FACT CHECKING ITEMS FROM THE FIRST TRUMP IMPEACHMENT HEARING
…Acting US Ambassador to
Ukraine, William Taylor Jr.
Misleading GOP claims
from the beginning
Well, I’m back from vacation
and from taking some time-off from my Blog articles. But now, with the beginning of the
impeachment hearing testimonies, I just had to step back into the fray.
As with my previous
articles, my focus will be on revealing some of the misleading claims from the
president’s administration and from his supporters.
Let’s start with some of
the statements from the Republicans on the opening day of the testimonies of the
acting US ambassador to Ukraine, William B. Taylor Jr., and George Kent, his
boss at the State Department who is the deputy assistant secretary overseeing
European and Eurasian affairs.
Translation: Kent is a very high-level official who oversees all US
policy over Ukraine and someone who has a deep knowledge of the relationship
between the United States and Ukraine.
Here is some of what was
mis-stated by the GOP representatives at the hearing:
“President [Volodymyr] Zelensky didn’t
announce he was going to investigate [Ukrainian gas company] Burisma or the
Bidens. He didn’t do a press conference and say: ‘I’m going to investigate the
Bidens. We’re going to investigate Burisma.’ He didn’t tweet about it … and yet
you said you have a clear understanding that those two things were going to
happen — the money was going to get released but not until there was an
investigation. And that in fact didn’t happen.”
“You
have to ask yourself: What did President Zelensky actually do to get the aid?
The answer is nothing. He did nothing. He didn’t open any investigations. He
didn’t call Attorney General Bill Barr. He didn’t do any of the things that
House Democrats say that he was being forced and coerced and threatened to do.
He didn’t do anything because he didn’t have to.”
“For
the millions of Americans viewing today, the two most important facts are the
following. Number one, Ukraine received the aid. Number two, there was in fact
no investigation into Biden.”
The “nothing to see
here” defense was a recurring theme in the hearing. Republicans argued that
Ukrainian officials never opened the investigations President Trump requested
into the Bidens or supposed Ukrainian interference in the 2016 US election, yet
Trump released the nearly $400 million aid package for Ukraine anyway.
But this is a selective
retelling of events. Missing is any mention of key developments between July
18, when the White House told agencies to freeze Ukraine’s aid package,
and Sept. 11, when the White House finally released the funds.
At least four national
security officials were so alarmed by the Trump administration’s attempts to
pressure Ukraine for political purposes, that they raised concerns with a White
House lawyer both before and immediately after Trump’s July 25 call with
Zelensky.
“Word of the aid freeze
had gotten to high-level Ukrainian officials by the first week in August,” the New York Times reported. According to the Times, Trump’s personal
attorney met in Madrid on Aug. 2 with a top aide to Zelensky, Andriy
Yermak, and encouraged the Ukrainians to investigate the two issues Trump had
raised: the Biden investigation and possible Ukraine election interference in
2016.
“Ambassador
Taylor testified that President Trump was the first president to see that
Ukraine was afforded Javelin antitank weapons. This was a very strong message
that Americans are willing to provide more than blankets. This was the Obama
administration’s approach.” This is wrong.
— Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA
Nunes has repeated this
Trump talking point often made by Trump which is one statement listed in The
Post’s database of Trump lies. This lie
from Trump is that President Obama only provided “blankets” to Ukrainian
security forces. The suggestion is that Obama did not provide security aid to
Ukraine, but this is very wrong.
Fiona Hill, who joined
the Trump administration as the top Russia adviser on the National Security
Council, in 2015 she co-wrote an opinion piece in The Post warning
against supplying lethal weapons because it could lead to a regional war.
In her deposition to the impeachment investigators, she said circumstances
had changed by 2017.
“When I got into the
government, the administration, I became actually more convinced that there was
a thorough plan. That our colleagues at
the Pentagon had really thought all of this through,” Hill said. “They
had a proper plan for the long-term sustainability of the Ukrainian military,
and that the intent was that the Ukrainian defense sector would be able to get
itself back into shape again over time.”
“I am very confident
based on all of the analysis that has been done and, again, I don’t want to
start getting into intelligence matters, that the Ukrainian Government did not
interfere in our election in 2016,” Hill insisted in her interview when yet another GOP
lawmaker asked her about the issue.
In other words, the GOP
talking point does not take into account the differences between the state
of the Ukrainian military under Obama versus Trump. (As Hill had noted,
“Everybody changes their mind, you know, and kind of learns things.”)
Even so, while the Trump
administration did supply the Javelin antitank weapons long sought by Ukraine,
the weapons came with the restriction that they cannot be used in the on-going
conflict with the Russian-led separatists.
This is precisely because of the escalation issues that had concerned
the Obama administration.
“The special US envoy
for Ukraine, Kurt Volker, has said that the Javelins are being stored in a
secure facility far from the front line,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported in June. “Ukrainian
and US sources with knowledge of the storage locations have told RFE/RL that
the missiles and launchers have been separated into smaller groups and are held
in strategic locations around the country, possibly in underground bunkers,
where they can be moved quickly to areas that border Russia or the eastern
front line.”
Because of the
restrictions, “Ukrainian soldiers at the front have improvised: They prop up
the dummies of straw with extra uniforms that appear to hold the missiles, as a
ruse”, an army spokesman said. “The fake missiles are conjured
from logs and empty ammunition boxes, roughly mimicking the silhouette of a
Javelin.”
But it was the supposed
Ukraine corruption that the president said was the reason he wanted the
investigations of Biden and the interference in the 2016 election. The word has it that it was the Russian President
Putin that told Trump that it was the Ukrainians that interfered with the US
electrons, not Russia. All of the US
Intelligence agencies have said it was Russia, but Trump has said he believes
Putin.
The Defense Department
since 2017 has been required by law to certify annually that Ukraine has
made sufficient progress on anti-corruption efforts to merit US security
assistance funds. Congress approved those funds for Ukraine in the fall of
2018. The Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy, John C. Rood, sent a letter on May
23 to congressional committees certifying that “the Government of Ukraine
has taken substantial actions to make defense institutional reforms for the
purposes of decreasing corruption, increasing accountability, and sustaining
improvements of combat capability enabled by US assistance.”
The White House
has not said if it conducted a separate review of corruption in Ukraine. If so, did it differed from the Pentagon’s
review? And where is that White House review?
The experts doubt that a
formal White House review was done.
“My sense is that all of the senior leaders of the US national
security departments and agencies were all unified in their view that this
assistance was essential, and that we could work with the government of Ukraine
to tackle corruption. They were trying
to find ways to engage this president on these issues,” said Laura Cooper,
the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and
Eurasia, when she testified to the House impeachment inquiry
committee.
It will be decades after
the Trump administration until the American public can trust the information that
comes out of their White House.
Copyright G. Ater 2019
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