Many features of Trumpism—the cynical populism, the brazen readiness to profit from high office, the racist and nativist taunts—have antecedents in American politics. But Donald Trump’s open willingness to ask foreign governments to dig up dirt on political opponents has been an idiosyncratic aspect of his rise to power. At a press conference in July, 2016, when he was the presumptive Republican nominee for President, he invited Russia to get hold of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and leak them to the press. This past June, George Stephanopoulos asked him what he thought his campaign should do now “if foreigners, if Russia, if China, if someone else,” offered information on his political opponents—accept it or call the F.B.I.?
Trump allowed that he might do both, adding, “If somebody called from a country—Norway—‘We have information on your opponent.’ Oh, I think I’d want to hear it.” (When the interview was released, Ellen L. Weintraub, the chair of the Federal Election Commission, felt obliged to point out that “it is illegal for any person to solicit, accept, or receive anything of value from a foreign national in connection with a U.S. election.”) We now know that, as Trump spoke to Stephanopoulos, he and Rudolph Giuliani, his personal lawyer, were deep in a vigorous effort to persuade the government of Ukraine to conduct investigations that might rake up some muck about Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
Two bombshell documents made public this week—a record of a telephone conversation between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s President, and a whistle-blower’s complaint about that call—fully justify House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision, announced on Tuesday, to open an official impeachment inquiry. The documents describe a breach of Trump’s constitutional duties that is exceptional even in light of his record to date. During the telephone call, made on July 25th, he leveraged the vast disparity of wealth and power in the alliance between the United States and Ukraine to ask Zelensky to, in effect, aid his reëlection bid. The complaint, filed on August 12th, by a person whom the Times has described as an intelligence officer, further recounts how U.S. national-security and foreign-policy officials who worked on issues concerning Ukraine became entangled in Trump’s scheme, and how this distorted and undermined their work on behalf of American interests. According to the complaint, once it became clear how damaging the record of the call might be, Administration officials participated in a coverup, moving the memorandum of conversation—the contemporaneous documentation of the call—to a highly restricted computer system not intended for such materials.
The whistle-blower’s complaint is one of the great artifacts to enter Washington’s sizable archive of political malfeasance. In the second paragraph, its author distills Trump’s offense with bracing clarity: “I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.” The author goes on to provide a revelatory narrative about the underlying facts of the case, one that complements investigative reporting previously published by the Washington Post, the Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and other outlets.
The complaint’s lucidity and detail may help House investigators defend the integrity of their inquiry against the torrent of spin and lies that will surely continue to issue from Trump and his allies. When Washington scandals involving foreign affairs become politically contested, a timeworn tactic by those accused of wrongdoing is to befuddle the public; the unfamiliar names, tangled chronologies, and ambiguous meetings offer a way to distract non-obsessives from the heart of the matter. Already, Trump and Giuliani, on Twitter and Fox News, have fogged the record by repeating falsehoods and conspiracy theories. The story we can discern so far, however, retains a certain straightforwardness, thanks to Trump’s lack of subtlety.
Ukraine is enmeshed in a low-grade but persistent war with Russia, which began in February, 2014, after a popular revolution in Kiev that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, a corrupt ally of Moscow. He fled to Russia, and Vladimir Putin ordered Russian forces to invade Ukraine. They seized Crimea, which Russia then annexed. Putin’s motive was the reassertion of Russian power; the United States and Europe, stunned by his audacity, imposed sanctions and tried to shore up the post-revolutionary government in Kiev. In search of accountability, the new Ukrainian regime opened corruption investigations into the previous political order.
That April, Joe Biden’s son Hunter, a lawyer, accepted a lucrative seat on the board of one of Ukraine’s largest private gas companies, Burisma Holdings, which is controlled by a Ukrainian oligarch, Mykola Zlochevsky. Burisma became a subject of Kiev’s investigations, although the extent, seriousness, and focus of the inquiry are unclear. Hunter Biden’s decision to accept the board seat when his father was the Vice-President and Ukraine’s crises were of international importance showed questionable judgment. Since 2014, the Kiev government has been a ward of America and Europe; the potential for real or perceived conflicts of interest should have been apparent to both Bidens. Still, according to Ukrainian officials, no evidence of wrongdoing by either Hunter Biden or Zlochevsky has been found.
In 2015, the United States and some of its European allies sought to oust Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, because they believed that he had gone soft on corruption. That September, the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, denounced Shokin’s failure “to successfully fight internal corruption.” In December, Joe Biden went to Kiev and told Ukraine’s leaders that the U.S. would withhold loan guarantees if they didn’t get rid of Shokin; he was ousted the following March. One of Giuliani’s aims has been to encourage Ukraine to examine whether Shokin was pushed out to protect Burisma—and, by extension, Hunter Biden—from a corruption probe. But the record indicates that Shokin was removed because he wasn’t doing enough about Ukrainian corruption. Vitaliy Kasko, a Ukrainian former prosecutor, recently told Bloomberg, “There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against Zlochevsky.” He added that the Burisma case “was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015.”
As it turned out, the American politician first affected by Ukraine’s emboldened investigators was Donald Trump. Yanukovych had been a client of Paul Manafort, who became Trump’s campaign chairman in May, 2016. That August, a Ukrainian law-enforcement unit released records showing that Manafort had received $12.7 million in payments from the Yanukovych regime, and he resigned from the campaign. Trump apparently concluded that Ukraine was conspiring with Hillary Clinton and the Democrats to try to defeat him. For reasons that are not easy to fathom, he also came to endorse a conspiracy theory holding that Ukraine harbors a computer server used by the Democratic National Committee in 2016. “They’re terrible people,” Trump said privately of the Ukrainians as recently as May, according to the Times. “They’re all corrupt and they tried to take me down.”
This did not stop Trump and Giuliani from attempting to use the Ukrainians against Joe Biden. At the start of this year, they got wind of provocative allegations made by Ukraine’s then prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko. Ukraine was in the midst of its own raucous Presidential election, and Lutsenko, in the course of attacking his opponents in Ukrainian politics, alleged that Shokin had, indeed, been fired in order to protect Burisma. (Later, Lutsenko told Bloomberg that he had no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens.)
In April, Trump told Fox News that Lutsenko’s allegations were “big” and “incredible,” and that he thought Attorney General William Barr would find them interesting. That same month, Zelensky, a former television comic, won Ukraine’s election in a landslide. In May, Giuliani announced that he would go to Kiev to urge the new government to investigate, among other subjects, the Bidens and alleged links between Ukraine and the Democrats. He would do so, he told the Times, “because that information will be very, very helpful to my client.” Soon after the story was published, Giuliani cancelled his trip.
It was a few days later that the whistle-blower, according to the complaint, “heard from multiple U.S. officials that they were deeply concerned” that Giuliani was doing an end run around proper national-security decision-making, and opening a back channel between Kiev and Trump. Ukraine’s leaders were also apparently worried that Trump’s willingness to meet or talk with Zelensky, whose government cannot afford to lose American backing, “would depend on whether Zelensky showed willingness to ‘play ball.’ ”
Around mid-July, according to the Washington Post, Trump ordered his chief of staff to hold back four hundred million dollars in military aid for Ukraine that had been approved by Congress. Then, on July 25th, Trump had the phone call with Zelensky that all the world can now review. According to the memorandum of conversation released by the White House (it is a cross between a transcript and a summary, and its completeness is uncertain), Trump began by mentioning how generous the U.S. is to Ukraine. “We do a lot,” he said, and then noted, twice, that “the United States has been very, very good to Ukraine.” Finally, he got to the point. “I would like you to do us a favor though,” he said, and went on to ask Zelensky to speak with Giuliani and Barr about conducting investigations. “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,” Trump said. After the call, Giuliani flew to Madrid and met an aide to Zelensky. As Giuliani later told the Post, he said to the aide, “Your country owes it to us and to your country to find out what really happened.”
This week, the President and his allies made much of the fact that, during the call, Trump did not mention the suspended military aid or link its resumption to Zelensky’s participation in the President’s incipient dirty-tricks operation. (The aid was released this month, after bipartisan pressure from Congress.) Yet, according to the record of the call, Trump immediately followed a fulsome account of America’s support for Ukraine with a request for investigations of Democrats. Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, called Trump’s technique “a classic Mafia-like shakedown.”
Historically, impeachment processes have been treacherous, tumultuous, and unpredictable; with Trump involved, this one can hardly be otherwise. Opinion polls suggest that, currently, Americans are about evenly divided on the question of impeachment, a complication for Democrats. Even if the House does eventually impeach Trump, it will require a two-thirds vote by the Republican-controlled Senate to remove him from office, and the Grand Old Party continues to lash itself to the President. The unlikelihood of Trump’s removal means that the impeachment inquiry may become a part of the political arguments during the primary and general-election campaigns of 2020. The President may not welcome the prospect of being impeached, but he is already using the battle to defame Joe Biden, and to reprise his “witch hunt” mantra in rage-inflected ad-libs, while his reëlection campaign is citing the inquiry in fund-raising solicitations. He and his allies are also testing their defenses and counterattacks, among them the contention that, if Trump is to be investigated over his conduct involving Ukraine, Joe Biden should be, too.
The Democrats swept the House in 2018 in large part by running a disciplined campaign emphasizing health care and the need to address economic insecurity among working and middle-class households—and by avoiding baiting the President. Pelosi’s launch of a formal inquiry followed a surge in support for impeachment among moderate Democrats, some of them military and intelligence veterans, who said that they were shocked by the Ukraine revelations. Their change of mind is notable for its lack of obvious political reward.
During the summer of 1787, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, delegates designed impeachment as a political process entrusted to Congress. The record of their debate shows they hoped that Presidents who were merely incompetent would be thrown out of office at election time, by the voters. Yet they also assumed that, occasionally, Presidents might be so corrupt and so ruthless that it would be damaging to the republic to wait for the next election. William Davie, a delegate from North Carolina, raised an alarming scenario: if a rogue with no conscience gained the Presidency, he might “spare no efforts or means whatever to get himself reëlected.” In 1972, Richard Nixon proved his point. So, now, has Donald Trump. ♦
