President Trump faces impeachment because personal attorney Rudy Giuliani was manipulated by a disreputable official who hoped to avoid being fired by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, according to regional analysts and anti-corruption activists.
“Consider the notion that Rudy Giuliani, who is no fool, was conned,” a U.S.-based Central European policy specialist who is active in Ukrainian issues told the Washington Examiner.
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A consensus has been forming for months, in both Ukraine and in the U.S. government, that Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko, who earned the distrust of local anti-corruption activists during his three years in office, lured President Trump’s personal lawyer into a rash pursuit of dirt on Democrats that could ultimately bring the American president down.
Lutsenko, 54, convinced Giuliani that he had evidence of corruption involving former Vice President Joe Biden. But his back channel meetings are widely perceived as an attempt to forge the kind of political alliance with Trump that would make it difficult for Zelensky to oust him.
“He did what he did maybe to make himself look like a valuable asset to the new regime,” Oxana Shevel, an expert in the post-Communist region at Tufts University, told the Washington Examiner. “He’s a serious politician. Ukrainian politics [involves] figuring out where, informally, the power lies and being on the right side at the right time.”
“Clearly, Lutsenko was seeking to maintain his position in the new administration,” the Central European specialist said. “What the new administration in Kiev is well aware of is that this whole Ukrainegate mess was initiated by Lutsenko in his conversations with Giuliani.”
When Lutsenko’s allegations provoked Trump to recall the top U.S. ambassador in Kiev, Kurt Volker, the other key American diplomat in Ukraine policy, downplayed the issue by casting doubt on the outgoing prosecutor’s motives.
“Other people in Ukraine are trying to use the U.S. domestic politics as a vehicle for their own engagement, either in fighting their domestic enemies inside Ukraine or trying to feel like they’ve got some special relationship with people in the United States,” Volker, who resigned last week as the State Department’s special representative for the war in Ukraine, said in May.
That was Volker’s explanation for a series of explosive allegations that Lutsenko aired throughout the spring as Zelensky surged in the presidential elections. Lutsenko claimed to have evidence that Ukrainian officials helped 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign by leaking information that would lead to the indictment of a Trump campaign adviser.
Lutsenko also suggested that Biden had protected his son, Hunter, by pressuring Ukrainian officials to fire a previous prosecutor who was investigating a company that had hired the younger Biden. Trump would echo these suspicions in his now-famous July 25 phone call with Zelensky, but Ukrainian activists counter that Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor Biden denounced, was in fact refusing to investigate the company.
“He was dismissed because of a lack of willingness to investigate this particular case as well as other important cases,” Daria Kaleniuk, director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, said in July. “[Lutsenko] wanted to become a person with whom people in the United States wanted to talk, and then probably he found Giuliani and found a sexy story that fit into the Giuliani agenda.”
Lutsenko had a motive for resorting to these tactics. The prosecutor general was an ally of the outgoing president, Petro Poroshenko, the oligarch who came to power after Yanukovych was ousted in 2014. When Lutsenko was appointed in 2016, he had a “reformist” reputation due to his record as an enemy of Yanukovych, but that would change.
“By the time Zelensky was running, it was pretty clear that all of these corruption investigations under Poroshenko and Lutsenko’s watch wasn’t going anywhere,” Shevel said. “And so, clearly the idea would be that there would be changes.”
Lutsenko lost his job at the end of August, but Giuliani kept pursuing the allegations against the Bidens. Now, the ex-prosecutor is now undermining those efforts, portraying Giuliani as pushing him to “start an investigation just for the interests of an American official” and adding that he knew of no illegal activity by either the former vice president or his son.
“The president has done things … based on his obvious presumption that there is something to be found about Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton in Ukraine,” said the Central European specialist. “What if there’s no there there? It means, then, that Giuliani may have drawn Trump into a situation which is, politically, extraordinarily damaging — for no purpose.”
