Trump’s pick for national security role now lobbying for Ukrainian tycoon

Monica Crowley, who had been tapped for a national security post in the Trump White House before being derailed by plagiarism allegations, has found a new job: lobbying for a Ukrainian tycoon.

Crowley registered on Friday to provide “outreach services” on behalf of Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian steel magnate who’s given millions to the Clinton Foundation and also donated to Trump’s foundation after the election.

Those services “will include inviting government officials and other policy makers to attend conferences and meetings, such as the annual Munich Security Conference, to engage in learning and dialogue regarding issues of concern to Mr. Pinchuk,” according to a Justice Department filing.

Crowley is working for the consulting firm of Doug Schoen, a former Bill Clinton adviser who’s represented Pinchuk since 2011. Schoen and Crowley know each other from Fox News, where they’re both contributors.

“After she left the position she had been appointed to, and only thereafter, I approached her about doing some work for me,” Schoen said in an interview. He declined to specify what that work will be.

“She began about a month ago,” he said. “We will at the appropriate time file the appropriate registration,” which will disclose her work in more detail.

Crowley did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The filing was first spotted by LegiStorm.

Trump tapped Crowley last year to serve as senior director of strategic communications for the National Security Council, working under a national security adviser who has since resigned. But she backed out less than a week before Trump took office after CNN discovered that she’d plagiarized “large sections” of her 2012 book, “What the (Bleep) Just Happened?” POLITICO Magazine also reported that she’d plagiarized passages in her Columbia University Ph.D. dissertation.

It’s unclear whether Crowley was required to sign any of Trump’s lobbying bans. While the Trump administration bans former officials from lobbying the agency that employed them for five years and from lobbying for foreign interests for life, the Trump transition’s lobbying ban lasts just six months. Schoen said he didn’t know whether Crowley had signed anything during the transition.

Pinchuk, the son-in-law of the former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma and one of the country’s richest men, has had close ties to the Clintons for years. He has given between $10 million and $25 million to their foundation, according to The New York Times, and once loaned the family his private plane. He was also a guest at Bill Clinton’s 65th birthday party in 2011.

But Pinchuk was also the second-largest donor to Trump’s foundation in 2015, giving $150,000. Schoen told The Times in an email at the time that the gift was “in support of appearance he did by video link at a conference Mr. Pinchuk’s foundation organizes every year in September in Kiev, Ukraine.”

Trump lavished praise on Pinchuk when he spoke at the conference in 2015.

“Viktor, by the way, is a very, very special man, a special entrepreneur,” Trump said in his remarks. “When he was up seeing me I said, ‘I think I can learn more from you than you can learn from me.’”