The July 25 call between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has often been described as a call in which Trump congratulated the new president on his election. It wasn’t. Because Trump made that congratulatory call all the way back on April 21, on the night of Zelensky’s election. And following that call, the incoming Ukrainian leader came away convinced of one thing: Trump was applying pressure to open an investigation into Joe Biden.
Just as it did with the later call, the White House did not make a transcript available of the April 21 call to Zelensky. However, the call was noted and described as one in which Trump urged Zelensky to “root out corruption.” Back in April, it might not have been clear to Americans reading the brief release from the White House what exactly Trump had said to the incoming Ukrainian leader. But on the other side of the world, the message was clear.
The Associated Press is reporting that, as early as May 7, Zelensky gathered his staff to tell them that Trump was pressing for an investigation into Biden. That pressure had come in the form of both the April phone call and messages being passed along to Ukrainian officials by Trump’s agent in the field, Rudy Giuliani. Both men were delivering the message that the U.S. relationship with Ukraine depended on Zelensky announcing an investigation into Burisma, the company where Biden’s son had been on the board, as well as investigations into conspiracy theories connected with the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.
Zelensky understood what Trump was demanding. He also understood just what a trap it created. Opening an investigation into Biden for no reason other than that Trump wanted it meant interfering full-on in the 2020 U.S. election. On the other hand, he knew that if he didn’t please Trump, he was unlikely to receive the aid he needed to face Russian forces moving into Ukraine’s Donbass region. Zelensky was already desperately searching for a position by which he could secure Trump’s favor without having to take a step that implicated his country in attempting to influence the election.
So at that May 7 meeting in Kyiv, Zelensky spent three hours trying to navigate how to deal with Trump and Giuliani. It’s not known what Zelensky decided or where his assistants may have turned for help at the end of those three hours. But one day after the meeting, the State Department recalled U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.
The conspiracy theories concerning Biden and Ukraine may not have hit the front page of The New York Times until May 1, but they had already been circulating in right-wing media outlets for months. In fact, Giuliani had already been on the case since early 2018, and his successful kneecapping of Yovanovitch came at the end of a year-long effort of feeding rumors of her disloyalty to Trump and folders of propaganda to Mike Pompeo.
The reason Giuliani and his now-jailed “associates” were so interested in smearing Yovanovitch is that they saw her as a way-too-lawful roadblock to their campaign of soliciting favors from the Ukrainian government. Giuliani had made himself the face of a public campaign, in both Ukraine and the United States, seeking the announcement of an investigation into the Bidens. The story that the Times ran on May 1, with it’s unsupported claims about Biden and the false claims that a new investigation was already underway, was not new to alt-right media. Those claims, along with the seriously bizarre conspiracy theories about Ukraine’s involvement in the theft of information from both the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s email server, were already in heavy rotation in the alt-right.
Trump has previously defended his April call to Zelensky and declared that a transcript would be released. But the White House has not yet produced that transcript.
But the idea that Trump wasn’t explicitly requesting an investigation to harm Joe Biden, or that the Ukrainians were unaware of what he was after, is not only false—it was false even before Zelensky was elected.