Trump turns to China for help
President focusing on Bidens; envoys pushed Ukraine to commit to investigations
WASHINGTON » Two of President Donald Trump’s top envoys to Ukraine drafted a statement for the country’s new president in August that would have committed Ukraine to pursuing investigations sought by Trump into his political rivals, three people briefed on the effort said.
The drafting of the statement marks new evidence of how Trump’s fixation with Ukraine began driving senior diplomats to bend U. S. foreign policy to the president’s political agenda in the weeks after the July 25 call between the two leaders.
Trump on Thursday also publicly encouraged China to investigate Democratic political rival Joe Biden, snubbing his nose at an impeachment inquiry into whether a similar, private appeal to another foreign government violated his oath of office.
Trump declared at the White House, “China should start an investigation into the Bidens.” He said he hadn’t previously asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to investigate the former vice president and his son Hunter, but it’s “certainly something we could start thinking about.”
By publicly egging on China, Trump was amplifying the message he’d delivered in private to the president of Ukraine. That message, revealed by a government whistleblower, has spawned the impeachment investigation by the House. Trump, who has defended his contact with Ukraine as “perfect,” went further in expanding his request to China, a communist world power that has much at stake in its relationship with the United States in an ongoing trade war.
CNN reported that Thursday’s comments weren’t the first time Trump has injected Biden into his relationship with China, though he said Thursday he has never pushed Xi to investigate the former vice president. Nor is it the first time he has sought to trade favors with Xi, who this week celebrated the 70th birthday of his ruling Communist Party with a note of congratulations from Trump.
During a phone call with Xi on June 18, Trump raised Biden’s political prospects as well as those of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who by then had started rising in the polls, according to two people familiar with the discussion. In that call, Trump also told Xi he would remain quiet on Hong Kong protests as trade talks progressed.
The statement for Ukraine was drafted by Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, and Kurt Volker, then the State Department’s envoy to Ukraine, according to the three people who have been briefed on it.
Volker spent Thursday on Capitol Hill being questioned by House investigators as Democrats pursued their impeachment inquiry into Trump’s actions. He disclosed a set of texts in September in which Bill Taylor, the top American diplomat in Ukraine, alluded to Trump’s decision earlier in the summer to freeze a military aid package to the country. He told Sondland and Volker: “I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.”
After speaking with Trump, Sondland texted back that there was no quid pro quo, adding, “I suggest we stop the back and forth by text.”
It was not clear if the statement drafted in August by Sondland and Volker came up in the closed-door session on Capitol Hill.
The statement was written with the awareness of a top aide to the Ukrainian president, as well as Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer and the de facto leader of a shadow campaign to push the Ukrainians to press ahead with investigations that could be of political benefit to Trump, according to one of the people briefed on it.
The statement would have committed Ukraine to investigating the energy company Burisma, which had employed Hunter Biden, the younger son of former Vice President Joe Biden. And it would have called for the Ukrainian government to look into what Trump and his allies believe was interference by Ukrainians in the 2016 election in the United States to benefit Hillary Clinton.
The idea behind the statement was to break the Ukrainians of their habit of promising American diplomats and leaders behind closed doors that they would look into matters and never follow through.
It is unclear if the statement was delivered to Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president , but no statement was released publicly under his name. Around that time, the Ukrainian officials indicated to the Americans that they wanted to avoid becoming more deeply enmeshed in U.S. politics.
The drafting of the statement, which came in the weeks after the July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelensky, was an effort to pacify Trump and Giuliani and normalize relations between the two countries as Ukraine faced continuing conflict with Russia.
Sondland and Volker believed that Giuliani was “poisoning” Trump’s mind about Ukraine and that eliciting a public commitment from Zelensky to pursue the investigations would induce Trump to more fully support the new Ukrainian government, according to the people familiar with it.
Giuliani said he was aware of the statement but that it was not written at his behest. He said the statement would include a commitment to investigations of Burisma and the circumstances around the 2016 election.
According to Reuters, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy wrote to Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday asking that all efforts surrounding the impeachment inquiry be suspended until “customary rules and procedures are established.”
He asked whether she planned to hold a vote of the full House authorizing the inquiry, and whether the president’s counsel would be allowed to attend all hearings and depositions.
Refusing to do these things would contradict previous impeachment procedures, McCarthy said.
The White House plans to send Pelosi a letter, possibly today, that will argue Trump and his team can ignore lawmakers’ demands until she holds a full House vote formally approving an impeachment inquiry, a source familiar with the plan said. Axios was first to report the plan.