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What the Ukraine scandal looked like on 28 October 2019
Summary
A look back at the evidence and court filings that had accumulated by 28 October 2019 in the dispute linking US military aid to Ukraine with investigations.
What did the public know about the Trump–Ukraine affair by 28 October 2019? Two developments from the preceding week set the picture.
On 22 October 2019, William B. Taylor Jr., the acting US Ambassador to Ukraine, testified before Congress as part of the impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump. He said he had been told that the US President would withhold military aid to Ukraine until the country publicly declared that investigations would be launched. One concerned Burisma Holdings, a company that had hired Hunter Biden, son of former Vice President Joe Biden. The other concerned Ukraine's alleged involvement in the 2016 US presidential election. According to that account, the aim was to help Trump's reelection chances.
On 23 October 2019, a second strand surfaced in a New York City court. Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two associates of Rudy Giuliani, the President's personal lawyer, pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors alleged that they had funnelled $350,000 in illegal donations to a pro-Trump political committee and another $20,000 to former Republican Congressman Pete Sessions, while acting on behalf of at least one Ukrainian government official. Giuliani had been seeking damaging information in Ukraine on Trump's political opponents, and the two men had aided that search.
Why it mattered in Kyiv
Later accounts described the affair as an effort to pressure Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to investigate Joe Biden, with a congressionally mandated $400 million military aid package blocked in an attempt to secure cooperation. Those accounts trace contacts between the White House and Ukraine to a phone call between Trump and Zelenskyy on 25 July 2019.
By 28 October 2019, then, the inquiry rested on sworn testimony about conditional aid, while a separate criminal case examined money and intermediaries around Giuliani. Both threads put Ukraine at the centre of a US domestic political dispute.
