The Ukraine call: Trump, Giuliani and the Bidens

On 25 July 2019 Volodymyr Zelensky thanked Trump for U.S. support and mentioned Javelin missiles. Trump replied: “I would like you to do us a favor though.” He asked about the CrowdStrike server theory and then said: “The other thing, 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 so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it . . . It sounds horrible to me.” [1]

At the time, $391 million in military and security aid for Ukraine had been frozen on the President’s orders. In January 2020 the GAO found the hold violated the Impoundment Control Act. The House impeached Trump in December 2019; the Senate acquitted him on 5 February 2020. Only one Republican, Mitt Romney, voted to convict, on abuse of power. [2][3]

Through 2019 Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, met Ukrainian figures who offered stories about the Bidens, including Shokin and his successor Yuriy Lutsenko. Lutsenko later said he had no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens under Ukrainian law. [1][4]

One of Giuliani’s sources, the Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Derkach, released edited recordings of Biden’s calls with Poroshenko in 2020. In September 2020 the Treasury Department, under Trump, sanctioned him, saying he had “been an active Russian agent for over a decade.” And at the end of 2019, as Burisma became an issue in the U.S. election, Russian military intelligence ran a phishing campaign against the company, according to the security firm Area 1. What, if anything, it stole has never been published. [2][3]