Trump's Attempt to Extort Ukraine Started Long Before the Infamous Phone Call

When Trump tried to blackmail Ukrainian President Zelensky in July 2019, it wasn't the first time he abused his position as President of the United States by meddling in that country's affairs.

Just to be clear, the recent succession of Ukrainian presidents looks like this:

2010-2014 Viktor Yanukovych 

2014-2019 Petro Poroshenko

2019-present Volodymyr Zelensky

Yanukovych was Putin's puppet in Ukraine and was ousted from office by the Euromaiden protests in 2014. We haven't heard much about the presidency of Poroshenko, who was elected after Yanukovych fled the country for asylum in Russia. But in 2018, Andrew Kramer reported this in the New York Times:

In the United States, Paul J. Manafort is facing prosecution on charges of money laundering and financial fraud stemming from his decade of work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.

But in Ukraine, where officials are wary of offending President Trump, four meandering cases that involve Mr. Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, have been effectively frozen by Ukraine’s chief prosecutor...

The decision to halt the investigations by an anticorruption prosecutor was handed down at a delicate moment for Ukraine, as the Trump administration was finalizing plans to sell the country sophisticated anti-tank missiles, called Javelins.

Kramer went on to report that, just prior to halting investigations into Manafort, Ukrainian law enforcement allowed Konstantin V. Kilimnik, who was also under investigation in Ukraine for espionage, to flee to Russia, putting him out of reach for questioning. We now know that Kilimnik was a Russian agent who had probably been involved with the GRU hacking of the DNC and the Clinton Campaign. He met with Manafort on at least two occasions during the 2016 campaign.

In other words, the dots seem to be connected: Poroshenko halted investigations into Manafort and Kilimnik in exchange for Javelins...the same weapons Trump later used in an attempt to extort Zelensky. 

But it gets worse. According to reporting by Josh Kovensky at TPM, Trump and Giuliani thought they had a deal with Poroshenko for political dirt just prior to the Ukrainian election in April 2019.

By late February, the Wall Street Journal reported last week, Poroshenko was open to a deal pushed by [Giuliani co-conspirators] Parnas and Fruman in which the Ukrainian leader would get electoral help via a state visit to the U.S., while he would give Trump a lift by announcing investigations into the Bidens and potential Ukrainian interference in the 2016 elections.

About a month later, Poroshenko's prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, started feeding stories to now-disgraced reporter John Solomon, including accusations that Ukrainians had interfered in the 2016 election, a smear campaign against Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, and attacks on the Bidens.

But a funny thing happened on the way to that criminal conspiracy. Zelensky won the election against Poroshenko in a landslide. That sent Trump and Giuliani scrambling. 

When Poroshenko lost in a landslide to Volodymyr Zelensky on April 21, it set off a mad scramble in Trumpworld to make inroads with the new government. It’s no coincidence that the flurry of activity in early May which has been the focus of investigators comes in the weeks after Zelensky’s win and before his May 20 inauguration.

The available evidence suggests that Trump, through Giuliani, was scrambling to re-up the deal with his new Ukrainian counterpart.

That is what led to the now-infamous phone call between Trump and Zelensky, as well as Trump's first impeachment.

To get some idea of how enraged Trump was at Zelensky's election, which foiled his deal with Poroshenko, just listen to Ambassador Volker's testimony about a meeting with the president in May 2019 (a month after the Ukrainian election).  

Trump and his defenders tried to pretend that their concern was about corruption in Ukraine. But as Rep. Jim Himes put it so succinctly during the House impeachment hearings, "President Trump wasn’t trying to end corruption in Ukraine, he was trying to aim corruption in Ukraine at Vice-President Biden and at the 2020 election.” 

Trump was successful at aiming Ukrainian corruption when Poroshenko was president. He got them to back off investigations into Manafort and Kilimnick in exchange for weapons and had a deal ready to go to influence the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Zelensky walked a tightrope over his first few months in office, but ultimately foiled their efforts.