This story was co-published with Time Magazine and ProPublica. Sign up for email updates from Trump, Inc. to get the latest on our investigations.
Rick Perry came to Washington looking for a deal, and less than two months into his tenure as Energy Secretary, he found a hot prospect. It was April 19, 2017, and Perry, the former Texas governor, failed presidential candidate and contestant on Dancing With the Stars, was sitting in his office on Independence Avenue with two influential Ukrainians. “He said, ‘Look, I’m a new guy, I’m a dealmaker, I’m a Texan,’” recalls one of them, Yuriy Vitrenko, then Ukraine’s chief energy negotiator. “We’re ready to do deals,” he remembers Perry saying.
The deals they discussed that day became central to Ukraine’s complex relationship with the Trump Administration, a relationship that culminated in December with the House vote to impeach President Donald Trump. Perry was a leading figure in the impeachment inquiry last fall. He was among the officials, known as the “three amigos,” who ran a shadow foreign policy in Ukraine on Trump’s behalf. Their aim, according to the findings of the impeachment inquiry in the House, was to embarrass Trump’s main political rival, Joe Biden.
Alongside this political mission, Perry and his staff at the Energy Department worked to advance energy deals that were potentially worth billions of dollars to Perry’s friends and political donors, a six-month investigation by reporters from TIME, WNYC and ProPublica shows. Two of these deals seemed set to benefit Energy Transfer, the Texas company on whose board Perry served immediately before and after his stint in Washington. The biggest was worth an estimated $20 billion, according to U.S. and Ukrainian energy executives involved in negotiating them.
If this long discussed deal succeeds, Perry himself could stand to benefit: in March, three months after leaving government, he owned Energy Transfer shares currently worth around $800,000, according to his most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Perry appears to have stayed on the right side of the law in pursuing the Ukraine ventures. Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York questioned at least four people about the deals over the past year, according to five people who are familiar with the conversations and discussed them with our reporting team on condition of anonymity. “As far back as last year, they were already interested in events that had taken place in Ukraine around Rick Perry,” including allegations that Perry “was trying to get deals for his buddies,” says one of the people who spoke to the Manhattan prosecutors. Perry is not a target of their investigation, according to two sources familiar with the probes.
But two ethics experts say Perry’s efforts were violations of federal regulations. Administration officials are not allowed to participate in matters directly relating to companies on whose board they have recently served. Other experts say Perry and his aides may have broken a federal rule that prohibits officials from advocating for companies that have not been vetted by the Commerce Department. “Even if it skirts the criminal statute, it’s still unethical,” says Richard Painter, the top ethics lawyer in the White House of President George W. Bush, with whom we shared our findings.
Through a spokesman, Perry said he “never connected or facilitated discussions” between Energy Transfer and Ukraine’s state energy firm in one of the deals we uncovered. The spokesman declined to comment on the other ventures Perry advanced while in government, including the $20 billion deal, or on the federal probe. In response to written questions for this article, Energy Transfer said, “We are not aware of any contact between Secretary Perry and Ukrainian officials on Energy Transfer’s behalf.”
Read the full print story by Time reporter Simon Shuster.
Update, Sept. 24, 2020: Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter on Wednesday asking the Inspector General for the Department of Energy to investigate Rick Perry’s actions in Ukraine. Citing a joint investigation by the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs and the Senate’s Committee on Finance, Wyden wrote that “witness testimony in this investigation has directly implicated former Secretary Rick Perry in alleged wrongdoing and the Department more broadly in a scheme to undermine anti-corruption efforts that were implemented by Ukraine in partnership with the international community.” The letter noted that a Naftogaz board member testified that Perry “inappropriately pressured the Ukrainian government to place Robert Bensh on the Naftogaz advisory board while Department of Energy officials were also pressuring the Ukrainian government to sign a memorandum of understanding with a private business entity connected to Mr. Bensh, Louisiana Natural Gas Exports.” The letter also cites reporting by ProPublica, Time and WNYC for “Trump, Inc.,” as well as reporting by other media outlets, and asks the IG to investigate what role Perry played in “pressuring Ukraine to make changes to the Naftogaz advisory board”; what efforts Perry and his staff made to “facilitate a deal between any American companies and Naftogaz”; whether the Naftogaz deals “were in Ukraine’s financial or economic interest”; whether Perry “undermined anti-corruption reform efforts in Ukraine” and whether Perry received ethics advice “about his efforts related to [Michael Bleyzer], Mr. Bensh, and Naftogaz.”