OMB's after-the-fact rationale for withholding aid to Ukraine

The White House budget office asserts in a new legal memo that it withheld aid to Ukraine this summer -- an issue at the heart of Democrats' impeachment inquiry -- to "engage in a policy process."

"It was OMB's understanding that a brief period was needed, prior to the funds expiring, to engage in a policy process regarding those funds," Office of Management and Budget general counsel Mark Paoletta wrote in the memo dated Wednesday, provided to CNN by a senior administration official. "OMB took appropriate action, in light of a pending policy process, to ensure that funds were not obligated prematurely in a manner that could conflict with the President's foreign policy."

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The White House has offered shifting and vague accounts of why the hold was implemented and what triggered Trump to ultimately change course and release the money.

Wednesday's memo stresses that the agency "has significant discretion in determining how and when funds are released" and states that it will often put temporary holds on money allocations signed into law.

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Paoletta wrote the memo in response to an inquiry from the Government Accountability Office about why the US aid to Ukraine was delayed over the summer.

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The memo states that while the OMB will notify Congress before delaying some allocations, the Ukraine aid amounted to a "programmatic delay" that did not require notification.

  CNN

Perhaps there was someone within President Trump’s administration who spent the period from July 12 to Sept. 11 assiduously working to determine that providing military and security aid to Ukraine didn’t “conflict with the President’s foreign policy,” as articulated in a legal memo from the Office of Management and Budget produced Wednesday. Perhaps this person or team of people were articulating benchmarks and seeking out information that would establish that the benchmarks had been met. Perhaps those people were working with senior officials within the U.S. government and within the administration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to cross the proper T’s and dot each pertinent I.

If that was the case, though, no one who’s offered public testimony about the hold on aid was aware of it. And at no point before Wednesday was there any suggestion that such an extended, formal review was underway.

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[One of two tranches of Congressionally appropriated aid], totaling $250 million, was finalized in May after defense officials certified that necessary safeguards against waste had been met. That aid was announced publicly June 18 in a news release.

That turns out to have been a mistake. Trump, who in 2018 had signed into law the bill allocating that funding, saw a news article about the impending release of the aid and slammed on the brakes.

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On July 3, OMB halted a notification to Congress that aid was going out, the first hint that the assistance would be stopped. The hold was in place July 12 and messaged broadly in a meeting July 18.

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After the hold was announced internally, there were repeated conversations within the administration where government agencies, including Defense, pushed for the aid to be released. During a meeting July 25 — the same day as Trump’s call with Zelensky — a number of staffers from various departments met and discussed the aid.

Each “endorsed the resumption of military aid, or they spoke of their own aid programs and indicated they wanted their programs to continue, as well,” according to Undersecretary of State David Hale. He later added that “the lone objection came from the — directly from the representative of OMB.”

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To hold the aid, OMB had to go through a formal process involving the creation of a memo in which the hold was indicated in a footnote with a designated duration. Between July and Sept. 11, the hold was extended multiple times, requiring the issuance of different iterations of the document. One document, released in August, failed to update the end date for the hold properly, meaning that there was a period of about a week in which the aid technically wasn’t on hold at all.

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[T]he hold became public Aug. 28.

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Were the aid not allocated by the end of the fiscal year — Sept. 30 — OMB officials were concerned about a potential violation of a law called the Impoundment Control Act. The footnote therefore indicated that the Defense Department could continue to plan as though the aid was moving forward. Early iterations of the memo also indicated that the Pentagon agreed that the hold wouldn’t prevent it from getting all the money out the door by the end of the fiscal year. That provision was removed in the middle of August, when the Defense Department indicated that it no longer had that confidence.

That detail, which comes from Sandy’s testimony, seems to be obviously at odds with the Wednesday memo from OMB. The memo rationalized the hold in part by arguing that Defense had never planned on releasing security funds until September in the first place — a claim that’s hard to reconcile with the department’s sudden revocation of its confidence in getting the money out the door.

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“Trump had made the decision [...] without an assessment of the reasoning or legal justification, according to two White House officials,” The Post’s Josh Dawsey, Carol D. Leonnig and Tom Hamburger reported.

  WaPo

What a surprise.

In early September, [OMB Director Mark Sandy] got a reason, receiving “an email that attributed the hold to the president’s concern about other countries not contributing more to Ukraine.”

That was one of three reasons offered in that time period.

Another came from Pence, who told Zelensky in a meeting Sept. 1 that the United States had “great concerns about issues of corruption.”

On that same day, though, Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland spoke with Zelensky aide Andriy Yermak, telling Yermak that the hold would be lifted only once Ukraine agreed to undertake investigations that Trump sought that would benefit the president politically. This conversation was conveyed to other administration officials at the time.

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On Sept. 10, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) wrote to the acting director of national intelligence asking for a whistleblower complaint centered on Ukraine to be released to Congress as stipulated by law.

The next day, the aid was released.

Coincidence, of course.

And Republican Judiciary Committee minority leader has yet another excuse:

So, take your pick, I guess.

UPDATE: