegal to be investigated by the Ukrainian government was all in Donald Trump’s mind, as the president attempted to influence the 2020 election by smearing the reputation of his leading Democratic opponent.
Trump, lashing out at the whistle-blower, called him a “treasonous spy” and suggested he be executed by hinting that the whistle-blower suffer the same punishment the US “used to do in the old days when we were smart with spies and treason, right?”
Trump, who often accused others of doing what he himself was doing, also claimed that Joe Biden had made the same extortion threats to a foreign power. Trump accused Biden, when he was vice president, of withholding a billion dollars in foreign aid unless then Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko fired a Ukrainian prosecutor to keep him from investigating Biden’s son.
Trump’s story, not surprisingly, wasn’t true. In fact, it was the opposite of true.
Said Daria Kaleniuk, Ukraine’s leading anti-corruption activist, the story is “absolute nonsense.”
The real story was that Viktor Shokin, the Ukrainian prosecutor, was fired from office after attacking the reformers within the attorney general’s office. Shokin was refusing to investigate corruption, embezzlement, and misconduct of public officials following the 2014 popular uprising that deposed President Viktor Yanukovych. The Obama administration threatened to withhold a billion dollars of American aid until Shokin was removed, and it was Vice President Biden who conveyed that message, but there is no evidence this had anything to do with Hunter Biden.
Biden, our vice president, was acting as the point man for a coordinated international effort to dump Shokin. Corruption was killing Ukraine financially, and the reformers wanted him removed. As for Biden’s son Hunter, Shokin was actually protecting the head of Burisma, Hunter Biden’s boss, and Shokin’s removal made it more likely that Burisma would be investigated. Biden’s threat of withholding the billion dollars in aid was the only way to get Shokin removed, and he acted despite how it might have adversely affected a company that his son worked for.
Of course, the falsity of the allegation about Biden’s role in all of this didn’t stop Trump and his minions from trashing the former vice president and his son.
When news of Trump’s telephone call with President Zelensky came to light, the outcry demanding Trump’s impeachment this time was loud and long. Seven Democratic House members representing right-leaning districts wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post demanding that Trump be impeached for inviting a foreign power to meddle in the 2020 election.
House Democrats demanded that a transcript of the conversation be made public. It was locked safely away along with a trove of other documents and transcripts of phone calls. Trump refused to release it, but instead made public what he described as a “full, rough transcript of the conversation based on voice-activated software.”
The transcript, which was a partial recitation of the conversation between Trump and Zelensky, proved that Trump had done exactly what he was accused of doing. The number of House members supporting an impeachment investigation continued to grow up to and above the 218-vote threshold required for impeachment. On September 24, 2019, Speaker Pelosi announced that there would be a formal impeachment inquiry.
“We are at a different level of lawlessness,” said Pelosi.
The phone conversation that launched this groundswell of support for an impeachment inquiry began with Trump, speaking of the Ukrainian presidential election, congratulating Zelensky “on a great victory.” Zelensky then stroked Trump’s fragile ego. He really piled it on.
“We worked a lot but I would like to confess to you that I had an opportunity to learn from you. We used quite a few of your skills and knowledge and were able to use it as an example to our elections, and yes it is true that these were unique elections.” He went on to say, “I think I should run more often so you can call me more often and we can talk over the phone more often.”
Zelensky told Trump, “To tell you the truth, we are trying to work hard because we wanted to drain the swamp here in our country … You are a great teacher for us and in that.”
Trump then patted himself on the back saying, “I will say that we do a lot for Ukraine … Much more than the European countries are doing, and they should be helping you more than they are.”
Zelensky agreed with him, and said, “I’m very grateful to you for that because the United States is doing quite a lot for Ukraine. Much more than the European Union especially when we are talking about sanctions against the Russian Federation. I would also like to thank you for your great support in the area of defense. We are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps specifically we are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes.”
Responded Trump, “I would like you to do us a favor though [italics ours].”
The word “though” caught everyone’s attention, because Zelensky and Trump had been talking about military aid, and Trump then mentioned the conspiracy theory that Ukraine helped Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election, and then he told Zelensky he wanted him to talk with Attorney General Bill Barr about that “to get to the bottom of it.”
Said Trump, “As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense [the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election] ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.”
Zelensky talked about how important it was for him to cooperate with Trump. He added, “I will personally tell you that one of my assistants spoke with Mr. Giuliani just recently, and we are hoping very much that Mr. Giuliani will be able to travel to Ukraine, and we will meet once he comes to Ukraine.” He then told Trump that “we are friends. We are great friends.”
“Good,” said Trump, “because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good, and he was shut down, and that’s really unfair.” Trump talked about Giuliani, that he was mayor of New York, “a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the attorney general. “The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution, and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it. It sounds horrible to me.”
Zelensky didn’t respond directly on that subject, but they did talk about Trump’s firing in May of Marie Yovanovitch, the American ambassador to Ukraine, whom Trump called “bad news.”
She was apparently “bad news” because Trump and his henchmen needed to get rid of her if their plot to smear Biden and his son was to get any traction.
And there was more. Two associates of Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, sent illegal contributions to the 2018 reelection campaign of Peter Sessions, a congressman who was head of the House Rules Committee, whom they used to get rid of Ambassador Yovanovitch. In a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Sessions accused Yovanovitch of being disloyal to President Trump. Parnas and Fruman both were arrested by police at Dulles Airport in Virginia, outside of Washington, DC, in October 2019 as they attempted to leave the country. They were charged with conspiring to violate the ban on foreign donations and contributions in connection with federal and state elections. In addition, they were charged with conspiring to make contributions in connection with federal elections in the names of others, and with making false statements and falsifying records to obstruct the administration of a matter within the jurisdiction of the Federal Election Commission.
Yovanovitch had been a thirty-three-year State Department veteran who had also been vilified in the right-wing media. Appointed as ambassador to Ukraine by President Obama, she was a critic of the rife corruption. Without any evidence, she was accused of being disloyal to the president by former federal prosecutor Joseph diGenova on Fox News. Two days later, Trump tweeted he had been trying to fire her for a year. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo refused to answer questions about why she had been recalled.
In the July 25 phone call, Zelensky, continuing to kowtow, told Trump, “You were the first one who told me that she was a bad ambassador. I agree with you one hundred percent.”
Trump then reiterated that Barr and Giuliani would call him, “and we will get to the bottom of it. I’m sure you will figure it out. I heard the prosecutor was treated very badly, and he was a very fair prosecutor, so good luck with everything.”
Zelensky informed Trump that, the last time he’d visited the United States, he had stayed at Trump Tower. He agreed to talk to Giuliani and Barr, and he finished, “We are great friends, and you Mr. President have friends in our country so we can continue our strategic partnership. I also plan to surround myself with great people and in addition to that investigation, I guarantee as the president of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly. That I can assure you.”
Trump and a number of his Republican allies refused to categorize the conversation as a quid pro quo—“It was a perfect conversation,” said Trump—but at least one career diplomat working in Ukraine was horrified by the exchange that he heard.
In text messages, Ambassador William Taylor, the chargé d’affaires at the US embassy in Kiev, repeatedly questioned the decision to withhold millions of dollars of aid to Ukraine unless the Ukrainian president conducted the investigations that Trump was demanding.
On October 3, 2019, the House impeachment inquiry released twenty-two pages of text messages between a group of top diplomats involved with Ukraine. The texts, released by Kurt Volker, the special US envoy to Ukraine, showed conclusively that Trump committed the impeachable offense described by the whistle-blower.
“Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?” texted William Taylor to US ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, on September 1, 2019, after Trump skipped a trip to Poland, during which he was supposed to meet with Zelensky. They then talked on the telephone.
A week later Taylor texted to Sondland, “As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.” Taylor complained that Trump’s decision to hold back congressionally approved aid to Ukraine had created a “nightmare scenario.”
Sondland, realizing how this text message looked, quickly went into cover-your-ass mode.
“The president has been crystal clear no quid pro quo’s [sic] of any kind,” he texted. He then texted, “I suggest we stop the back and forth by text.”
The cover-up had begun. Trump forbade anyone involved in the impeachment investigation from testifying before Congress.
He then went on television to admit what he had done. He defended his phone call to Zelensky as being “entirely appropriate,” and admitted they had talked about Joe Biden and Biden’s son’s corruption as part of the conversation.
“The conversation we had was largely congratulatory, with largely corruption, all of the corruption taking place and largely the fact that we don’t want our people like Vice President Biden and his son creating the corruption already in the Ukraine.”
Trump then doubled down. On October 3, he stood before reporters prior to boarding Marine One, and without any evidence whatsoever, he accused China of paying Hunter Biden $1.5 billion to influence his father to win trade deals for some of China’s biggest financial companies.
“And that’s probably why China, for so many years, has had a sweetheart deal where China rips off the USA—because they deal like people with Biden, where they give their son a billion and a half dollars. And that’s probably why China has such a sweetheart deal that, for so many years, they’ve been ripping off our country.”
The attack on the Bidens by Trump came after it was revealed that members of Trump’s extended family, including daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, were awarded dozens of potentially valuable patents by the Chinese government, and Kushner’s sister Nicole Meyer used her connections with the president to lure Chinese investors into buying into a development in New Jersey.
Standing on the South Lawn of the White House, Trump spoke to reporters about opening trade talks with China. He said, “If they don’t do what we want, we have tremendous power.” Then he said, “China should start an investigation into the Bidens, because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened in the Ukraine.”
Facing intense criticism for soliciting assistance from foreign powers to discredit political opponents, Trump argued there was nothing wrong with seeking foreign help to fight corruption.
“As president of the United States,” he wrote on Twitter, “I have an absolute right, perhaps even a duty, to investigate, or have investigated CORRUPTION, and that would include asking, or suggesting, other Countries to help us out!”
It was as though Trump was daring the House of Representatives to impeach him. At the same time, Trump and his right-wing echo chamber were claiming that the impeachment hearing against him was part of a coup.
“As I learn more and more each day,” Trump tweeted, “I am coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of the United States of America.”
Trump had tweeted earlier, “Why isn’t Congressman Adam Schiff being brought up on charges for fraudulently making up a statement and reading it to Congress as if this statement, which was very dishonest and bad for me, was directly made by the President of the United States. This should never be allowed.”
As the president raged, the House, including its Judiciary Committee and Intelligence Committee, continued its work on impeachment.
With the Ukraine scandal, House investigators finally had that which everyone suspected, but which Robert Mueller could not prove definitively in the Russia investigation: a quid pro quo in which Trump offered official action of the United States government in exchange for foreign government assistance for his political campaign. There had been abundant evidence that Russia released the hacked Clinton emails and interfered in the 2016 election in order to get the economic sanctions against Russia lifted (both subjects were brought up repeatedly, including at the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian agent). Still, Mueller did not find a smoking gun email, telephone call, or other communication in which Trump or anyone working for him presented such a quid pro quo to the Russians. The circumstantial evidence (much of it redacted from Volume I of the Mueller Report) was substantial, but not sufficient for criminal charges.
Now, in 2019, Trump had been caught red-handed—this time in his capacity as president, not just as a candidate. He was on tape (wherever that tape might be hidden in a White House vault) in a phone call offering a remarkably similar proposition to the president of Ukraine: give me dirt on Joe Biden that I can use against him in 2020, give me an investigation that undermines the US investigation of what Russia did in the 2016 election, and I will give you vital US military aid for Ukraine.
A quid pro quo. Solicitation of a bribe. Extortion. Illegal. Impeachable.
Then, while the world was focusing on Trump and his dealings with Ukraine, on October 6, 2019, Trump hung up on a call with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and ordered American troops to leave Syria and get out of the way so that Erdoğan could mount an invasion to attack the Kurds and wipe them out. Even though the Kurds were our allies, Trump removed the American troops protecting them despite opposition from the State Department and the military.
It wasn’t the first time Trump signaled a willingness to bow to Erdoğan’s wishes. In December of 2018, Erdoğan had asked Trump to remove the American troops so he could attack the Kurds. American officials warned Trump that some troops had to remain in order to contain ISIS, which was (and is) a guerilla army. Erdoğan then offered to take over from the American troops, and Trump agreed, sending the generals into a state of shock and bewilderment.
Defense Secretary James Mattis, furious about a number of things, including that Trump would betray the Kurds, submitted his resignation. Brett McGurk, the American envoy to the coalition against ISIS, did as well. On December 23, 2018, Trump announced he was accelerating Mattis’s departure.
With Mattis gone, Trump gave Erdoğan the okay to attack the Kurds. Republicans, who kept strangely silent after the Ukraine fiasco, howled in protest. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell warned that Trump’s withdrawal would benefit Russia, Iran, Syria, and the Islamic State.
“Exercise American leadership,” McConnell intoned.
Another strong Trump supporter, Senator Lindsey Graham, said he wanted to block what the president did and keep our troops in place.
“This impulsive decision by the president has undone all the gains we’ve made, thrown the region into further chaos; Iran is licking its chops, and if I’m an ISIS fighter, I’ve got a second lease on life,” he said on Fox & Friends. “To those who think ISIS has been defeated, you will soon see; and to Turkey, you have destroyed the relationship, what little you had, with the US Congress, and I will do everything I can to sanction Turkey’s military and their economy if they step one foot into Syria,” Graham added.
Meanwhile, a Fox News poll showed that more and more registered voters favored Trump’s impeachment. Of those surveyed, 51 percent said they want Trump impeached and removed from office. Forty percent opposed impeachment.
Fox News also found that 66 percent of voters found that asking a foreign leader to investigate a political opponent was “generally inappropriate.”
Trump tweeted that “I have NEVER had a good @FoxNews poll. Whoever the pollster is, they suck.” He complained, “FoxNews doesn’t deliver for US anymore. It is so different than it used to be.”
“Oh well, I’m President!” he added.
It remained to be seen for how much longer.
Why was Trump so deferential to Erdoğan and his Turkish government? Why was he abandoning the Kurds, who had helped us fight Saddam Hussein in Iraq and then had helped us fight ISIS, to be slaughtered?
As Trump professed his wish to scale back on American troop presence in the Middle East, that very same week he ordered a deployment of 2,800 additional US troops to Saudi Arabia, an oil-rich nation very capable of defending itself. Trump’s Middle East policy has been confusing to say the least. Could the motivating factor be that the Trump Organization has business dealings with Saudi Arabia and none in Syria? Could it be that we are experiencing the very fears that the founders had when they drafted the emoluments clause of the Constitution?
As for Turkey and Erdoğan, Trump’s policy is also a mystery.
Or perhaps not. Recall this infamous April 20, 2012, tweet from Ivanka Trump that we mentioned in an earlier chapter: “Thank you Prime Minister Erdogan for joining us yesterday to celebrate the launch of #TrumpTowers Istanbul!”