While the U.S. impeachment inquiry failed to gather the votes necessary to remove President Donald Trump from office, the so-called UkraineGate saga has entered a disconcerting new chapter.
The good news is that there may still be hope that the major players in this saga will be brought to justice.
Immediately after the Senate vote on Feb. 5, which saw Republicans – with the exception of Mitt Romney – uniformly support acquitting the president, Trump began a campaign of revenge against officials who disclosed the nature of his administration’s machinations in Ukraine.
First came the purge of witnesses who testified in the impeachment inquiry. It began with the Feb. 7 firing of Alexander Vindman, a lieutenant colonel and Ukrainian immigrant whose testimony offered an emotional justification for backing Ukraine’s military defense against Russia. Next, Gordon Sondland, the one-time Trump loyalist appointed U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, was fired later that day.
Then, on Feb. 9, Sen. Lindsay Graham told CBS reporters that federal prosecutors had created channels for Rudy Giuliani to pass information he collected in Ukraine to the Justice Department, giving what was an illegitimate pressure campaign a new degree of official status. Attorney General William Barr confirmed Graham’s statement the following day.
After this announcement, David Laufman, the Justice Department’s former chief of counterintelligence, tweeted that, there’s “nothing normal about the Attorney General creating a special ‘intake process in the field’ for info relating to claims advancing a White House political narrative – particularly for someone reportedly under criminal investigation.”
Outside the charged political machinations of the executive branch – federal prosecutors included – America’s justice system is pushing ahead with investigations of malfeasance by Trump’s associates. There are already several strong cases against the major players in the Ukraine pressure campaign, including Giuliani.
U.S. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are reportedly investigating Giuliani for campaign finance violations related to his lobbying in Ukraine and for failure to register as a foreign agent.
And there remains the related case against Giuliani associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. They were arrested in October for violating foreign donor bans: They tried to use donations to American politicians, including a Trump-affiliated PAC, to build support for the campaign to discredit Joe Biden and remove U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch from office. Their trial date will be Oct. 5, 2020, less than a month before the U.S. presidential election.
Yet Trump has already begun to use the impeachment “witch hunt” as a rallying cry for his supporters. At his first post-acquittal rally in New Hampshire on Feb. 11, Trump derided Democrats for failing to remove him from office, basking in his “full, complete and absolute and total acquittal.”
History is written by the victors, as the saying goes. In this case, the ultimate judge will be the American public, whose decision in that election will be the final referendum on Trump and his actions in Ukraine.
