National-security officials objected to stopping Ukraine aid
The view among the national-security officials was unanimous: Military aid to Ukraine should not be stopped. But President Donald Trump’s acting chief of staff thought otherwise.
As the aid was being blocked this summer, Ukraine officials began quietly asking the State Department about the holdup. The young democracy was battling an aggressive Russia. “If this were public in Ukraine it would be seen as a reversal of our policy,” said Catherine Croft, the special adviser for Ukraine at State. Croft fielded the inquiries from the Ukrainians.
She testified: “It would be a really big deal in Ukraine, and an expression of declining U.S. support for Ukraine.”
Croft’s remarks were among the transcripts released Monday from the House impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump.
And they begin to chisel away at a key Republican defense of Trump. Allies of the president say Trump did nothing wrong because the Ukrainians never knew the aid was being delayed.
Eventually, the funds were sent to the ally.
The impeachment inquiry is looking at whether Trump violated his oath of office by holding back the congressionally approved funds while he asked the new Ukraine president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, for a favor — to investigate political rival Joe Biden’s family and the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Transcripts of testimony from closed-door interviews with Croft and another Ukraine specialist at State, Christoper Anderson, as well as the Defense Department’s Laura Cooper, come as House Democrats are pushing ahead for live public hearings, which begin Wednesday.
Cooper told investigators that in July meetings at the White House she came to understand that Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, was holding up the military aid.
“There was just this issue of the White House chief of staff has conveyed that the president has concerns about Ukraine,” she said.
When she and others tried to get an explanation, they found none.
Croft and Anderson testified about the oversized reach of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani into foreign policy on Ukraine in unsettling ways as he portrayed Zelenskiy’s new government as an “enemy” of Trump.
Croft — who in the spring became an adviser to the special envoy to Ukraine, Kurt Volker — worried that Giuliani was influencing Trump to change U.S. policy toward the ally. She said she theorized that by “painting sort of Ukraine as being against Trump” it could help the president “distract from a narrative” that Russia had interfered in the 2016 U.S. election to help him.
Anderson, who held the special adviser role before Croft, said Volker had warned him, “Giuliani is not moving on to other issues, and so this might still be a problem for us moving forward.”
Cooper said she and other aides were asking questions about what legal authority the White House had to halt congressionally approved aid for Ukraine.
She said it was “unusual” to have the congressional funds suddenly halted that way. The Pentagon was “concerned.”
Cooper told investigators that it was when Volker visited in August that he explained there was a “statement” that the Ukraine government could make to get the security money flowing.
It was the first time she had heard of what is now the quid pro quo that is central to the impeachment inquiry — the administration’s push for the Ukraine government to investigate Trump’s political rivals as the funding was being withheld.
“Somehow an effort that he was engaged in to see if there was a statement that the government of Ukraine would make that would somehow disavow any interference in U.S. elections and would commit to the prosecution of any individuals involved in election interference,” she said.