Let's Revisit Trump's "Perfect Phone Call"

The "perfect phone call", as Trump himself characterized it, was a heavily monitored 30-minute conversation on July 25, 2019 with current Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky. Zelensky, a political outsider but a well-known media figure like Trump, had defeated the incumbent Petro Poroshenko in a runoff election 73%-24% on April 21 of that year. Thus this call would be a get-acquainted opportunity that would set the tone for ongoing relations between the US and its relatively new client state Ukraine.

As far as I can tell, since the "perfect phone call" has simply faded away in the wake of two Trump impeachments, the 2020 campaign and its continuing controversies, as well as Joe Biden's own scandals, nobody has tried to put that 2019 call in the context of what we now know about developments in Ukraine between 2014 and the call itself. As a result, for instance, Wikipedia still has an entry on the Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory that dismisses the story as

part of efforts by Donald Trump and his campaign in the Trump–Ukraine scandal. . . to damage Joe Biden's reputation and chances during the 2020 presidential campaign.

United States intelligence community analysis released in March 2021 found that proxies of Russian intelligence promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about the Bidens "to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration."

Just like Hunter's laptop, it was Russian disinformation. But again, let's review what we've come to know about the whole course of US-Ukraine relations since the 2000s.

By Obama's second term, neoconservatives in the Deep State, led particularly by then-Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, had developed a strategy of peeling away former Warsaw Pact countries from the Russian sphere of influence, which had reached as far as bringing Ukraine into the Western fold with the eventual goal of EU and even NATO membership. Intriguingly, this was irrespective of political party, even when Obama himself was well known for his hot-mic remark to Dmitry Medvedev,

“This is my last election ... After my election I have more flexibility,” Obama said, expressing confidence that he would win a second term.

“I will transmit this information to Vladimir,” said Medvedev, Putin’s protégé and long considered number two in Moscow’s power structure.

After Obama's greater reelection flexibility or not, Victoria Nuland and her allies at State and the CIA were pedal-to-the-metal with their scheme during 2013 to engineer a coup to remove Ukraine's moderately pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych.

Yanukovych was in a tricky spot. Ukraine relied on cheap gas from Russia, but a plurality of the country — not, crucially, an absolute majority — still wanted European integration. His political career was caught in the same bind: with his party formally allied to Vladimir Putin’s own United Russia party, his pro-Russia base wanted to see closer relations with its neighbor; but the oligarchs who were the real reason he had gotten anywhere near the presidency were financially entangled with the West, and they feared competition to their grip on the country from across the Russian border. All the while, two geopolitical powers in the form of Washington and Moscow hoped to use these cleavages to draw the country into their respective orbits.

Following Yanukovych's ouster, Petro Poroshenko, the US-backed candidate, won a 2014 snap presidential election. According to the same link, dated February 7, 2022, just weeks before the Russian invasion:

Little to nothing has changed about Ukrainian corruption or authoritarianism, under either Poroshenko or current president Volodymyr Zelensky, elected in 2019 as an outsider change agent. Each has governed like an autocrat, using their powers to go after political opponents and weaken dissent, and have been embroiled in personal enrichment scandals that remain endemic to the Ukrainian political class.

Not that it stopped either from being feted by Washington and flooded with American support. In fact, this new imperial patron has only added to these problems, with the current US president’s family being personally embroiled in one of the country’s major corruption scandals, before using his position to install a markedly corrupt prosecutor general.

This would be the pre-invasion, post Zelensky election context in which Trump's "perfect phone call" took place. The first thing to keep in mind about this call is how many members of the Deep State were monitoring it, all of them with their factional and career interests in mind. Most of them, whether they were Trump staffers or not (and most of them weren't), had careers that were tied into the existing interventionist strategies on Ukraine. Estimates of how many were on the call, for instance via speaker in the White House Situation Room, differ, but it must have been dozens. According to NPR,

Other duty officers and policy staff for the White House Situation Room are believed to have monitored the call to help memorialize the conversation in written form as the conversation took place — a standard practice for presidential calls with world leaders. Translators for both leaders are also believed to have participated.

Among those listening in the Situation Room was Alexander Vindman, a US Army lieutenant colonel born in Ukraine who speaks fluent Russian and Ukrainian, and who had been able to parlay this into high-level diplomatic assignments:

Beginning in 2008, Vindman became a Foreign Area Officer specializing in Eurasia. In this capacity he served in the U.S. embassies in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Moscow, Russia. Returning to Washington, D.C. he was then a politico-military affairs officer focused on Russia for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Vindman was on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon from September 2015 to July 2018.

In July 2018, Vindman accepted an assignment with the National Security Council. In his role on the NSC, Vindman became part of the U.S. delegation at the inauguration of Ukraine's newly elected President, Volodymyr Zelensky.

It appears that in this position, he felt entitled to monitor policy discussions for conformance to Deep State orthodoxy, and that included the question of whether the Bidens had been entitled to intervene in Ukrainian affairs by pressuring Poroshenko to fire Victor Shokin.

Here I have a question that won't go away: for good or ill, Shokin's firing by 2019 was three years in the past, under prior presidential administrations in both Ukraine and the US, something that ought to have been a single personnel issue from which everyone should long since have moved on. But not for Vindman. According to the Wikipedia link, in closed-doior testimony to the House, he said

he was concerned by two events, both of which he objected to with senior officials in real time, and which he reported to the National Security Council's lead attorney. The first event occurred at a July 10 meeting between Ukraine's then Secretary of National Security and Defense Council Oleksandr Danylyuk, and then US National Security Advisor John Bolton, at which Ambassadors Volker and Sondland, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry were in attendance, and at which Sondland asked Ukraine to launch investigations into the Bidens in order to get a meeting with President Trump. Vindman states that Bolton cut the meeting short, and that both Vindman and Hill told Ambassador Sondland that his comments were inappropriate and reported their concerns to the NSC's lead counsel.

The second event occurred on a July 25 phone call between Presidents Trump and Zelensky. Vindman states, "I was concerned by the call. I did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen, and I was worried about the implications for the U.S. Government's support of Ukraine. I realized that if Ukraine pursued an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma, it would likely be interpreted as a partisan play which would undoubtedly result in Ukraine losing the bipartisan support it has thus far maintained. This would all undermine U.S. national security." Vindman also stated that he reported his concern to the NSC's lead counsel, John Eisenberg.

Note, by the way, that the cabinet secretary at this meeting was the Secretary of Energy, which we may see in the context that the Deep State envoy to Ukraine in 2014-15 was the energy expert Amos Hochstein, not a general or an anti-corruption cop. That reinforces the agenda role of energy in all this.

But in other words, Vindman, a lieutenant colonel, happened to be in a July 10 meeting that included cabinet-level policymakers, who appear to have been aware of the December 2015 Biden-Hochstein visit to Kyiv that resulted in Shokin's firing. It's reasonable to conclude that those policymakers were also aware of Hunter's and Devon Archer's positions on the Burisma board, as well as the concerns over conflict of interest that had already reached Amos Hochstein and, in Hochstein's account, even reached Joe.

Vindman, a lieutenant colonel, not a policymaker and indeed someone sworn to execute policy made by actual policymakers, was also in on Trump's July 25 "perfect phone call", and in his words, he "was worried about the implications for the U.S. Government's support of Ukraine". A non-policymaker, he didn't like potential policy changes that policymakers seemed to have in mind. Just what those were, he never seems to have made clear.

But let's look at the juxtaposition here.

On the call, Trump was first to speak. He showered the 41-year-old Ukrainian, a novice politician and former comedian, with praise following his party’s victory in parliamentary elections. Zelenskiy chatted about how he wanted to “drain the swamp” in Kyiv and how he wished the European Union would provide more financial support. He told Trump that Ukraine was ready to buy more Javelin anti-tank missiles from the United States.

The next 10 words that came out of Trump’s mouth — “I would like you to do us a favor, though” — are what triggered the House impeachment inquiry that has imperiled his presidency.

Trump asked Zelenskiy to work with Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr to look into Biden and his son, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.

The first thing that occurs to me is that the problem of Hunter's position on the Burisma board and the related issue of Poroshenko's firing Shokin had to have been unspoken general knowledge to most of the policymakers, both US and Ukraine, on the call, however obscure it may have been to the public. Vindman himself, if he was a competent subject area expert, must surely have been aware of it. But -- and let's get back to my earlier point -- this was water under the bridge.

Vindman must presumably have wanted the water to have flowed downstream years ago and stayed there. All of a sudden, Trump, a member of the former opposition and an outsider, was going to review this whole question of Deep State political involvement in Ukraine and indeed how this related to US politics. In fact, Trump, if nothing else, was proposing a deal with newcomer Zelensky not much different from the deal Joe Biden had already made with Poroshenko, except that this new deal simply wasn't the deal that had been made in 2014 and 2015 with Amos Hochstein.

This made Vindman freak out, and he became a "whistleblower", except that he was simply blowing the whistle about a policymaker's interest in examining policies that had begun to strike him as against our interests and might be subject to change.

Another question that won't go away is why Vindman, a US Army lieutenant colonel who should have been outside politics, was so sensitive about the Bidens. Joe Biden as of July 2019 was out of office and had just recently made the decision to run in 2020, having decided not even to try in 2016. He wasn't taken seriously as presidential material at that point. Why was the Deep State so eager to work on Joe's behalf so early in the electoral process? It sounds as though, although Victoria Nuland and Amos Hochstein left the government when Trump assumed office, there were vested interests in resuming US Ukraine policy as it had been under Joe, anmd once Joe came in, they both came right back, with promotions.

Which has brought us where we are. How'd that happen, really?