To hear Drumpf and his Repugnant allies tell it, the holdup of military aid to Ukraine was just a normal part of the diplomatic effort to get rid of any chance of corruption in that country. The holdup, they insist, had nothing to do with trying to get leverage on possible 2020 rival Joe Biden and/or to invalidate the Mueller investigation by blaming the 2016 election interference on a Ukraine plot. But if we look at the timeline of the aid and its eventual release on September 11, 2019, the story becomes more damning. This is very important, but most news outlets simply stay with the events closely surrounding the July 25 phone call from Trump to Ukraine President Zelensky. That misses the deep issue.
What’s really key is to go back and focus on when exactly, the U.S Congress authorized desperately-needed military aid of about $400 million for Ukraine. This aid was for military equipment to stave off the Russian-backed forces trying to bite off another chunk of Ukraine in its eastern province. If we look at the record, as outlined by an important article in Lawfare (10/16/19), we see this:
On Feb. 15, Congress appropriated $445.7 million to the State Department to assist Ukraine (see here, § 7046(a)(2)), which included the $141 million at issue here. In a joint explanatory statement (page 65 of Division F, for interested readers), Congress broke down the $445.7 million in funding, which included (among other initiatives) $115 million in foreign military financing; $2.9 million in military training; and $45 million in international narcotics control, law enforcement and anti-terrorism funding.
Look at that date again. Congress authorized $445.7 million on Feb. 15, 2019. Yet that aid was not released to Ukraine until September 11. This in spite of the fact that the Trump administration twice notified Congress—on February 28, 2019 and again on May 23, 2019—that it was going to release the aid. It thereafter has struggled mightily to explain why the authorized aid was withheld for so long. That’s because top officials in both the Defense Dept. and the State Dept. sent letters to Congress authorizing the release of the aid—in the first case in May certifying that Ukraine was making good progress in the fight against corruption, and in the second in June with the Pentagon announcing that a large grant was being released to Ukraine for training, equipment and advisory efforts. These notices were undergirded by a May 23 letter from John Rood, defense undersecretary for policy who wrote:
“On behalf of the secretary of defense, and in coordination with the secretary of state, I have certified that the government of Ukraine has taken substantial actions to make defense institutional reforms for the purpose of decreasing corruption.” (www.militarytimes.com.)
So Congress had authorized the $450 million, and both the State Dept and the Pentagon had approved dispersal of the funds; but still they were not released. Now the law says that the OMB in the White House has to approve these funds and can take up to 45 days to review them. But it is only supposed to ensure that the funding lasts for the required time and is spent appropriately. It is not supposed to alter or amend the purposes for which the money is to be spent without formally notifying the Congress in accord with procedures, and must adhere to the 45-day limit. The Trump White House most decidedly did not. In this case, in fact, the White House OMB held up the funds, not just for a few weeks, or 45 days, but for several months (until Sept 11), and then only released them under the duress of the impeachment hearings.
The White House, of course has several explanations (aside from the extortion of President Zelensky) for the withholding of the funds. One of them came from Mick Mulvaney, the White House chief of staff and director of the OMB. He told leaders at State and Defense in mid-July that the president wanted the aid withheld because he was concerned about the ‘necessity’ for the aid (even though Ukraine is fighting for its very life and depends on the U.S aid to do it). Note the timing here: the order to withhold the aid came before that notorious July 25 phone call, and the president himself ordered the delay. This means that the plan to extort the president of Ukraine was already in place well before the president made his recorded demands by phone. Other evidence makes this even more telling. Ambassador William Taylor’s testimony, for one, makes clear that the aid money to Ukraine (and the promise of a meeting) had long been conditioned on their complying with President Trump’s wishes to investigate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter:
“That was my clear understanding, security assistance money would not come until the President [of Ukraine] committed to pursue the investigation.”
Taylor then affirmed that this demand, plus the demand to investigate the 2016 election interference by Ukraine (not Russia) met the definition of a “quid pro quo.” He also affirmed that it was Rudy Giuliani’s idea to get the Ukrainians to investigate Burisma Holdings, the company on whose board Hunter Biden served. He said the idea was to get President Zelensky to publicly announce these investigations so as to put him into a “box” that would force him to comply. Taylor’s testimony contradicted EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s earlier testimony that there was no “quid pro quo,” after which the ambassador then revised his testimony to agree that, in fact, there was a “quid pro quo.” He agreed that the pressure on Ukraine was “improper” and “insidious” and that it probably violated the law.
There is much more to this nefarious case, including the politically-calculated firing of veteran ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Jovanovich, but it is all coming out in public hearings. The bottom line remains: the President of the United States held up for months desperately-needed aid to a U.S. ally in order to 1) damage the election prospects of his presumptive rival, Joe Biden; and 2) to impel a bogus investigation into a supposed Ukrainian plot to affect the 2016 election, thus invalidating the hated Mueller investigation. Both of these bogus Ukraine investigations were meant to serve not the nation he is sworn to serve, but his own political (and criminal) purposes. This is a textbook definition of extortion and of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” that the Constitutional remedy of impeachment was written for. QED.
Lawrence DiStasi
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