Parsing Steve Scalise’s attempt to rewrite Trump’s history with Ukraine

You’ll remember that the impeachment centered on Trump’s having withheld military and economic aid to Ukraine as he sought to get then-newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Joe Biden, who Trump presumed would be his 2020 opponent. On Tuesday, Scalise was asked by a reporter if, given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he felt differently about Trump’s actions in 2019.

He did not.

Scalise began by mentioning the conversation between Trump and Zelensky that triggered the impeachment probe in the first place.

“You look at that conversation,” he said, “President Zelensky had called President Trump to thank him for the leadership that he provided. In fact, when Zelensky got elected, he said he modeled his campaign after President Trump’s.”

What’s important about Trump’s relationship with Zelensky, of course, is not however Zelensky thought of Trump as a politician before he got elected but, instead, his interactions with the American president after Zelensky himself took office.

It’s been two years, but it’s useful to remember what happened after Zelensky won. At the time of the impeachment, The Washington Post compiled a lengthy timeline of the effort to get Ukraine to announce an investigation of Biden and his son Hunter, who’d served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma.

In early 2019, a former Ukrainian prosecutor named Viktor Shokin began complaining that he had been fired because he planned to investigate Burisma. There’s no evidence for this; in fact, Shokin was fired for rampant corruption. But because Shokin blamed Biden for his ouster, his claims found traction with Trump’s attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani and with a conservative writer named John Solomon.

In April, Zelensky won election running on an anti-corruption platform. He and Trump have a perfunctory phone conversation in which Zelensky repeatedly asks Trump to either attend his inauguration or to send a high-level representative. His goal is clear: Demonstrate to Russia — which was even then stoking a rebellion in eastern Ukraine — that the United States stood firmly with Ukraine. Trump was noncommittal.

Over the next few months, Giuliani begins trying to get Zelensky to commit to announcing an investigation into Biden, leveraging a small group of diplomats working outside formal diplomatic channels. An associate of Giuliani’s says that he told Zelensky’s team that they needed to announce an investigation or Vice President Mike Pence would not attend Zelensky’s inauguration. There was no announcement; Pence was swapped for Energy Secretary Rick Perry. Zelensky then transitions to seeking a meeting in the Oval Office.

In June, the Defense Department announced a round of military aid to Ukraine approved by Congress. The next day, Trump begins inquiring about it. By early July, it’s put on hold. A week later, a meeting between Zelensky’s team and Trump officials at the White House goes sideways as one of Trump’s shadow diplomacy effort demands a probe before any Trump-Zelensky meeting.

A phone call is scheduled for late July. In the days and hours prior, Trump’s allies communicate to Zelensky’s team that he needs to commit to a Biden probe to get a White House meeting.

Trump and Zelensky get on the phone — a call not predicated on Zelensky “calling to thank” Trump, despite Scalise’s current representation. Instead, Zelensky asks for military aid, with Trump infamously replying that he’d “like you to do us a favor though.”

At another point, Zelensky does exactly as instructed, tying a D.C. visit to the promise of an investigation.

“I also wanted to thank you for your invitation to visit the United States, specifically Washington, D.C.,” Zelensky said. “On the other hand, I also want to ensure you that we will be very serious about the case and will work on the investigation.”

This was not a friendly call. This was the president of Ukraine, desperate to have a public demonstration of America’s support given the looming Russian threat, doing what he was told needed to be done to get that demonstration.

“Ultimately, he got the relief money that he was asking for,” Scalise continued on Tuesday. “If you go back to when Joe Biden was vice president, he bragged about how he withheld a billion dollars in aid to Ukraine, when Joe Biden was vice president, because he said he wanted a prosecutor to get fired, who ultimately from reports we saw was fired.”

The fired prosecutor was Shokin. In 2016, Biden, then vice president, announced that the United States would withhold loan guarantees from Ukraine if Shokin was retained — part of a broader international effort to force change in the prosecutor’s office. Shokin was subsequently fired.

What Scalise is doing, though is trying to equate Trump withholding aid to Ukraine with Biden threatening to do so. The difference — as was both established and litigated back in 2019 — is that Trump was withholding aid to get something of personal benefit to himself while Biden was threatening to do so in order to effect change benefiting Ukraine. To think Biden was trying to see benefit for himself is to accept Shokin’s repeatedly debunked insistences that he was an innocent victim poised to upend Burisma — in other words, to accept unsubstantiated claims from someone with a reason to try to attack Biden.

More important is Scalise’s quick “he got the relief money that he was asking for.” Yes, Zelensky did eventually get the military and economic aid that was withheld — but only after the effort to leverage it to aid Trump’s 2020 campaign was revealed. By early September, The Washington Post revealed that there was a plan to extort Zelensky, leveraging aid to Ukraine. In the same period, a whistleblower complaint documenting the effort became widely known. On Sept. 11, 2019, only after all of this became public, the aid was released.

“President Trump stood with President Zelensky, and in fact, the two of them had a really good relationship,” Scalise said, concluding his revisionism. “And when President Zelensky was asking for things like Javelin missiles that the Biden and Obama administration said no to, President Trump said yes and actually helped Ukraine get those tank-busting missiles that they needed and frankly, they’ve been using.”

There is not much evidence that Trump and Zelensky had a good relationship. They met only once, at a United Nations event in New York as the scandal was blowing up. The body language between the two did not suggest much comity. Nor did Zelensky ever get his Oval Office meeting.

It is true that Trump approved the sale of Javelin antitank missiles to Ukraine in December 2017, something that hadn’t been done under President Barack Obama. As Foreign Policy later reported, though, the approval came only after staffers overcame Trump’s reticence. The clinching argument? It would be good for the defense industry.

But Scalise again leaves out a salient aspect of the provision of Javelin missiles to Ukraine.

“We are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps,” Zelensky said in his July 29, 2019, call with Trump — “specifically we are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes.”

“I would like you to do us a favor though,” Trump replied.