Giuliani’s Ukraine Push Flummoxed Diplomats, Whistle-Blower Says
Guiliani’s Ukraine Push Flummoxed Diplomats, Whistle-Blower Says
(Bloomberg) -- Rudy Giuliani’s months of back-channel outreach to Ukraine’s government left U.S. diplomats in the dark, setting off a scramble around the State Department to understand the efforts and reassure the government in Kyiv, according to a whistleblower’s complaint.
The disconnect between President Donald Trump’s State Department and the actions of his personal lawyer emerged in the complaint that was released to the public Thursday after sparking a formal Congressional impeachment inquiry.
A Trump confidant who made his name as a federal prosecutor and later as New York City’s mayor, Giuliani has spoken publicly since May about his efforts to get Ukraine’s new government to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. The complaint adds new details of his efforts, however: Drawing on the accounts of several unidentified government officials, it paints Trump’s personal lawyer as operating outside diplomatic channels, at times actively undercutting U.S. envoys.
It casts Giuliani at the center of Trump’s alleged effort to use “the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country” to help him in the 2020 presidential election.
That language suggests the whistleblower was concerned about campaign-finance law, which bars candidates from seeking or receiving foreign help. The Justice Department has said Trump can’t be indicted because he’s president, and said it reviewed the call and found no campaign-finance violations.
“But that doesn’t mean you can’t charge someone with a conspiracy and the president could be an unindicted co-conspirator,” said Patrick Cotter, a former federal prosecutor, who said Giuliani could potentially have problems with campaign finance laws, conspiracy to misappropriate U.S. government property and obstruction of justice.
It’s unclear whether officials inside Trump’s Justice Department would choose to pursue those lines of inquiry. “The fact that William Barr is the attorney general and he’s involved in the factual situation should give comfort to Mr. Giuliani,” Cotter added.
There is little doubt, though, that lawmakers in the heat of an impeachment investigation will seek to call him as a key witness.
Giuliani didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Giuliani spent months establishing back channels to the circle of advisers around Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and the country’s prosecutors in a bid to persuade them to reopen probes into the owner of a natural gas company where Hunter Biden sat on the board, according to the complaint.
‘Circumvention’ of Security
U.S. officials were alarmed by Giuliani’s efforts, some of which emerged in news reports. “Starting in mid-May, I heard from multiple U.S. officials that they were deeply concerned by what they viewed as Mr. Giuliani’s circumvention of national security decision making processes to engage with Ukrainian officials and relay messages back and forth between Kyiv and the president,” the whistleblower wrote.
Kurt Volker, the U.S. special representative for Ukraine, and Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, spoke with Giuliani during this time to “contain the damage” to national security, the whistleblower says.
They then met with members of the Ukrainian president’s team to help them “understand and respond to the differing messages they were receiving from official U.S. channels on the one hand and from Mr. Giuliani on the other,” the complaint says.
The new account contradicts Giuliani’s publicly stated version of events. In a Fox News interview this week, he said he met with Ukrainian officials at the request of the State Department.
“I never talked to a Ukrainian official until the State Department called me and asked me to do it,” Giuliani said, waving his phone as if to suggest he had messages proving it.
One pivotal moment in the complaint is the July 25 telephone call between Trump and Zelenskiy. In it, according to a summary released Wednesday by the White House, Zelenskiy asks Trump about buying missiles from the U.S. Trump follows up by asking Zelensky to do him the favor of investigating the Bidens, saying that Giuliani would follow up with him.
The whistleblower complaint gives a similar account of that exchange -- adding that afterward, White House officials were asked to “lock down” records of the call on a special server for highly sensitive materials.
The next day, according to the complaint, Volker and Sondland met Zelenskiy and other Ukrainian politicians to provide advice on how to “navigate” the demands of the U.S. president.
April Outreach
Giuliani’s outreach to Zelenskiy’s team started even before he entered office on May 20.
“Associates” of Giuliani tried to make contact with Zelenskiy’s incoming team at the end of April, the whistleblower writes, citing a U.S. official who isn’t identified. Giuliani announced in early May that he was planning to travel to Kyiv to push the new government to pursue investigations into Biden and the origins of the special counsel’s investigation into Russian election interference in 2016.
The news of Giuliani’s trip raised alarms, with many critics accusing him of openly trying to enlist a foreign government to help Trump’s re-election campaign. He canceled his visit.
Giuliani also embraced at least one person that the U.S. State Department had singled out as a bad actor, Ukraine’s Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytskyy. In March, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, had urged Ukraine to fire Kholodnytskyy after reports emerged that he had tipped off suspects about their cases.
In early May, Yovanovitch was recalled from her post due to pressure from Ukraine’s prosecutor general Yuri Lutsenko, who had been in touch with Giuliani, the whistleblower complaint details.
A few days after Zelenskiy’s May 20 inauguration, Giuliani met with Kholodnytskyy, the complaint says. News reports at the time show a picture of Giuliani, Kholodnytskyy and French anti-corruption prosecutor Charles Prats in Paris on May 22.
Also in May, Giuliani met with Andriy Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat, the complaint says. Telizhenko worked as a political officer in the Ukrainian embassy in Washington, D.C. in the first half of 2016, and had alleged in media reports that he was ordered by the ambassador to collect dirt on Trump and Manafort before the election.
Reached by phone Thursday, Telizhenko said he met Giuliani in New York in May to discuss Ukrainian-U.S. relations as well as again in August and September. He said the two discussed then-Vice President Biden’s foreign policy stance toward Kyiv after Russian-backed separatists took control of the east of the country in 2014.
Telizhenko and Giuliani had a client in common. In 2017, Giuliani had advised the mayor of the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on security issues in a contract financed by Pavel Fuks, a Ukrainian oligarch. Fuks had also hired Telizhenko for political consulting work.
Meanwhile, Giuliani was ramping up the pressure on Ukraine. In a June 21 tweet, he said: “New Pres of Ukraine still silent on investigation of Ukrainian interference in 2016 election and alleged Biden bribery or [Ukrainian President Petro] Poroshenko. Time for leadership and investigate both if you want to purge how Ukraine was abused by Hillary and the Clinton people.”
Multiple U.S. officials told the whistleblower that Giuliani had “privately reached out” to a variety of Zelenskiy’s advisers, including his chief of staff Andriy Bohdan and security services head Ivan Bakanov, a lawyer and childhood friend of Zelenskiy’s. The complaint said it’s unclear whether they met or spoke with Giuliani.
On August 2, Giuliani traveled to Madrid to meet with Andriy Yermak, a lawyer and film producer and one of Zelenskiy’s advisers. The complaint described that meeting as a “’direct follow-up’” to Trump’s July 25 call about the “’cases’” they discussed. The complaint, dated August 12, also said Yermak and Bakanov had intended to travel to Washington in mid-August.
(A previous version of this article corrected the spelling of Giuliani in headline.)
--With assistance from David Voreacos.
To contact the reporters on this story: Stephanie Baker in London at stebaker@bloomberg.net;Daryna Krasnolutska in Kyiv at dkrasnolutsk@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jeffrey D Grocott at jgrocott2@bloomberg.net, David S. Joachim
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