Phone call showed only slice of Trump's Ukraine obsession
WASHINGTON — 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.
When Ukraine elected its new leader, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, on April 21, Trump seized on the moment as an opportunity to press his case. Within hours of Zelenskiy’s victory, Trump placed a congratulatory call as he was en route from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida to Washington. Four days after that call, Trump said on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program that he “would imagine” that Attorney General William Barr would like to review information about Ukraine’s actions in the 2016 election.
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. 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.”
One involves the overlap between 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. Giuliani’s work set the stage for the April call, Trump’s first contact with Zelenskiy, a former comedian and political neophyte. Zelenskiy is seen by the West as a reformer elected with a mandate to take a hard line against both Russian aggression and the political corruption that has long plagued his country.
Instead, Giuliani said he conveyed his information to an aide to Zelenskiy in a late July phone call, followed by an Aug. 1 meeting in Madrid, which was revealed by The Times. The meeting was arranged with the knowledge and cooperation of the State Department, and Giuliani said he briefed the department afterward.
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