Mike Pence is as guilty as anyone

Officials close to Pence insist that he was unaware of Trump’s efforts to press Zelensky for damaging information about Biden and his son, who had served on the board of an obscure Ukrainian gas company, when his father was overseeing U.S. policy on Ukraine.

Pence’s activities occurred amid several indications of the president’s hidden agenda. Among them were the abrupt removal of the U.S. ambassador to Kiev; the visible efforts by the president’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to insert himself in the U.S.-Ukraine relationship; as well as alarms being raised inside the White House even before the emergence of an extraordinary whistleblower complaint about Trump’s conduct.

Perhaps most significantly, one of Pence’s top advisers was on the July 25 call and the vice president should have had access to the transcript within hours, officials said.

  WaPo

If he had an adviser on the call, I'll wager he knew as soon as the call was ended.

Officials close to Pence contend that he traveled to Warsaw for a meeting with Zelensky on Sept. 1 probably without having read — or at least fully registered — the transcript of Trump’s July 25 call with the leader of Ukraine.

I'm calling bullshit. They're just trying to protect Pence, as you would expect them to do.

White House officials said that Pence likely would have received the detailed notes of the president’s call in his briefing book on July 26.The five-page document also should have been part of the briefing materials he took with him to Warsaw to prepare for the meeting, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

Of course.

It’s also not clear whether Pence failed to read the White House account of the call in his briefing book or read it and found it unremarkable.

Not clear is Pence's best defense.

A Pence aide disputed the notion that the vice president was poorly prepared for his meeting with Zelensky, and pointed to the eventual outcome — that the Trump administration ultimately released the aid — as a sign of a productive meeting.  The White House Counsel’s Office did not alert the vice president’s office to the existence of the whistleblower complaint until the day before it became public, the aide added.

That part's believable.

In his meeting with Zelensky, Pence conveyed the news that hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid to Ukraine was not going to be released amid concerns about the country’s lagging efforts to combat corruption. He also emphasized Trump’s frustration that he thought the European Union was not doing a sufficient job in helping to provide aid. A participant in the meeting said Zelensky was “crestfallen” by the news, though a second participant described the meeting as “cordial” and Zelensky as understanding of U.S. concerns.

Not clear is Zelensky's best defense, too.

At that point, Ukraine’s president had already spoken to Trump and was familiar with the president’s demands. Pence did not mention Biden or the dormant probe of Burisma, the company for which his son had served as a board member.

He didn't have to. Zelensky knew why he was there. Zelensky, being Ukrainian, dealing with Russia, is surely familiar with mob techniques.

[F]ormer officials said that Pence’s emphasis on corruption probably would have been interpreted by Zelensky as “code” for that issue, whether the vice president intended it or not.

Yeah, probably.

Pence often seems to be the last to be aware of major problems or scandals — a phenomenon that depicts the vice president as out of the loop at times. But it also helps insulate him from controversy within the White House.

He may be the last because Trump doesn't trust him. But he knows.

Pence’s staff was weighing whether to lead a delegation to attend Zelensky’s inauguration in May, an important vote of confidence for the new Ukrainian president whose nation has come to view the United States as a bulwark against Russian aggression. Russia has annexed Crimea, a part of Ukraine, and continues to foment a separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine.

The date of the inauguration had been in flux, the White House still had not dispatched advance staff and Secret Service to Ukraine, and no visit had been officially confirmed when the president instructed Pence not to attend, according to officials.

Trump is not a fan of Ukraine.

White House lawyers, alarmed by [Trump's call to Zelensky], quickly moved detailed notes of it from a widely shared internal computer network to one reserved for “codeword-level” records about CIA covert action programs and other highly classified material.

[...]

Kellogg, Pence’s top national security adviser, listened in on the call from the Situation Room, which was the standard practice, but did not see it as unusual or flag any concerns about it to the vice president, officials said.

White House lawyers were alarmed, but Pence's security adviser didn't find anything unusual about it? If that's true, Pence needs a new adviser. It's not true. And why is Pence's security adviser there for the call if he's not going to tell Pence what he heard? He told him.

In early September, with a hurricane bearing down on Florida, Trump canceled a trip to Poland, where he was scheduled to attend a World War II commemoration and meet with Zelensky to discuss the frozen U.S. aid.

Instead he sent Pence, with instructions to “take the measure” of the Ukrainian leader and inform him that the administration wasn’t going to release the aid until it had assurances that Zelensky was committed to fighting corruption, U.S. officials said.

[...]

Once the meeting began, Pence faulted the E.U. for not providing more security aid to Ukraine, just as Trump did on the July 25 call, [...]

Bingo. Exactly. He was fully aware of what was in that call.

[...] and also reiterated the administration’s position that Zelensky needed to do more to fight corruption.

When Zelensky asked about the aid, Pence replied that the administration was “still looking at it,” a U.S. official said.

Aid that had been authorized by Congress, the branch that holds the purse.  Trump had no right to hold it up.  For any reason.

Upon his return to Washington, Pence [...] encouraged Trump to release the aid.

A few weeks later — under pressure from Democrats and Republicans in Congress who saw the aid to Ukraine as critical to standing up to Russia and with Pence’s assessment that he should provide Ukraine with the support — Trump relented and released the aid to Ukraine. Pence and Zelensky spoke again on Sept. 18 in a call that U.S. officials described as somewhat perfunctory.

Why didn't Trump call Zelensky himself to tell him he was getting the money? Somebody - one of those "alarmed" lawyers, perhaps - told him to stay off the phone, I'll wager.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.