EVERYbody wants to avoid jail

President Trump’s attempt to pressure the leader of Ukraine followed a months-long fight inside the administration that sidelined national security officials and empowered political loyalists — including the president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani — to exploit the U.S. relationship with Kiev, current and former U.S. officials said.

  WaPo

They're all singing now.

The sequence, which began early this year, involved the abrupt removal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, the circumvention of senior officials on the National Security Council, and the suspension of hundreds of millions of dollars of aid administered by the Defense and State departments.

[...]

Several officials described tense meetings on Ukraine among national security officials at the White House leading up to the president’s phone call on July 25, sessions that led some participants to fear that Trump and those close to him appeared prepared to use U.S. leverage with the new leader of Ukraine for Trump’s political gain.

And they were right.

[S]ome senior officials worked behind the scenes to hold off a Trump meeting or call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

[...]

“An awful lot of people were trying to keep a meeting from happening for the reason that it would not be focused on Ukraine-U.S. relations,” one former official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.

I can see it, can't you? People realize what he wants to do and panic. They try to talk him out of it, but he thinks he's the smartest guy in the room (on the planet) and can handle this on his own without incriminating himself. And, from the things he's been saying about a beautiful conversation, and being willing to release a transcript that's actually very incriminating, he thinks that's just what he did.

White House officials disputed these accounts, saying that no such concerns were raised in National Security Council meetings and that Trump’s focus was on urging Ukraine to root out corruption.

Some people want their jobs.

One official — speaking, like others, on the condition of anonymity — described the climate as verging on “bloodletting.”

Trump has fanned this dynamic with his own denunciations of the whistleblower and thinly veiled suggestions that the person should be outed. “Is he on our Country’s side. Where does he come from,” Trump tweeted this week.

Trump’s closest advisers, including acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who was ordered by Trump to suspend the aid to Ukraine, are also increasingly targets of internal finger-pointing. Mulvaney has agitated for foreign aid to be cut universally but has also stayed away from meetings with Giuliani and Trump, officials said.

[...]

“Rudy — he did all of this,” one U.S. official said. “This s---show that we’re in — it’s him injecting himself into the process.”

Did he dial Zelensky for Trump? The shitshow is first and last a Trump production, no matter how many clowns he brings in.

After the conclusion of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russia’s role in the 2016 election, Giuliani turned his attention to Ukraine, officials said, and soon began pushing for personnel changes at the embassy while seeking meetings with Zelensky subordinates. He also had his own emissaries in Ukraine who were meeting with officials, setting up meetings for him and sending back information that he could circulate in the United States.

It's not like Rudy hasn't shot himself (and by extension, the president) in the foot before.

The U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, became a primary Giuliani target.

Yovanovitch, a longtime State Department Foreign Service officer, arrived in Ukraine as ambassador at the end of the Obama administration, more than two years after an uprising centered on Kiev’s Independence Square ousted the Russian-leaning government.

Though she was widely respected in the national security community for her efforts to prod Ukraine to take on corruption, Giuliani targeted Yovanovitch with wild accusations including that she played a secret role in exposing Manafort and was part of a conspiracy orchestrated by the liberal financier George Soros.

This, apparently, is the woman Trump called "bad news" in his phone call to Zelensky.

“She should be part of the investigation as part of the collusion,” Giuliani said in a recent interview with The Washington Post, adding that “she is now working for Soros.” Yovanovitch is still employed by the State Department and is a fellow at Georgetown University. She declined to comment.

No doubt she'll get to talk to Congress.

Many of Giuliani’s charges were either recycled from, or subsequently echoed by, right-wing media outlets.

In late March, the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. amplified this campaign by sharing an article on Twitter titled “Calls Grow To Remove Obama’s U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine.” He then referred to the ambassador as a “joker.”

I think he meant "joke", but have a little mercy on poor Junior. He's not the brightest bulb on the tree. On the other hand, wasn't he supposed to stay out of politics while running the Trump Organization as long as his father is president? Rhetorical question.

Yovanovitch, who was to depart in July after a three-year assignment, was prematurely ordered back to Washington, a move that both baffled and unnerved senior officials at the State Department and the White House, officials said.

Within days of her ouster on May 9, Giuliani seemed determined to seize an unsanctioned diplomatic role for himself, announcing plans to travel to Ukraine to push for investigations that would “be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government.”

Rudy would love to have a bigger role to play.

Giuliani canceled the trip amid an ensuing backlash over his purpose but later met with one of Zelensky’s senior aides in Madrid and pressed the issue of Ukraine’s helping against Biden.

[...]

In Washington, officials outside Trump’s inner circle who were dismayed by Yovanovitch’s ouster reacted with growing alarm and confusion over Giuliani’s subsequent activities.

Then-national security adviser John Bolton was outraged by the outsourcing of a relationship with a country struggling to survive Russian aggression, officials said. But by then his standing with Trump was strained, and neither he nor his senior aides could get straight answers about Giuliani’s agenda or authority, officials said. Bolton declined to comment.

That will be in a book he'll write.

“We had the same visibility as anybody else — watching Giuliani on television,” a former senior official said. Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev were similarly deprived of information, even as they faced questions from Ukrainians about whether Giuliani was a designated representative.

“The embassy didn’t know what to do with the outreach,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who traveled to Ukraine this month.

In an interview Tuesday on Fox News, Giuliani said he had been enlisted by the State Department to intervene on the Ukraine matter. “You know who I did it at the request of? The State Department,” he said, holding up his cellphone to indicate that call records would back up his claim. He also said that he began pursuing the issue in late 2018 after a visit from an investigator whom he did not identify.

You never know what's true and what's not with Rudy. At least with Trump, you always know: nothing is true.

The perception of a parallel, hidden agenda intensified in the summer as officials at the NSC, Pentagon and State Department began reacting to rumors that hundreds of millions of dollars of military and intelligence aid to Ukraine was being mysteriously impeded.

“There were never any orders given, any formal guidance from the White House to any of the agencies,” said a U.S. official familiar with the matter. “And the NSC was scratching their heads: How is this possible?”

NSC officials, including Tim Morrison, who had replaced Fiona Hill as the senior director for European and Russian affairs, began organizing meetings to try to understand these hidden forces affecting Ukraine policy, officials said.

[...]

Officials were told that the money was being blocked by the Office of Management and Budget, without any accompanying explanation.

[...]

It was in this stretch, in July, that some officials began to question the wisdom of a Trump call with Zelensky.

[...]

The [day after Robert Mueller's testimony before Congress], Trump spoke with Zelensky on a call, and the vague misgivings that had risen over the preceding five months hardened into alarm. Among those who listened in on the call or were in a position to see a transcript, the president’s persistence with Zelensky on the corruption probe marked the crossing of a perilous threshold.

And now, here we are.