Tag: Trump Ukraine phone call

Trump ordered Pentagon to delay Ukraine aid less than 2 hours after Zelensky phone call: FOIA’d emails

AlterNet logoThe fact that Donald Trump has now been impeached (despite what the loons on Fox News say), hasn’t slowed the discovery of new evidence of his guilt. This is one of the reasons that it’s so important to ensure a comprehensive consideration of the Articles of Impeachment when they get transmitted to the Senate. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knows this, and so do the vast majority of Americans who favor a full and fair hearing, including witnesses and document production.

The impeachment controversy has sparked as epic battle between Pelosi and the Senate’s GOP majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who has already announced that he has no intention of conducting a fair hearing and will be “taking his cues” from White House lawyers. In the meantime, new evidence has already emerged that appears to be profoundly damaging to Trump: Continue reading “Trump ordered Pentagon to delay Ukraine aid less than 2 hours after Zelensky phone call: FOIA’d emails”

3 takeaways from Mark Sandy’s and Philip Reeker’s testimony on Ukraine

Washington Post logoImpeachment investigators released transcripts Tuesday from two depositions in their investigation: Philip Reeker, the acting assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and Mark Sandy, the deputy associate director for national security programs at the Office of Management and Budget

Transcript: Philip Reeker’s deposition

Full transcript: Mark Sandy’s deposition

Here are three takeaways from their testimony.

1. More evidence that Trump’s hold on Ukraine assistance wasn’t because of concern over general ‘corruption’

Not one but two officials in the Office of Management and Budget resigned as tensions rose over why Ukraine’s military aid was held up. Congress approved the money and the Pentagon signed off on it. It was OMB’s job to administer the aid, and Sandy, a top career official there, testified he didn’t understand why they couldn’t give to Ukraine. They were told the president wanted it paused.

View the complete November 26 article by Amber Phillips on The Washington Post website here.

Impeachment witness: Ukraine ‘gradually came to understand that they were being asked to do something’

The Hill logoA State Department staffer told House lawmakers last week that he believed officials in Ukraine “gradually came to understand that they were being asked to do something” in order for a hold on security assistance from the U.S. to be lifted, according to a transcript released by House Democrats on Monday evening.

David Holmes, a career State Department official now based in Kyiv who is slated to testify publicly later this week, also told lawmakers that he had “never seen anything like” the phone call he overheard between President Trump and U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland in July. 

“This was an extremely distinctive experience in my Foreign Service career. I’ve never seen anything like this, someone calling the President from a mobile phone at a restaurant, and then having a conversation of this level of candor, colorful language. There’s just so much about the call that was so remarkable that I remember it vividly,” Holmes told investigators, according to the transcript.

View the com plate November 18 article by Morgan Chalfant, Brett Samuels and Olivia Beavers on The Hill website here.

In Trump Phone Call With Zelensky, The Voice Of A Gangster

To anyone familiar with the life and times of Donald Trump, there was nothing surprising in the tone of his July 25 conversation with the new president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump spoke in the oblique yet perfectly clear language of a Mafia don who knows what he wants and how to enforce his will.

The dialogue between the two presidents, as seen in a transcript released this week, sounds like a scene from ‘The Godfather” or a wiretap of the office of Trump’s late attorney Roy M. Cohn, who represented the infamous mob bosses Carmine Galante, Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, and John Gotti. (For details, see the excellent new film Where’s My Roy Cohn? whose title is a Trump quote.)

The transcript opens with Zelensky flattering Trump obsequiously and at great length — as every head of state is now instructed to do — before hinting that he is “almost ready” to receive new Javelin missiles to defend his country from Russian invaders.

View the complete September 25 article by Joe Conason on the National Memo website here.