Foiled in U.S. Courts, Anti-Trump Lawyer Got Results Taking Ukraine Cases to Mueller and FBI

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Real Clear Politics

When the FBI began investigating Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman – the indicted pair who worked with Rudy Giuliani on his Ukraine inquiries – one of the first people agents interviewed early last year was Kenneth McCallion. A New York lawyer, former federal prosecutor and onetime Democratic congressional candidate, McCallion doesn’t claim to know Parnas or Fruman, or have any firsthand knowledge of their activities on behalf of President Trump’s personal lawyer. But McCallion told RealClearInvestigations he was a go-to source because of his years spent representing Ukrainian politicians in lawsuits and, more important, because the agents had used him as a source in the biggest probe in recent years: the Trump-Russia investigation.

 

McCallion claims to have informed the feds about shady Ukraine-related dealings by former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort – dealings McCallion had spent years trying and failing to sue Manafort over. When Robert Mueller was named special counsel, McCallion says, he fed that same information to his team. The special counsel never uncovered a conspiracy with Russia, but his probe did lead to Manafort’s conviction in part on the conduct described by McCallion, including bank fraud and hiding money abroad. In one of the final codas of the Mueller prosecutions, Manafort associate Rick Gates – another McCallion target – was sentenced last month to 45 days in jail and three years of probation.

In the long investigative cloud trailing Donald Trump’s presidency, Kenneth McCallion may be one of the most influential people almost no one has heard of. A key player in Manafort’s downfall, the lawyer has helped make Ukraine central to American politics -- including, now, impeachment. McCallion is also a Rorschach test for these partisan times. The avowedly Trump-hating attorney might be seen as a truth-teller whose help exposing wrongdoing led to criminal convictions; or he might be seen as a lawyer with a failed case and a grudge who used personal relationships with federal prosecutors to bring the crushing force of the federal government down on his enemies. Either way, McCallion is a common thread in both the Mueller probe and the push for impeachment. He also helps explain the curious conundrum of how Ukraine’s bitter and byzantine politics came to be America’s politics.