Mulvaney again insists no quid pro quo over Ukraine
WASHINGTON — Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney continued to back away Sunday from his public acknowledgment of a quid pro quo in which the Trump administration leveraged military aid to Ukraine for an investigation that could politically benefit President Donald Trump, while the top U.S. diplomat defended Trump’s private lawyer’s role in Ukrainian affairs as “completely appropriate.”
“I never said there was a quid pro quo, cause there isn’t,” Mulvaney said on “Fox News Sunday”, insisting that while he “didn’t speak clearly maybe on Thursday,” there couldn’t have been a quid pro quo because “the aid flowed.”
Mulvaney has struggled to explain his about-face since a Thursday news conference in which he said Trump “absolutely” raised concerns about a Democratic National Committee server that was hacked in 2016, which according to a debunked conspiracy theory could be in Ukraine and could prove Russia didn’t interfere in the 2016 election.
During that appearance, Mulvaney also told a reporter pointing out he had articulated a quid pro quo that “we do that all the time with foreign policy,” listing “three issues” that were involved in the Ukraine decision: corruption, the support other countries were offering and an ongoing Justice department investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation.
But in a subsequent written statement, and again Sunday, Mulvaney insisted there were only “two reasons for holding back the aid,” leaving out the Justice Department’s probe, which a DOJ official already disavowed. Mulvaney added that once the administration was able to satisfy its concerns that Ukraine was “doing better with” corruption and establish that European nations were giving “a considerable sum of money in nonlethal aid, once those two things cleared, the money flowed.”
Yet current and former officials who have been providing testimony to the House’s i mpeachment probe paint a different picture.
According to their statements as described by people familiar with their closed-door testimony, the administration was pushing for Ukrainian leaders to conduct investigations into the server and the role of former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter on the board of Ukrainian energy giant Burisma — probes Trump himself referenced in a July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
The push was largely being driven by the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, they said, whom diplomats were being told to work with on Ukraine policy, according to U.S. ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, who said he was disappointed by the directive.
Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo refused to say whether Giuliani had been acting in Ukraine with his blessing, arguing that it was his “consistent policy ... not to talk about the internal deliberations” of the administration. But he defended the decision to bring in an outside figure like Giuliani, arguing that “it happens all the time.”
“This is completely appropriate,” Pompeo said, pointing out that in the past, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took advice from Sidney Blumenthal and former Ambassador Bill Richardson had been deputized to help on North Korea policy.
But others disagree. “Rudolph W. Giuliani running around meeting with heads of state on behalf of the presidents’ political interests is a profoundly shocking and important thing for us to understand,” Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
Himes sits on the intelligence committee, one of three House panels conducting the impeachment inquiry.
Not just Democrats are upset.
According to former top National Security Council director for Russia and Europe Fiona Hill’s testimony, former national security adviser John Bolton was livid at Giuliani’s involvement, calling him a “hand grenade.”