A6| Saturday/Sunday, October 19 - 20, 2019 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
U.S. NEWS
Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s role in administration activities in Ukraine has made him a figure in the Trump impeachment inquiry.STEPHEN VOSS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNALRussian Influence
EuropeannaturalgasimportsfromRussiahavesteadilygrown
evenasgasfromotherpartsoftheworldhasleveledoff.In2018,
morethantwo-fifthsofnaturalgasimportedintotheEuropean
UnioncamefromRussia.Source: EurostatNatural gas imports to the EU
150050100million tons2014 2015 2016 2017 20182018 gas imports, by countryRussiaNorwayAlgeriaQatarOther countries outside the EU40.2%35.0%11.3%5.8%7.7%because they reflected “im-
proper coziness between the
regulator and regulated.”
After months assessing the
relative responsibility of fed-
eral regulators and the plane
maker in creating the MAX
crisis, Mr. DeFazio said now
his probe’s focus “is shifting
way over to the Boeing side.”
“You can’t pin this on just
this guy,” he said, adding that
“this was a cultural problem.”
The messages between
Messrs. Forkner and Gustavs-
son, which were earlier reported
by Reuters, highlight issues re-
lating to Boeing’s efforts to get
the MAX approved smoothly—
as well as what pilots were told
about MCAS—both topics that
congressional investigators and
federal prosecutors are focused
on, according to people familiar
with the probes.
The pilots appeared to dis-
cuss Mr. Forkner’s role in Boe-
ing’s crafting pilot MAX manu-
als, which excluded references
to MCAS. After describing the
feature “running rampant” in
the flight simulator, Mr.
Forkner wrote: “Oh great, that
means we have to update the
speed trim description” in
those documents. Speed trim
is another flight-control sys-
temrelatedtoMCAS.
Investigators have been look-
ing into whether such an update
could have alerted FAA officials
about the power of MCAS, or
possibly prompted the agencyday, Boeing shed $14 billion in
market value, with its shares
closing down 6.8% at $344.
Boeing said Mr. Muilenburg
called the FAA chief on Friday to
respond to the concerns raised
in his letter, and the company
reiterated it will continue to co-
operate with the House panel.
A Boeing spokesman said
the company didn’t believe it
was appropriate to share the
document with the FAA sooner
because of the ongoing crimi-
nal investigation. The spokes-
man said Boeing shared it with
the FAA’s parent agency on
Thursday because it planned to
turn the letter over to congres-
sional investigators on Friday.
“We will continue to follow
the direction of the FAA and
other global regulators, as we
work to safely return the 737
MAX to service,” Boeing said,
adding that the company
shared the documents with
the appropriate authorities in
a timely manner.
Mr. Forkner served as an im-
portant liaison among Boeing,
FAA officials vetting the new
model and managers at South-
west, the MAX’s lead customer,
which was establishing training
programs to serve as templates
for the rest of the industry. Mr.
Forkner left Boeing in 2018 and
now works at Southwest. An
attorney for Mr. Gustavsson,
who succeeded Mr. Forkner in
his old role and is still at Boe-
ing, couldn’t be reached.sages in February of this year,
several months after a Lion
Air 737 MAX crashed in Indo-
nesia and around a month be-
fore another of the jets oper-
ated by Ethiopian Airlines
crashed, killing all on board.
But Mr. Dickson’s letter said
Boeing didn’t reveal their exis-
tence to the agency until this
week and demanded the plane
maker provide an immediate
explanation for the delay.
The messages suggest Boe-
ing’s pilots may have encoun-
tered some of the problems
that eventually led to the two
crashes, which together claimed
346 lives. MCAS has been impli-
cated in both crashes.
David Gerger, an attorney
for Mr. Forkner, said: “If you
read the whole chat, it is obvi-
ous that there was no ‘lie’ and
the simulator program was not
operating properly. Based on
what he was told, Mark
thought the plane was safe, and
the simulator would be fixed.”
The messages, coupled with
questions about why they
weren’t shared earlier with
the FAA or congressional in-
vestigators, intensify scrutiny
on Boeing’s management and
safety culture. They also raise
the stakes for Boeing at an
Oct. 30 hearing of the House
Transportation and Infrastruc-
ture Committee.
Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon,
the Democratic chairman of the
committee, has signaled that
Boeing Chief Executive Dennis
Muilenburg will be grilled about
whether the company misled
regulators about MCAS and
then withheld relevant docu-
ments from investigators.
Mr. DeFazio said the mes-
sages “show deliberate conceal-
ment” of a problematic system
that was on the plane but not
included in the training man-
ual. “That’s just outrageous.”
Late Friday, Mr. DeFazio
sent a letter to Transportation
Secretary Elaine Chao saying
he was “deeply troubled” by
the documents he received,Continued from Page Onethe country’s top diplomat on
international energy. He homed
in on Europe, where Russia’s
influence is strongest. The EU
receives more than one-third of
its gas from Russia, and a big
chunk of those exports travels
through pipes under Ukraine.
“This is a really important
piece of dirt in the grand
scheme of things,” Mr. Perry
said. And selling American
liquefied natural gas was his
answer.Mr. Perry had calls with Mi-
chael Bleyzer, a Ukrainian-
American businessman from
Texas, that convinced him cor-
ruption was blocking U.S. in-
vestment and further energy
development in Ukraine.
Mr. Perry became convinced
that state-owned energy com-
pany Naftogaz was the primary
source of corruption and that
Ukraine needed to follow
through on promises to Europe
to break apart the company.“When one company con-
trols everything, no one can
compete with it,” said Olek-
sandr Kharchenko, director of
the Kyiv-based Energy Industry
Research Centre, an indepen-
dent think tank.
Naftogaz said it is taking
steps and working with the
government toward breaking
up the company.
“Our goal is the completion
of the corporate governance re-
form...that will boost transpar-
ency, internal controls—and
will serve as an extra safeguard
against political meddling and
graft,” said Aliona Osmolovska,
corporate-communications di-
rector at Naftogaz.
Naftogaz also was a target
for two associates of Mr. Giu-
liani, Lev Parnas and Igor Fru-
man.They were attempting to
forge deals that would lead to
Ukrainian gas imports. Their
company, Global Energy Pro-
ducers LLC, sought to deliver
U.S. gas to Ukraine, and they
devised a plan to facilitate that
by replacing the chief executive
of Naftogaz to ease their access
to the market. Their efforts
weren’t successful.
Mr. Perry and his staff said
he never met the two men or
knew about them. And he said
he was careful not to crosslines in his dealings with
Ukraine to avoid unduly favor-
ing any businesses or mixing
politics with his advice.
“There is no there there,” he
said of accusations, contained
in media reports, that he had
tried to get Ukranian officials
to put his associates or political
donors onto the Naftogaz board
or to oust current board mem-
ber Amos Hochstein, an Obama
administration diplomat who
had worked closely with former
Vice President Joe Biden.
Mr. Perry said he recom-
mended names of well-known
energy experts who might be
useful to the company as infor-
mal advisers and didn’t try to
interfere with Mr. Hochstein.
Mr. Hochstein didn’t return
calls seeking comment. Naf-
togaz wouldn’t comment on
Messrs. Fruman and Parnas’s
attempts to change its man-
agement.
Messrs. Parnas and Fruman,
along with two others, were re-
cently arrested on campaign-fi-
nance and conspiracy charges,
to which they have pleaded not
guilty.
John Dowd, a lawyer who
represents Messrs. Parnas and
Fruman, said in an email: “No
contact with Perry. No business
with Perry.”Long before Ukraine was
central to an impeachment in-
quiry into President Trump, it
was central to Rick Perry’s plan
for Europe.
Early after he took the job in
2017, the energy secretary said
he saw a continent uncomfort-
ably reliant on Russian energy,
with potential to be a U.S. cus-
tomer instead. Ukraine, at the
crossroads of East and West,
Mr. Perry thought, was key: Sell
more U.S. natural gas there, as
the U.S. itself was becoming an
energy exporter, and it could
both reach other European
countries and cut down on Rus-
sia’s ability to use energy as a
weapon against a former Soviet
territory.
Several visits with Ukrainian
leaders followed, with Mr.
Perry viewing himself as sales-
man-in-chief for the U.S. energy
industry. Two years later, his
role expanded into being one of
Mr. Trump’s primary foreign-
policy intermediaries in
Ukraine, involving him in ad-
ministration activities that are
now at the heart of the House
impeachment inquiry.
The inquiry is looking at the
pressure Mr. Trump, his per-
sonal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and
administration officials put on
Ukraine to launch investiga-
tions into Mr. Trump’s political
opponents, just as Mr. Trump
had ordered congressionally
approved aid to Ukraine put on
hold. Democrats allege his ac-
tions amount to an abuse of
power by inviting foreign elec-
tion interference. Mr. Trump
has said he did nothing wrong.
Mr. Perry was subpoenaed
last week by several House
committees seeking any docu-
ments related to his interac-
tions on the matter. At the Fri-
day deadline, his department
ByTimothy Pukoin
Washington andGeorgi
Kantchevin Kyivsent a letter to the House com-
mittees saying it wouldn’t com-
ply with the request, calling the
probe invalid and further citing
executive privilege and a lack
of time.
He also this past week an-
nounced his imminent resigna-
tion, though a person familiar
with the matter said his depar-
ture is unrelated to the scrutiny
of his actions in the impeach-
ment inquiry.
When Ukraine elected a new
president, Volodymyr Zelensky,
in April, Mr. Perry accepted a
call from the White House to
lead the U.S. delegation to the
inauguration. According to the
whistleblower complaint filed
in August that set off the im-
peachment probe last month,
U.S. officials said Vice President
Mike Pence had been set to
lead the delegation, but that
Mr. Trump instructed Mr.
Pence to cancel.
An Energy Department offi-
cial said the White House asked
for a cabinet-level volunteer to
lead the delegation instead. Mr.
Perry said he thought he would
be a natural fit to go because of
his relationships with Ukranian
leaders.
He used the May inaugura-
tion to press reforms in
Ukraine’s energy industry and
to size up Mr. Zelensky, who
ran on an anticorruption
agenda.
Mr. Perry became one of
three administration officials
who oversaw U.S. policy toward
the country, the others being
Gordon Sondland, the ambassa-
dor to the European Union, and
special envoy Kurt Volker. It was
an arrangement that brought
them, at the president’s direc-
tion, in contact with Mr. Giuliani,
whose dealings in Ukraine are
also being investigated by fed-
eral prosecutors. Mr. Giuliani has
denied any wrongdoing.
Mr. Perry, a former Republi-
can Texas governor, turned his
role as energy secretary intoEnergy Push
Linked Perry
To Ukraine
“While there were some in-
stances of classified informa-
tion being inappropriately in-
troduced into an unclassified
system in furtherance of expe-
dience, by and large, the indi-
viduals interviewed were
aware of security policies and
did their best to implement
them in their operations.”
None of the 38 individuals
were named in the report.
In July 2016, Federal Bu-
reau of Investigation Director
James Comey concluded that
Mrs. Clinton and her close
aides were “extremely care-
less” in their handling of clas-
sified information while email-
ing on unsecure networks, but
that “no reasonable prosecu-
tor” would bring charges in
such a case.
Then, days before the 2016
election, Mr. Comey said he
was reopening the probe of
Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic
presidential candidate.
Critics say that action
helped tip the election to Pres-
ident Trump.
A spokesman for Mrs. Clin-
ton didn’t immediately respond
to a request for comment.WASHINGTON—The State
Department identified 91 secu-
rity violations by 38 individu-
als in its review of classified
information on former Secre-
tary of State Hillary Clinton’s
personal email server.
The report, the culmina-
tion of several years of work
by the department, found
there was “no persuasive evi-
dence of systemic, deliberate
mishandling of classified in-
formation” by anyone in gov-
ernment, according to a copy
of the report provided to the
office of U.S. Sen. Chuck
Grassley (R., Iowa), which
shared it with The Wall
Street Journal.
The review concluded that
Mrs. Clinton’s use of a per-
sonal email server for govern-
ment business put State De-
partment information at a
greater risk of compromise
because a private server
“lacks the network monitor-
ing and intrusion detection
capabilities of State Depart-
ment networks.”
The report also found:
BYBYRONTAU
Clinton Email Report
Cites 91 Violations
The Federal Aviation Administration was in the process of certifying the 737 MAX as safe when
the senior pilot flagged concerns about a system in the aircraft later linked to two fatal crashes.DAVID RYDER/GETTY IMAGESPilot Gave
Warning
On MAX
to mandate additional simulator
training for pilots on the new
model. Boeing and airlines that
bought the MAX, especially
Southwest Airlines Co., were
determined to persuade the
FAA that additional simulator
training wasn’t required be-
cause MCAS was simply an off-
shoot of the longstanding
speed-trim system previously
approved by regulators.
At the end of the exchange,when the aviators complain
that Boeing test pilots failed to
alert them about the issues, Mr.
Forkner responded: “They’re all
so damn busy, and getting
pressure from the program.”
Boeing is also the subject of
a criminal investigation by the
U.S. Department of Justice,
which is working with the
Federal Bureau of Investiga-
tion and the Transportation
Department’s inspector gen-
eral’s office to delve into how
the 737 MAX aircraft was de-
veloped and certified.
Last week, the company
stripped Mr. Muilenburg of his
dual role as chairman. On Fri-A Boeing pilot told a
colleague in 2016
that he unwittingly
misled regulators.P.O. Box 2195, Duxbury, MA 02331
800-222-1236 781-934-
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