President Trump’s mistrust of Ukraine was fueled by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his ally Viktor Orban of Hungary, strongmen who both harbor anti-Ukraine views that they eagerly shared with a receptive commander-in-chief, according to multiple reports.
The president, according to sources familiar with testimony in the House impeachment investigation, believes that the US’s Eastern European ally, not Russia, was responsible for the interference in the 2016 election that was later investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller.
The US intelligence community, as well as Mueller’s probe, established that Russian hackers at Putin’s direction meddled in the election to help Trump, who nonetheless has publicly called for Ukraine to investigate the 2016 campaign.
One career State Department official, George Kent, told lawmakers that Putin and Orban had teamed up to sour Trump’s attitude toward Ukraine.
Russia and Ukraine have been foes since Putin’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, as Kiev tries to align with the West, while Putin and Orban grow closer.
“President Trump was skeptical” of Ukraine, said Gordon Sondland, US ambassador to the EU, according to his written remarks.
Sondland said that only later did he understand that Trump, by connecting the Ukrainians with his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, was interested in probing the 2016 election as well as the family of his potential 2020 rival, Joe Biden.
“It was apparent to all of us that the key to changing President Trump’s mind on Ukraine was Mr. Giuliani,” he said.
Sondland, special envoy Kurt Volker and other witnesses have described Trump as suspicious of Ukraine despite well-established American support for the fledgling democracy there.
In a phone call with Trump in early May, Putin “did what he always does” in trying to undercut the US’s relationship with Ukraine, a former US official familiar with details of the conversation told the Washington Post, which first reported the story. “[Putin] has always said Ukraine is just a den of corruption.”
Trump also met with Orban at the White House between President Volodymyr Zelensky’s April 21 election and his May 20 inauguration.
The president also spoke with Putin on June 28, during a summit in Japan, and by phone on July 31, days after the July call in which he solicited a “favor” from Zelensky, which prompted the House’s impeachment effort, the paper reported.
Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney last week confirmed that Trump had ordered military aid to Ukraine suspended in part to compel Kiev to investigate the unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that a hacked Democratic National Committee computer server was taken to Ukraine in 2016 to hide evidence that it was actually Ukraine that meddled in the presidential election.
And at the White House last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi angered Trump by asserting: “With you, all roads lead to Putin.”
On Tuesday, Trump derided the impeachment probe as a “lynching,” insisting that he did nothing wrong in his phone call with Zelensky, which he called “perfect.”
During the call, Trump asked for an investigation not only of Joe Biden and his son Hunter, but also of the DNC’s server.
“Our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it,” Trump told Zelensky, according to a rough transcript of the call released by the White House.
“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike,” Trump said. “The server, they say Ukraine has it.”
The paper said there was no indication that either Putin or Orban mentioned either Biden during their conversations with the president.
CrowdStrike determined in June 2016 that Russian agents had broken into the committee’s network and stolen emails that were subsequently published by WikiLeaks.
The White House did not immediately respond Tuesday to a request for comment from The Post.
With wires