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".

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

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

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

[...]

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

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

[...]

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

[...]

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

  CNN

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

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

[...]

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

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

[...]

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

[...]

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

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

[...]

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

[...]

[T]he hold became public Aug. 28.

[...]

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

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

[...]

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

  WaPo

What a surprise.

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

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

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

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

[...]

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

The next day, the aid was released.

Coincidence, of course.

And Republican Judiciary Committee minority leader has yet another excuse:

So, take your pick, I guess.

UPDATE:

Philip Reeker and Mark Sandy testimony, and John Solomon

Philip Reeker, acting assistant secretary of European and Eurasian Affairs, testified privately last month that a “media storm” of negative but “highly inaccurate” stories targeting Marie Yovanovitch led to her recall from Kyiv in May, even as veteran State officials sought “a formal statement from the department” in her defense.

"There would be no statement," Reeker told investigators, according to a transcript of his testimony released Tuesday by Democrats leading the impeachment inquiry into Trump. "We would continue to use the press guidance that we had that had been cleared."

  The Hill

Mike Pompeo is up to his sweaty palms in this. Nunes and all the Republicans who sat through all those public hearings trashing every witness knew all of this the whole time. No wonder Adam Schiff didn't cut them an inch of slack.

[Reeker's testimony] supported the narrative delivered by a number of other veteran diplomats testifying in the impeachment investigation who have painted a graphic picture of efforts by Trump’s allies — led by his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani — to go after Yovanovitch, a career diplomat described by Reeker as “one of the foreign service great leaders.”

Reeker testified that the public effort to target Yovanovitch began weeks earlier with a column from John Solomon, a conservative opinion writer formerly with The Hill, who had interviewed Yuriy Lutsenko, Ukraine’s top prosecutor at the time. Lutsenko told Solomon that Yovanovitch had given him a list of figures he was not to prosecute, even as U.S. policy sought to rein in corruption in a country well known for it.

Both Yovanovitch and the State Department have denied the allegation, and Lutsenko has since walked it back.

Reeker dismissed it as an outright fabrication.

[...]

Nonetheless, the charge caught fire in the conservative press, attracting the attention of Trump’s allies and stirring more stories in the right-wing media.

And who, I wonder, put Solomon on that path?*

Reeker testified that it was the “understanding” of the State Department that the hold on military aid had originated with Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff, and that Giuliani was fueling the narrative that Kyiv was undeserving of the funds by “feeding the president a lot of very negative views about Ukraine.”

“What we sensed was a very negative stream coming from Mr. Giuliani to the president,” he said.

The Ukraine meddling theory has been widely debunked, not least by a host of U.S. intelligence agencies that found Russia to be the culprit. Yet Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Tuesday that there are legitimate reasons to pursue Trump’s suspicions that Kyiv — not Moscow — was behind the interference.

[...]

In his testimony, Sandy [a senior official at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB)] appeared to further link the president to claims that he directly ordered nearly $400 million in U.S. aid to be withheld as leverage to get Kyiv to open the two politically motivated investigations.

The official said the hold began to grip individuals in OMB, enough to motivate two staff members to resign in part because of their frustration with the aid being withheld. One such person was an OMB lawyer, Sandy said.

I don't believe we heard that before. I could be wrong.

Sandy said he was not given a reason for the aid hold.

The career civil servant said he was informed of the Ukraine hold in a July 12 email from Robert Blair, his supervisor, who served as a senior adviser to Mulvaney. Sandy said he was told that the president “is directing a hold on military support funding for Ukraine.”

Sandy testified that OMB began the process of implementing the hold on July 25, which fueled much concern and frustration in the office.

The day that Trump made that "perfect" call to Zelensky to personally extort him.

The move came a month after Mike Duffey, another one of Sandy's superiors, informed him in a June email that Trump had expressed “an interest in getting more information from the Department of Defense” regarding the security assistance program.

Sandy described the circumstances as unusual and said he brought his concerns to Duffey to tell him that if the funds were held too long, they could expire on Sept. 30, which would possibly “be a violation of the Impoundment Control Act.”

The funds were released Sept. 11.

Right after the press got wind of the deal and Schiff announced an investigation.


*

Scott Wong approached Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) on Friday amid the hubbub of an impeachment hearing. The lawmaker asked Wong where he worked. The Hill, where he’s a senior staff writer. Upon hearing this response, Speier quipped, “I’m not speaking to The Hill anymore. Sorry.”

There you have it: The legacy of John Solomon, a veteran Washington journalist who served simultaneously as an executive vice president at the Hill and as spinner of a flimsy and tendentious trail of reporting that the real collusion in the 2016 presidential election featured the Democrats and Ukrainian officials.

[...]

“I just find it reprehensible that any newspaper would just be willing to put that kind of crap out that is not — has no veracity whatsoever, and not check to see if it had any veracity,” Speier said, according to audio reported by Politico’s Michael Calderone. “And then it becomes a talking point. And he becomes a nonpartisan commentator. It’s corrupt. It’s just corrupt.”

When the Erik Wemple Blog reached Wong by phone, he referred us to his supervisor, citing a company policy that the Hill’s reporters shouldn’t speak to reporters.

  WaPo

That's rich.

Witness after witness — all of them under oath — has slammed Solomon’s series of articles for containing a tenuous connection to actual events. “It was, if not entirely made up in full cloth, it was primarily non-truths and non-sequiturs,” said George Kent, a senior State Department official, in reference to a key Solomon article from March 2019.

[...]

For good measure, Yovanovitch denied a rumor — also raised in Solomon’s reporting — that she had bad-mouthed President Trump in Ukraine by saying his orders must be ignored because of his likely impeachment. “I did not and I would not say such a thing. Such statements would be inconsistent with my training as a Foreign Service officer and my role as an ambassador,” said Yovanovitch.

There’ll be no endorsement here of Speier’s action. We’d prefer a world in which public officials accepted all reasonable questions regardless of their provenance. Yet the petit flare-up may serve to shake the leadership of the Hill out of its denial regarding Solomon’s work. Though Solomon departed from the organization earlier this fall — the circumstances of the split remain unclear — he has left behind the stink of a rotten fish in the site’s archives. And it’s wafting into the corridors of Capitol Hill.

Maybe the impeachment investigation needs to include testimony from Solomon - where did he first hear these unfounded rumors about Yovanovitch that he printed without investigating?

In Wong’s exchange with Speier, the reporter stressed that he works on the Hill’s news side, whereas Solomon was an “opinion contributor,” a risible title invented when Solomon’s conspiratorial “news” stories so alienated staffers that they demanded distance from the veteran Washington scribe. According to Calderone, Speier dismissed the distinction. As she should have.

[...]

Meantime, Solomon isn’t budging. “I stand by each and every one of the columns that I wrote,” Solomon said in a statement — a statement provided to . . . the Hill.

You've got to say one thing about Trumpers: they rarely back down.

On Nov. 19, House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes, R-Calif., opened the second week of public impeachment hearings by citing Solomon’s scoops and findings as fact.

"Solomon’s reporting on Burisma, Hunter Biden and Ukraine election meddling has become inconvenient for the Democratic narrative," Nunes said in his statement, which came just one day after The Hill announced it would be reviewing, annotating and correcting Solomon’s columns.

[...]

The veteran Washington, D.C., reporter has become a regular on Fox News and a go-to source of information for Trump.

[...]

His columns alleged corruption by Biden and a former ambassador and accused Democrats of working with Ukraine to hurt Trump’s chances in 2016. They gained traction as Trump, his allies and various Fox News hosts talked about them on TV and social media.

[...]

Solomon worked for years at the Associated Press and briefly at the Washington Post before moving to the Washington Times, where he was editor in chief. He later spent time at Circa and the Center for Public Integrity before joining The Hill in 2017.

[...]

In 2017, he played a major role in pushing the inaccurate Uranium One conspiracy, alleging that Hillary Clinton sold a share of America’s uranium to Russia in exchange for a massive donation to the Clinton Foundation.

  Politifact

He should have spent more time at the Center for Public Integrity.

In 2018, The Hill began labeling Solomon’s articles as opinion.

That's rich. Don't can the guy because his stories don't pass the factual reporting test. Keep printing them and call them opinion.

Then, in March and April 2019, Solomon published a series of columns alleging conspiracies involving Democrats and Ukraine.

One of his key sources, apparently, was former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer.

Bingo!

Solomon left The Hill in September for undisclosed reasons, and Fox News soon hired him. He has stood by his work as "completely accurate and transparent," even as one impeachment witness after another has questioned his findings.

[...]

He has had an assist from Fox News host Sean Hannity, Giuliani and Trump, who tweeted about Solomon’s work four times and recently suggested he should win a Pulitzer Prize.

Final deposition transcripts

Mark Sandy

Philip Reeker

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.

Stirring up the base

Lee Zeldin is a crackpot who has been spouting shit all along.

Here he was on October 24:

[A new Wall Street Journal editorial] quotes Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) claiming this about [ambassador Willian] Taylor: “Much of his leaked opening statement collapsed, but Schiff keeps the public in the dark on that!”

The “leaked” opening statement, of course, was the full opening statement, but put that aside. The Journal editorial then notes that “What we don’t know is how Mr. Taylor responded to questions” about what he knew firsthand, adding: “If the evidence against Mr. Trump is so damning, then why not make it all public now so the American people can judge for themselves?”

You see, Zeldin wants you to know that the withering cross-examination skills of Republicans like himself debunked what you think you learned from Taylor in his already-revealed opening statement. The point here isn’t just that the already-known and deeply damning details in Taylor’s testimony should be seen as suspect, simply because House Republicans say so. It’s also that the effectiveness of House Republicans unmasked this, and Democrats are trying to conceal it.

  WaPo

And on November 4:

Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), a slavish Trump lickspittle, called for the release of the transcript of Taylor’s testimony, claiming: “Much of his leaked opening statement collapsed, but Schiff keeps the public in the dark on that!”

Zeldin then broadened his case. “The public is absolutely being misled about every single deposition that takes place,” Zeldin told the Washington Examiner.

  WaPo

And then...we saw that transcript, and heard his public testimony. The public was not misled.

Maybe there's something that benefits Trump in some way in the deposition, but even if it does, it can't possibly be anything that negates everything we already know, and the scare tactic of needing it to be released BEFORE the next public hearing is just that: a scare tactic.  He knows it's not likely to be released before that, because there are hours and hours worth of testimony that have to be passed before some agency (or agencies) to make sure there's nothing that needs to be redacted in the interest of national security.  And I think it's a pretty safe bet that there are things since this is the budget office and foreign aide is being discussed.

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

UPDATE:  Is THIS the urgent message?

Taylor staffer Holmes' opening statement revealed

CNN has a copy.

Excerpts:

Zelensky is going to love that revelation.

That's going to bring Ambassador Taylor's testimony into question.  Taylor said at his public hearing that he had only just heard from Holmes about that lunch and Sondland's phone call to Trump.  I wondered at the time why Holmes had not told him sooner.  This makes more sense, but puts Taylor in a hot spot.  That's unfortunate, to say the least.  Republicans are going to be able to say everybody's lying, hiding things, to try to make the president look bad.  A big misstep by Taylor.

What the hell does the attorney general of the United States have to do with foreign policy?

In this next excerpt, Holmes cleans up for Taylor, but I think Taylor will still get raked.

In Taylor's public testimony, he should have said Holmes had just reminded him of a phone call that Taylor had forgotten.

Taylor's statement:

It appears that this was an unauthorized leak of the statement.  It looks like somebody hastily photographed it, doing so surreptitiously by placing it on the floor.  It looks like carpet underneath it.

"We always learn more when witnesses come in, and today we learned a lot more," Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), a member of the Intelligence Committee, said Friday night as he left the closed-door deposition. "The arrows continue to point in the direction of a shakedown scheme, led by the president of the United States [and] operated by agents like Rudy Giuliani, Gordon Sondland and Mick Mulvaney," he continued.

[...]

Holmes, the counselor for political affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, is one of Taylor's top staffers in Kyiv.

  The Hill

And now Holmes undermines a central claim in Sondland’s testimony: That Sondland didn’t know that Trump and his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani’s interest in investigating a Ukrainian company that employed Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden had anything to do with the Biden family.

[...]

“But I did not understand, until much later,” Sondland said as of late May, “that Mr. Giuliani’s agenda might have also included an effort to prompt the Ukrainians to investigate Vice President Biden or his son or to involve Ukrainians, directly or indirectly, in the President’s 2020 reelection campaign.”

[...]

Sondland explained in his testimony that he hadn’t read the news coverage, even though aides compiled it for him and he was focused on Ukraine policy during this time.

Holmes’s testimony quotes Sondland explicitly referring to this as the “Biden investigation” in July, which suggests there was a reason the ambassador’s testimony didn’t make sense. Sondland will testify alongside others on Wednesday, and his hot seat just got significantly hotter.

  WaPo

Sondland is up to his neck in lies and corruption.

Holmes says Taylor told him that on a June 28 call he had with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and the “three amigos” — Sondland, special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker and Energy Secretary Rick Perry — “it was made clear that some action on a Burisma/Biden investigation was a precondition for an Oval Office meeting.”

This call, notably, was not part of Taylor’s own testimony, though Taylor quickly came to believe that such a meeting was indeed conditioned on Ukraine launching such an investigation.

More problems with Taylor. Slight but still problems. Perhaps he's old enough to be forgetful. I know I would be.

Taylor testified that on the June 28 call, before Zelensky was added to the line, Sondland said he didn’t want interagency officials on the call, because “he wanted to make sure no one was transcribing or monitoring as they added President Zelensky to the call.”

Sondland's Wednesday hearing is goig to be lit.

It’s worth noting that, despite early GOP attempts to portray Holmes as a partisan — on Friday they promoted a photo of him shaking hands with Barack Obama — he won an award in 2014 after raising concerns about Obama’s Afghanistan policy. Holmes, who served in Afghanistan, was awarded for his “constructive dissent.”

Holmes doesn’t directly say that his testimony contradicts the GOP’s arguments, but it’s certainly suggested. And it makes his full deposition, which we have yet to see, worth paying close attention to.

Also, there's another closed door hearing being held today.

A longtime career employee at the White House Office of Management and Budget is expected to break ranks and testify Saturday in the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, potentially filling in important details on the holdup of military aid to Ukraine.

Mark Sandy would be the first OMB employee to testify in the inquiry, after OMB acting director Russell T. Vought and two other political appointees at the agency defied congressional subpoenas to appear. The White House has called the impeachment inquiry unconstitutional and ordered administration officials not to participate.

  WaPo

Which is totally outrageous. Unconstitutional? Do they not understand the Constitution?

Unlike these other OMB officials, Sandy is a career employee, not one appointed by the president. He has worked at the agency off and on for over a decade, under presidents of both parties, climbing the ranks to his current role as deputy associate director for national security programs.

He'll be getting the boot.

Typically, witnesses in the impeachment inquiry have been served with subpoenas immediately before their depositions are scheduled to begin, an approach Democrats say is designed to give them cover against an administration that has ordered officials not to comply with the inquiry.

[...]

“If he is subpoenaed, he will appear,” Sandy’s lawyer, Barbara “Biz” Van Gelder, said Thursday evening.

[...]

Sandy could provide insight into the process by which some $400 million in military and security aid to Ukraine was held up over the summer. He was among the career staffers who raised questions about the holdup on the aid, people familiar with the matter said, and his role gave him responsibility for signing the documents required to hold it up.

So we're going to at least find out who ordered him to sign them.

Sandy’s signature appears on at least one of these so-called apportionment letters in July that prevented the money from going to Ukraine, according to copies of the documents discussed during an earlier deposition in the impeachment inquiry, a transcript of which was made public. But after that, the process for approving or denying such funds was taken over by a political appointee at OMB, Michael Duffey, who defied a congressional subpoena to testify earlier this month.

All those people who defy Congress should, in the end, pay some price for it. Otherwise, Congressional power is a farce and we might as well admit we're an authoritarian state.

Dude, could you not have laid it out flat and photographed it?

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

It’s also faintly hilarious that the whole case may be broken because two old men talked too loudly on their cellphones.

  Charles P Pierce

UPDATE:

Holmes transcript

Fallout

Holmes:  the staffer who overheard the Sondland/Trump phone call?

David Holmes is the Counselor for Political Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, and a top aide to William Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine.

Holmes is one of two additional witnesses expected to speak in closed sessions on Friday.

  Heavy