Tag: Ukraine

GOP lawmaker face-plants on CNN when grilled over Trump asking for foreign help against political opponents

AlterNet logoAn interview with Rep. Tom Reed (R-NY) turned contentious on Sunday morning when CNN host Victor Blackwell asked him if he approved of Donald Trump asking foreign leaders for dirt on political opponents.

With Reed saying he was happy that the impeachment inquiry was going to go public — despite voting against it last week — Blackwell asked him about a key part of the hearing: Trump’s Ukraine phone call.

Asked, if he thought it was okay for the president to “pressure a foreign leader to get information that would benefit him politically in exchange for military aid,” Reed ducked the question.

View the complete November 3 article by Tom Boggioni from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

Internal Mueller documents show Trump campaign chief pushed unproven theory Ukraine hacked Democrats

Washington Post logoPresident Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, suggested as early as the summer of 2016 that Ukrainians might have been responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee during the presidential campaign rather than Russians, a key witness told federal investigators last year.

Newly released documents show that Manafort’s protege, deputy campaign manager Rick Gates, told the FBI of Manafort’s theory during interviews conducted as part of former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. Gates told the FBI that Manafort had shared his theory of Ukrainian culpability with him and other campaign aides before the election.

The new information shows how early people in Trump’s orbit were pushing the unsubstantiated theory about Ukraine’s role. And it illustrates a link between Mueller’s investigation, which concluded in March, and the current House impeachment investigation of Trump. The president had pushed Ukrainians to open a probe into whether their country interfered in the election — an assertion his allies have made in an effort to discredit Mueller’s findings about Russia’s role.

View the complete November 2 article by Rosalind S. Helderman and Spencer S. Hsu on The Washington Post website here.

GOP sinks lower and outs purported ‘whistleblower’

AlterNet logoRepublican lawmakers are publicly spreading the name of a CIA officer named in a RealClearInvestigations report as the whistleblower who reported President Donald Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate the Bidens.

The unconfirmed report named a 33-year-old CIA analyst as the purported whistleblower, although mainstream media outlets have declined to disclose the name after his attorneys warned that they have received death threats targeting their client. Republican lawmakers have reportedly repeatedly attempted to get the whistleblower’s name on record at impeachment hearings in hopes that it will be released publicly. (Salon has made the decision not to publish this person’s name, although it will no doubt soon be in the public record.)

The report, which relied primarily on quotes from former Trump administration officials and a “dossier” compiled on this individual that has circulated around Capitol Hill, identifies the purported whistleblower as a “registered Democrat” who worked on the National Security Council under the Obama administration and was held over in the early days of the Trump administration before he was “accused of working against Trump,” according to the report.

View the complete November 2 article by Igor Derysh from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

A presidential loathing for Ukraine is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry

Washington Post logoThree of President Trump’s top advisers met with him in the Oval Office in May, determined to convince him that the new Ukrainian leader was an ally deserving of U.S. support.

They had barely begun their pitch when Trump unloaded on them, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the meeting. In Trump’s mind, the officials said, Ukraine’s entire leadership had colluded with the Democrats to undermine his 2016 presidential campaign.

“They tried to take me down,” Trump railed.

View the complete November 2 article by Greg Jaffe and Josh Dawsey on The Washington Post website here.

Growing number of GOP senators consider acknowledging Trump’s quid pro quo on Ukraine

Washington Post logoA growing number of Senate Republicans are ready to acknowledge that President Trump used U.S. military aid as leverage to force Ukraine to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his family as the president repeatedly denies a quid pro quo.

In this shift in strategy to defend Trump, these Republicans are insisting that the president’s action was not illegal and does not rise to the level of an impeachable offense as the Democratic-led House moves forward with the open phase of its probe.

But the shift among Senate Republicans could complicate the message coming from Trump as he furiously fights the claim that he had withheld U.S. aid from Ukraine to pressure it to dig up dirt on a political rival, even as an increasing number of Republicans wonder how long they can continue to argue that no quid pro quo was at play in the matter.

View the complete November 1 article by Rachael Bade and Seung Min Kim on The Washington Post website here.

White House official who heard Trump’s call with Ukraine leader testified that he was told to keep quiet

Washington Post logoeveral days after President Trump’s phone call with the leader of Ukraine, a top White House lawyer instructed a senior national security official not to discuss his grave concerns about the leaders’ conversation with anyone outside the White House, according to three people familiar with the aide’s testimony.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman testified that he received this instruction from John Eisenberg, the top legal adviser for the National Security Council, after White House lawyers learned July 29 that a CIA employee had anonymously raised concerns about the Trump phone call, the sources said.

The directive from Eisenberg adds to an expanding list of moves by senior White House officials to contain, if not conceal, possible evidence of Trump’s attempt to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to provide information that could be damaging to former vice president Joe Biden.

View the complete November 1 article by Tom Hamburger, Carol D. Leonnig, Greg Miller and Ellen Nakashima on The Washington Post website here.

Ex-Trump aide confirms Ukraine aid was linked to Biden probe

WASHINGTON (AP) — A former top White House official confirmed that military aid to Ukraine was held up by President Donald Trump’s demand for the ally to investigate Democrats and Joe Biden but testified that there’s nothing illegal, in his view, about the quid pro quo at the center of the Democrat-led impeachment inquiry.

Tim Morrison, who stepped down from the National Security Council the day before his Thursday testimony, was the first White House political appointee to appear and spent more than eight hours behind closed doors with House investigators.

“I want to be clear, I was not concerned that anything illegal was discussed,” Morrison said about a pivotal phone call between Trump and the Ukraine president, according to prepared remarks obtained by The Associated Press.

View the complete November 1 article by Lisa Mascaro, Zeke J. Miller and Deb Riechmann on the Associated Press website here.

Mike Pompeo doubles down on conspiracy theory claiming Biden and Obama withheld Ukraine assistance

AlterNet logoIt’s often forgotten that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attended West Point, where he took a pledge to hold honesty above all. And the person who seems to forget it most often is Mike Pompeo.

The Washington Post reports that Pompeo appeared on Fox News Wednesday evening not only to profess his support for an entire series of definitively debunked, never-made-any-sense-to-begin-with conspiracy theories—such as American company CrowdStrike ferrying a secret “missing” DNC server to Ukraine, and the Steele dossier actually being written by a Ukrainian hired by Hillary Clinton. Pompeo refused to condemn any of the things that Trump was asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate, even though they aren’t just false—they are genuinely bizarre.

Then Pompeo made his own contribution to the Hall of Ludicrous by adding a new conspiracy theory, one that involves President Barack Obama: “I couldn’t tell you why, I couldn’t answer if it’s because of Hunter Biden, that Barack Obama and Vice President Biden didn’t give weapons to Ukraine. They’ll have to answer for that. Maybe — maybe I just don’t have the full story.”

View the complete October 31 article by Mark Sumner from Daily Kos on the AlterNet website here.

White House official corroborates diplomat’s account that Trump appeared to seek quid pro quo

Washington Post logoA White House adviser on Thursday corroborated key impeachment testimony from a senior U.S. diplomat who said last week he was alarmed by efforts to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate President Trump’s political rivals in exchange for nearly $400 million in military aid.

Tim Morrison, the top Russia and Europe adviser on President Trump’s National Security Council, told House investigators over eight hours of closed-door testimony that the “substance” of his conversations recalled by William B. Taylor Jr., the acting ambassador to Ukraine, was “accurate,” according to his prepared remarks and people familiar with Morrison’s testimony.

In particular, Morrison verified that Trump’s envoy to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, conveyed to a Ukrainian official that the military aid would be released if the country investigated an energy firm linked to the son of former vice president Joe Biden. Morrison, who announced his resignation the night before his testimony, said he did not necessarily view the president’s demands as improper or illegal, but rather problematic for U.S. policy in supporting an ally in the region.

View the complete October 31 article by Carol D. Leonnig, John Hudson, Karoun Demirjian and Rachael Bade on The Washington Post website here.

White House lawyer moved transcript of Trump call to classified server after Ukraine adviser raised alarms

Washington Post logoMoments after President Trump ended his phone call with Ukraine’s president on July 25, an unsettled national security aide rushed to the office of White House lawyer John Eisenberg.

Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the top Ukraine adviser at the White House, had been listening to the call and was disturbed by the pressure Trump had applied to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate his political rivals, according to people familiar with Vindman’s testimony to lawmakers this week.

Vindman told Eisenberg, the White House’s legal adviser on national security issues, that what the president did was wrong, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.

View the complete October 30 article by Carol D. Leonnig, Tom Hamburger and Greg Miller on The Washington Post website here.