The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Secretary of state’s role in Ukraine affair clearer
WASHINGTON — Internal State Department emails and documents released late Friday further implicate Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a campaign orchestrated this year by President Donald Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to pressure Ukraine for political favors. What the emails/ documents say
The emails indicate Pompeo spoke at least twice by phone with Giuliani in March as Giuliani was urging Ukraine to investigate Trump’s rivals and trying to oust a respected U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who had been promoting anti-corruption efforts in the country. Pompeo ordered Yovanovitch’s removal the next month. The first call between Giuliani and Pompeo was arranged with guidance from Trump’s personal assistant, the documents suggest.
The documents also show the State Department sent members of Congress a deliberately misleading reply about Yovanovitch’s departure after they asked about pressure on her. As part of the effort to oust her, Giuliani and his associates urged news outlets favorable to Trump to publicize unsubstantiated claims about Yovanovitch’s disloyalty to the president.
The documents, and recent congressional testimonies in the impeachment inquiry, tie Pompeo closely to efforts by Trump and Giuliani to persuade the Ukrainian government to announce investigations that could help Trump politically. Those include investigations into the family of former Vice President Joe Biden, a Democratic presidential candidate, and claims that Ukrainian officials worked to undermine Trump’s 2016 campaign. As Trump sought those investigations, he and his team held up $391 million of military aid critical to Ukraine — which is in a grinding war against Russian-backed separatists — and a coveted White House meeting.
How the emails were obtained
Release of the documents, obtained by a liberal watchdog group that filed a public records request, came as Pompeo refused to voluntarily hand over State Department documents about Ukraine to House committees leading the impeachment inquiry. Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Wednesday that Pompeo was engaged in Watergate-style “obstruction of this investigation.”
The State Department released the documents in response to a lawsuit brought by the liberal watchdog American Oversight, whose founders include lawyers who worked in the Obama administration. Austin Evers, the group’s executive director, said the documents show “a clear paper trail from Rudy Giuliani to the Oval Office to Secretary Pompeo to facilitate Giuliani’s smear campaign against a U.S. ambassador.”
The documents bolstered testimony delivered Wednesday by Gordon Sondland, U.S. ambassador to the European Union and a player in the pressure campaign on Ukraine. He told lawmakers in a public hearing that Pompeo had full knowledge of the campaign and even approved certain hard-line tactics. Pompeo and his top aides “knew what we were doing, and why,” Sondland said, noting that “everyone was in the loop.”