Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky was worried about how to deal with pressure from the Trump administration to investigate Joe Biden in early May — about two weeks before he was inaugurated, a new report said Wednesday.
Zelensky had gathered a small group of advisers on May 7 in Kiev for a meeting that was supposed to be about his nation’s energy needs.
Instead, the group spent most of the three-hour discussion talking about how to navigate President Trump’s and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s calls for a probe into Biden, The Associated Press reported, citing a trio of sources familiar with the details of the meeting.
The meeting came about two weeks after Trump called to offer his congratulations on the night of the Ukrainian leader’s April 21 election.
The full details of what the two leaders discussed in that Easter Sunday phone call have never been publicly disclosed, and it is not clear whether Trump asked for an investigation of the Bidens.
The sources’ memories differ on whether Zelensky specifically cited that first call with Trump as the source of his unease.
But their accounts all show the Ukrainian president-elect was wary of Trump’s push for an investigation into the former vice president and his son Hunter’s business dealings with Burisma Holdings, an energy giant in Ukraine.
Either way, the newly elected leader of a country wedged between Russia and the US-aligned NATO democracies knew early on that vital military support might depend on whether he was willing to choose a side in an American political tussle.
A former comedian who won office on promises to clean up corruption, Zelensky’s first major foreign policy test came not from his enemy Russia, but rather from the country’s most important ally, the US.
The May 7 meeting included two of his top aides, Andriy Yermak and Andriy Bohdan, the sources said.
Also in the room was Andriy Kobolyev, head of the state-owned natural gas company Naftogaz, and Amos Hochstein, an American who sits on the Ukrainian company’s supervisory board.
Hochstein is a former diplomat who advised Biden on Ukraine matters during the Obama administration.
Zelensky’s office in Kiev did not respond to messages on Wednesday seeking comment.
The White House would not comment on whether Trump demanded an investigation in the April 21 call.
The White House has offered only a short public readout on the April call, saying Trump urged Zelensky and the Ukrainian people to implement reforms, increase prosperity and “root out corruption.”
In the intervening months, Trump and his supporters have frequently used the word “corruption” to reference the months-long efforts to get the Ukrainians to investigate Democrats.
Trump has said he would release a transcript of the first call, but the White House had no comment Wednesday on when, or if, that might happen, AP reported.
After news broke that a White House whistleblower had filed a complaint about his July 25 call with Zelensky, Trump said the conversation was “perfect” and that he had asked his Ukrainian counterpart to do “whatever he can in terms of corruption because the corruption is massive.”
During the call, Trump asked Zelensky for “a favor” and then told him he should investigate Biden and his son.
Trump then advised Zelensky that Giuliani and Attorney General Bill Barr would be contacting him about the request, according to a summary of the called released by the White House.
Within days, Giuliani flew to Madrid to meet privately with Yermak, Zelenskiy’s aide who was in the May 7 meeting.
Trump has denied that an investigation of Biden was a condition for releasing military aid as a quid pro quo, and the nearly $400 million in aid was released on Sept. 11.
But on Tuesday, the senior US diplomat in Ukraine at the time, Ambassador William Taylor, contradicted the president, saying that Trump had demanded that everything Zelensky wanted, including the aid and a White House meeting, was conditional on a public vow that he would open an investigation into the Bidens and the 2016 election.
The president reportedly believes in an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that it was Ukraine and not Russia that meddled in the 2016 election.
Taylor also detailed multiple previously undisclosed diplomatic interactions between Trump’s envoys and senior Ukrainian officials in which the president’s demand to investigate the Bidens in exchange for American aid was clear.
In a joint Sept. 25 news conference with Trump at the UN, Zelensky denied he felt pressured to investigate the Bidens.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be involved, to democratic, open elections of USA,” the Ukrainian leader said.
“We had, I think, good phone call. It was normal. We spoke about many things, and I think, and you read it, that nobody push it. Push me.”
Trump added: “In other words, no pressure.”
Before Zelensky was elected, however, a public campaign to initiate investigations into the Bidens was already underway.
One day before Zelensky’s May 7 meeting with his advisers, the State Department on Trump’s orders recalled Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, a career diplomat with a reputation for combating corruption.
Yovanovitch had been the target of a sustained yearlong campaign by Giuliani and his associates, who wanted her gone.
Meanwhile, The New York Times reported Wednesday that Ukrainian officials knew the military aid was being withheld in early August, not a month later, as the White House had contended.
