"Some on the left"

"Just" documents?  LOL.  What else would they be looking for?  Bodies?

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

They're lining up to save their skins

Flip on the other guy before he flips on you in order to get the credit and hopefully the leniency.

Two Three more resignations

Deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger resigned on Wednesday in response to Trump’s reaction to the mob which breached the US Capitol, CNN reported, citing a person close to Pottinger. Bloomberg first reported the resignation of Pottinger, a leading figure in the development of Trump’s China policy.

[...]

The White House social secretary, Anna Cristina “Rickie” Niceta, also reportedly resigned on Wednesday.Other officials who are considering quitting their positions include Deputy Chief of Staff Chris Liddell, and National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien.

  alJazeera

What's to consider?  You will forever be anchored about the neck by your devotion to Trump.  Trumpism is not coming  back from this in any important way in goavernment, no matter what Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz think.

According to sources familiar to the matter, O’Brien was persuaded to stay on by allies.

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

UPDATE:

Former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney on Thursday resigned from his post as the special envoy to Northern Ireland following the riot at the U.S. Capitol.

“I can’t stay here, not after yesterday,” Mulvaney said in an appearance on CNBC. “You can’t look at that yesterday and say I want to be a part of that in any way shape or form.”

  The Hill

Should have resigned moons ago when he was Chief of Staff.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see more of my friends resign over the course of the next 24 to 48 hours, and it’d be completely understandable if they did,” Mulvaney said. “Those who choose to stay, and I have talked some of to them, are choosing to stay because they are concerned that the president might put someone in to make things even worse.”

Does Mulvaney want to get out of his job?

Former acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney on Friday acknowledged that Donald Trump “didn’t hire very well” in the earlier stages of his presidency, specifically noting his poor working relationships with administration officials who had ties to the military.

“If there was one criticism that I would level against the president, [it] is that he didn’t hire very well. He did not have experience at running government and didn’t know how to put together a team that could work well with him,” Mulvaney, now the U.S. special envoy to Northern Ireland, told CNN’s “New Day.”

[...]

Mulvaney argued Friday that many of those former officials “are folks who are either in the military or actively involved in the military,” judging that the “military personality is just not the type that works well with Donald Trump, who’s a small businessman who’s done extraordinarily well.”

  Politico

Ahem, Mick?  He hired YOU.

I'm not sure a qualified insult is going to save Mick's hide.

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

Indeed

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

The inevitable ouster of Mick Mulvaney

President Donald Trump announced on Friday night that Rep. Mark Meadows will become the new White House chief of staff, a dramatic reshuffling of his senior aides in the midst of the growing coronavirus crisis affecting the United States and the world.

  Politico

He was leaving Congress anyway.

Meadows’ resignation from the House will open up his western North Carolina House seat just months before this year’s election. His retirement last December — just days before the filing deadline to run for the seat — roiled the state’s GOP political scene, with some Republicans speculating he may have timed his announcement to preclude state lawmakers from running and benefit his desired replacement, a charge Meadows disputed.

[...]

Meadows, a conservative North Carolina Republican who helped overthrow one Republican speaker, considered getting rid of another and pushed Trump into a disastrous government shutdown over funding his border wall, will be Trump’s fourth chief of staff in just over three years in office.

[...]

It’s a most remarkable turn for the 60-year old Meadows, who in the eyes of his detractors has few qualifications for the post besides a talent for disruption, obstruction and obfuscation.

But so far Meadows has only sucked up and praised Trump, so who cares what he wrecks? Let's see how long HE lasts.

Meadows was first elected in 2012, formed the Freedom Caucus with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) in 2014 and was the man who went to the floor to seek to remove John Boehner from the speakership in the summer of 2015.

[...]

Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff for the last 14 months, will become envoy to Northern Ireland.

He can't even stay in the country.  LOL.

Trump is now on his fourth Chief of Staff in as many years.

UPDATE:

When you have no fear of democracy

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

Yep, Mulvaney is not long for this administration

Trump advisor Tucker Carlson:

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

Mick Mulvaney must know he's getting canned

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney called out Republicans for being “a lot less interested” in deficits under President Trump than when former President Obama was in office, The Washington Post reported.

Mulvaney spoke at the Oxford Union and said that the GOP is “very interested in deficits when there is a Democrat in the White House,” according to audio from the speech obtained by the Post.

[...]

The acting chief of staff then added he found the $1 trillion deficit in the Trump era “extraordinarily disturbing.”

[...]

“A life expectancy of a chief of staff is roughly 18 months,” he said. “Generally speaking, this job does not last that long … Who knows how much longer I’m going to last?”

  Teh Hill

How long till the firing tweet?

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

Bolton's book draft is leaked

President Trump told his national security adviser in August that he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens, according to an unpublished manuscript by the former adviser, John R. Bolton.

[...]

Mr. Bolton’s explosive account of the matter at the center of Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial, the third in American history, was included in drafts of a manuscript he has circulated in recent weeks to close associates. He also sent a draft to the White House for a standard review process for some current and former administration officials who write books.

Multiple people described Mr. Bolton’s account of the Ukraine affair.

  NYT

So not so much a leak as a levy breach.

The White House could use the pre-publication review process, which has no set time frame, to delay or even kill the book’s publication or omit key passages.

Won't much matter if everybody's blabbing.

Over dozens of pages, Mr. Bolton described how the Ukraine affair unfolded over several months until he departed the White House in September. He described not only the president’s private disparagement of Ukraine but also new details about senior cabinet officials who have publicly tried to sidestep involvement.

For example, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo acknowledged privately that there was no basis to claims by the president’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani that the ambassador to Ukraine was corrupt and believed Mr. Giuliani may have been acting on behalf of other clients, Mr. Bolton wrote.

Maybe knowing this was in the offing was what made Pompeo snap at Mary Louise Kelly.

Are the Republicans still going to hang their futures on covering Trump's huge ass?

Mr. Bolton also said that after the president’s July phone call with the president of Ukraine, he raised with Attorney General William P. Barr his concerns about Mr. Giuliani, who was pursuing a shadow Ukraine policy encouraged by the president, and told Mr. Barr that the president had mentioned him on the call. A spokeswoman for Mr. Barr denied that he learned of the call from Mr. Bolton; the Justice Department has said he learned about it only in mid-August.

And Barr has proved himself to be beyond reproach, right?

But wait...there's more.

And the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, was present for at least one phone call where the president and Mr. Giuliani discussed the ambassador, Mr. Bolton wrote. Mr. Mulvaney has told associates he would always step away when the president spoke with his lawyer to protect their attorney-client privilege.

As Sondland and Parnas said, everybody was in the loop.

The White House has ordered Mr. Bolton and other key officials with firsthand knowledge of Mr. Trump’s dealings not to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry. Mr. Bolton said in a statement this month that he would testify if subpoenaed.

And now there's not even a fig leaf for Senate Republicans to hide behind in their refusal to call witnesses.  They're just going to have to admit they're all compromised and willing to destroy the country.

In recent days, some White House officials have described Mr. Bolton as a disgruntled former employee, and have said he took notes that he should have left behind when he departed the administration.

They've got an answer for everything.

Mr. Trump told reporters last week that he did not want Mr. Bolton to testify and said that even if he simply spoke out publicly, he could damage national security.

Only if Trump decides to nuke the world in response.

“The problem with John is it’s a national security problem,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference in Davos, Switzerland. “He knows some of my thoughts. He knows what I think about leaders. What happens if he reveals what I think about a certain leader and it’s not very positive?”

“It’s going to make the job very hard,” he added.

Every leader already knows what Trump thinks, because he tweets every bit of shit that runs through what's left of his mind. Bolton couldn't possibly tell anybody anything they don't already know. Besides, none of that is relevant to the Ukraine scam.

Mr. Bolton would like to testify for several reasons, according to associates. He believes he has relevant information, and he has also expressed concern that if his account of the Ukraine affair emerges only after the trial, he will be accused of holding back to increase his book sales.

It's a little late for that excuse. He could have offered to testify upon being subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee, but he chose not to, for which he has already been (correctly) accused of doing just that.

Key to Mr. Bolton’s account about Ukraine is an exchange during a meeting in August with the president after Mr. Trump returned from vacation at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. Mr. Bolton raised the $391 million in congressionally appropriated assistance to Ukraine for its war in the country’s east against Russian-backed separatists. Officials had frozen the aid, and a deadline was looming to begin sending it to Kyiv, Mr. Bolton noted.

He, Mr. Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper had collectively pressed the president about releasing the aid nearly a dozen times in the preceding weeks after lower-level officials who worked on Ukraine issues began complaining about the holdup, Mr. Bolton wrote. Mr. Trump had effectively rebuffed them.

[...]

In his August 2019 discussion with Mr. Bolton, the president appeared focused on [conspiracy] theories Mr. Giuliani had shared with him, replying to Mr. Bolton’s question that he preferred sending no assistance to Ukraine until officials had turned over all materials they had about the Russia investigation that related to Mr. Biden and supporters of Mrs. Clinton in Ukraine.

[...]

Mr. Bolton also described other key moments in the pressure campaign, including Mr. Pompeo’s private acknowledgment to him last spring that Mr. Giuliani’s claims about Ms. Yovanovitch had no basis and that Mr. Giuliani may have wanted her removed because she might have been targeting his clients who had dealings in Ukraine as she sought to fight corruption.

[...]

Mr. Bolton also said he warned White House lawyers that Mr. Giuliani might have been leveraging his work with the president to help his private clients.

[...]

Mr. McConnell and other Republicans in the Senate, working in tandem with Mr. Trump’s lawyers, have spent weeks waging their own rhetorical battle to keep their colleagues within the party tent on the question of witnesses, with apparent success. Two of the four Republican senators publicly open to witness votes have sounded notes of skepticism in recent days about the wisdom of having the Senate compel testimony that the House did not get.

Ask them again.

Lucky for them Kobe Bryant was killed in a helicopter crash today, so that will take Bolton's bombshell off the front pages.

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

Assuming Mulvaney, et al., have lawyered up

Deep into a long flight to Japan aboard Air Force One with President Trump [on June 27, more than a week after Mr. Trump had first asked about putting a hold on security aid to Ukraine,], Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, dashed off an email to an aide back in Washington.

“I’m just trying to tie up some loose ends,” Mr. Mulvaney wrote. “Did we ever find out about the money for Ukraine and whether we can hold it back?”

[...]

“Expect Congress to become unhinged” if the White House tried to countermand spending passed by the House and Senate, [the aide, Robert B. Blair,] wrote in a previously undisclosed email. And, he wrote, it might further fuel the narrative that Mr. Trump was pro-Russia.

[...]

Trump’s order to hold $391 million worth of sniper rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, night vision goggles, medical aid and other equipment the Ukrainian military needed to fight a grinding war against Russian-backed separatists would help pave a path to the president’s impeachment.

[...]

American diplomats used the withheld aid as leverage in the effort to win a public commitment from the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to carry out the investigations Mr. Trump sought into Mr. Biden and unfounded or overblown theories about Ukraine interfering in the 2016 election.

[...]

What emerges is the story of how Mr. Trump’s demands sent shock waves through the White House and the Pentagon, created deep rifts within the senior ranks of his administration, left key aides like Mr. Mulvaney under intensifying scrutiny — and ended only after Mr. Trump learned of a damning whistle-blower report and came under pressure from influential Republican lawmakers.

[...]

Opposition to the order from his top national security advisers was more intense than previously known. In late August, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper joined Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and John R. Bolton, the national security adviser at the time, for a previously undisclosed Oval Office meeting with the president where they tried but failed to convince him that releasing the aid was in interests of the United States.

  NYT

Their mistake was in thinking that he might give a shit about the interests of the United States.

By late summer, top lawyers at the Office of Management and Budget who had spoken to lawyers at the White House and the Justice Department in the weeks beforehand, were developing an argument — not previously divulged publicly — that Mr. Trump’s role as commander in chief would simply allow him to override Congress on the issue.

[...]

Mulvaney is shown to have been deeply involved as a key conduit for transmitting Mr. Trump’s demands for the freeze across the administration.

[...]

Those carrying out Mr. Trump’s orders on the aid were for the most part operating in different lanes from those seeking the investigations, including Mr. Giuliani and a number of senior diplomats, including Gordon D. Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, and Kurt D. Volker, the State Department’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia.

[...]

[S]ome key players are now offering a defense that they did not know the diplomatic push for the investigations was playing out at the same time they were implementing the aid freeze — or if they were aware of both channels, they did not connect the two.

Really? They're going to use the "we're too stupid to be criminals" defense?

Mr. Mulvaney is said by associates to have stepped out of the room whenever Mr. Trump would talk with Mr. Giuliani to preserve Mr. Trump’s attorney-client privilege, leaving him with limited knowledge about their efforts regarding Ukraine. Mr. Mulvaney has told associates he learned of the substance of Mr. Trump’s July 25 call weeks after the fact.

Yet testimony before the House suggests a different picture. Fiona Hill, a top deputy to Mr. Bolton at the time, told the impeachment inquiry about a July 10 White House meeting at which Mr. Sondland said Mr. Mulvaney had guaranteed that Mr. Zelensky would be invited to the White House if the Ukrainians agreed to the investigations — an arrangement that Mr. Bolton described as a “drug deal,” according to Ms. Hill.

[...]

At the center of the maelstrom was the Office of Management and Budget, a seldom-scrutinized arm of the White House that during the Trump administration has often had to find creative legal reasoning to justify the president’s unorthodox policy proposals, like his demand to divert Pentagon funding to his proposed wall along the border with Mexico.

In the Ukraine case, however, shock about the president’s decision spread across America’s national security apparatus — from the National Security Council to the State Department and the Pentagon.

[...]

On Sept. 10, the day before Mr. Trump changed his mind, a political appointee at the budget office, Michael P. Duffey, wrote a lengthy email to the Pentagon’s top budget official, with whom he had been at odds throughout the summer about how long the agency could withhold the aid.

He asserted that the Defense Department had the authority to do more to ensure that the aid could be released to Ukraine by the congressionally mandated deadline of the end of that month, suggesting that responsibility for any failure should not rest with the White House.

Forty-three minutes later, the Pentagon official, Elaine McCusker, hit send on a brief but stinging reply.

“You can’t be serious,” she wrote. “I am speechless.”

[...]

Typical of the Trump White House, the inquiry was not born of a rigorous policy process. Aides speculated that someone had shown Mr. Trump a news article about the Ukraine assistance and he demanded to know more.

[Russell T. Vought, the acting head of the Office of Management and Budget,] and his team took to Google, and came upon a piece in the conservative Washington Examiner saying that the Pentagon would pay for weapons and other military equipment for Ukraine, bringing American security aid to the country to $1.5 billion since 2014.

Seriously? Administration officials have to Google to find out what's going on? Jesus.

The budget office officials had little idea of why Mr. Trump was interested in the topic, but many of the president’s more senior aides were well aware of his feelings about Ukraine. Weeks earlier, in an Oval Office meeting on May 23, with Mr. Sondland, Mr. Mulvaney and Mr. Blair in attendance, Mr. Trump batted away assurances that Mr. Zelensky was committed to confronting corruption.

“They are all corrupt, they are all terrible people,” Mr. Trump said, according to testimony in the impeachment inquiry.

[...]

With the [aid] money having been appropriated by Congress, it would be hard for the administration to keep it from being spent by the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.

The task of dealing with the president’s demands fell primarily to a group of political appointees in the West Wing and the budget office, most with personal and professional ties to Mr. Mulvaney. There was no public announcement that Mr. Trump wanted the assistance withheld. Neither Congress nor the Ukrainian government was formally notified.

[...]

The four top political appointees helping Mr. Mulvaney execute the hold — Mr. Vought, Mr. Blair, Mr. Duffey and Mark Paoletta, the budget office’s top lawyer — all had extensive experience in either congressional budget politics or Republican and conservative causes.

Their efforts would cause tension and at times conflict between officials at the budget office and the Pentagon, some of whom watched with growing alarm.

The single largest chunk of the federal government’s annual discretionary budget, some $800 billion a year, goes to the Pentagon, spy agencies and the Department of Veterans Affairs. The career official in charge of managing the flow of all that money for the budget office is an Afghanistan war veteran named Mark Sandy.

After learning about the president’s June 19 request, Mr. Sandy contacted the Pentagon to learn more about the aid package. He also repeatedly pressed Mr. Duffey about why Mr. Trump had imposed the hold in the first place.

[...]

From the start, budget office officials took the position that the money did not have to go out the door until the end of September, giving them time to address the president’s questions.

It was easy enough for the White House to hold up the State Department portion of the funding. Since the State Department had not yet notified Congress of its plans to release the money, all it took was making sure that the notification did not happen.

Freezing the Pentagon’s $250 million portion was more difficult, since the Pentagon had already certified that Ukraine had met requirements set by Congress to show that it was addressing its endemic corruption and notified lawmakers of its intent to spend the money.

So on July 19, Mr. Duffey proposed an unusual solution: Mr. Sandy should attach a footnote to a routine budget document saying the money was being temporarily withheld.

[...]

Mr. Sandy said in testimony that he had never done [that] before in his 12 years at the agency.

And there was a problem with this maneuver: Mr. Sandy was concerned it might violate a law called the Impoundment Control Act that protects Congress’s spending power and prohibits the administration from blocking disbursement of the aid unless it notifies Congress.

“I asked about the duration of the hold and was told there was not clear guidance on that,” Mr. Sandy testified. “So that is what prompted my concern.”

[...]

[O]n July 18, [...] a group of top administration officials meeting on Ukraine policy — including some calling in from Kyiv — learned from a midlevel budget office official that the president had ordered the aid frozen.

[...]

That same day, aides on the House Foreign Affairs Committee received four calls from administration sources warning them about the hold and urging them to look into it.

A week later came Mr. Trump’s fateful July 25 call with Mr. Zelensky. Mr. Bolton, the national security adviser, had recommended the call take place in an effort to end the “incessant lobbying” from officials like Mr. Sondland that the two leaders connect.

Some of Mr. Trump’s aides had thought the call might lead Mr. Trump to lift the freeze. But Mr. Trump did not specifically mention the hold, and instead asked Mr. Zelensky to look into Mr. Biden and his son and into supposed Ukrainian involvement in the 2016 election. Among those listening on the call was Mr. Blair.

Mr. Blair has told associates he [...] saw the aid freeze not as a political tool, but as an extension of Mr. Trump’s general aversion to foreign aid and his belief that Ukraine is rife with corruption.

Just 90 minutes after the call ended, and following days of email traffic on the topic, Mr. Duffey, Mr. Sandy’s boss, sent out a new email to the Pentagon, where officials were impatient about getting the money out the door. His message was clear: Do not spend it.

“Given the sensitive nature of the request, I appreciate your keeping that information closely held to those who need to know to execute the direction,” Mr. Duffey wrote in his note.

[...]

This caused immediate discomfort at the Pentagon, with a top official there noting that this hold on military assistance was coming on the same day Ukraine announced it had seized a Russian tanker — a potential escalation in the conflict between the two nations.

[...]

By that point, officials in Ukraine were getting word that something was up. At the same time, the effort to win a commitment from the Ukrainians for the investigations sought by Mr. Trump was intensifying.

[...]

And inside the intelligence community, a C.I.A. officer was hearing talk about the two strands of pressure on Ukraine, including the aid freeze. Seeing how they fit together, he was alarmed enough that by Aug. 12 he would take the extraordinary step of laying them out in detail in a confidential whistle-blower complaint.

[...]

In a very unusual step, the White House removed Mr. Sandy’s authority to oversee the aid freeze. The job was handed in late July to Mr. Sandy’s boss, Mr. Duffey, the political appointee.

[...]

Two budget office staff members left the agency after the summer. Mr. Sandy testified that their departures were related to the aid freeze, a statement disputed by budget office officials.

Pentagon officials, in the dark about the reason for the holdup, grew increasingly frustrated. Ms. McCusker, the powerful Pentagon budget official, notified the budget office that either $61 million of the money would have to be spent by Monday, Aug. 12 or it would be lost. The budget office saw her threat as a ploy to force release of the aid.

[...]

Complicating matters, another budget battle was escalating. Mr. Vought was attempting to impose cuts of as much as $4 billion on the nation’s overall foreign aid budget. It was an entirely separate initiative from the Ukraine freeze, and was quickly abandoned, but helped the White House establish that its concern about aid was not limited to Ukraine.

By the second week of August, Mr. Duffey had taken to issuing footnotes every few days to block the Pentagon spending. Office of Management and Budget lawyers approved each one.

[...]

In a previously unreported sequence of events, Mr. Mulvaney worked to schedule a call for [August 12] with Mr. Trump and top aides involved in the freeze, including Mr. Vought, Mr. Bolton and Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel. But they waited to set a final time because Mr. Trump had a golf game planned for Monday morning with John Daly, the flamboyant professional golfer, and they did not know how long it would take.

By all means, don't interrupt the president's golf game with pressing foreign aid business.

The planned-for conference call with the president never happened. Budget office lawyers decided that Ms. McCusker had inaccurately raised alarms about the Aug. 12 date to try to force their hand.

In Bedminster with Mr. Trump, Mr. Mulvaney finally reached the president and the answer was clear: Mr. Trump wanted the freeze kept in place. In Washington, the whistle-blower submitted his report that same day.

[...]

Backed by a memo saying the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the State Department all wanted the aid released, Mr. Bolton made a personal appeal to Mr. Trump on Aug. 16, but was rebuffed.

On Aug. 28, Politico published a story reporting that the assistance to Ukraine had been frozen.

[...]

Bolton’s relationship with the president had been deteriorating for months, and he would leave the White House weeks later, but on this front he had powerful internal allies.

On a sunny, late-August day, Mr. Bolton, Mr. Esper and Mr. Pompeo arrayed themselves around the Resolute desk in the Oval Office to present a united front, the leaders of the president’s national security team seeking to convince him face to face that freeing up the money for Ukraine was the right thing to do. One by one they made their case.

[...]

Trump responded that he did not believe Mr. Zelensky’s promises of reform. He emphasized his view that corruption remained endemic and repeated his position that European nations needed to do more for European defense.

“Ukraine is a corrupt country,” the president said. “We are pissing away our money.”

[...]

On Aug. 31, Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, arranged a call with Mr. Trump. Mr. Johnson had been told days earlier by Mr. Sondland that the aid would be unblocked only if the Ukrainians gave Mr. Trump the investigations he wanted.

When Mr. Johnson asked Mr. Trump directly if the aid was contingent on getting a commitment to pursue the investigations, Mr. Johnson later said, Mr. Trump replied, amid a string of expletives, that there was no such demand and he would never do such a thing.

Around the same time, White House lawyers informed Mr. Trump about the whistle-blower’s complaint regarding his pressure campaign.

[...]

Behind the scenes in Warsaw, Mr. Sondland, the American envoy who was Mr. Trump’s point person on getting the Ukrainians to agree to the investigations, had a [blunt] message. Until the Ukrainians publicly announced the investigations, he told Mr. Yermak, the Zelensky adviser, they should not expect to get the military aid. (Mr. Yermak has questioned Mr. Sondland’s account.)

[...]

[T]op lawyers at the budget office were developing a proposed legal justification for the hold.

[...]

The president, the lawyers believed, could ignore the requirements of the Impoundment Control Act and continue to hold the aid by asserting constitutional commander in chief powers that give him authority over diplomacy. He could do so, they believed, if he determined that, based on existing circumstances, releasing the money would undermine military or diplomatic efforts.

[...]

Mr. Bolton was opposed to using [that] argument. [...] And pressure from Congress was intensifying. Mr. Johnson and another influential Republican, Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, were both pushing for the aid to be released.

[...]

Democrats in the House were gearing up to limit Mr. Trump’s power to hold up the money to Ukraine, and the chairmen of three House committees had also announced on Sept. 9 that they were opening an investigation.

Still, White House officials did not expect anything to change, especially since Mr. Trump had repeatedly rejected the advice of his national security team.

But then, just as suddenly as the hold was imposed, it was lifted.

And that call to Zelensky was "perfect".

Get out before the hammer comes down

Once the Senate finishes its impending impeachment trial, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney is expected to leave his post, Politico reported.

  TPM

Somebody keep an eye out for one-way plane tickets in Mulvaney's name.

According to several aides and associates of President Trump who spoke to Politico, Trump’s been pressured from inside and outside the White House to find a replacement before his reelection campaigning kicks into high gear.

[...]

According to Politico, Mulvaney’s control over operations is dwindling and he’s not in charge of the White House’s impeachment strategy.

“He is there. I’ll leave it at that,” a Republican close to Trump told Politico. “He’s like a kid. His role at the dinner table is to be seen and not heard.”

Are they still mad because he went on TV and admitted that there was a quid pro quo and we should all just "get over it"?

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), who announced his retirement this week, is widely believed to be in the running to replace Mulvaney, who embarrassed the White House in the early stages of Democrats’ impeachment inquiry when he essentially admitted there was a quid pro quo tied to the withheld military aid for Ukraine and then had to walk it back hours later.

I guess so.

Rudy in Ukraine

Rudy Giuliani has made a surprise visit to Kyiv — but the city isn’t buzzing with his arrival. It’s groaning.

Giuliani arriving with his shady band of conspiracy theorists — just as Democrats move to officially file impeachment charges against President Donald Trump — is the last thing Ukrainians who have tried desperately to stay out of the drama unfolding in Washington wanted. Kyiv is trying to focus on upcoming peace talks with Russia to end the war simmering in its east, but Giuliani’s visit meant the headlines were all about impeachment once more.

[...]

“Holy shit. I don’t believe in such coincidences,” Ukrainian anti-corruption activist Daria Kaleniuk wrote of Giuliani’s arrival on Facebook, noting that it comes just days ahead of long-anticipated peace talks between Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Paris on Monday.

  Buzzfeed

And Rudy wouldn't be working in favor of Ukraine.

Giuliani, who is being investigated by federal prosecutors looking into whether he violated federal lobbying laws, is on a mission to “destroy” the Democrats’ impeachment narrative via a documentary series on the vehemently pro-Trump One America News Network (OAN). But judging by the questionable cast of Ukrainian characters he’s meeting, whatever information he manages to dig up is likely to be extremely dubious. “I’m just a country lawyer trying to show his client is being framed. I will do it,” Giuliani told Fox News.

A country lawyer. That's rich.

Giuliani’s meddling in Kyiv is what helped lead to the impeachment inquiry in the first place.

[...]

An official in Zelensky’s office said the president was caught off guard by Giuliani’s arrival, learning about it from the media. The official emphasized that there are “no official meetings” planned with him. Zelensky refused to meet with Giuliani in May, causing him to back out of his last planned trip to Kyiv. This is Giuliani’s first trip since his backchannel Ukraine campaign put the country on the map for many Americans.

Equally shocked by his arrival was the US Embassy, according to a US diplomat who said there would very likely not be a meeting between Giuliani and Bill Taylor, the current top US diplomat in Kyiv who replaced the former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and has provided key testimony in the impeachment inquiry, or anyone else at the embassy, for that matter.

Poor Bill Taylor. If he doesn't quit after this latest, he's super-human.

[Giuliani] began in Budapest, where he met Tuesday with Yuriy Lutsenko, a discredited former Ukrainian prosecutor general who has emerged as a key figure in the impeachment inquiry. Giuliani is filming the three-part program, Ukrainian Witnesses Destroy Schiff’s Case for OAN, hosted by Chanel Rion, inside a series of “undisclosed safe houses” for no discernible reason.

Most likely it's for the "documentary" to show how dangerous it is for Ukrainians to support Trump, which will be couched as "telling the truth."

He is expected to meet with Viktor Shokin and Kostiantyn Kulyk, two other former Ukrainian prosecutors who were fired for poor performance and alleged corruption.

Shokin, Kulyk, and Lutsenko have helped Giuliani push a bogus conspiracy theory that Ukraine — not Russia — interfered in the 2016 election and have spread unfounded corruption accusations against former vice president Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, whose previous work on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma is being used by Republicans to try to undermine the candidacy of his father.

[...]

Foreign correspondents who’ve descended upon the city in recent weeks, as well as local reporters, exchanged frantic messages over WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger groups about where Giuliani might be hiding out. “Are you wasting your day looking for Giuliani, too?” asked one reporter.

The obvious places were searched first: We looked for him in Kyiv’s glitzy hotels, including the glass-covered Hyatt that was a preferred haunt of Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign manager convicted of financial crimes, and which overlooks the city’s golden-domed St. Sophia Monastery; the plush InterContinental, which looks over the extravagant blue-and-gold St. Michael’s Monastery; the marbled Opera hotel owned by Ukraine’s richest man Rinat Akhmetov, where professional Ukrainian soccer players lounge in the lobby; and the 11 Mirrors hotel, a slick boutique owned by former boxing champion turned Kyiv Mayor, Vitaliy Klitschko, who is a friend and former business partner of Giuliani’s.

At each location, the cologne-drenched lobbies hummed with chatter from foreign businessmen in boxy suits, but there was no sign of the mayor.

[...]

Thursday morning, Kyiv got its first look at Giuliani at work in the city when he met with Andriy Derkach, a shady Ukrainian lawmaker who was once a member of former president Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Russian Party of Regions. Derkach, who graduated from an academy run by the KGB, the Soviet predecessor to Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, posted photographs on Facebook of the two men meeting at an undisclosed location.

[...]

Derkach, who held two press conferences in recent weeks during which he waved unsubstantiated documents in front of news cameras that he claimed would prove that Burisma had paid Joe Biden himself for lobbying, said they’d discussed “the creation of the inter-parliamentary group Friends of Ukraine: STOP Corruption.” Derkach also said that he’d told Giuliani about sending letters asking for support for the group to three top Republicans: Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee Sen. Lindsey Graham, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee Rep. Devin Nunes, and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.

As Gordon Sondland testified, everybody was in the loop. I have no doubt Graham's participation will eventually get aired. He's been way too obsequious toward Trump to not be in the Russia fold up to his eyeballs.

Giuliani is traveling with Andriy Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat at the country’s embassy in Washington and a close confidant of Giuliani who shares his love of cigars. Telizhenko has become Trump world’s own sort of “whistleblower” amid the impeachment inquiry after pushing a theory that the Ukrainian embassy in Washington worked with a DNC contractor [Alexandra Chalupa] to dig up dirt on Manafort in order to undermine Trump’s campaign in 2016.

When asked how long Giuliani would be in Kyiv, Telizhenko said, “not long.” He declined to say where Giuliani was staying and didn’t want to disclose their plans. Instead, Telizhenko wanted to talk about how “Soros people”— a common refrain from conspiracy theorists — at the US Embassy in Kyiv are trying to “block” his return to Washington, apparently by refusing to process his visa paperwork.

[...]

Rumors — but not serious ones — of Telizhenko’s possible appointment to the post of Ukraine’s ambassador to Washington have circulated for the past couple of weeks. Nobody seems to know where they began, but Telizhenko himself has done a lot to help spread them. He claims he heard the rumors from someone close to the Zelensky administration. Zelensky’s people, however, say they have nothing to do with them.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,” a Zelensky spokesperson responded via WhatsApp to a request for comment on Telizhenko’s suggestion. “As representatives of the Office of the President have already publicly stated, Volodymyr Yelchenko, Permanent Representative of Ukraine to the United Nations, is the only candidate for the position of the Ambassador of Ukraine to the United States.”

Let me guess - that's going to be Trump's next demand of Zelensky: put Telizhenko in as ambassador.

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

The Sondland bomb

According to Sondland, Vice President Pence was informed of the extortion attempt and said nothing. Both acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were closely involved in the effort. Trump would not hesitate to fire all three men if it would put him one point higher in the polls. But shedding your vice president, your chief of staff and your secretary of state is not a strategy of containment; it would be the complete collapse of the executive branch into recrimination and chaos.

[...]

Some stories, such as the involvement of Attorney General William P. Barr, are yet to be fully told. Why did Justice Department prosecutors dismiss the possibility of campaign finance law violations after such a narrow and cursory examination? Why did Trump, according to the rough transcript of the July 25 phone call, say (twice) that Barr would be in touch with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky or his people to cooperate in a Burisma/Bidens investigation?

[...]

Congress now has every reason and right to hear directly from Barr, Pence, Mulvaney and Pompeo, given their implication in public corruption. And their refusal to testify compounds their apparent corruption with cowardice.

  WaPo

To be fair, given the opportunity to confess, is there any corrupt politician that wouldn't be a coward? I don't think cowardice adds any perceptible negative weight to being corrupt.

Second, we have once again seen evidence of Trump’s mobster mentality.

And that's the crux of the matter: This is a mobster administration.

The president surrounds himself with a bodyguard of rotters — fixers who are willing to do his dirty work based on hints delivered with all the subtlety of a silent film actor. Any leader who would depend on Rudy Giuliani, Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone for service and counsel is not a bad judge of character; he is a good judge of useful knaves.

Bingo.

Public servants such as Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and William B. Taylor Jr., the acting ambassador to Ukraine, raised concerns about corruption up the normal lines of authority. But at the top of those lines Trump has placed people such as Mulvaney, Barr, Pence and Pompeo, who are morally neutered. In a perverse form of political Darwinism, leaders in the executive branch have been selected for traits of turpitude and tractability.

They have been selected for thosse qualities. Those qualities haven't been glossed over or overlooked. They've been selected for.

None of this is likely to change the minds of most elected Republicans on impeachment itself.

No, because they have been coerced into submission - and most likely because they have similar characteristics - at least the tractability.

In the face of serious charges against the president, Republicans have no exculpatory evidence to offer. Their true appeal — their only appeal — is tribal. Republicans would certainly support impeachment for a Democratic president who sought foreign help in rigging an American presidential election, particularly in a manner that strengthened an international rival. But no matter. Tribalism dictates that Republicans stick together in their opposition to impeachment because, well, you can’t give aid and comfort to an enemy intent on ruining the country. The only thing that matters in the end? Using power to keep power.

UPDATE:

Everybody was in the loop.

Sondland said that later in his opening statement, which is going to be one of those documents on display in the National Archives one day. The president*. The vice president. The Secretary of State. The acting White House chief of staff. Rudy Giuliani. Even Ron Johnson, the Republican senator from Wisconsin. Sondland wrapped every one of them in dynamite. They were all in on the shakedown, which, when you come right down to it, was not very complicated at all. All of those people wanted the Bidens investigated. All of those people (initially) tried to leverage a White House visit for the new Ukrainian president to get that. Later, they continued to shake that president down by withholding military aid that already had been approved by the Congress. All of them, wrapped in dynamite by Gordon Sondland: hotelier, bon vivant, and now a human detonator.

  Charles P Pierce

Stirring up the base - Part 2

Previously, on the Lee Zeldin Alarm Hour.



This hour's episode:

White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) official Mark Sandy, who testified in the impeachment inquiry Saturday, told congressional investigators that he did not know why aid to Ukraine was held up, The New York Times reported, citing two sources.

Sandy also said he had never come across a similar situation during his time with the OMB.

[...]

Sandy testified Saturday in the impeachment probe into President Trump after he was subpoenaed by House Democrats, making him the latest to defy the White House's attempt to prevent officials from testifying in the inquiry. He is the first budget official to testify.

  The Hill

Take it away New York Times...

Mark Sandy, a senior budget official, [...] told investigators that political appointees above him did not provide a rationale for the hold and that he had never encountered a similar situation in his time at the agency, according to two people familiar with his testimony.

Mr. Sandy also said that he had sought guidance on the legality of the move, echoing testimony from a Defense Department official who said that she had raised legal concerns.

  NYT

If I'm not mistaken, they're talking about taking their concerns to John Eisenberg, the top legal adviser to the National Security Council, assistant to the president and deputy counsel to the president for national security affairs. Eisenberg was subpoenaed to testify and refused. And  I still can't believe they let these people get away with refusing a Congressional subpoena.

Mr. Sandy was the first budget official to speak with impeachment investigators. At least three higher-profile Trump administration officials connected to the budget office have stiff-armed the inquiry: Russell T. Vought, the agency’s acting director; Michael Duffey, who helped carry out Mr. Trump’s directive to freeze the aid; and Mick Mulvaney, who retains the title of budget director and is the acting White House chief of staff.

He testified that he was directed to sign paperwork on July 25 enforcing the hold, but that Mr. Duffey, a political appointee, signed such paperwork going forward, a highly unusual intervention by his account.

Does any of that sound "bad for Schiff's fairy tale" to you?

Me either.

How about this...

Sandy is the first OMB official to testify, which he did for almost six hours under subpoena, according to an official working on the impeachment inquiry. OMB had instructed him not to cooperate.

[...]

The testimony from Mark Sandy, the first employee of OMB to testify in the House impeachment probe, appeared to confirm Democrats’ assertion that the decision to withhold nearly $400 million in congressionally approved funds for Ukraine, including millions in lethal aid, was a political one.

[...]

Other witnesses have testified that the letter Sandy signed was dated July 25 — the same day that President Trump spoke by phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and one week after OMB verbally informed interagency officials that they were withholding the funds on orders from the White House. The signature of Sandy’s boss, political appointee Michael Duffey, appears on subsequent letters.

  WaPo

Yeah, Duffey, former head of the Wisconsin Republican Party, skipped out on his scheduled hearing, too.

Does this whole thing stink enough yet? No? Okay, here's more...

Sandy testified that the change came about when Duffey told him he wanted to learn more about the budget apportionment process. Sandy thought this was odd, the people familiar with his testimony said — and he told investigators that he suggested to Duffey that if he wanted to learn more about the process, there were other ways to do it. But Duffey insisted.

Sandy testified that he had never in his career seen a senior political OMB official assume control of a portfolio in such a fashion [but] did not raise a fuss because he wanted to keep his job.

His testimony does not appear to shed any new light on whether the Trump administration’s decision to withhold Ukraine aid was leverage to pressure that country’s government to launch investigations against Trump’s political rivals. But it undermines acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney’s public assertion that the Ukraine aid was frozen in a routine manner that happened “all the time.”

Have you noticed that all the honest people are appearing under subpoena - as they are required by law to do? Well, Gordon Sondland appeared, as I assume he wasn't willing to break the law and defy his subpoena like the Trump loyalists Perry, Mulvaney and his adviser Robert Blair, Giuliani, Duffey, Eisenberg and his deputy Michael Ellis, and Brian McCormack from OMB. Sondland also wasn't smart enough to tell the truth, and he's up Schiff's creek now.

Dear Mr. Zeldin: Stop digging.

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

Like we didn't already know

Because, in one sense, he IS the most transparent president ever.

President Trump has been threatening for weeks to fire acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, but senior advisers have counseled him to hold off on such a drastic step amid a high-stakes impeachment probe, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

Trump has expressed particular anger over Mulvaney’s performance in an Oct. 17 news conference in which Mulvaney stunned White House aides by saying military aid to Ukraine was withheld to pressure its government to launch investigations that could politically benefit Trump, two of the people said.

[...]

Senior advisers have cautioned Trump that removing Mulvaney at such a sensitive time could be perilous, the people said — both because Mulvaney played an integral role in the decision to freeze the aid, and because of the disruption that would be caused by replacing one of Trump’s most senior aides.

“I don’t think you’ll see him going anywhere until after December,” said one Trump adviser. [...] “But the president was very unhappy with that press conference. That was a very bad day for the president.”

  WaPo

What's magical about December?

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

Trump working for the Russians

From two released hearing transcripts:

In one odd anecdote relayed by [Volker aide Christopher] Anderson, he described an early-2019 conversation in which then-national security adviser John Bolton revealed Trump had called him at his home to complain about a CNN story that made it appear the Navy was pushing back against Russian aggression in the Black Sea.

“Ambassador Bolton relayed that he was called at home by the president, who complained about this news report,” Anderson told lawmakers.

Anderson described a sense of “Ukraine fatigue” emerging inside the administration that was evident when the Navy launched a routine “freedom-of-navigation” operation in the Black Sea. Anderson said officials notified the Turkish government, and when CNN reported on the move — portraying it as a response to Russia — the White House asked the Navy to cancel the maneuver.

“We met with Ambassador Bolton and discussed this, and he made it clear that the president had called him to complain about that news report.

[...]

[Volker aide Catherine] Croft revealed that a previously unknown hold was placed on a separate aspect of U.S. lethal military aid to Ukraine. She told investigators that OMB put a hold on a transfer of javelin missiles to Ukraine — and that Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, expressed concerns that “Russia would react negatively.”

She said OMB was the “lone objector” to transferring the missiles to Kyiv and that “all of the policy agencies,” including the State Department and the National Security Council, supported the transfer.

Croft added that [from a briefing with Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney] refusing to provide javelins to Ukraine would benefit Russia.

  Politico

And in that "perfect" call to Uranian president Zelensky, Zelensky mentioned the javelins, and Trump said, "I want you to do us a favor though."

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

Mulvaney will be looking for a new job

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney first learned about the U.S. military raid against ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi after the operation was already underway, according to five current and former senior administration officials.

Mulvaney was at home in South Carolina when President Donald Trump wrote on Twitter Saturday night that “Something very big has just happened!” He was briefed on the raid that night, officials said.

  NBC

I assume he's watching Trump's Twitter account closely.

The extraordinary move by Trump to leave his chief of staff out of the most significant U.S. military operation against the world’s most wanted terrorist since the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 represents a major blow to Mulvaney, suggesting that he is increasingly sidelined inside the White House.

And that bus is barreling down the highway.

The White House chief of staff typically would be central to such a momentous gambit for a president, coordinating logistics, public statements and notifications of congressional leaders and allies. Bill Daley, who was White House chief of staff during the bin Laden raid, was seated next to then-President Barack Obama as he monitored the raid in a secure White House room with a small group of senior officials.

Andrew Card, former President George W. Bush’s longtime chief of staff, said the exclusion of Mulvaney from a moment of such magnitude in the presidency is difficult to grasp because the chief of staff typically would be in national security meetings leading up to it and tasked with coordinating with other top officials on everything from a communications strategy to a plan in case the raid failed.

The writing is on the wall, Mick.

“I’m baffled by it,” Card said. “It’s hard for me to imagine."

[...]

“It’s really unprecedented, and to me it’s just a symptom of a total breakdown in the White House functions,” said Chris Whipple, author of “The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency.”

Honestly, I think it's pretty easy to understand. Mulvaney blew it on national TV when he admitted to a quid pro quo in Trump's dealings with Ukraine a couple of weeks ago.

“Only in a completely dysfunctional White House would the White House chief of staff be out of the loop on something so significant,” he added.

And that's what we have. A completely dysfunctional White House.

Trump has been actively considering possible replacements for Mulvaney, officials said. On Monday, White House spokesman Hogan Gidley repeatedly declined to say whether the president has confidence in Mulvaney when pressed by NBC News.

“Mick has done a good job implementing the president’s policies at OMB and as acting chief of staff,” Gidley said, referring to Mulvaney’s role as the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

[...]

[A] person close to the president said Mulvaney was “cooked” after that performance.

“Mick self-immolated,” this person said. “He got up there, poured lighter fluid on himself and lit the match.”

UPDATE 11/13:

President Trump has been threatening for weeks to fire acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, but senior advisers have counseled him to hold off on such a drastic step amid a high-stakes impeachment probe, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

Trump has expressed particular anger over Mulvaney’s performance in an Oct. 17 news conference in which Mulvaney stunned White House aides by saying military aid to Ukraine was withheld to pressure its government to launch investigations that could politically benefit Trump, two of the people said.

[...]

Senior advisers have cautioned Trump that removing Mulvaney at such a sensitive time could be perilous, the people said — both because Mulvaney played an integral role in the decision to freeze the aid, and because of the disruption that would be caused by replacing one of Trump’s most senior aides.

“I don’t think you’ll see him going anywhere until after December,” said one Trump adviser. [...] “But the president was very unhappy with that press conference. That was a very bad day for the president.”

  WaPo

Impeachment: Bribery

Any public corruption prosecutor familiar with the federal bribery statute and self-dealing cases will recognize that firsthand witnesses, such as Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland, Mulvaney, and Trump himself, have now offered evidence to all the elements of the offense. The bribery law—18 U.S.C. § 201(b)—is easy to understand. The elements, as they pertain here, are as follows:

Whoever, being a public official … corruptly directly or indirectly demands or seeks … anything of value for himself or some other person in return for being influenced in the performance of any official act …

has committed the felony. I believe the federal bribery crime, a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison, also gets at the heart of the self-dealing issue more effectively than some alternative theories of criminal behavior, such as “honest services fraud” (which has some complex legal issues associated with it) or foreign campaign finance violations (which tend to involve monetary help apparently lacking here).

[...]

Parnas and Fruman have already been indicted for the campaign finance violations allegedly committed in a bribery scheme (described in the indictment) to gain the dismissal of U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, with the aid of then-Rep. Pete Sessions (who is cooperating with investigators).

[...]

In late April, encouraged by Giuliani, Trump reportedly overrode State Department resistance and ordered the dismissal of Ambassador Yovanovitch.

[...]

[Secretary of Energy Rick] Perry has publicly summarized the guidance he received from Giuliani in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. According to Perry, Trump and Giuliani in following weeks again and again reiterated several specific demands, of which information regarding the Bidens was only one. The demands were to be made under the guise of forcing Ukraine to undertake an “anti-corruption” effort. As Trump, Perry and Mulvaney directly attest, the actual demands were to find “evidence” for a Democratic-Ukrainian conspiracy in the election of 2016.

Specifically, they included demands:

To seek “evidence” that in 2016 Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the criminal cyberattacks against the Clinton campaign.
To seek “evidence” that in 2016 Ukrainians, perhaps with help from Clinton operatives, fabricated or corruptly released the “black ledger” of evidence about the relationship of the former, pro-Russia, Ukrainian regime to Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort (which contributed to Manafort’s resignation that year and his later felony convictions).
To seek “evidence”that in 2016 Ukrainians had acted corruptly to help create the so-called “Steele dossier” of investigative speculation about the Trump-Russia relationships.
To seek “evidence” that in 2016 Vice President Biden had been acting to protect the interests of a Ukrainian firm, Burisma, and his son Hunter (then on a Burisma board of advisers) when he joined in the international effort to pressure then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to replace his prosecutor-general, Viktor Shokin.

[...]

Federal bribery law does not require that the value be in money. As the Department of Justice Criminal Resource Manual points out, such things include “intangible as well as tangible things” and “have been broadly construed to focus on the worth attached to the bribe by the defendant, rather than its commercial value.”

[...]

[A]ny prosecutor familiar with the federal bribery statute, and any lawyer familiar with self-dealing cases, will recognize all the elements of the offense. Under the law, the quid pro quo need not be explicit, and need only be intended, although in this case there was actually direct bargaining about how Ukraine must meet the demands as a condition of the various U.S. official acts to maintain good relations and aid. Even before Mulvaney’s public admission, the nature of the quid pro quo seems to have been unusually clear.

[...]

There is no reliable evidence that the allegations about Ukrainian-Democratic collusion in 2016 are true. But Trump, Giuliani and Mulvaney can argue that, even if their 2016 conspiracy theories are false, they sincerely believed in them and thus did not act “corruptly.”

[...]

Even if Trump and Giuliani sincerely believe that Trump was wronged in the 2016 election or that his opponents are criminals, this does not make their 2019 desire for vindication, revenge or political advantage into a public, rather than private, interest. If they think Americans have committed crimes, they could have brought those allegations to the public institutions that investigate such allegations, which must follow certain rules—including in an international investigation. Trump and Giuliani did not do that. What they therefore must prove, against the prima facie evidence of bad, private intent, is that they really believed—even falsely—that working on these 2016 allegations would help clean up Ukrainian politics in 2019.

There are four big problems with this defensive cover story.

First, Trump ran the bargaining with Ukraine through his private lawyer, Giuliani, not through public channels.

[...]

As a private citizen, Giuliani was unconstrained by ethics rules, conflict of interest rules or any other restrictions set in place to make sure that public work is done in the public interest. Since individuals like Parnas had, in fact, retained Giuliani too (paying him half a million dollars just last August, according to Giuliani), such concerns were hardly theoretical.

It is revealing that, when Trump escalated the pressure in July to withhold aid—something Giuliani could not do for him—Trump managed this through Mulvaney, as news reports have shown. He thus chose to bypass the national security adviser, John Bolton, and the National Security Council process. Again, this is evidence that the motives were essentially personal and not the design of a foreign policy move to help Ukraine.

Second, the Trump and Giuliani demands had nothing to do with the long-standing anti-corruption agenda with Ukraine. That agenda was well-known.

It is revealing that at no time did the Trump administration make any diplomatic effort to persuade others across the administration or in the IMF or the EU that its 2016 theories should be made part of the Ukraine anti-corruption policy agenda. It is also revealing that the government professionals actually working on anti-corruption efforts with Ukraine did not believe that these demands were part of that agenda, once they learned of them.

Third, the Trump and Giuliani demands would have actually knocked down the existing Ukrainian anti-corruption efforts. One of the main targets of anti-corruption efforts were corrupt and unqualified prosecutors general who stymied investigations and blocked prosecutions, like Viktor Shokin. Yet Shokin is an indispensable ally in Giuliani’s work. Shokin appears to have provided an affidavit fingering Biden to lawyers for Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash, who himself may have been in business with Parnas and Fruman and is seeking to avoid extradition to face federal charges in the United States.

One of the sad ironies of the Biden tangle is that the Western pressure to dismiss Shokin, in which Vice President Biden joined, was not likely to help Burisma, as Trump has alleged. On the contrary, it was likely to threaten Burisma.

[...]

Fourth, at the time it began using the “anti-corruption” cover story, the Trump administration had just officially certified that Ukrainian anti-corruption efforts were satisfactory. Congressional aid could not be released unless the Trump administration certified to Congress that Ukraine was making adequate progress on corruption, at least as it might affect military aid. On May 23, the administration made that certification. [...] In July, when Trump and Mulvaney decided to claim “anti-corruption” as a cover story to block the aid, they did not withdraw the certification to Congress.

[...]

Another cover story, that the aid was held up because Europeans were not contributing enough to help Ukraine, will not hold up well either. Both IMF and European contributions exceed the American effort. Nor did the Trump administration approach the Europeans after withholding aid to demand that Europe do more as a condition to release the U.S. aid.

[...]

I believe that if Perry had consulted a good lawyer beforehand, he might not have given the interview he gave to the Wall Street Journal, in which he may have unwittingly incriminated himself before he was ready to handle this. He conceded that he accepted private direction to represent these private demands in his share of the bargaining with Ukraine over official acts to welcome the new government.

  Lawfare Blog

And Perry is getting a bus ride beneath the wheels for it.

Sondland, by contrast, has clearly consulted a good lawyer, since his prepared statement took great care to emphasize that he, Sondland, was unaware of the specific demands that were actually being made underneath the “anti-corruption” cover story. Sondland says that he was troubled by Giuliani’s role and that, once he found out the nature of the asks, he was shocked and then distanced himself from the work.

Unfortunately for Mr. Sondland, Ambassador Taylor has contradicted him, and Taylor has contemporaneous notes.

Volker’s situation depends on the evidence about his conduct as a go-between. It could be at least partly exculpatory if he kept trying, even if unsuccessfully, to convert Trump and Giuliani’s unlawful private demands into requests that would be at least harmless and in the public interest.

Mulvaney does not appear to have consulted a lawyer before he publicly admitted to the quid pro quo in the strongest possible terms (“absolutely!”). Then, presumably having obtained legal advice, the White House issued the written statement that tried to walk back his admissions. This is not likely to help Mulvaney much with prosecutors or jurors.

[...]

The evidence so far presents a prima facie case of self-dealing meeting the elements of 201(b) (and also the “Bribery” offense that the Constitution says “shall” cause impeachment). The Trump and Giuliani demands to force Ukraine to seek evidence on their 2016 conspiracy theories were essentially private, in the pursuit of a very personal agenda. They were not policy choices developed to clean up Ukrainian politics. They would, in fact, have the opposite effect. Any knowledgeable official would have told them that—and my guess is that the evidence will show that every knowledgeable official in fact did try to tell them that.

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

Ambassador Taylor's "leaked" opening statement

Ambassador Taylor will be leaving his post soon, won't he?

The diplomat, William Taylor, painted a damaging portrait of events that directly tied Trump to a quid pro quo with Ukraine, according to his prepared remarks obtained by POLITICO and his responses to questions as described by sources in the room for the closed-door testimony.

[...]

The timeline Taylor laid out during his nearly 10 hours testifying before investigators is at the heart of Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into the president. The 50-year veteran of government service systematically dismantled Trump’s repeated denials that he sought to leverage American military and diplomatic might to coerce an ally into a coordinated campaign to damage his potential 2020 rival. Trump himself and his congressional allies did not attempt on Tuesday to dispute the substance of Taylor’s claims, which were based on copious notes. Instead, the White House attacked Taylor personally, saying he was part of a band of “radical unelected bureaucrats waging war on the Constitution.”

  Politico

Sad!

“It is a rancorous story about whistle-blowers, Mr. Giuliani, side channels, quid pro quos, corruption and interference in elections,” Taylor said, referring to Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who was deeply involved in the shadow effort.

[...]

Taylor also testified that Sondland said Trump personally told him that he wanted Ukraine to “state publicly” that it would open such probes, before the U.S. would release the aid, which is viewed as critical for combating Russia’s aggression in the region. Taylor repeatedly underscored the damage that even a temporary hold on the aid had done to the U.S.-Ukraine relationship, at a time when the budding democracy was resisting an advance by Russian forces and fighting corruption at the highest levels of the government.

[...]

“The body language of the people hearing it was, ‘holy s---’ — seriously,” Rep. Harley Rouda (D-Calif.), a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, said in reference to Taylor’s opening statement.

[...]

“I’ll tell you, as a former State Department political appointee, in my experience the difference between career folks and political appointees is the career folks take very good notes,” Malinowski said, hinting that Taylor provided corroboration to back up his recollections. Lawmakers roundly criticized Sondland, a political appointee and a donor to the 2016 Trump campaign, for failing to recall certain events and conversations during his deposition last week.

You don't usually keep notes if you know what you're doing is unethical and/or illegal.

Sondland’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment. Sondland has emphasized that he wants to provide notes and documents to the committee but has been blocked by the State Department.

Possibly untrue. But, if true, it means Sondland knows there are notes that are damning to the President.

Congressional Republicans were more muted, but they showed no immediate signs of breaking with Trump despite the latest bombshells.

He could shoot someone on 5th Avenue in broad daylight.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the president's lead defender in the room, was tight-lipped as he emerged from the closed-door deposition for a lunch break. He praised what he described as GOP lawyers’ effective questioning of Taylor but declined to say whether it yielded exculpatory information.

And we all know that Jim Jordan would have been shouting it coming out the door if that were the case.

A source who attended the deposition said a phone call between Taylor and Sondland was a key episode about which Taylor provided new information. That conversation came at Sondland’s request after Taylor, in one of the text messages released earlier this month, questioned whether the military assistance and possible White House meeting are “conditioned on investigations.”

“After today, Mr. Sondland is going to have some explaining to do,” Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) said.

The acting US ambassador to Kyiv has provided congressional committees conducting impeachment hearings a detailed account of how Donald Trump repeatedly sought to make a summit meeting and military aid to Ukraine conditional on its government launching investigations into the president’s political opponents.

Bill Taylor’s testimony was the latest in a series of depositions by serving and former administration officials, as part of the impeachment inquiry, [and] it was the most detailed and damning to date.

Taylor, who took over as acting ambassador in June, presented his testimony behind closed doors on Capitol Hill but copies of his opening statement soon leaked.

The veteran diplomat said that soon after arriving in Kyiv, he became concerned “our relationship with Ukraine was being fundamentally undermined by an irregular informal channel of US policymaking, and by the withholding of vital security assistance for domestic political reasons”.

Taylor said this irregular channel was run by Trump through several emissaries: the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, the departing energy secretary, Rick Perry, the ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, and the special Ukraine envoy, Kurt Volker.

They became focused solely on persuading the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to announce investigations that would damage Democrats and especially Joe Biden [...] .

[...]

According to Taylor’s statement [...] Sondland, made clear in a phone call that both military aid and a White House meeting with Trump were dependent on the launch of two investigations.

  Guardian

Ambassador Taylor may be "resigning" soon.

Bill Taylor's statement at Time.

Exerpts:

For 50 years, I have served the country, starting as a cadet at West Point, then as an infantry officer for six years, including with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam; then at the Department of Energy; then as a member of a Senate staff; then at NATO; then with the State Department here and abroad in Afghanistan, Iraq, Jerusalem, and Ukraine; and more recently, as Executive Vice President of the nonpartisan United States Institute of Peace.

[...]

My background and experience are nonpartisan and I have been honored to serve under every administration, Republican and Democratic, since 1985.

[...]

At the outset, I would like to convey several key points. First, Ukraine is a strategic partner of the United States, important for the security of our country as well as Europe. Second, Ukraine is, right at this moment—while we sit in this room—and for the last five years, under armed attack from Russia. Third, the security assistance we provide is crucial to Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression, and, more importantly, sends a signal to Ukrainians—and Russians— that we are Ukraine’s reliable strategic partner. And finally, as the Committees are now aware, I said on September 9 in a message to Ambassador Gordon Sondland that withholding security assistance in exchange for help with a domestic political campaign in the United States would be “crazy.”

[...]

I cared about Ukraine’s future and the important U.S. interests there. So, when Secretary Pompeo asked me to go back to Kyiv [to replace ambassador Yovanovitch], I wanted to say “yes.”

But it was not an easy decision. The former Ambassador, Masha Yovanovitch, had been treated poorly, caught in a web of political machinations both in Kyiv and in Washington. I feared that those problems were still present. When I talked to her about accepting the offer, however, she urged me to go, both for policy reasons and for the morale of the embassy.

[...]

I could be effective only if the U.S. policy of strong support for Ukraine—strong diplomatic support along with robust security, economic, and technical assistance—were to continue and if I had the backing of the Secretary of State to implement that policy. [...] So during my meeting with Secretary Pompeo on May 28, I made clear to him and the others present that if U.S. policy toward Ukraine changed, he would not want me posted there and I could not stay. He assured me that the policy of strong support for Ukraine would continue and that he would support me in defending that policy.

[...]

I returned to Kyiv on June 17, carrying the original copy of a letter President Trump signed the day after I met with the Secretary. In that letter, President Trump congratulated President Zelenskyy on his election victory and invited him to a meeting in the Oval Office. I also brought with me a framed copy of the Secretary’s declaration that the United States would never recognize the illegal Russian annexation of Crimea.

[...]

On June 27, Ambassador Sondland told me during a phone conversation that President Zelenskyy needed to make clear to President Trump that he, President Zelenskyy, was not standing, in the way of “investigations.”

[...]

I sensed something odd when Ambassador Sondland told me on June 28 that he did not wish to include most of the regular interagency participants in a call planned with President Zelenskyy later that day. Ambassador Sondland, Ambassador Volker, Secretary Perry, and I were on this call, dialing in from different locations. However, Ambassador Sondland said that he wanted to make sure no one was transcribing or monitoring as they added President Zelenskyy to the call. Also, before President Zelenskyy joined the call, Ambassador Volker separately told the U.S. participants that he, Ambassador Volker, planned to be explicit with President Zelenskyy in a one-on-one meeting in Toronto on July 2 about what President Zelenskyy should do to get the White House meeting. [...] Ambassador Volker noted that he would relay that President Trump wanted to see rule of law, transparency, but also, specifically, cooperation on investigations to “get to the bottom of things.” Once President Zelenskyy joined the call, the conversation was focused on energy policy and the Stanytsia-Luhanska bridge. President Zelenskyy also said he looked forward to the White House visit President Trump had offered in his May 29 letter.

[...]

By mid-July it was becoming clear to me that the meeting President Zelenskyy wanted was conditioned on the investigations of Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. It was also clear that this condition was driven by the irregular policy channel I had come to understand was guided by Mr. Giuliani.

[...]

In a regular NSC secure video-conference call on July 18, I heard a staff person from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) say that there was a hold on security assistance to Ukraine but could not say why. Toward the end of an otherwise normal meeting, a voice on the call—the person was off-screen—said that she was from OMB and that her boss had instructed her not to approve any additional spending of security assistance for Ukraine until further notice. I and others sat in astonishment—the Ukrainians were fighting the Russians and counted on not only the training and weapons, but also the assurance of U.S. support. All that the OMB staff person said was that the directive had come from the President to the Chief of Staff to OMB. In an instant, I realized that one of the key pillars of our strong support for Ukraine was threatened. The irregular policy channel was running contrary to the goals of longstanding U.S. policy.

[...]

My understanding, was that the Secretaries of Defense and State, the CIA Director, and the National Security Advisor sought a joint meeting with the President to convince him to release the hold, but such a meeting was hard to schedule and the hold lasted well into September.

Hard to schedule because His Lardship's "executive time" couldn't be interrupted?

The next day on the phone, Dr. Hill and Mr. Vindman tried to reassure me that they were not aware of any official change in U.S. policy toward Ukraine, OMB’s announcement notwithstanding. They did confirm that the hold on security assistance for Ukraine came from Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and that the Chief of Staff maintained a skeptical view of Ukraine.

In the same July 19 phone call, they gave me an account of the July 10 meeting with the Ukrainian officials at the White House. Specifically, they told me that Ambassador Sondland had connected “investigations” with an Oval Office meeting for President Zelenskyy, which so irritated Ambassador Bolton that he abruptly ended the meeting, telling Dr. Hill and Mr. Vindman that they should have nothing to do with domestic politics. He also directed Dr. Hill to “brief the lawyers.” Dr. Hill said that Ambassador Bolton referred to this as a “drug deal” after the July 10 meeting. Ambassador Bolton opposed a call between President Zelenskyy and President Trump out of concern that it “would be a disaster.”

Needless to say, the Ukrainians in the meetings were confused. Ambassador Bolton, in the regular Ukraine policy decision-making channel, wanted to talk about security, energy, and reform; Ambassador Sondland, a participant in the irregular channel, wanted to talk about the connection between a White House meeting and Ukrainian investigations.

Also during our July 19 call, Dr. Hill informed me that Ambassador Volker had met with Mr. Giuliani to discuss Ukraine. This caught me by surprise. The next day I asked Ambassador Volker about that meeting, but received no response.

[...]

Later on July 19 and in the early morning of July 20 (Kyiv time), I received text messages on a three-way WhatsApp text conversation with Ambassadors Volker and Sondland, a record of which l understand has already been provided to the Committees by Ambassador Volker. Ambassador Sondland said that a call between President Trump and President Zelenskyy would take place soon. Ambassador Volker said that what was “[m]ost impt is for Zelensky to say that he will help investigation—and address any specific personnel issues—if there are any.”

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Also on July 20, I had a phone conversation with Mr. Danyliuk, during which he conveyed to me that President Zelenskyy did not want to be used as a pawn in a U.S. re-election campaign. The next day I texted both Ambassadors Volker and Sondland about President Zelenskyy’s concern.

On July 25, President Trump and President Zelenskyy had the long-awaited phone conversation. Strangely, even though I was Chief of Mission and was scheduled to meet with President Zelenskyy along with Ambassador Volker the following day, I received no readout of the call from the White House. The Ukrainian government issued a short, cryptic summary.

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Although I spent the morning of July 26 with President Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian officials, the first summary of the Trump-Zelenskyy call that I heard from anybody inside the U.S. government was during a phone call I had with Tim Morrison, Dr. Hill’s recent replacement at the NSC, on July 28. Mr. Morrison told me that the call “could have been better” and that President Trump had suggested that President Zelenskyy or his staff meet with Mr. Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr. I did not see any official readout of the call until it was publicly released on September 25.

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On August 16, I exchanged text messages with Ambassador Volker in which I learned that Mr. Yermak had asked that the United States submit an official request for an investigation into Burisma’s alleged violations of Ukrainian law, if that is what the United States desired. A formal U.S. request to the Ukrainians to conduct an investigation based on violations of their own law struck me as improper, and I recommended to Ambassador Volker that we “stay clear.” To find out the legal aspects of the question, however, I gave him the name of a Deputy Assistant Attorney General whom I thought would be the proper point of contact for seeking a U.S. referral for a foreign investigation.

By mid-August, because the security assistance had been held for over a month for no reason that I could discern, I was beginning to fear that the longstanding U.S. policy of strong support for Ukraine was shifting. [...] My concerns deepened the next day, on August 22, during a phone conversation with Mr. Morrison. I asked him if there had been a change in policy of strong support for Ukraine, to which he responded, “it remains to be seen.” He also told me during this call that the “President doesn’t want to provide any assistance at all.” That was extremely troubling to me.

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Just days later, on August 27, Ambassador Bolton arrived in Kyiv and met with President Zelenskyy. [...] Near the end of Ambassador Bolton’s visit, I asked to meet him privately, during which I expressed to him my serious concern about the withholding of military assistance to Ukraine while the Ukrainians were defending their country from Russian aggression. Ambassador Bolton recommended that I send a first-person cable to Secretary Pompeo directly, relaying my concerns. I wrote and transmitted such a cable on August 29, describing the “folly” I saw in withholding military aid to Ukraine at a time when hostilities were still active in the east and when Russia was watching closely to gauge the level of American support for the Ukrainian government. I told the Secretary that I could not and would not defend such a policy. Although I received no specific response, I heard that soon thereafter, the Secretary carried the cable with him to a meeting at the White House focused on security assistance for Ukraine.

The same day that I sent my cable to the Secretary, August 29, Mr. Yermak contacted me and was very concerned, asking about the withheld security assistance. The hold that the White House had placed on the assistance had just been made public that day in a Politico story. At that point, I was embarrassed that I could give him no explanation for why it was withheld.

It had still not occurred to me that the hold on security assistance could be related to the “investigations.” That, however, would soon change.

On September 1, just three days after my cable to Secretary Pompeo, President Zelenskyy met Vice President Pence at a bilateral meeting in Warsaw. [...] I contacted Mr. Danyliuk to let him know that the delay of U.S. security assistance was an “all or nothing” proposition, in the sense that if the White House did not lift the hold prior to the end of the fiscal year (September 30), the funds would expire and Ukraine would receive nothing. I was hopeful that at the bilateral meeting or shortly thereafter, the White House would lift the hold, but this was not to be. Indeed, I received a readout of the Pence-Zelenskyy meeting over the phone from Mr. Morrison, during which he told me President Zelenskyy had opened the meeting by asking the Vice President about security cooperation. The Vice President did not respond substantively, but said that he would talk to President Trump that night.

[...]

During this same phone call I had with Mr. Morrison, he went on to describe a conversation Ambassador Sondland had with Mr. Yermak at Warsaw. Ambassador Sondland told Mr. Yermak that the security assistance money would not come until President Zelenskyy committed to pursue the Burisma investigation.

[...]

This was the first time I had heard that the security assistance—not just the White House meeting—was conditioned on the investigations.

Very concerned, on that same day I sent Ambassador Sondland a text message asking if “we [are] now saying that security assistance and [a] WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?” Ambassador Sondland responded asking me to call him, which I did. During that phone call, Ambassador Sondland told me that President Trump had told him that he wants President Zelenskyy to state publicly that Ukraine will investigate Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.

Ambassador Sondland also told me that he now recognized that he had made a mistake by earlier telling the Ukrainian officials to whom he spoke that a White House meeting with President Zelenskyy was dependent on a public announcement of investigations—in fact, Ambassador Sondland said, “everything” was dependent on such an announcement, including security assistance. He said that President Trump wanted President Zelenskyy “in a public box” by making a public statement about ordering such investigations.

And there it is.

I told Ambassador Sondland that President Trump should have more respect for another head of state and [...] asked Ambassador Sondland to push back on President Trump’s demand. Ambassador Sondland pledged to try. We also discussed the possibility that the Ukrainian Prosecutor General, rather than President Zelenskyy, would make a statement about investigations, potentially in coordination with Attorney General Barr’s probe into the investigation of interference in the 2016 elections.

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On September 5, I hosted Senators Johnson and Murphy for a visit to Kyiv. During their visit, we met with President Zelenskyy. His first question to the senators was about the withheld security assistance. My recollection of the meeting is that both senators stressed that bipartisan support for Ukraine in Washington was Ukraine’s most important strategic asset and that President Zelenskyy should not jeopardize that bipartisan support by getting drawn into U.S. domestic politics.

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But the push to make President Zelenskyy publicly commit to investigations of Burisma and alleged interference in the 2016 election showed how the official foreign policy of the United States was undercut by the irregular efforts led by Mr. Giuliani.

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Two days later, on September 7, I had a conversation with Mr. Morrison in which he described a phone conversation earlier that day between Ambassador Sondland and President Trump. Mr. Morrison said that he had a “sinking feeling” after learning about this conversation from Ambassador Sondland. According to Mr. Morrison, President Trump told Ambassador Sondland that he was not asking for a “quid pro quo.” But President Trump did insist that President Zelenskyy go to a microphone and say he is opening investigations of Biden and 2016 election interference, and that President Zelenskyy should want to do this himself.

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The following day, on September 8, Ambassador Sondland and I spoke on the phone. He said he had talked to President Trump as I had suggested a week earlier, but that President Trump was adamant that President Zelenskyy, himself, had to “clear things up and do it in public.” President Trump said it was not a “quid pro quo.” Ambassador Sondland said that he had talked to President Zelenskyy and Mr. Yermak and told them that, although this was not a quid pro quo, if President Zelenskyy did not “clear things up” in public, we would be at a “stalemate.” I understood a “stalemate” to mean that Ukraine would not receive the much-needed military assistance. Ambassador Sondland said that this conversation concluded with President Zelenskyy agreeing to make a public statement in an interview with CNN.

Blackmail, in essence.

Ambassador Sondland tried to explain to me that President Trump is a businessman. When a businessman is about to sign a check to someone who owes him something, he said, the businessman asks that person to pay up before signing the check. Ambassador Volker used the same terms several days later while we were together at the Yalta European Strategy Conference. I argued to both that the explanation made no sense: the Ukrainians did not “owe” President Trump anything, and holding up security assistance for domestic political gain was “crazy,” as I had said in my text message to Ambassadors Sondland and Volker on September 9.

Finally, I learned on September 11 that the hold had been lifted and that the security assistance would be provided.

The news of the quid pro quo had by then been leaked and published by the Washington Post on September 5.

My fear at the time was that since Ambassador Sondland had told me President Zelenskyy already agreed to do a CNN interview, President Zelenskyy would make a statement regarding “investigations” that would have played into domestic U.S. politics. I sought to confirm through Mr. Danyliuk that President Zelenskyy was not planning to give such an interview to the media. While Mr. Danyliuk initially confirmed that on September 12, I noticed during a meeting on the morning of September 13 at President Zelenskyy’s office that Mr. Yermak looked uncomfortable in response to the question. Again, I asked Mr. Danyliuk to confirm that there would be no CNN interview, which he did.

On September 25 at the UN General Assembly session in New York City, President Trump met President Zelenskyy face-to-face. He also released the transcript of the July 25 call. The United States gave the Ukrainians virtually no notice of the release, and they were livid. Although this was the first time I had seen the details of President Trump’s July 25 call with President Zelenskyy, in which he mentioned Vice President Biden, I had come to understand well before then that “investigations” was a term that Ambassadors Volker and Sondland used to mean matters related to the 2016 elections, and to investigations of Burisma and the Bidens.

Complete statement.

UPDATE: