The 2019 Trump–Ukraine political scandal arose primarily from the discovery of U.S. president Donald Trump's attempts to coerce Ukraine into investigating his political rival Joe Biden and thus potentially damage Biden's campaign for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination. Trump enlisted surrogates in and outside his administration, including personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr, to pressure Ukraine and other governments to cooperate in supporting and legitimizing the Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory and other conspiracy theories concerning U.S. politics. Trump blocked payment of a congressionally mandated $400 million military aid package, in an attempt to obtain quid pro quo cooperation from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Contacts were established between the White House and government of Ukraine, culminating in a phone call between Trump and Zelenskyy on July 25, 2019.
Trump released the aid after becoming aware of a whistleblower complaint made in August 2019, before the complaint was known by Congress or the public. The scandal reached public attention in mid-September 2019. The complaint raised concerns about Trump using powers to solicit foreign electoral intervention in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The White House corroborated allegations raised by the whistleblower. A transcript of the Trump–Zelenskyy call confirmed Trump requested investigations into Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, as well as a conspiracy theory involving a Democratic National Committee server, while urging Zelenskyy to work with Giuliani and Barr on this.
Former acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said one reason why Trump withheld aid to Ukraine was Ukrainian "corruption related to the DNC server", referring to a debunked theory that Ukrainians framed Russia for hacking into the DNC system. Trump has publicly urged Ukraine and China to investigate the Bidens. The Trump administration's top diplomat to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, testified he was told aid to Ukraine and a Trump–Zelenskyy White House meeting were conditional on Zelenskyy announcing investigations into the Bidens and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. U.S. ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland testified he worked with Giuliani at Trump's "express direction" to arrange a quid pro quo with the Ukraine government.
On September 24, 2019, the House of Representatives began a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump. On October 31, 2019, the House of Representatives voted to approve guidelines for the next phase of impeachment. Trump was impeached on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, but was acquitted by the Senate.
On December 3, 2019, as part of the inquiry, the House Intelligence Committee published a report detailing that "President Trump, personally and acting through agents within and outside of the U.S. government, solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, to benefit his reelection. ...President Trump conditioned official acts on a public announcement by the new Ukrainian president...of politically-motivated investigations, including one into Joe Biden, one of Trump's domestic political opponents. In pressuring President Zelenskyy to carry out his demand, President Trump withheld a White House meeting desperately sought by the Ukrainian president, and critical U.S. military assistance to fight Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine." In January 2020, the Government Accountability Office, a non-partisan watchdog, concluded the White House broke federal law by withholding Congress-approved military aid to Ukraine.
Background
The scandal came to light when a whistleblower report revealed that President Trump had asked Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in July 2019 to investigate Joe Biden, Trump's political opponent in the 2020 presidential election, his son Hunter Biden, and company CrowdStrike, to discuss these matters with Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr. The allegations were confirmed by a non-verbatim summary of the conversation released by the White House. Trump acknowledged he had told Zelenskyy "we don't want our people like Vice President Biden and his son [contributing] to the corruption already in the Ukraine." According to the whistleblower, the call was part of a wider campaign by Trump, his administration, and Giuliani to pressure Ukraine into investigating the Bidens, which may have included Trump's cancelling a scheduled trip to Ukraine by Vice President Mike Pence, and Trump withholding $400 million in military aid from Ukraine.
Immediately after the Trump–Zelenskyy call ended, White House national security aides discussed their deep concerns, with at least one National Security Council (NSC) official alerting White House national security lawyers. A text message between a State Department envoy to Ukraine and a Ukrainian official showed the envoy understood from the White House that a Zelenskyy visit with Trump was contingent upon Ukraine's investigating a conspiracy theory about alleged Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Records of the Trump–Zelenskyy call were moved from the system where presidential call transcripts are typically stored to a system reserved for the government's most sensitive secrets. The Trump administration had also similarly restricted access to records of Trump's conversations with the leaders of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Australia. It was subsequently revealed that this placement had been made for political rather than national security reasons.
The first whistleblower complaint was filed on August 12, 2019, reportedly by a CIA officer detailed to the White House. It was based both on "direct knowledge of certain alleged conduct" and on the accounts of more than "half a dozen U.S. officials". The complaint was eventually released to congressional intelligence committees on September 25, 2019, and a redacted version of the complaint was made public the next day. On October 6, 2019, attorney Mark Zaid announced the existence of a second official whistleblower, an intelligence official with firsthand knowledge who had spoken with the inspector general of the Intelligence Community but had not yet contacted the congressional committees involved in the investigation.
The whistleblower's complaint prompted a referral to the Department of Justice Criminal Division. On September 25, a Department of Justice spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec, announced that the division had "concluded the matter" and determined that the call did not constitute a campaign finance violation. On October 3, after Trump publicly called for China and Ukraine to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden, Federal Election Commission (FEC) chair Ellen Weintraub reiterated 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."
Trump has denied all wrongdoing. He confirmed that he had withheld aid from Ukraine, while offering contradicting reasons for doing so. Trump first claimed it was withheld because of corruption in Ukraine, but later said it was because other nations, including those in Europe, were not contributing enough aid to Ukraine. European Union institutions provided more than twice the amount of aid to Ukraine than did the United States during 2016-17, and Trump's budget proposal sought to cut billions of dollars from U.S. initiatives to fight corruption and encourage reform in Ukraine and elsewhere.
Trump has repeatedly attacked the whistleblower and sought information about the whistleblower. In October 2019, after mentioning that the U.S. has "tremendous power" in the trade war with China "if they don't do what we want", Trump publicly urged Ukraine and China to investigate the Bidens. As of October 2019, there has been no evidence produced of any alleged wrongdoing by the Bidens. Trump, his supporters, and right-wing media have spread multiple conspiracy theories regarding Ukraine, the Bidens, the whistleblower, and the foreign interference in the 2016 election. The scope of the scandal expanded on October 9, when arrests were made by the FBI of two of Giuliani's clients involved in political and business affairs in the U.S. and Ukraine, as well as news two days later that Giuliani himself was under federal investigation.
President Donald Trump
Before this scandal came to light, U.S. president Donald Trump indicated he would accept foreign intelligence on his political rivals. In June 2019, Trump was interviewed by George Stephanopoulos, who asked: "If foreigners, if Russia, if China, if someone else offers you information on an opponent, should they accept it or should they call the FBI?" Trump responded: "I think maybe you do both. I think you might want to listen. I don't. There's nothing wrong with listening. If somebody called from a country—Norway—we have information on your opponent. Oh. I think I'd want to hear it." After Trump said this, the chair of the Federal Election Commission, Ellen Weintraub, reminded Americans that according to federal law: "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." Previously in July 2016, while Trump was still a candidate in the 2016 United States presidential election, he made a request: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing" from 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's email server.
Ukraine and the Bidens
In 2014, the Obama administration was trying to provide diplomatic support to the post-2014 Ukrainian revolution Yatsenyuk government in Ukraine, and then-vice president Joe Biden was "at the forefront" of those efforts. Hunter Biden joined the board of directors of Burisma Holdings on April 18, 2014. Hunter, then an attorney with Boies Schiller Flexner, was hired to help Burisma with corporate governance best practices, and a consulting firm in which Hunter is a partner was also retained by Burisma. In a December 2015 interview, Joe Biden said he had never discussed Hunter's work at Burisma. Joe Biden traveled to Ukrainian capital Kyiv on April 21, 2014, and urged the Ukrainian government "to reduce its dependence on Russia for supplies of natural gas". He discussed how the United States could help provide technical expertise for expanding domestic production of natural gas.
Since 2012, the Ukrainian prosecutor general had been investigating Burisma's owner, oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, over allegations of money laundering, tax evasion, and corruption. In 2015, Viktor Shokin became the prosecutor general, inheriting the investigation. The Obama administration, other governments, and non-governmental organizations soon became concerned that Shokin was not adequately pursuing corruption in Ukraine, was protecting the political elite, and was regarded as "an obstacle to anti-corruption efforts". Among other issues, he was slow-walking the investigation into Zlochevsky and Burisma, to the extent that Obama administration officials were considering launching their own criminal investigation into the company for possible money laundering. Shokin has said he believes he was fired because of his Burisma investigation, where Hunter Biden was allegedly a subject. However, that investigation was dormant at the time Shokin was fired. In December 2015, then-vice president Biden visited Kyiv and informed the Ukrainian government that $1 billion in loan guarantees would be withheld unless anti-corruption reforms were implemented, including the removal of Shokin. Ukraine's parliament voted to dismiss Shokin in March 2016. The loan guarantees were finally approved on June 3, after additional reforms were made.
At the time, corruption in Ukraine was a matter of bipartisan concern in the U.S., with Republican senators Rob Portman, Mark Kirk, and Ron Johnson co-signing a Senate Ukraine Caucus letter in February 2016 urging then-President Poroshenko to implement reforms, including "to press ahead with urgent reforms to the Prosecutor General's office". Biden was not alone in targeting Shokin for anti-corruption reasons; he was joined by other European and U.S. officials. Former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt and the assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland both said in 2015 that Shokin's office was failing to root out corruption. In March 2016, testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, former ambassador to Ukraine John E. Herbst stated, "By late fall of 2015, the EU and the United States joined the chorus of those seeking Mr. Shokin's removal" and that Joe Biden "spoke publicly about this before and during his December visit to Kyiv."
During the same hearing, Nuland stated, "we have pegged our next $1 billion loan guarantee, first and foremost, to having a rebooting of the reform coalition so that we know who we are working with, but secondarily, to ensuring that the prosecutor general's office gets cleaned up." Meanwhile, protests within Ukraine were calling for Shokin's removal, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) also threatened to delay $40 billion of aid in light of corruption in Ukraine. Anders Åslund, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said that "Everyone in the Western community wanted Shokin sacked ... The whole G-7, the IMF, the EBRD [European Bank for Reconstruction and Development], everybody was united that Shokin must go, and the spokesman for this was Joe Biden." The European Union eventually praised Shokin's dismissal due to a "lack of tangible results" of his office's investigations, and also because people in Shokin's office were themselves being investigated.
As of May 16, 2019, when the prosecutor general's office cleared Biden and his son of alleged corruption, there is no evidence that Biden acted to protect his son's involvement with Burisma, although Trump, Giuliani, and their allies have fueled speculation. Shokin's successor, Yuriy Lutsenko, initially took a hard line against Burisma, but within a year, Lutsenko announced that all legal proceedings and pending criminal allegations against Zlochevsky had been "fully closed". In a related 2014 investigation by the United Kingdom, British authorities froze U.K. bank accounts tied to Zlochevsky; however, the investigation was later closed due to a lack of evidence. Lutsenko said in May 2019 that there was no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens, but he was planning to provide information to Attorney General William Barr about Burisma board payments so American authorities could verify whether Hunter Biden had paid U.S. taxes.
In November 2019, Senator Rand Paul asserted that the whistleblower "is a material witness to the possible corruption of Hunter Biden and Joe Biden," adding, "[the whistleblower] might have traveled with Joe Biden to Ukraine for all we know," calling for investigators to subpoena the whistleblower. Asked for evidence to support his allegations, Paul replied, "we don't know unless we ask." Senator Lindsey Graham, the Senate Judiciary Committee chair, responded by saying "What basis does he have to say that? He needs to tell us ... You can't ask members [of Congress], 'Do you want to subpoena this guy?' He might be this, he might be that."