Exclusive: Ukraine Releases ‘Shock’ Call With
Giuliani As Trump’s Second Impeachment Trial Begins
BY SIMON
SHUSTER
FEBRUARY 9, 2021 5:59 PM EST
“Let these
investigations go forward,” Rudy Giuliani told the presidential headquarters in
Kyiv, Ukraine, his voice turning impatient. “Get someone to investigate this.”
On the other end of the line, hunched over a speakerphone, two Ukrainian
officials listened in disbelief as Giuliani demanded probes that could help his
client, then-President Donald Trump, win another term in office.
The
40-minute call, a transcript of which was obtained by TIME, provides the
clearest picture yet of Giuliani’s attempts to pressure the Ukrainians on
Trump’s behalf. The President’s personal lawyer toggled between veiled threats—“Be
careful,” he warned repeatedly—and promises to help improve Ukraine’s relations
with Trump. “My only motive—it isn’t to get anybody in trouble who doesn’t
deserve to be in trouble,” Giuliani said. “For our country’s sake and your
country’s sake, we [need to] get all these facts straight,” he added. “We fix
them and we put it behind us.”
The
conversation on July 22, 2019, kicked off the campaign of intimidation that
resulted in Trump’s first impeachment. For a year and half, Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky and his aides said little about their interactions with
Giuliani, not wanting to anger an emissary of the U.S. President. But now, as
the Trump era ends with a historic second impeachment trial, the Ukrainians
have begun to speak up about the circumstances that led to the first. They are
also taking steps that could imperil Giuliani and his Ukrainian allies.
Igor
Novikov, who served as a close adviser to Zelensky during Trump’s first
impeachment, says he is willing to assist an ongoing federal investigation of
Giuliani that is reportedly underway in New York, as well as a separate effort
to strip Giuliani of his license to practice law. Zelensky’s government has
taken legal action against Giuliani’s Ukrainian associates. And they have
opened up to the media about the pressure campaign mounted by Trump and his
allies. On Feb. 3, Novikov sent TIME a transcript of the Giuliani call, whose
accuracy TIME has independently verified.
Giuliani
did not respond to a detailed list of questions about the transcript of his
call with the Ukrainian officials, the Ukrainian support for his disbarment and
the federal investigation.
In a series
of interviews, Zelensky’s advisers say their motives are not to get even with
Giuliani or merely clarify the historical record. Their goal is to rebuild
relations with the U.S. now that President Joe Biden has taken office. “The
past is the past,” Zelensky told TIME in a statement on Feb. 4. “I care deeply
about the future of our relationship with the United States, so I want to focus
on that.”
The
Ukrainian moves highlight the raft of fresh threats to Trump and his associates
now that he has left office. Under the Constitution, impeachment by the House
and a conviction by the Senate are the remedies for presidential misconduct.
Trump is now likely to escape conviction for the second time. Yet his critics
don’t have to rely on Congress to punish Trump and his allies. They are finding
ways to do it themselves: through libel lawsuits, criminal investigations,
pressure to ban his social media accounts and other means.
The costs
are mounting for Giuliani and his associates, especially the Russian agents and
Ukrainian politicians who aided his crusade to get Trump re-elected in 2020. In
the final days of Trump’s term, the U.S. government sanctioned seven of these
men—all Ukrainian citizens—for being part of a “Russia-linked foreign influence
network” that promoted Giuliani’s spurious claims against the Bidens.
Zelensky’s
government has launched its own counter-offensive against Giuliani and his
enablers in Ukraine. It moved to shut down several Ukrainian media outlets that
broadcast unsubstantiated claims of corruption against the Biden family, which
Giuliani spent more than a year trying to prove and publicize. One of the
Ukrainian lawmakers who helped him, Oleksandr Dubinsky, was kicked out of
Zelensky’s political party on Feb. 1.
Potentially
more worrying for Giuliani is the Ukrainian support for the investigations he
is reportedly facing in New York. Novikov tells TIME that he is providing
assistance to a legal campaign to revoke Giuliani’s law license. Novikov is
also open to helping the investigation that the former New York City mayor is
reportedly facing in the Southern District of New York, the same office where
Giuliani made his name as a prosecutor in the 1980s.
“If I get
an official request from SDNY or any other non-partisan effort, such as
potential disbarment of Rudy Giuliani, I would be open to helping them,” says
Novikov, who left government in August but remains close to Zelensky’s
administration. “That is because I believe Mayor Giuliani’s actions in Ukraine
threatened our national security,” he adds. “It is our responsibility to make
sure that any effort to drag our country into our allies’ domestic politics
does not go unpunished.”
Initiated
in 2019, the SDNY investigation has reportedly focused on Giuliani’s alleged
lobbying on behalf of Ukrainian politicians, as well as business deals that his
associates pursued in the country’s energy sector. A spokesman for the Southern
District declined to comment on the status of the probe, though an NBC News
report indicated that it is ongoing as of December. At least two Ukrainian
officials have told TIME that they already discussed Giuliani with SDNY
investigators. “It was weird,” says one, describing a visit in 2019 to their
Manhattan offices, which Giuliani led before becoming mayor of New York City.
“There I am to give testimony against Giuliani, and [hanging on the wall]
they’ve got these pictures of him shaking hands with people.”
Giuliani
has long insisted that there is no grounds for SDNY to investigate him. After
NBC News reported in December that prosecutors are seeking access to his
communications, Giuliani tweeted, “They want to seize my emails. No reason[.]
No wrongdoing.” On his video blog and other outlets, the former mayor has also
defended his ethical standards. “I’m not stupid,” he said on his radio show
Jan. 14. “I don’t want to get in trouble. And I have a high sense of ethics,
personally. I hate it when people attack my integrity.”
In the
phone call with Zelensky’s aides in 2019, Giuliani was careful to avoid
explicitly asking for a favor, according to the transcript. “I have no interest
in anybody not telling the truth or exaggerating. It isn’t about political
favor,” Giuliani said on the call. He also seemed keenly aware of the dilemma
he was creating for the Ukrainians, and how it might make them feel. “You
shouldn’t feel terrible,” he said. “All we need from the President is to say,
‘I’m putting an honest prosecutor [on these investigations], and he will dig up
the evidence that presently exists.’”
But from
Ukraine’s perspective, the call put the Zelensky government in a perilous
position. “That first phone call left me in a state of shock,” says Novikov,
who participated in the call along with Andriy Yermak, then a top adviser to
Zelensky and currently his chief of staff. “After we hung up the phone, without
a shadow of a doubt I knew that we were in grave danger.”
Three days
after that conversation, Trump held a phone call with Zelensky that would
become Exhibit A in his first impeachment inquiry. He used the call to make
some of the same requests of the Ukrainians that his lawyer made earlier that
week. Trump famously asked Zelensky to “do us a favor” by opening
investigations related to Biden and his son Hunter, who had served on the board
of a Ukrainian gas company.
At the dawn
of the Biden administration, Zelensky and his top aides have embarked on a
mini-media tour to discuss some of these events. During an interview with Axios
broadcast on Jan. 31, Zelensky was asked whether he felt “a little bit angry”
at Trump. The Ukrainian leader laughed and responded, “A little bit?” The day
before that interview aired, details of Giuliani’s first phone call with
Zelensky’s aides appeared in the Washington Post, which cited Novikov’s notes
from the conversation.
Trump
ordered a freeze on some $400 million in aid to Ukraine in the summer of 2019.
After learning of the move, Zelensky and his aides prepared to announce the
investigations that Trump and Giuliani wanted. But before they went through
with it, a complaint from a whistleblower inside the White House exposed
Giuliani’s pressure campaign, and Trump agreed to release the aid to Ukraine.
Looking
back on those events, Zelensky’s advisers still wonder what the fallout would
have been if those investigations of the Biden family had been opened. “The
consequences could have been catastrophic,” says Yermak, the chief of staff to
Ukraine’s president. “I think we avoided domestic American politics,” he tells
TIME. “At least that was our mission all along.”
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