Giuliani Didn't Go Rogue, State Dept Was Behind Ukraine Meeting: Report
By golly, we’ve got him again!
No, the Mueller report didn’t deliver the goods for an impeachment trial, but thankfully, we’ve got the Ukraine whistleblower. Now we know that the Trump administration wanted to investigate a political opponent and sent Rudy Giuliani to do it. Hot diggity!
Now, granted, the whistleblower wasn’t actually present for the call. Never mind that, though — Giuliani’s decision to meet with representatives of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky proves there was ill intent, right?
Well, not quite. As John Solomon pointed out in an Op-Ed published Friday in The Hill, Giuliani had actually met with the Ukrainian representatives at the behest of the State Department. In other words, he hadn’t just gone rogue to get information on the Bidens.
A veteran investigative journalist, Solomon’s work on the Trump/Russia investigation is a must-read. He was also one of the few journalists looking into the Ukraine angle before the whistleblower scandal erupted, including Hunter Biden’s strange relationship with Burisma and former Vice President Joe Biden’s decision to put pressure on the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor who was looking into the matter.
In his Friday piece, Solomon again tackled the administration’s contacts with the Zelensky government, reporting that “there is a missing part of the story that the American public needs in order to assess what really happened: Giuliani’s contact with Zelensky adviser and attorney Andrei Yermak this summer was encouraged and facilitated by the U.S. State Department.
“Giuliani didn’t initiate it. A senior U.S. diplomat contacted him in July and asked for permission to connect Yermak with him,” Solomon wrote.
“Then, Giuliani met in early August with Yermak on neutral ground — in Spain — before reporting back to State everything that occurred at the meeting.”
When contacted by Solomon, Giuliani confirmed the sequence of events.
“I didn’t even know who he [Yermak] really was, but they vouched for him. They actually urged me to talk to him because they said he seemed like an honest broker,” Giuliani said.
“I reported back to them [the two State officials] what my conversations with Yermak were about. All of this was done at the request of the State Department.”
“So, rather than just a political opposition research operation, Giuliani’s contacts were part of a diplomatic effort by the State Department to grow trust with the new Ukrainian president, Zelensky, a former television comic making his first foray into politics and diplomacy,” Solomon wrote.
Furthermore, he said the contact occurred because Zelensky and those around him were trying to turn over information about American citizens they believed might have broken U.S. law in Ukraine during Barack Obama’s presidency.
These violations involved not only the Hunter Biden kerfuffle but also “efforts by the Democratic National Committee to pressure Ukraine to meddle in the 2016 U.S. election.”
The State Department connection has often been overlooked in reporting about Giuliani’s dealings with the Ukrainians; most stories have seized upon his CNN appearance where he admitted Biden was a topic of conversation and came to the conclusion the president’s lawyer was Michael Cohen part deux.
Take, for instance, a Politico omnibus story on the matter. It managed to cram Giuliani’s appearance on Chris Cuomo’s show, the Democrats’ attempts to have the whistleblower report delivered to Congress and Connecticut Democrat Sen. Chris Murphy’s Twitter claims that he met with Zelensky and that the Ukrainian president was “VERY concerned about the cut off of aid, and VERY aware of the conversations that Rudy Giuliani was having with his team.”
Zelensky did not explicitly connect the two in our meeting, but he was VERY concerned about the cut off of aid, and VERY aware of the conversations that Rudy Giuliani was having with his team. I told him it was best to ignore requests from Trump’s campaign operatives. He agreed.
— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) September 20, 2019
Buried in paragraph 11 of the story was this: “Democrats have noted that within days of Trump’s call to Zelensky, Giuliani met one of the Ukrainian president’s aides in Spain, a meeting that the State Department later said had been facilitated by the American ambassador to Ukraine, Kurt Volker.”
The only reason Politico noted this was to make a connection between the meeting and the fact the Trump administration had held up $250 million in spending for Ukraine shortly afterward.
However, it goes to show that even when the State Department’s role in this is mentioned, people tend to slide over it as if it were wholly unimportant.
Furthermore, Solomon had an explanation for the July meeting that didn’t involve putting pressure on the Ukrainians to spill the beans on Biden.
According to him, when Giuliani was first investigating the Ukrainians in late 2018-early 2019, “Ukrainian officials leaked word that he was considering visiting Ukraine to meet with senior officials to discuss the allegations.” Giuliani called off the trip and stopped talking to his contacts there.
“Since that time, my American and foreign sources tell me, Ukrainian officials worried that the slight of Giuliani might hurt their relations with his most famous client, Trump,” Solomon wrote.
“And Trump himself added to the dynamic by encouraging Ukraine’s leaders to work with Giuliani to surface the evidence of alleged wrongdoing that has been floating around for more than two years, my sources said.
“It is likely that the State Department’s overture to Giuliani in July was designed to allay fears of a diplomatic slight and to assure the nascent Ukrainian administration that everything would be OK between the two allies.”
In his story, Solomon expressed disappointment that “a shallow media effort has failed to capture the whole story and tell it to the American public in its entirety.”
“It’s almost as though the lessons of the now debunked Russia-Trump collusion narrative didn’t really sink in for some reporters. And that is a loss for the American public,” he wrote.
The hazards of throwing the weight of the Democrat-media complex behind an entirely new narrative for impeachment should be apparent to everyone involved. And yet, here we are again in the heady days before Robert Mueller’s report went public. Democrats believe it’s only a matter of time before President Donald Trump is booted out of office.
I don’t pretend to have a crystal ball in this matter. I certainly don’t know where this is going to end. However, for every Democrat who believes they have a slam dunk on their hands here, I would urge them to read Solomon’s report — and then to think back to how this ended the last time.
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