President also backs Giuliani ahead of new week of depositions in probe
President Trump said he has encouraged his Republican allies to defend him on the substance of the impeachment probe, instead of focusing on criticizing the process, ahead of another week of scheduled testimony from administration officials.
“I’d rather go into the details of the case rather than the process,” he told reporters on Monday morning before flying to Chicago, reiterating his stance that Democrats had no evidence of wrongdoing. “Process is wonderful.…But I think you ought to look at the case.”
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House impeachment investigators have maintained a rapid clip of depositions in recent weeks as they investigate efforts by Mr. Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to pressure Ukraine to announce investigations into Democrat Joe Biden and alleged interference in the 2016 U.S. election just as aid to Ukraine was being held up.
Republicans last week escalated their complaints about the closed-door nature of the House’s impeachment inquiry, when GOP lawmakers—including many not on the investigating committees—stormed into a secure meeting room and delayed testimony for several hours. Democrats point to previous House investigations that used closed-door depositions and have said they intend to make transcripts of the testimony public. Multiple Republican lawmakers are part of the committees conducting the closed-door interviews.
Top Democrats have said they hope to hold impeachment proceedings in public before Thanksgiving and that they hope to conclude the investigations before presidential primaries begin in January.
On Monday, Mr. Trump also defended Mr. Giuliani, whose business dealings in Ukraine are being investigated by federal prosecutors in New York, according to people familiar with the matter. Asked if he thought Mr. Giuliani was in trouble over his Ukraine efforts, Mr. Trump said of the former New York City mayor and federal prosecutor: “No, I think Rudy Giuliani is a great crime fighter.…He’s always looking for corruption, which is what more people should be doing. He’s a good man.”
Mr. Giuliani has denied wrongdoing.
Some of Mr. Trump’s allies have grown frustrated with Mr. Giuliani, warning the president that his public comments about Ukraine are complicating efforts to defend the president.
Timeline: Interactions Between Trump’s Camp and Ukraine
Timeline: Interactions Between Trump’s Camp and Ukraine
President Trump’s efforts to persuade Ukraine to investigate his political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, have set off an impeachment inquiry by House Democrats. WSJ’s Shelby Holliday lays out a timeline of interactions between the president’s inner circle and Ukrainian officials. Photo Composite: Laura Kammermann/The Wall Street Journal
The House committees had scheduled a deposition on Monday for Charles Kupperman, Mr. Trump’s former deputy national security adviser, who listened in on the July 25 call between Mr. Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky that sparked the impeachment inquiry. Mr. Kupperman late Friday asked a federal judge to rule on whether he must testify, after the White House has instructed him not to appear in response to a House subpoena. That ruling hasn’t yet been issued, and Mr. Kupperman didn’t testify Monday.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said that in instructing him not to appear, the White House “obstructed the work of a coequal branch of government.”
“If this witness had something to say that would be helpful to the White House, they would want him to come and testify,” Mr. Schiff told reporters Monday. “They plainly don’t.”
House panels are expected to hear from about a half dozen more witnesses in their inquiry this week, including a top White House official who has been mentioned in testimony linking a hold on aid to Ukraine to investigations Mr. Trump and his allies pressured the country to pursue.
Tim Morrison, the National Security Council’s Russia and Europe director, is to testify behind closed doors on Thursday, an official working on the impeachment inquiry said. The committees are also expected to hear this week from Alexander Vindman, the director of European affairs at the National Security Council who attended the Ukrainian president’s inauguration in May, and Kathryn Wheelbarger, the acting assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. Former Pentagon officials said she would have likely been involved in discussions about the freeze on security assistance to Ukraine this summer.
Democrats say the president’s pressuring of a foreign leader to undertake a probe that would benefit him politically amounts to an abuse of power. Mr. Trump has said he acted appropriately.
Investigators have now heard from two current U.S. diplomats who say they understood there to be a quid pro quo related to the investigations Mr. Trump wanted Ukraine to pursue.
Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, testified earlier this month about a separate quid pro quo, telling House committees he believed Ukraine agreeing to open investigations into a company where Mr. Biden’s son served on the board and into election interference was a condition for a White House meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky, Mr. Sondland’s lawyer, Robert Luskin, said.
Mr. Trump’s ouster of the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, has also come under heightened scrutiny in recent weeks. On Saturday, a senior State Department official told House investigators that top officials stymied a show of solidarity for Ms. Yovanovitch after Mr. Trump had her removed, according to a person familiar with his closed-door testimony.
Philip Reeker, the acting assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, was named to the job in March, around the time Mr. Trump ordered the removal of Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. Mr. Giuliani and others had said Ms. Yovanovitch was obstructing efforts to persuade Kyiv to investigate Mr. Biden, which the envoy characterized as a “concerted campaign” against her in testimony this month.
THE UKRAINE WITNESSES
Oct. 3: Kurt Volker, former U.S. special representative for Ukraine negotiations, testifies and hands over text messages with other State Department officials that showed officials attempting to use a potential meeting between Mr. Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart as leverage to press Kyiv to investigate Joe Biden.
Oct. 11: Marie Yovanovitch, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, testifies that Mr. Trump sought for over a year to remove her and that his allies, including Rudy Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, targeted her in a “concerted campaign.”
Oct. 14: Fiona Hill, President Trump’s former top Russia adviser, testifies that she and other White House officials grew so alarmed by the administration’s efforts to push Ukraine to open certain investigations that they raised objections with a White House lawyer.
Oct. 17: Gordon Sondland, U.S. ambassador to the European Union, criticizes President Trump over his efforts to enlist Ukraine in investigating a political rival and says he and other U.S. officials were “disappointed” by the president’s directive to work with Mr. Giuliani on Ukraine matters.
Oct. 29: Alexander Vindman, the director of European affairs at the National Security Council who attended the Ukrainian president’s inauguration in May
Oct. 30: Kathryn Wheelbarger, the acting assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs; Catherine Croft, who served at the State Department as special adviser for Ukraine; Christopher Anderson, who was a special adviser to Kurt Volker, the former U.S. envoy for Ukraine negotiations
Oct. 31: Tim Morrison, the National Security Council’s Russia and Europe director
President Trump is engulfed in Ukraine scandal and impeachment probe, as Dems ramp up their strategy. Tony Schwartz, ‘Art of the Deal’ co-author, joins MSNBC’s Ari Melber on why President Trump ‘sees the world as against him at all moments,’ and the pressure from the damning testimony from his own staff. Schwartz argues Trump has a ‘self-destructive impulse’ and his ‘paranoid’ creates a ‘vicious cycle’ that makes everything ‘he fears’ become ‘true.’ Aired on 10/24/19.
Military assistance deserves more scrutiny in many cases. Ukraine is nowhere near the most important.
If you take Donald Trump at face value about his now-infamous phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which occurred shortly after he mysteriously stopped military aid meant for Ukraine, he was only concerned about sending millions to a country known for corruption. It was just a coincidence that he named his political rival’s son, Hunter Biden.
He raised an important issue, albeit for ends that congressional Democrats consider impeachable. Military and other security-assistance aid eats up about a third of the U.S. foreign-aid budget, which itself has been a target of Trump’s ire. And it has a spotty record—both in achieving stated American goals when it’s offered, and in forcingbetter behavior when it’s withheld.
This is partly because of the conditions that can lead to U.S. military aid in the first place. The notoriously corrupt governments of Iraq and Afghanistan, which have received tens of billions of dollars to build up their security forces over more than a decade, are just the most expensive examples. After all, as the military analyst Stephen Biddle and co-authors put it in a recent paper: “The U.S. rarely gives [security assistance] to Switzerland or Canada because they don’t need it; the states that need it are rarely governed as effectively as Switzerland or Canada.”
Ukraine does suffer from corruption, but it’s by no means the worst offender among the recipients of American largesse. The research group Security Assistance Monitor noted in a report last fall that some two-thirds of the countries receiving U.S. counterterrorism aid, or 24 of 36 countries examined, “posed serious corruption risks.” In Ukraine’s case, the Obama White House hesitated to provide military aid—and avoided providing lethal aid altogether—for other reasons, fearing that doing so would provoke Russia and worsen the conflict.
After Barack Obama left, Trump announced, and Congress approved, a plan to provide anti-tank missiles as well, something both military and diplomatic officials had recommended. Joseph Dunford, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in congressional testimony in the fall of 2017 that “Ukraine needed additional capabilities to protect their sovereignty” from Russia, which was supporting an insurgency in the eastern half of the country and had already seized the Crimean Peninsula. To the extent corruption was a concern at the time, it did not take precedence over the determination to try to stop Russian tanks.
The Pentagon specifically said Ukraine was making progress tackling corruption in a letter to Congress this spring, two months before Trump suspended aid and then raised the corruption issue in the phone call with Ukraine’s president, during which he asked for an investigation into Joe Biden’s son. The letter from the Defense Department, which NPR first reported, certified that “the government of Ukraine has taken substantial actions to make defense institutional reforms for the purposes of decreasing corruption,” among other things.
But other countries’ experiences have demonstrated how aid itself can fuel corruption, even indirectly by freeing up more of the host government’s resources to distribute bribes. Or it can create perverse incentives. A weak government in a country getting massive amounts of military aid has reason to fear the development of a strong and professional military; see: Egypt’s Mohamed Morsi.
And security assistance can simply fail entirely—especially when corruption is endemic. This was the case in Iraq in 2014, which Transparency International has called “one of the most spectacular defeats of the 21st century [in which] 25,000 Iraqi soldiers and police were dispersed by just 1,300 ISIS fighters in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.” One key factor: Then–Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki prized loyalty over competence in the promotion of senior officers, some of whom preferred stealing public funds to training a competent fighting force.
So it stands to reason that the U.S. should be able to withhold military aid—either to try to force better behavior, or simply to stop wasting taxpayer money on something that’s not working. It’s not especially rare—historically, presidents and lawmakers have done this for all kinds of reasons. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan did it to Israel, stopping the sale of cluster bombs to the country for six years after Congress found Israel had used them against civilians in Lebanon. The George W. Bush administration once suspended military aid to 35 countries simultaneously when they refused to guarantee U.S. immunity in potential cases at the recently formed International Criminal Court. (Much of this money has since been reinstated, particularly for NATO and major non-NATO allies.) There’s a law that bans assistance to human-rights abusers, though it applies to military units, not to entire countries. It was this law, for instance, that Trump’s State Department invoked in 2017 when declaring Burmese units involved in abuses against Rohingya Muslims to be ineligible for military aid.
But presidents have also historically gone to absurd lengths to avoid suspending military aid to entire countries when the aid is seen as advancing a key national-security interest. The U.S. continued to provide security assistance to Pakistan during the Obama administration despite the country’s failure to meet American demands to stop supporting terrorist groups and combat the Taliban. (The Trump administration suspended military aid to Pakistan this year, however.) In Egypt, following the overthrow of the elected President Morsi, the Obama administration temporarily suspended delivery to Egypt of some weapons systems, but famously declined to describe what had happened as a “coup,” for fear of triggering the aid restrictions such a designation might entail.
Elias Yousif, a program and research associate at Security Assistance Monitor, says such suspensions may happen far more than the public realizes, as Congress and the executive branch tussle over aid packages and approvals. When the disputes are severe, they can spill out into the open. For instance, the White House and Congress have argued repeatedly this year over military support to the Saudi campaign in Yemen; Congress supported cutting off aid on the grounds that the U.S. was becoming complicit in a humanitarian catastrophe, but the White House kept providing the aid anyway.
U.S. foreign policy relies a great deal on giving military aid, in the form of arms sales and training foreign forces, in an effort to advance security interests without committing large forces overseas. The public should be scrutinizing where it’s going and what ends it’s achieving—and at what cost. But in the Ukraine instance, the bigger question now is whether, in the course of a phone call, the president dangled $400 million not in the American interest, but in his own.
