Former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort started feeding conspiracy theories to Team Trump about Ukraine's supposed interference in the election during the summer of 2016. In newly released testimony from the Mueller report, Manafort deputy Rick Gates testified that his former boss started spewing that baseless theory with Gates and other Trump campaign aides just before the election. Gates also said the narrative mirrored one that had been promoted by Manafort employee Konstantin Kilimnik who had ties to Russian intelligence, according to the FBI.
But whatever kind of nonsense had gotten into Trump’s head by the time he assumed office, it was clear that he had soured on Ukraine and held an unshakeable negative view of the country, according to Trump's close aides at the time. Trump's antipathy for Ukraine forced then-President Petro Poroshenko to do double back flips in order to get any of the assistance the country badly needed from the U.S. in order to maintain its battle against Russian-backed separatists on its eastern border. According to the New York Times, Poroshenko's charm offensive involved taking meetings with Rudy Giuliani, offering up incentives like trade deals that politically benefitted Trump, and halting Ukrainian investigations into Trump allies.
When Poroshenko needed Trump to approve Javelin missile sales to Ukraine, his prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko suspended a Mueller-related inquiry into millions in dollars of payments to Manafort. Poroshenko's administration also brokered a deal to purchase tens of millions of dollars worth of coal from a Pennsylvania-based company, Xcoal Energy & Resources—the first of three similar deals hammered out by Ukraine with American companies in a move intended to please Trump and his base voters.
These early Ukrainian attempts to woo Trump are now reportedly being investigated by House Democrats as a precursor to Trump's presumptive campaign to pressure Volodymyr Zelensky's nascent administration into opening investigations that could benefit Trump politically. Giuliani's entrance on the scene came fortuitously in 2017 in the weeks following Manafort's October indictment in the U.S. for his political work in Ukraine. During Giuliani’s stay, he met with Lutsenko, who then took control of Ukraine’s Manafort inquiry shortly after his visit with Giuliani. Lutsenko eventually suspended the probe altogether in April 2018, the same month that "the first of 210 Javelins and 35 launching units were shipped to Ukraine," writes the Times.
Lutsenko and Giuliani would later collaborate on advancing the idea of investigating the Bidens.