Administration’s review of military funds to the country is at center of broadening probe
President Trump on Monday suggested a link between his delay of military aid to Ukraine and what he said were concerns about corruption in the country, but he denied threatening to withhold the support if Kiev didn’t pursue an investigation of Joe Biden, his potential 2020 opponent.
“It’s very important to talk about corruption,” Mr. Trump said at a United Nations event. “If you don’t talk about corruption, why would you give money to a country that you think is corrupt?”
Later in the day, he said he didn’t draw that connection in a call with the president of Ukraine in July. “I did not make a statement that you have to do this or I won’t give you aid,” he said. “I didn’t put any pressure on them whatsoever.” But, he added: “I think it would probably, possibly have been OK if I did.”
Congress in fall 2018 had agreed to send $250 million to Ukraine to defend it against Russian aggression. But this summer, the president and his advisers, including then-national security adviser John Bolton and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, began discussing putting a hold on the funds while the administration reviewed them, a senior administration official said. In July, the administration decided to do just that, people familiar with the matter said.
On July 25, Mr. Trump in a phone call urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to work with his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, on a probe that would produce information about Mr. Biden and his son, The Wall Street Journal reported. Mr. Giuliani had met with an official from the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office the previous month to discuss such a probe.
Messrs. Trump and Giuliani have pressed for an inquiry into Mr. Biden’s anticorruption efforts in Ukraine while he was vice president and while his son Hunter Biden had business interests there. Ukraine’s prosecutor general at the time said earlier this year he had no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Biden or his son. On Saturday, Joe Biden said he had never discussed with his son any overseas business dealings and accused Mr. Trump of abusing his office.
The administration’s reason for putting a hold on the Ukraine funds—which for weeks this summer proved elusive to lawmakers who were eager for answers—is at the center of the expanding investigation on Capitol Hill into whether there was any connection between the review of foreign aid and efforts by the president and Mr. Giuliani to urge Ukraine to investigate Mr. Biden. The examination of Mr. Trump’s dealings with his Ukrainian counterpart is likely to escalate this week as Congress continues to probe a whistleblower complaint concerning Mr. Trump, an aspect of which involves the Ukraine call, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Ukrainian officials earlier this month expressed concern to U.S. senators that the aid had been held up as a penalty for resisting that pressure. “They worried the aid that was being cut off to Ukraine by the president was a consequence for their unwillingness at the time to investigate the Bidens,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.), who earlier this month met in Ukraine with Mr. Zelensky and other officials.
The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington didn’t respond to a request for comment on Mr. Murphy’s remarks.
BIDENS IN UKRAINE: AN EXPLAINER
Joe Biden served as the Obama administration’s point person on relations with Ukraine and rooting out bureaucratic corruption, a role he took on shortly after Russia invaded the country in 2014.Around that time, Mr. Biden’s son Hunter took a board position with a Ukrainian natural-gas extraction company, Burisma Holdings Ltd., which some anticorruption advocates feared would undermine the elder Mr. Biden’s work. The White House said at the time that Hunter Biden’s work didn’t create a conflict of interest.
One of the targets of Mr. Biden’s ire, and that of most Western diplomats, was Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, who they said wasn’t doing enough to weed out corruption. The owner of Mr. Biden’s company, Burisma, had been under the scrutiny of prosecutors, and President Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, have suggested that Mr. Biden’s interest in having Mr. Shokin fired was motivated by his trying to protect his son. But Mr. Shokin had dragged his feet on the investigations into Burisma’s owner, and the probe into the company was no longer active when Mr. Shokin was removed from office in 2016.
Yuriy Lutsenko, Ukraine’s prosecutor general at the time, said earlier this year he had no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Biden or his son. Mr. Biden said he had never discussed with his son any overseas business dealings.
On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) called on Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) to launch an investigation touching on who directed the suspension of aid, saying it should be part of a broader probe. Mr. McConnell, speaking on the Senate floor, said he urged the administration to release its hold on the aid “throughout July, August and early September,” adding that he twice urged Mr. Esper to do so and made a similar plea to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
The Democratic chairmen of the House foreign affairs, intelligence and oversight committees also sent a letter to Mr. Pompeo threatening to issue a subpoena if the department didn’t begin turning over related documents. The State Department didn’t respond to a request for comment.
For weeks, as lawmakers lobbied Mr. Trump to release the Ukraine money personally and called officials across his administration, they kept getting shifting responses, according to multiple interviews over the past few weeks.
Mr. Trump himself told some lawmakers that other countries weren’t spending enough to bolster Ukraine, according to a person familiar with the matter. On Monday, Mr. Trump reiterated that complaint.
Others in the administration offered different explanations. On Sept. 3, Vice President Mike Pence, who had met a day earlier with Mr. Zelensky, said that in the meeting, “as President Trump had me make clear, we have great concerns about issues of corruption.”
That day, a bipartisan group of senators in a letter to acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and the Office of Management and Budget said the funding was “crucial to the long term stability of Ukraine” and urged them to immediately release the funds.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee members were also receiving muddled answers. “There was a lot of consternation about why this was held up and what was going on,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.), a member of the panel. “I don’t remember ever hearing a clear response about what the holdup was.”
Fed up, senators coalesced around an amendment that Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) had sought to attach to a fiscal 2020 defense-spending bill to force the release of funds to Ukraine. The day before the Senate Appropriations Committee was scheduled to vote, the White House released the military aid, along with $142 million in State Department funds.
Democrats are now raising questions about whether the president successfully enlisted others in the Trump administration to carry out the pressure campaign on Ukraine. The U.S. Embassy in Ukraine told Mr. Murphy earlier this month that it wasn’t involved in demanding the Ukrainian president mount an investigation, a statement that Mr. Murphy took as a sign that diplomats had refused to get involved because they believed such conduct was improper.
Journalist: Trump Seems ‘Willfully Blind’ To Putin’s Real Goals
And with Trump and Putin, there is this very strange way in which Trump constantly forgives Putin for his bad actions. He dismisses accusations against Putin. He says – he finds alternate explanations. Just to give you a couple quick examples, we have all followed the story of the Russian hacking during this election. And Trump has been very reluctant to admit that this actually happened. You know, and he said, you never know. It could be a 400-pound guy sitting on his mother’s bed.
But it goes back much farther. You know, when Trump was asked about whether Putin has political opponents and journalists killed, Trump said, well, you don’t know that. People say that he does it. But I don’t know if it’s true. When the passenger jet MH17 was shot down over Ukraine a couple of years ago, and international investigation concluded, this was supported by all kinds of Western intelligence agencies – that the plane was shot down by pro-Russian separatists using a missile supplied by Moscow. Trump was asked about that. And he said, well, people say that. But you don’t know.
And there’s other theories out there. Even the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, the Russian who drank polonium from a tea cup in London and died after that – he was a big Putin critic. Trump has been asked about that – same thing. We don’t know. We don’t know. He seems almost, you know, willfully blind to this pattern of Putin’s actions in a way that doesn’t add up. It makes you think that there’s something going on that we don’t completely understand. And that’s really frustrating and, I think, for a lot of people, very troubling.