Special envoy to Ukraine resigns
Kurt Volker, a former US ambassador to NATO caught in the middle of a whistleblower complaint over the President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, has resigned from his post as special envoy to the Eastern European nation, according to a US official.
The official said Volker told secretary of state Mike Pompeo on Friday of his decision to leave the job, following disclosures that he had connected Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani with Ukrainian officials to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his family over allegedly corrupt business dealings.
Giuliani has said he was in frequent contact with Volker about his efforts. The State Department had no immediate comment on his resignation and has said only that Volker put Giuliani in touch with an aide to Ukraine’s president.
Pompeo said Thursday that as far as he knew, all state department employees had acted appropriately in dealing with Ukraine.
Volker was brought into the Trump administration by former secretary of state Rex Tillerson to serve as envoy for Ukraine. He worked in a volunteer capacity and had retained his job as head of the John McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University. Arizona State’s student newspaper was the first to report his resignation.
‘TRUMP SHRUGGED OFF RUSSIA MEDDLING ROW’
President Trump told Russia’s foreign minister and ambassador he was unconcerned about their country’s interference in the 2016 elections, The Washington Post reported on Friday. Trump made the previously unreported comments during the same May 2017 Oval Office meeting in which he famously revealed highly classified information on the Islamic State.
During the conversation he reportedly told Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that he was not bothered by their country’s meddling because the US did the same in other countries, according to three former officials who requested anonymity.
Meanwhile, a former official said The White House severely restricted distribution of memos detailing Trump’s calls with foreign leaders including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, in an effort to curtail the kind of leaks that had embarrassed him early in his tenure.