Giuliani pushed for visa for booted Ukrainian official
Top prosecutor was denied paperwork due to corruption
President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, pressed the Trump administration to grant a visa to a former Ukrainian official who had been removed from his job because of concerns he was not aggressively pursuing corruption cases.
But senior State Department officials denied the visa for Viktor Shokin, who had been booted as Ukraine’s top prosecutor in 2016 following pressure from the West, including from then-Vice President Joe Biden, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union, according to four U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
His visa was denied on corruption grounds, officials said.
Giuliani requested the visa around January this year, according to the testimony of George Kent, a career diplomat interviewed behind closed doors last week by three House committees conducting an impeachment inquiry into Trump over his dealings with Ukraine, said one of the officials.
“One of the significant aspects of this was there was no debate about this anywhere in the Trump administration,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe a closed session. “Because it came from Giuliani you can imagine it wasn’t just the desk officer making the decision.”
Indeed, a second official said, the decision to reject the visa was made by “the political leadership” of the State Department. Giuliani appealed to the White House but the denial was not reversed, Kent said, according to officials.
An attorney for Kent declined to comment.
The visa rejection was first reported by CNN on Friday evening.
Giuliani told The Washington Post on Friday he was really upset that Shokin couldn’t get a visa but declined to say whether he had anything to do with the effort. “He had people helping him,” he said. “I’m not going to tell you more than that.”
The revelation is but the latest reflection of how Giuliani has sought to operate a shadow foreign policy from outside the government, attempting to sideline traditional policymakers — including political appointees — to achieve political goals favorable to the president.
Giuliani has figured prominently in a campaign to pressure Ukraine’s new president, Volodomyr Zelenskiy, to take actions that would undermine Biden, a potential political rival of Trump in 2020. Those include an effort, revealed by a whistleblower in a complaint made public last month, by Trump in a July phone call to cajole Zelenskiy to reopen a dormant investigation into a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, on whose board Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, once sat.
Shokin has aided Giuliani’s effort, alleging in an affidavit last month that the reason he was removed as prosecutor general — and why Biden wanted him gone — was that he was investigating Burisma for corruption.
In fact, U.S. and European officials have said that the investigation into Burisma was dormant at the time of his firing and that Shokin was generally not pursuing corruption aggressively and needed to be removed.
Giuliani also has sought the removal of U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who was recalled in May before her tour was over. Her ouster outraged many at the State Department, and Yovanovitch, who is on leave at Georgetown, testified two weeks ago that her departure came as a direct result of pressure Trump placed on the State Department.
In an interview in late September, a Giuliani associate, Lev Parnas, said he had helped connect Giuliani to Shokin late last year, after learning that Giuliani was interested in Ukraine. Parnas was arrested last week along with a business partner, Igor Fruman, and charged with campaign finance violations.