THE MUCKRAKERS

How a bunch of gutsy Ukrainian journalists helped light the fuse that led to Trump’s impeachment

- Mark Schapiro

ON A CHILLY morning in February 2014, a group of journalists stood on a dock inside the abandoned estate of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and saw an astonishing sight. Loose papers and colored file folders were bobbing in the Dnieper River, tossed there by the fleeing president’s minions.

Yanukovych had just decamped for Russia after months of demonstrations in which more than 100 protesters had been killed by government security forces and snipers. Yanukovych left behind a 350-acre, $1 billion compounds, which included a zoo, a golf course, a dog breeding center, and a lavishly furnished mansion. But not before attempting to drown the evidence against him.

Anna Babinets, one of the first journalists on the scene, recalls how she and her colleagues found divers who could get there, fast, to fish out the papers sinking into the ice-cold river. Everything happened fast that day, Babinets, editor-in-chief of the investigative journalism organization Slidstvo, recalled when I met her in Kyiv late last year. “It was,” she says, “revolution time.”

They were able to salvage 25,000 documents from the river. Babinets and a cast of fellow journalists spent the next eight days holed up in Yanukovych’s compound, drying some of the documents on the ex-president’s heated massage table. Sleeping on ornate sofas or inlaid marble floors under $53 million worth of crystal chandeliers, they scanned every page and then posted them on a website called YanukovychLeaks before handing off dozens of boxes of documents to prosecutors. Oleg Khomenok, coordinator of YanukovychLeaks and now a board member of the Global Investigative Journalism Network, says he was too busy to dwell on