Kent said president twisted Ukraine policy
WASHINGTON » The senior State Department official in charge of Ukraine told impeachment investigators last month that he was alarmed at President Donald Trump’s insistence that Ukraine “initiate politically motivated prosecutions,” casting the effort as the kind of tactic the United States typically condemns in the world’s most corrupt countries.
George P. Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, testified that he regarded the push for investigations — spearheaded by Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer — as “injurious to the rule of law,” and to decades of U.S. foreign policy.
“There is an outstanding issue about people in office in those countries using selectively politically motivated prosecutions to go after their opponents,” Kent said in his interview with the House Intelligence Committee, according to a transcript released Thursday. “And that’s wrong for the rule of law regardless of what country that happens.”
Kent said he documented his concerns in a memo that he wrote over the summer, weeks before the public disclosure of a whistleblower complaint about a July 25 call in which Trump pressured President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine to begin investigations of former Vice President Joe Biden and the 2016 election.
In his testimony, Kent offered a new detail that appeared to underscore that political motivation was at the heart of Trump’s demand for investigations by Ukraine, saying that he was told that the president wanted to hear the country’s leader say the name “Clinton” in connection with potential wrongdoing.
Kent described being briefed about an early September conversation in which Trump told Gordon
D. Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, that Zelenskiy should publicly commit to investigating the Bidens and questions about Democratic collusion in 2016.
“POTUS wanted nothing less than President Zelenskiy to go to microphone and say investigations, Biden and Clinton,” Kent said, using an acronym for “president of the United States.”
Kent said that he understood “Clinton” to be a shorthand reference to an investigation of the 2016 campaign.
That would suggest that Trump had politics in mind — not just a broader interest in Ukraine’s anticorruption agenda, as his defenders have insisted — when he pressed Zelenskiy to take action. Kent admitted during his testimony that his account of the conversation was not firsthand, and other witnesses have not mentioned it.
Public hearings
Democrats plan to begin public hearings next week as they seek to build their case that Trump abused his power by withholding military aid and the promise of a White House meeting unless Ukraine agreed to the investigations. Kent and William B. Taylor Jr., the top diplomat in Ukraine, will be the first witnesses called by the Democrats to testify in a set of highly anticipated hearings that are likely to be televised live.
Rep. Adam B. Schiff, DCalif., chairman of the Intelligence Committee, formally invited Republicans on Thursday to request witnesses for the public hearings.
Another deposition
Behind closed doors, Democrats also continued depositions, interviewing Jennifer Williams, a longtime State Department employee with expertise in Europe and Russia who is detailed to Vice President Mike Pence’s national security staff.
Williams told investigators that the July call stood out as unusual to her because she was not accustomed to a president discussing domestic political issues, rather than diplomatic matters, with a foreign leader, according to three people familiar with her remarks. But unlike other White House officials who listened in, she did not take any steps to report concerns to her superiors and made only a passing reference to the call in briefing materials for Pence.
Williams said she did not know whether Pence read the materials, including a summary of the call, the people said. She testified that Pence later spoke with Trump on the day of his conversation with Zelenskiy but that she did not know what was discussed.
Pence told reporters Thursday that “as the facts continue to come out, people will see that the president did nothing wrong, that the focus of our administration and all of my contacts with President Zelenskiy were in the national interests.”
Bolton a no-show
John R. Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, did not show up Thursday for a voluntary interview as part of the House impeachment inquiry, but Democratic investigators said they would not subpoena him and would instead use his refusal to appear as further evidence of Trump’s attempts to obstruct Congress.
Bolton, who regularly interacted with Trump directly as his top national security aide in the White House, would have been among the highest-profile advisers to testify in the impeachment inquiry.