The first phone call

[F]or President Trump, Ukraine has been an obsession since the 2016 campaign.

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Mr. Trump fretted and fulminated about the former Soviet state, angry over what he sees as Ukraine’s role in the origins of the investigations into Russian influence on his 2016 campaign.

His fixation was only intensified by his hope that he could employ the Ukrainian government to undermine his most prominent potential Democratic rival in 2020, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

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And Mr. Trump has put the powers of his office behind his agenda: He has dispatched Vice President Mike Pence and top administration officials with thinly veiled messages about heeding his demands about confronting corruption, which Ukrainian and former American officials say is understood as code for the Bidens and Ukrainians who released damaging information about the Trump campaign in 2016.

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When Ukraine elected its new leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, on April 21, Mr. Trump seized on the moment as an opportunity to press his case. Within hours of Mr. Zelensky’s victory, Mr. Trump placed a congratulatory call as he was en route from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida to Washington.

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He urged Mr. Zelensky to coordinate with Mr. Giuliani and to pursue investigations of “corruption,” according to people familiar with the call, the details of which have not previously been reported.

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Four days after that call, Mr. Trump said on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program that he “would imagine” that Attorney General William P. Barr would like to review information about Ukraine’s actions in the 2016 election.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department said that the official named to review the origins of the counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Trump’s campaign, John H. Durham, is looking into the role of Ukraine, among other countries.

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When the American delegation dispatched to Mr. Zelensky’s inauguration — including Energy Secretary Rick Perry — reported back favorably in May about the new leader, Mr. Trump was dismissive. “They’re terrible people,” he said of Ukrainian politicians, according to people familiar with the meeting. “They’re all corrupt and they tried to take me down.”

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Asked at his appearance with Mr. Zelensky if he believed that Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails are on a server spirited into Ukraine — an element of an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory circulating on the far right — Mr. Trump replied, “Yeah, I think they could very well — boy, that was a nice question.”

  NYT

That means planted, doesn't it?

Trump’s focus on Ukraine started after a law enforcement organization, the National Anticorruption Bureau of Ukraine, released damaging information about cash payments earmarked to his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, by the Russia-aligned political party of Ukraine’s ousted former president.

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The issue continued to fester with Mr. Trump. He tweeted six months after his inauguration about “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump campaign” and to “boost Clinton,” and asked, “where is the investigation?”

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With Mr. Trump’s blessing, Mr. Giuliani has worked for months with current and former Ukrainian prosecutors to seek information and push for investigations into matters that he admitted would be of political benefit to Mr. Trump.

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Mr. Giuliani’s work set the stage for the April call, Mr. Trump’s first contact with Mr. Zelensky, a former comedian and political neophyte. Mr. Zelensky is seen by the West as a reformer elected with a mandate to take a hard line against both Russian aggression and the political corruption that has long plagued his country.

The White House released a summary — but not a full transcript — of the April call, noting that Mr. Trump pledged to work with the new administration “to implement reforms that strengthen democracy, increase prosperity and root out corruption.”

Mr. Giuliani planned to travel to Kiev in May to try to meet with Mr. Zelensky to urge him to pursue the corruption investigations of interest to Mr. Trump, telling The New York Times, which revealed his efforts and the planned trip, that he had the full support of Mr. Trump.

Ukrainian officials blocked his efforts to arrange a meeting with Mr. Zelensky, and Mr. Giuliani canceled the trip at the last minute amid a backlash.

Instead, Mr. Giuliani said he conveyed his information to an aide to Mr. Zelensky in a late July phone call, followed by an Aug. 1 meeting in Madrid. [...] The meeting was arranged with the knowledge and cooperation of the State Department, and Mr. Giuliani said he briefed the department afterward.

As Mr. Giuliani was pressing for discussions with Ukrainian officials, the American ambassador to Ukraine was recalled in May, two months before her term was to expire, amid growing attacks from conservatives in the United States who saw her as insufficiently supportive of Mr. Trump — an early public sign of American foreign policy being intertwined with Mr. Trump’s political priorities.

And even though the Defense Department certified in a letter to Congress in May that Ukraine was making sufficient progress in fighting corruption to justify the release of $125 million in military assistance, Mr. Trump subsequently froze that aid and more — not releasing it until this month, under pressure from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers.

And, more importantly, because of the leak of the whistleblower complaint.

In the weeks leading up to the call, Mr. Zelensky had taken steps toward removing Yuriy Lutsenko, the country’s top prosecutor, with whom Mr. Giuliani had been working to gather information about, and push investigations into, the Bidens and the Manafort documents.

Two days before the call, Mr. Zelensky had floated the name of a successor to Mr. Lutsenko. Mr. Giuliani saw the move to replace Mr. Lutsenko as a threat to the investigations for which he was pushing, and the account of the July 25 call released by the White House suggests that Mr. Trump concurred.

“I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Zelensky, in what people familiar with the conversation said was a reference to Mr. Lutsenko.

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In fact, Mr. Lutsenko was widely criticized in Ukraine as corrupt.