summary of recent events surrounding Ukraine scandal

Heather Cox Richardson
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Today was a red hot mess, but a number of lines are becoming clear. Trump and a number of his cronies did indeed pressure Ukraine’s leaders to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, and a number of career officials are willing to spill what they know about it, either out of outrage or out of self-preservation as they try to get ahead of the story.

Today we learned that career officials became concerned about the actions of Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, who was involved with Ukraine although it was not in his portfolio, when Trump recalled popular career Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch in May. Officials became more concerned as Giuliani and Sondland seemed to be pursuing a half-baked conspiracy theory in Ukraine. Then, the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukraine Leader Volodymyr Zelensky was so disturbing that at least four more White House officials complained to the lawyer for the National Security Council John Eisenberg. Eisenberg apparently did nothing.

The struggle between career officials and the Trump camp is spilling into public view. Yovanovitch is testifying before the Congressional investigative committees on Friday. Her testimony will be followed on Monday by that of Fiona Hill, who was Trump’s top aide on Russia until she resigned in mid-July a week before Trump made the fateful call to Ukraine President Zelensky. Hill is expected to say that Giuliani and Sondland went around the State Department to develop their own relationship with Ukraine.

Giuliani, of course, has insisted that he was not going rogue, but was working alongside the State Department. This is problematic because he was never officially employed by the State Department, and was not instructed by it or bound by it. He was, he said, working solely for Trump. For their part, Trump’s people have suddenly reversed course and, having stopped Sondland from testifying on Tuesday, are saying he will testify next Wednesday, apparently convinced that they must counter the testimony of the career diplomats. The fact that an aide to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, career diplomat Michael McKinley, resigned in protest over Yovanovitch’s persecution tonight suggests that this fight is not going to be papered over easily.

But Ukraine is turning out to be just the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

The big news of the day was that last night, Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas, the two men who worked with Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to pressure Ukraine to dig up dirt on the Bidens and who were trying to gain control of Urkaine natural gas– the two whose lawyer wrote to Congress in Comic Sans font to say they wouldn’t testify about their dealings in Ukraine– were arrested at Washington’s Dulles airport as they tried to flee the country. They had bought one way tickets to Vienna shortly after having lunch with Giuliani, and tonight we learned that Rudy Giuliani had planned to travel to Vienna himself tomorrow.

Fruman and Parnas worked with Giuliani on the Ukraine scheme, but their grand jury indictment from the Southern District of New York did not focus on that. It focused on election laws. It said the defendants “conspired to circumvent the federal laws against foreign influence by engaging in a scheme to funnel foreign money to candidates for federal and state office so that the defendants could buy potential influence with candidates, campaigns, and the candidates’ governments.”

What?!

The indictment goes on to say that they laundered Russian money through Political Action Committees (PACs) and made political donations through straw men. Among those who received hefty payments were former Representative Pete Sessions (R-TX), who is running for reelection, who got $3 million, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California), who got $500,000. Tonight McCarthy said he would return the money, which he did not know was illicit. (I’m not sure this will fly. McCarthy was the congressmen caught on tape in June 2016 saying “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” Rohrabacher (R-CA) lost his 2018 reelection bid).

This election finance crime strikes me as a huge story. In August 2017, the Dallas Morning News reported that in 2016, GOP PACs that supported certain campaigns took more than $7 million from a Ukraine-born oligarch close to Putin. That man, Len Blavatnik, holds dual US and UK citizenship, and is so close to Putin that Oxford and Princeton came under popular pressure for accepting money from him. In 2016, from Blavatnik and his companies, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell’s PAC got $2.5 million; Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s got $1.5 million; Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s PACs got $1.1 million; South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham got $800,000; John Kasich’s PAC got $250,000; Arizona Senator John McCain’s PAC got $200,000. Blavatnik also donated $1 million to Trump’s Inauguration.

Blavatnik is also very close to another one of Putin’s closest associates, Oleg Deripaska, who owns RUSAL, the second largest aluminum company in the world. RUSAL fell under the US sanctions put in place after Russian invaded Ukraine, which meant it could not do business in America. Could not, that is, until the Trump administration lifted sanctions on RUSAL, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell led the fight to keep the Senate from overturning the decision, which was unpopular with both Democrats and many Republicans. Three months later, RUSAL invested $200 million in a new aluminum plant in Kentucky.

My guess is that we are going to find out that there has been a lot of Russian money washing around in PACs associated with Republican figures, and that, unlike Blavatnik’s contributions, which are legal because he is a naturalized US citizen, there will be others that are not. I guess we’ll find out when Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen comes back to New York court to testify about the Ukraine scandal. He was, after all, a deputy national finance chairman for the Republican National Committee, appointed in April 2017 by the newly-elected President Trump.

Russia came up again today, too, when the US sided with Russia at an emergency meeting of the UN security council, called by our allies Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, and Poland, to condemn the Turkish attack on the Kurds. Russia opposed the condemnation, and the US joined it, rather than the Europeans, to veto the condemnation. Our ambassador, Kelly Kraft, said that Trump “has made it abundantly clear” that we do not endorse the invasion, and said there would be “consequences” for killing Kurds, but did not say what they would be.

And finally, tonight we learned that Attorney General William Barr met with Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News Channel, at Murdoch’s home in New York on Wednesday. The Attorney General is supposed to represent the American people; he is not the president’s lawyer. (The president’s lawyer is called the White House Counsel, and the position is currently held by Pat Cipollone, the man who signed the 8-page crazy letter to Nancy Pelosi last week, saying that the impeachment investigation was unconstitutional.) What on earth Barr has to say to Murdoch is unclear, but it is worth noting that the actual reporters on that channel have been pushing Trump’s spokesmen with hard questions, rather than simply repeating talking points, and it is possible Barr was urging softer treatment. Neither Barr nor Murdoch would comment on the meeting.

Overall, this was a disastrous day for the Trump administration. The mounting leaks about the Ukraine call are worrisome enough, but the arrests of Fruman and Parnas seem like a whole new kettle of fish.