US Presidency: Ukraine scandal triggers impeachment inquiry

Michael Goldhaber, IBA US CorrespondentThursday 24 October 2019

‘The President of the United States leveraged his authority over military and diplomatic affairs to pressure a foreign state to provide dirt for his personal political use,’ says Bowman. ‘That’s pretty easy to understand.’ In particular, it’s easier to understand than unsuccessfully obstructing a controversial indeterminate investigation into some murky coordination with Russia by his pre-Presidential advisers. ‘There’s no question that obstruction was legally impeachable,’ Bowman argues, ‘but politically it couldn’t get traction.’ And in contrast to the underlying Russia conspiracy – where even Robert Mueller couldn’t conclude there was a crime – the Ukraine scandal doesn’t require a contestable statutory determination. Rather than to invite hairsplitting under election or corruption law, Bowman urges Congress to invoke a broad historic principle: abuse of power.

‘Abuse of power has been a common grounds for impeachment since the instrument was invented by the British in the 14th century, and our founders were intimately familiar with the 1787 case of the Governor-General in Bengal,’ says Bowman. ‘Abuse of power means using legitimate authority for an illegitimate purpose. Trump is the commander-in-chief and the chief diplomat – and he used both baskets of authority to extort a personal political favour. That’s abuse of power plain and simple.’ What’s even worse, says Bowman, the President sought a political favour from a national rival – and that’s exactly the sort of conduct the ‘founding fathers’ feared. Asked to justify impeachment at the Constitutional Convention, James Madison warned pithily: ‘He might betray his trust to foreign powers.’

The precise favours the President sought from Ukraine strike David J Kramer as ironic at many levels. And Kramer is uniquely qualified to comment – having served under George W Bush as both Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, and Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs, responsible for Russia and Ukraine, among others.

Most controversially, President Trump pushed Ukraine to probe the claim that Joe Biden engineered the 2014 firing of Prosecutor-General Viktor Shokin because Shokin was supposedly pursuing corruption at a company where Hunter Biden served on the board. (Per the call transcript: ‘I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down…. 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.’)

In reality, the entire Western establishment called for Shokin’s removal exactly because he was too lax on corruption. Republican Senators Rob Portman and Ron Johnson were admittedly part of that bipartisan chorus. And so was Kramer, who called for Shokin’s ouster as then-President of the nonprofit Freedom House. ‘Shokin was bad news absolutely,’ he recalls. ‘It wasn’t just Americans who had this position. It was the IMF, the Europeans, across the board.’

The President also pushed for a probe of the dizzying claims that Ukrainians triggered Robert Mueller’s ‘witch hunt’ of the Trump campaign by falsely accusing Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort of corruption; and that the forensic investigators at a supposedly-Ukrainian firm called CrowdStrike framed Russia for the 2016 email hack of the Democratic national committee. In the President’s muddled words: ‘I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike ... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it…. [T]hat whole [Mueller] nonsense…they say a lot of it started with Ukraine.’

The CrowdStrike tale has been traced back to the Russian military intelligence hacking avatar Guccifer 2.0, and features prominently in the defence of Roger Stone, the exhibitionist dirty trickster whom Mueller accuses of serving as the Trump campaign’s conduit to Wikileaks. Even ex-Trump Homeland Security Adviser Thomas Bossert calls it a ‘completely debunked’ ‘conspiracy theory’ with ‘no validity’. In reality, CrowdStrike is a Silicon Valley firm whose co-founder emigrated from Russia at age 13, and whose findings were ratified with high confidence by all 17 US intelligence agencies.

As for Paul Manafort: after a US jury found him guilty of bank fraud, he fully admitted to avoiding taxes on $13m in secret payments and secretly lobbying on behalf of the Ukrainian President who looted tens of billions and violently suppressed democracy before fleeing to Russia in 2014. Echoing Manafort’s defense, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani accuses the anti-corruption campaigner Serhiy Leshchenko of fabricating the ledger documenting secret payments to Manafort (and setting the Mueller probe in motion) out of enmity to Trump and America. Kramer retorts: ‘I know Leshchenko and saw him soon after. He was outraged and alarmed that Manafort was paid with Ukrainian money by an incredibly corrupt pro-Russian leader who has blood on his hands. That’s why he disclosed the secret ledger.’

One lesson of the Manafort trial is that a nation controlled by oligarchs is attractive to kleptocrats of every nationality. As Mark Hays of Global Witness put it: When the boundary between the public and private sector erodes, individuals can ‘exploit the infrastructure of state and set it up as a looting mechanism.’ Americans who promoted the rule of law, like Kramer, recognised this as a vulnerability. Manafort saw it as an opportunity. As his longtime lobbying partner Rick Davis confessed: ‘We loved non-US business because the political and business elites are the same.’

It’s becoming increasingly difficult for Americans of either party to lecture other nations on kleptocracy. Hunter Biden may have broken no laws (and if he did, Joe Biden’s actions would only have placed him at greater risk), but there’s no explanation for Hunter’s lucrative board seat except that his company, Burisma, craved political influence. Burisma’s co-founder is accused of awarding himself oil and gas licences when he served as Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources under Manafort’s favourite Ukrainian President. But the US can hardly preach probity given the report that President Trump’s own Energy Secretary, Rick Perry, tried to place two Republican Texan donors on the three-man board of Ukraine gas champion Naftogaz. Or the report that the two Soviet-born Florida businessmen who were recently indicted for funneling Russian cash to Republicans were peddling a natural gas deal with Naftogaz while pursuing Giuliani’s private diplomacy on President Trump’s behalf.

‘Blurring the lines between personal or political interests and the national interest is only going to confuse countries that receive our support and assistance,’ says Kramer. ‘We were trying to advise Ukrainians to root out corruption. How can we promote the rule of law when our President asks their President to meet with his personal lawyer and the Attorney General as if there’s no distinction between the two? […] We aren’t helping them by intermingling government business with private business, or by engaging in and facilitating corrupt activities. This is all counter to the national interest and the interests of Ukraine. The whole thing boggles the mind.’