Tag: Ukraine

Graham Says Trump Was ‘Stupid’ To Urge China Probe Of Bidens

The relationship between Donald Trump and top Trump defender Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) continued to show fissures over the weekend, when Graham criticized Trump’s public call for China to investigate 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden.

“As to asking China to look into Biden, that was stupid,” Graham told Axios’ Jonathan Swan in an interview that aired Sunday night on HBO. “Nobody believes that China would be fair to Biden, Trump, me or you, or anybody. Bad idea. That didn’t last very long.”

Graham was referencing Trump’s comment from the White House lawn, in which he openly called on Ukraine and China to investigate Biden. It was that very topic that sparked a whistleblower to come forward and report Trump’s behavior, and what prompted a House impeachment inquiry.

View the complete October 22 article by Emily Singer on the National Memo website here.

Putin and Hungary’s Orban helped sour Trump on Ukraine

Washington Post logoPresident Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine for information he could use against political rivals came as he was being urged to adopt a hostile view of that country by its regional adversaries, including Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, current and former U.S. officials said.

Trump’s conversations with Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and others reinforced his perception of Ukraine as a hopelessly corrupt country — one that Trump now also appears to believe sought to undermine him in the 2016 U.S. election, the officials said.

Neither of those foreign leaders specifically encouraged Trump to see Ukraine as a potential source of damaging information about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, nor did they describe Kyiv as complicit in an unsubstantiated 2016 election conspiracy theory, officials said.

View the complete October 21 article by Greg Miller, Greg Jaffe, John Hudson and Ellen Nakashima on The Washington Post website here.

Trump and Giuliani’s efforts to find ‘dirt’ on Joe Biden went way beyond his son’s involvement with Ukrainian energy company: report

AlterNet logoMuch of the coverage of the Ukraine scandal has focused heavily on Hunter Biden’s involvement with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, and how President Donald Trump hoped to use that involvement to harm a political adversary: former Vice President Joe Biden, Hunter Biden’s father. But Ryan Goodman and Alex Potcovaru, in an October 21 article for Just Security, stress that there is another crucial element to Ukrainegate: Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to prove an “unfounded” conspiracy theory that Joe Biden and other Democrats, in 2016, tried to harm Trump’s presidential campaign via Ukraine.

“Giuliani’s unfounded conspiracy theory is that Biden removed Ukraine prosecutor General Viktor Shokin and approved the new prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, as part of an effort to ‘frame (2016 Trump campaign manager) Paul Manafort and the Trump campaign in the 2016 election,” Goodman and Potcovaru explain. “Giuliani asserts, without evidence, that the new prosecutor dropped a case against an organization that had produced information in coordination with the Democrats and U.S. officials to taint Manafort. This conspiracy theory fits in with the overall idea that Russia was not behind the 2016 election interference, but instead, the real collusion involved Ukrainian and Democratic operatives.” Continue reading “Trump and Giuliani’s efforts to find ‘dirt’ on Joe Biden went way beyond his son’s involvement with Ukrainian energy company: report”

A few Republican cracks on impeachment are showing

Washington Post logoThe initial revelations about the whistleblower complaint and transcript of President Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president made it difficult for Republicans to defend Trump. Now, after a month of actions by the White House that seemed designed to test the limits of their willingness to go along, the cracks in Republicans’ tenuous defense are starting to show.

Here’s one of Trump’s most vocal defenders in the Senate, a lawmaker known for bending or ignoring the facts to back up Trump, opening the door to impeachment of the president:

“Sure. I mean … show me something that … is a crime,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) to Axios on HBO in an interview on Tuesday. “If you could show me that, you know, Trump actually was engaging in a quid pro quo, outside the phone call, that would be very disturbing.”

View the complete October 21 article by Amber Phillips on The Washington Post website here.

Mick Mulvaney Struggles to Explain Comments on Ukraine

New York Times logoWASHINGTON — Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, tried again on Sunday to back off assertions he made to reporters last week that the Trump administration had held up an aid package to Ukraine because the president wanted the country to investigate Democrats, acknowledging he did not have a “perfect press conference.”

During an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Mulvaney disagreed with an assertion by the show’s anchor, Chris Wallace, that Mr. Mulvaney’s remarks were proof of a quid pro quo, an exchange the president has publicly denied for weeks. But he struggled to explain how his comments Sunday were not at odds with what he said last week.

“That’s what people are saying that I said, but I didn’t say that,” Mr. Mulvaney said, adding that he had outlined “two reasons” for withholding the aid to Ukraine in a news briefing with reporters on Thursday. In the briefing, however, he outlined three reasons: the corruption in the country, whether other countries were also giving aid to Ukraine and whether Ukrainian officials were cooperating in a Justice Department investigation.

View the complete October 20 article by Katie Rogers and Emily Cochrane on The New York Times website here.

Mulvaney seeks to correct quid pro quo remarks in withering interview with Fox’s Chris Wallace

The Hill logoActing White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney insisted he never said the Trump administration expected a quid pro quo linking U.S. aid to Ukraine to Kiev launching investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden during a withering interview on “Fox News Sunday” with Chris Wallace.

Mulvaney repeatedly insisted his remarks at a Thursday press conference were taken out of context, saying he never used the language of “quid pro quo.”

“That’s not what I said. That’s what people said that I said,” he told a skeptical Wallace early in the interview.

View the complete October 20 article by Justine Coleman on The Hill website here.

Growing number of Republicans struggle to defend Trump on G-7 choice, Ukraine and Syria

Washington Post logoA growing number of congressional Republicans expressed exasperation Friday over what they view as President Trump’s indefensible behavior, a sign that the president’s stranglehold on his party is starting to weaken as Congress hurtles toward a historic impeachment vote.

In interviews with more than 20 GOP lawmakers and congressional aides in the past 48 hours, many said they were repulsed by Trump’s decision to host an international summit at his own resort and incensed by acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney’s admission — later withdrawn — that U.S. aid to Ukraine was withheld for political reasons. Others expressed anger over the president’s abandonment of Kurdish allies in Syria.

One Republican, Rep. Francis Rooney (Fla.) — whose district Trump carried by 22 percentage points — did not rule out voting to impeach the president and compared the situation to the Watergate scandal that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency.

View the complete October 18 article by Rachael Bade, Mike DeBonis and Seung Min Kim on The Washington Post website here.

Giuliani Mixes His Business With Role as Trump’s Lawyer

New York Times logoAmid intensifying scrutiny of his own work, the former New York mayor met recently with senior Justice Department officials on behalf of a client in a foreign bribery case.

WASHINGTON — It is an extraordinary time in Washington, but it is more or less business as usual for Rudolph W. Giuliani.

He is a central figure in the impeachment inquiry. He is under scrutiny by federal prosecutors. But throughout the building controversy, Mr. Giuliani has continued to represent clients, broker deals and take on consulting contracts in Washington and around the world in ways that leave him subject to criticism that he is using his role as President Trump’s personal lawyer to open doors to the government and influence policy despite the questions about his own conduct.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Giuliani secured a meeting, along with some other defense lawyers, with the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division and attorneys in the fraud section. They were there to discuss a foreign bribery case for a client that Mr. Giuliani described as “very, very sensitive.”

View the complete October 18 article by Kenneth P. Vogel, Michael S. Schmidt and Katie Benner on The New York Times website here.

Impeachment inquiry shows Trump at the center of Ukraine efforts against rivals

Washington Post logoTwo Cabinet secretaries. The acting White House chief of staff. A bevy of career diplomats. President Trump’s personal attorney. And at the center of the impeachment inquiry, the president himself.

Over two weeks of closed-door testimony, a clear portrait has emerged of a president personally orchestrating the effort to pressure a foreign government to dig up dirt on a potential 2020 political rival — and marshaling the full resources of the federal bureaucracy to help in that endeavor.

On Thursday, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney waded further into the morass, saying during a rare news conference that he understood Trump to be asking for a quid pro quo with his Ukrainian counterpart — only to attempt to retract those comments in a bellicose statement six hours later.

View the complete October 18 article by Ashley Parker on The Washington Post website here.

Next question for Rick Perry: Will he testify?

Energy Department Secretary Rick Perry’s departure from the Trump administration doesn’t resolve the most pressing question about his role in the Ukraine scandal — whether he will cooperate with House Democrats’ impeachment probe.

Perry, who told President Donald Trump on Thursday he intends to resign, faces a Friday deadline to comply with a House subpoena for information about outreach to Ukraine, which came as the president’s emissaries were pushing Kyiv to launch a corruption investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. House investigators also appear to be edging toward issuing a subpoena for Perry to testify — something he could be freer to do once he’s no longer in the administration.

Perry plans to depart by the end of the year, Trump told reporters Thursday. His confirmation that Perry would leave came two weeks after POLITICO reported that the former Texas governor planned to step down in the coming months, something Perry denied four days later.

View the complete October 17 article by Ben LeFebvre, Anthony Adragna and Zack Colman on the Politico website here.