Case 1 19-cv-01333-ABJ Document 16-1 Filed 10 01 19 Page 1 of 10 EXHIBIT A Plaintiffs' Motion for a Temporary Restraining Order Case 1 19-cv-01333-ABJ Document 16-1 Filed 10 01 19 Page 2 of 10 UNCLASSIFIED August 12 2019 The Honorable Richard Burr Chairman Select Committee on Intelligence United States Senate The Honorable Adam Schiff Chairman Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence United States House of Representatives Dear Chairman Burr and Chairman Schiff I am reporting an urgent concern in accordance with the procedures outlined in 50 U S C 3033 k 5 A This letter is UNCLASSIFIED when separated from the attachment In the course of my official duties I have received information from multiple U S Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U S election This interference includes among other things pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President's main domestic political rivals The President's personal lawyer Mr Rudolph Giuliani is a central figure in this effort Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well o o Over the past four months more than half a dozen U S officials have informed me of various facts related to this effort The information provided herein was relayed to me in the course of official interagency business It is routine for U S officials with responsibility for a particular regional or functional portfolio to share such information with one another in order to inform policymaking and analysis I was not a direct witness to most of the events described However I found my colleagues' accounts of these events to be credible because in almost all cases multiple officials recounted fact patterns that were consistent with one another In addition a variety of information consistent with these private accounts has been reported publicly I am deeply concerned that the actions described below constitute a serious or flagrant problem abuse or violation of law or Executive Order that does not include differences of opinions concerning public policy matters consistent with the definition of an urgent concern in 50 U S C 3033 k 5 G I am therefore fulfilling my duty to report this information through proper legal channels to the relevant authorities o I am also concerned that these actions pose risks to U S national security and undermine the U S Government' s efforts to deter and counter foreign interference in U S elections 1 UN CLASSIFIED Case 1 19-cv-01333-ABJ Document 16-1 Filed 10 01 19 Page 3 of 10 UNCLASSffIED To the best of my knowledge the entirety of this statement is unclassified when separated from the classified enclosure I have endeavored to apply the classification standards outlined in Executive Order EO 13526 and to separate out information that I know or have reason to believe is classified for national security purposes 1 o I If a classification marking is applied retroactively I believe it is incumbent upon the classifying authority to explain why such marking was applied and to which specific information it pertains a The 25 July Presidential phone call Early in the morning of 25 July the President spoke by telephone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy I do not know which side initiated the call This was the first publicly acknowledged call between the two leaders since a brief congratulatory call after Mr Zelenskyy won the presidency on 21 April Multiple White House officials with direct knowledge of the call informed me that after an initial exchange ofpleasantries the President used the remainder of the call to advance his personal interests Namely he sought to pressure the Ukrainian leader to take actions to help the President's 2020 reelection bid According to the White House officials who had direct knowledge of the call the President pressured Mr Zelenskyy to inter alia o o o initiate or continue an investigation 2 into the activities of former Vice President Joseph Eiden and his son Hunter Biden assist in purportedly uncovering that allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U S presidential election originated in Ukraine with a specific request that the Ukrainian leader locate and turn over servers used by the Democratic National Committee DNC and examined by the U S cyber sec ity firm Crowdstrike 3 which initially reported that Russian hackers had penetrated the DNC's networks in 2016 and meet or speak with two people the President named explicitly as his personal envoys on these matters Mr Giuliani and Attorney General Barr to whom the President referred multiple times in tandem 1 Apart from the information in the Enclosure it is my belief that none of the information contained herein meets the definition of classified information outlined in EO 13 526 Part 1 Section 1 1 There is ample open-source information about the efforts I describe below including statements by the President and Mr Giuliani In addition based on my personal observations there is discretion with respect to the classification of private comments by or instructions from the President including his communications with foreign leaders information that is not related to U S foreign policy or national security-such as the information contained in this document when separated from the Enclosure-is generally treated as unclassified I also believe that applying a classification marking to this information would violate EO 13526 Part 1 Section 1 7 which states In no case shall information be classified continue to be maintained as classified or fail to be declassified in order to 1 conceal violations of law inefficiency or administrative error or 2 prevent embarrassment to a person organization or agency 2 It is unclear whether such a Ukrainian investigation exists See Footnote #7 for additional information 3 I do not know why the President associates these servers with Ukraine See for example his comments to Fox News on 20 July And Ukraine Take a look at Ukraine How come the FBI didn't take this server Podesta told them to get out He said get out So how come the FBI didn't take the server from the DNC 2 UNCLASSIFIED Case 1 19-cv-01333-ABJ Document 16-1 Filed 10 01 19 Page 4 of 10 UNCLASSIFIED The President also praised Ukraine's Prosecutor General Mr Yuriy Lutsenko and suggested that Mr Zelenskyy might want to keep him in his position Note Starting in March 2019 Mr Lutsenko made a series of public allegations-many of which he later walked back-about the Biden family's activities in Ukraine Ukrainian officials' purported involvement in the 2016 U S election and the activities of the U S Embassy in Kyiv See Part IV for additional context The White House officials who told me this information were deeply disturbed by what had transpired in the phone call They told me that there was already a discussion ongoing with White House lawyers about how to treat the call because of the likelihood in the officials' retelling that they had witnessed the President abuse his office for personal gain The Ukrainian side was the first to publicly acknowledge the phone call On the evening of 25 July a readout was posted on the website of the Ukrainian President that contained the following line translation from original Russian-language readout o Donald Trump expressed his conviction that the new Ukrainian government wi-11 be able to quickly improve Ukraine's image and complete the investigation of corruption cases that have held back cooperation between Ukraine and the United States Aside from the above-mentioned cases purportedly dealing with the Biden family and the 2016 U S election I was told by White House officials that no other cases were discussed Based on my understanding there were approximately a dozen White House officials who listened to the call-a mixture of policy officials and duty officers in the White House Situation Room as is customary The officials I spoke with told me that participation in the call had not been restricted in advance because everyone expected it would be a routine call with a foreign leader I do not know whether anyone was physically present with the President during the call o o II In addition to White House personnel I was told that a State Department official Mr T Ulrich Brechbuhl also_listened in on the call I was not the only non-White House official to receive a readout of the call Based on my understanding multiple State Department and Intelligence Community officials were also briefed on the contents of the call as outlined above Efforts to restrict access to records related to the call In the days following the phone call I learned from multiple U S officials that senior White House officials had intervened to lock down all records of the phone call especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced-as is customary-by the White House Situation Room This set of actions underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call o white House officials told me that they were directed by WhiteHouse lawyers to remove the electronic transcript from the computer system in which such transcripts are typically stored for coordination finalization and distribution to Cabinet-level officials 3 UNCLASSIFIED Case 1 19-cv-01333-ABJ Document 16-1 Filed 10 01 19 Page 5 of 10 UNCLASSIFIED o Instead the transcript was loaded into a separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature One White House official described this act as an abuse of this electronic system because the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective I do not know whether similar measures were taken to restrict access to other records of the call such as contemporaneous handwritten notes taken by those who listened in III Ongoing concerns On 26 July a day after the call U S Special Representative for Ulaaine Negotiations Kurt Volker visited Kyiv and met with President Zelenskyy and a variety of Ukrainian po litical figures Ambassador Volker was accompanied in his meetings by U S Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sandland Based on multiple readouts of these meetings recounted to me by various U S officials Ambassadors Volker and Sondland reportedly provided advice to the Ukrainian leadership about how to navigate the demands that the President had made of Mr Zelenskyy I also learned from multiple U S officials that on or about 2 August Mr Giuliani reportedly traveled to Madrid to meet with one of President Zelenskyy' s advisers Andriy Yermak The U S officials characterized this meeting which was not reported publicly at the time as a direct follow-up to the President's call with Mr Zelenskyy about the cases they had discussed o o Separately multiple U S officials told me that Mr Giuliani had reportedly privately reached out to a variety of other Zelenskyy advisers including Chief of Staff Andriy Bohdan and Acting Chairman of the Security Service of Ukraine Ivan Bakanov 4 I do not know whether those officials met or spoke with Mr Giuliani but I was told separately-by multiple U S officials that Mr Yermak and lvlr Bakanov intended to travel to Washington in mid-August On 9 August the President told reporters I think President Zelenskyy is going to make a deal with President Putin and he will be invited to the White Ho use And we look forward to seeing him He's already been invited to the White House and he wants to come And I think he will He's a very reasonable guy He wants to see peace in Ukraine and I think he will be coming very soon actually IV Circumstances leading up to the 25 July Presidential phone call Beginning in late March 2019 a series of articles appeared in an online publication called The Hill In these articles several Ukrainian officials-most notably Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko--made a series of allegations against other Ukrainian officials and current and former U S officials Mr Lutsenko and his colleagues alleged inter alia Ina report published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project OCCRP on 22 July two associates of Mr Giuliani reportedly traveled to Kyiv in May 201Q and met with Mr Bakanov and another close Zelenskyy adviser Mr Serhiy Shefir 4 UNCLASSIFIED Case 1 19-cv-01333-ABJ Document 16-1 Filed 10 01 19 Page 6 of 10 UNCLASSIFIED o o o that they possessed evidence that Ukraini n officials-namely Head of the National Anticorruption Bureau of Ukraine Artem Sytnyk and Member of Parliament Serhiy Leshchenko-had interfered in the 2016 U S presidential election allegedly in collaboration with the DNC and the U S Embassy in Kyiv 5 that the U S Embassy in Kyiv-specifically U S Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch who had criticized Mr Lutsenko's organization for its poor record on fighting corruptionhad allegedly obstructed Ukrainian law enforcement agencies' pursuit of corruption cases including by providing a do not prosecute list and had blocked Ukrainian prosecutors from traveling to the United States expressly to prevent them from delivering their evidence about the 2016 U S election 6 and that former Vice President Biden had pressured former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in 2016 to fire then Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shakin in order to quash a purported criminal probe into Burisma Holdings a Ukrainian energy company on whose board the former Vice President's son Hunter sat 7 In several public comments 8 Mr Lutsenko also stated that he wished to communicate directly with Attorney General Barr on these matters 9 The allegations by Mr Lutsenko came on the eve of the first round of Ukraine's presidential election on 31 March By that time Mr Lutsenko's political patron President Poroshenko was trailing Mr Zelenskyy in the polls and appeared likely to be defeated Mr Zelenskyy had made known his desire to replace Mr Lutsenko as Prosecutor General On 21 April Mr Poroshenko lost the runoff to Mr Zelenskyy by a landslide See Enclosure for additional information 5 Mr Sytnyk and fr Leshchenko are two of Mr Lutsenko's main domestic rivals Mr Lutsenko has no legal training and has been widely criticized in Ukraine for politicizing criminal probes and using his tenure as Prosecutor General to protect corrupt Ukrainian officials He has publicly feuded with Nlr Sytnyk who heads Ukraine's only competent anticorruption body and with Mr Leshchenko a former investigative journalist who has repeatedly criticized Mr Lutsenko's record In December 2018 a Ukrainian court upheld a complaint by a Member of Parliament Mr Boryslav Rozenblat who alleged that Mr Sytnyk and Mr Leshchenko had interfered in the 2016 U S election by publicizing a document detailing corrupt payments made by former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych before his ouster in 2014 Mr Rozenblat had originally filed the motion in late 2017 after attempting to flee Ukraine amid an investigation into his taking of a large bribe On 16 July 2019 Mr Leshchenko publicly stated that a Ukrainian court had overturned the lower court's decision 6 Mr Lutsenko later told Ukrainian news outlet The Babel on 17 April that Ambassador Yovanovitch had never provided such a list and that he was in fact the one who requested such a list 7 Mr Lutsenko later told Bloomberg on 16 May that former Vice President Biden and his son were not subject to any current Ukrainian investigations and that he had no evidence against them Other senior Ukrainian officials also contested his original allegations one former senior Ukrainian prosecutor to ld Bloomberg on 7 May that Mr Shokin in fact was not investigating Burisma at the time of his removal in 2016 8 See fo r example Mr Lutsenko's comments to The Hill on 1 and 7 April and his interview with The Babel on 17 April in which he stated that he had spoken with Mr Giuliani about arranging contact with Attorney General Barr 9 In May Attorney General Barr announced that he was initiating a probe into the origins of the Russia investigation According to the above-referenced OCCRP report 22 July two associates of Mr Giuliani claimed to be working with Ukrainian offic ials to uncover information that would become part of this inquiry In an interview with Fox News on 8 August Mr Giuliani claimed that Mr John Durham whom Attorney General Barr designated to lead this probe was spending a lot of time in Europe because he was investigating Ukraine I do not know the extent to which if at all Mr Giuliani is directly coordinating his efforts on Ukraine with Attorney General Barr or Mr Durham 5 UNCLASSIFIED Case 1 19-cv-01333-ABJ Document 16-1 Filed 10 01 19 Page 7 of 10 UNCLASSIFIED o o It was also publicly reported that Mr Giuliani had met on at least two occasions with Mr Lutsenko once in New York in late January and again in Warsaw in mid-February In addition it was publicly reported that Mr Giuliani had spoken in late 2018 to former Prosecutor General Shokin in a Skype call arranged by two associates of Mr Giuliani 10 On 25 April in an interview with Fox News the President called Mr Lutsenko's claims big and incredible and stated that the Attorney General would want to see this On or about 29 April I learned from U S officials with direct knowledge of the situation that Ambassador Yovanovitch had been suddenly recalled to Washington by senior State Department officials for consultations and would most likely be removed from her position o o o Around the same time I also learned from a U S official that associates of Mr Giuliani were trying to make contact with the incoming Zelenskyy team 11 On 6 May the State Department announced that Ambassador Yovanovitch would be ending her assignment in Kyiv as planned However several U S officials told me that in fact her tour - ' as curtailed because of pressure stemming from Mr Lutsenko's allegations Mr Giuliani subsequently stated in an interview with a Ukrainian journalist published on 14 May that Ambassador Yovanovitch was removed because she was part of the efforts against the President On 9 May The New York Times reported that Mr Giuliani planned to travel to Ukraine to press the Ukrainian government to pursue investigations that would help the President in his 2020 reelection bid o o o In his multitude of public statements leading up to and in the wake of the pub ication of this article Mr Giuliani confirmed that he was focused on encouraging Ukrainian authorities to pursue investigations into alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U S election and alleged wrongdoing by the Biden family 12 On the afternoon of l OMay the President stated in an interview with Politico that he planned to speak with Mr Giuliani about the trip A few hours later Mr Giuliani publicly canceled his trip claiming that Mr Zelenskyy was surrounded by enemies of the U S President and of the United States On 11 May Mr Lutsenko met for two hours with President-elect Zelenskyy according to a public account given several days later by Mr Lutsenko Mr Lutsenko publicly stated that he had told Mr Zelenskyy that he wished to remain as Prosecutor General 10 See for example the above-referenced articles in Bloomberg 16 May and OCCRP 22 July I do not know whether these associates of Mr Giuliani were the same individua_ls named in the 22 July report by OCCRP referenced above 12 See for example Mr Giuliani's appearance on Fox News on April and his tweets on 23 April and 10 May In his interview with The New York Times Mr Giuliani stated that the President basically knows what I'm doing sure as his lawyer Mr Giuliani also stated We're not meddling in an election we' re meddling in an investigation which we have a right to do There's nothing illegal about it Somebody could say it's improper And this isn't foreign policy - I'm asking them to do an investigation that they're doing already and that other people are telling them to stop And I' m going to give them reasons why they shouldn't stop it because that information will be very very helpful to my client and may tum out to be helpful to my government 11 6 UNCLASSIFIED Case 1 19-cv-01333-ABJ Document 16-1 Filed 10 01 19 Page 8 of 10 UNCLASSIFIED Starting in mid-May I heard from multiple U S officials that they were deeply concerned by what they viewed as Mr Giuliani's circumvention of national security decisionmaking processes to engage w ith Ukrainian officials and relay messages back and forth between Kyiv and the President These officials also told me o o that State Department officials including Ambassadors Volker and Sandland had spoken with Mr Giuliani in an attempt to contain the damage to U S national security and that Ambassadors Volker and Sandland during this time period met with members of the new Ukrainian administration and in addition to discussing policy matters sought to help Ukrainian leaders understand and respond to the differing messages they were receiving from official U S -ch_a_nnels on1 h-e-orre-hand arrdi'rorn-Mr Giuliani on the other During this same timeframe multiple U S officials told me that the Ukrainian leadership was led to believe that a meeting or phone call between the President and President Zelenskyy would depend on whether Zelenskyy showed willingness to play ball on the issues that had been publicly aired by Mr Lutsenko and Mr Giuliani Note This was the general understanding of the state of affairs as conveyed to me by U S officials from late May into early July I do not know who delivered this message to the Ukrainian leadership or when See Enclosure for additional information Shortly after President Zelenskyy' s inauguration it was publicly reported that Mr Giuliani met with two other Ukrainian officials Ukraine's Special Anticorruption Prosecutor Mr Nazar Kholodnytskyy and a former Ukrainian diplomat named Andriy Telizhenko Both Mr Kholodnytskyy and Mr Telizhenko are allies of Mr Lutsenko and made similar allegations in the above-mentioned series of articles in The Hill On 13 June the President told ABC's George Stephanopoulos that he would accept damaging information on his political rivals from a foreign government On 2 1 June Mr Giuliani tweeted New Pres of Ukraine still silent on investigation of Ukrainian interference in 2016 and alleged Biden bribery of Poroshenko Time for leadership and investigate both if you want to purge how Ukraine was abused by Hillary and Clinton people In mid-July I learned of a sudden change of policy with respect to U S assistance for Ukraine See Enclosure for additional information ENCLOSURE Classified appendix 7 UNCLASSIFIED I Case 1 19-cv-01333-ABJ Document 16-1 Filed 10 01 19 Page 9 of 10 TOPSECRET August 12 2019 U CLASSIFIED APPENDIX U Supplementary classified information is provided as follows U Additional information related to Section II fFS According to multiple White House officials I spoke with the transcript of the President's call with President Zelenskyy was placed into a computer system managed directly by the National Security Council NSC Directorate for Intelligence Programs This is a standalone computer system reserved for codeword-level intelligence information such as covert action According to information I received from White House officials some officials voiced concerns internally that this would be an abuse of the system and was not consistent with the responsibilities of the Directorate for Intelligence Programs According to White House officials I spoke with this was not the first time under this Administration that a Presidential transcript was placed into this codeword-level system solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive-rather than national security sensitive-information U Additional information related to Section IV f - I would like to expand upon two issues mentioned in Section IV that might have a connection with the overall effort to pressure the Ukrainian leac krship As I lo not know definitively whether the below-mentioned decisions are connected to the broader efforts I describe I have chosen to include them in the classified annex If they indeed represent genuine policy deliberations and decisions formulated to advance U S foreign policy and national security one might be able to make a reasonable case that the facts are classified o E 'II I learned from U S officials that on or around 14 May the President instructed Vice President Pence to cancel his planned travel to Ukraine to attend President TOP SECRET Case 1 19-cv-01333-ABJ Document 16-1 Filed 10 01 19 Page 10 of 10 TOP 3ECR E'fi Zelenskyy' s inauguration on 20 May Secretary of Energy Rick Perry led the delegation instead According to these officials it was also made clear to them that the President did not want to meet with Mr Zelenskyy until he saw how Zelenskyy chose to act in office I do not know how this guidance was communicated or by whom I also do not know whether this action was connected with the broader understanding described in the unclassified letter that a meeting or phone call between the President and President Zelenskyy would depend on whether Zelenskyy showed willingness to play ball' ' on the issues that had been publicly aired by Mr Lutsenko and Mr Giuliani o S- On 18 July an Office of Management apd Budget 0MB official informed Departments and Agencies that the President earlier that month had issued instructions to suspend all U S security assistance to Ukraine Neither 0MB nor the NSC staff knew why this instruction had een issued During interagency meetings on 23 July and 26 July 0MB officials again stated explicitly that the instruction to suspend this assistance had come directly from the President but they still were unaware of a policy rationale As of early August I heard from U S officials that some Ukrainian officials were aware that U S aid might be in jeopardy but I do not know how or when they learned of it TOP SECRET This document is from the holdings of The National Security Archive Suite 701 Gelman Library The George Washington University 2130 H Street NW Washington D C 20037 Phone 202 994-7000 Fax 202 994-7005 nsarchiv@gwu edu