Two of President Trump’s top envoys to Ukraine drafted a statement for the country’s new president in August that would have committed Ukraine to pursuing investigations sought by Mr. Trump into his political rivals, three people briefed on the effort said.
The drafting of the statement marks new evidence of how Mr. Trump’s fixation with Ukraine began driving senior diplomats to bend American foreign policy to the president’s political agenda in the weeks after the July 25 call between the two leaders.
The statement was drafted by Gordon D. Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union, and Kurt D. Volker, then the State Department’s envoy to Ukraine, according to the three people who have been briefed on it.
Mr. Volker spent Thursday on Capitol Hill being questioned by House investigators as Democrats pursued their impeachment inquiry into Mr. Trump’s actions. He disclosed a set of texts in September in which Bill Taylor, the top American diplomat in Ukraine, alluded to Mr. Trump’s decision earlier in the summer to freeze a military aid package to the country. He told Mr. Sondland and Mr. Volker: “I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.”
After speaking with Mr. Trump, Mr. Sondland texted back that there was no quid pro quo, adding, “I suggest we stop the back and forth by text.”
It was not clear if the statement drafted in August by Mr. Sondland and Mr. Volker came up in the closed-door session on Capitol Hill.
The statement was written with the awareness of a top aide to the Ukrainian president, as well as Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and the de facto leader of a shadow campaign to push the Ukrainians to press ahead with investigations that could be of political benefit to Mr. Trump, according to one of the people briefed on it.
The statement would have committed Ukraine to investigating the energy company Burisma, which had employed Hunter Biden, the younger son of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. And it would have called for the Ukrainian government to look into what Mr. Trump and his allies believe was interference by Ukrainians in the 2016 election in the United States to benefit Hillary Clinton.
The idea behind the statement was to break the Ukrainians of their habit of promising American diplomats and leaders behind closed doors that they would look into matters and never follow through.
It is unclear if the statement was delivered to Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, but no statement was released publicly under his name. Around that time, the Ukrainian officials indicated to the Americans that they wanted to avoid becoming more deeply enmeshed in American politics.
The drafting of the statement, which came in the weeks after the July 25 phone call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky, was an effort to pacify Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani and normalize relations between the two countries as Ukraine faced continuing conflict with Russia. Mr. Sondland and Mr. Volker believed that Mr. Giuliani was “poisoning” Mr. Trump’s mind about Ukraine and that eliciting a public commitment from Mr. Zelensky to pursue the investigations would induce Mr. Trump to more fully support the new Ukrainian government, according to the people familiar with it.
Mr. Giuliani said he was aware of the statement but that it was not written at his behest. He said the statement would include a commitment to investigations of Burisma and the circumstances around the 2016 election.
President Trump ordered the removal of the ambassador to Ukraine after months of complaints from allies outside the administration, including his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, that she was undermining him abroad and obstructing efforts to persuade Kyiv to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, according to people familiar with the matter.
The recall of Marie Yovanovitch in the spring has become a key point of interest in the House impeachment inquiry. A whistleblower complaint by a CIA officer alleges the president solicited foreign interference in the 2020 elections by pressing Ukraine’s president in a July 25 call to pursue investigations, including into the activities of Mr. Biden, a Democrat who is running for president.
The complaint cites Ms. Yovanovitch’s ouster as one of a series of events that paved the way for what the whistleblower alleges was an abuse of power by the president. Mr. Trump has described the call with his Ukrainian counterpart as “perfect” and the House inquiry as a “hoax.”
State Department officials were told this spring that Ms. Yovanovitch’s removal was a priority for the president, a person familiar with the matter said. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo supported the move, an administration official said. Ms. Yovanovitch was told by State Department officials that they couldn’t shield her from attacks by the president and his allies, according to people close to her.
In an interview, Mr. Giuliani told The Wall Street Journal that in the lead-up to Ms. Yovanovitch’s removal, he reminded the president of complaints percolating among Trump supporters that she had displayed an anti-Trump bias in private conversations. In Mr. Giuliani’s view, she also had been an obstacle to efforts to push Ukraine to investigate Mr. Biden and his son Hunter.
As vice president, Mr. Biden spearheaded an international anticorruption reform push in Ukraine, which included calling for the dismissal of a prosecutor the U.S. and its allies saw as soft on corruption. He had once investigated the Ukrainian gas company where Hunter Biden served on the board at a salary of $50,000 a month, according to one official with ties to the company. Mr. Trump has accused the Bidens of corruption.
In May, Ukraine’s then-prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, said he had no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens.
When Ms. Yovanovitch left her post in May, the State Department said she was concluding her assignment “as planned,” and that her departure date aligned with the start of a new administration in Ukraine. She was recalled at least three months before the end of the customary three-year diplomatic tenure.
Mr. Giuliani told the Journal that when he mentioned the ambassador to the president this spring, Mr. Trump “remembered he had a problem with her earlier and thought she had been dismissed.” Mr. Giuliani said he subsequently received a call from a White House official—whom he declined to identify—asking him to list his concerns about the ambassador again.
Mr. Giuliani said he gave Mr. Pompeo a nine-page document dated March 28 that included a detailed timeline of the Bidens’ dealings in Ukraine and allegations of impropriety against Ms. Yovanovitch, including that she was “very close” to Mr. Biden.
“He called me back and he said they were going to investigate,” Mr. Giuliani said of the secretary of state, saying Mr. Pompeo asked for additional documents to back up the allegations. “The reason I gave the information to the secretary was I believed that he should know that the president’s orders to fire her were being blocked by the State Department.”
Neither the State Department nor the White House responded to requests for comment.
Andrew Bates, a Biden campaign spokesman, said Mr. Biden has professional respect for Ms. Yovanovitch but that the two aren’t close. “She became our ambassador during the final 6 months of the administration,” he said. “This is standard Rudy Giuliani: noun, verb, lie about Joe Biden. ”
When asked about Ms. Yovanovitch’s removal Thursday, Mr. Trump told reporters: “I don’t know if I recalled her or somebody recalled her but I heard very, very bad things about her for a long period of time. Not good.”
Ms. Yovanovitch couldn’t be reached for comment. She is set to testify before House lawmakers on Oct. 11 as part of the impeachment inquiry. People close to her disputed that she did anything wrong and defended her work.
“She was doing everything by the book,” said a senior Ukraine government official who interacted with her. “Everything was blessed by State Department.”
Ms. Yovanovitch remains an employee of the State Department and is a senior State Department fellow at Georgetown University.
A career diplomat, she first served as the second-ranking diplomat in Kyiv in 2001 under President George W. Bush and returned as ambassador under President Obama in 2016.
But the whistleblower who lit the impeachment cauldron by exposing Trump’s dealings with Ukraine used a tactic that the president had never confronted.
“The difference between leaking to the news media and going through the formal legal process is that it compels the government to actually do something about it,” said Donald Moynihan, a Georgetown University public policy professor who specializes in government administration.
The whistleblower, reportedly a CIA officer, originally approached a House Intelligence Committee staff member to ask for guidance about reporting his concerns. He was advised to file a complaint with the intelligence community’s inspector general, activating legal protections against retaliation or disclosure of his or her identity.
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But pushback has appeared at each step.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the longest-serving Republican in the Senate and an author of legislation that protects whistleblowers, issued a powerful defense of the whistleblower, warning against “uninformed speculation wielded by politicians or media commentators as a partisan weapon.”
And the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Louise Yovanovitch, a presumed witness to some of the events in question, has agreed to testify to the House Foreign Affairs Committee behind closed doors next week even though she still works at the State Department.
The former U.S. special representative to Ukraine, Kurt Volker, who resigned Friday, is also ignoring Pompeo’s restrictions. He is scheduled to give a deposition to the committee on Thursday that is likely to focus, in part, on what he told Zelensky before and after Trump’s phone call.
On Wednesday, the inspector general for the State Department took his own concerns to Capitol Hill. Democrats said he shared evidence of a disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting Yovanovitch inside the department.
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“This administration has always shown a disdain for any pattern and process around hiring and staffing and I think maybe all of that is coming home to roost right now,” said Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a fellow at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution who studies White House turnover patterns.
Trump, she noted, has already lost 78% of his original senior staff, far more than any of the five presidents who preceded him after their first 33 months in office.
The whistleblower, she added, “empowers others with concerns to come forward. We could be at a tipping point.”
In past scandals, Trump remained wildly popular with core Republican voters, and that doesn’t appear to be changing. But early polls suggest growing support for impeachment proceedings among independents who can swing an election, and congressional Republicans are watching.
“The crucial question mark is whether or not congressional Republicans are going to push back because that’s what ultimately sealed Nixon’s doom and that was a very late breaking thing,” said John A. Farrell, author of a 2017 biography of Richard Nixon, the only president to resign office to avoid certain impeachment.
Public opinion was slow to change during the two-year Watergate scandal, and it took the Supreme Court decision to hand over secretly recorded Oval Office tapes — with Nixon ordering a cover-up — to erode Nixon’s support on Capitol Hill. But the wall was never as solid as Nixon believed.
“Almost every institution to some extent did its job faithfully,” Farrell said. “Nixon really had counted on the awe of the presidency ... to intimidate them all. And it didn’t happen.”
Weeks before the whistleblower's complaint became public, the CIA's top lawyer made what she considered to be a criminal referral to the Justice Department about the whistleblower's allegations that President Donald Trump abused his office in pressuring the Ukrainian president, U.S. officials familiar with the matter tell NBC News.
The move by the CIA's general counsel, Trump appointee Courtney Simmons Elwood, meant she and other senior officials had concluded a potential crime had been committed, raising more questions about why the Justice Department later declined to open an investigation.
The phone call that Elwood considered to be a criminal referral is in addition to the referral later received as a letter from the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community regarding the whistleblower complaint.
Justice Department officials said they were unclear whether Elwood was making a criminal referral and followed up with her later to seek clarification but she remained vague.
In the days since the anonymous whistleblower complaint was made public accusing him of wrongdoing, Trump has lashed out at his accuser and other insiders who provided the accuser with information, suggesting they were improperly spying on what was a "perfect" call between him and the Ukrainian president.
But a timeline provided by U.S. officials familiar with the matter shows that multiple senior government officials appointed by Trump found the whistleblower's complaints credible, troubling and worthy of further inquiry starting soon after the president's July phone call.
While that timeline and the CIA general counsel's contact with the Justice Department has been previously disclosed, it has not been reported that the CIA's top lawyer intended her call to be a criminal referral about the president's conduct, acting under rules set forth in a memo governing how intelligence agencies should report allegations of federal crimes.
The fact that she and other top Trump administration political appointees saw potential misconduct in the whistleblower's early account of alleged presidential abuses puts a new spotlight on the Justice Department's later decision to decline to open a criminal investigation — a decision that the Justice Department said publicly was based purely on an analysis of whether the president committed a campaign finance law violation.
"They didn't do any of the sort of bread-and-butter type investigatory steps that would flush out what potential crimes may have been committed," said Berit Berger, a former federal prosecutor who heads the Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity at Columbia Law School. "I don't understand the rationale for that and it's just so contrary to how normal prosecutors work. We have started investigations on far less."
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) on Friday broke sharply with President Trump's call for China and Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, calling it "wrong and appalling."
"When the only American citizen President Trump singles out for China’s investigation is his political opponent in the midst of the Democratic nomination process, it strains credulity to suggest that it is anything other than politically motivated," Romney said in a statement, which he also tweeted out.
By all appearances, the President’s brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong and appalling. — Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) October 4, 2019
I-1 didn't actually use the term "quid pro quo", so I guess that makes everything all right...
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Sen. Ron Johnson, a top Republican ally of President Donald Trump, said a U.S. diplomat told him in August that the Trump administration had frozen almost $400 million in aid to Ukraine because the president wanted a commitment that Kyiv would carry out investigations related to U.S. elections.
The Wisconsin senator, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal published Friday, said he called Trump about the allegation on Aug. 31, and that Trump vehemently denied it.
"He said—expletive deleted—'No way. I would never do that. Who told you that?" Johnson recounted Trump as telling him in the call, according to the paper.
Johnson told The Wall Street Journal that he was informed of the allegations by U.S. ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland.
Speaking to reporters in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, before The Wall Street Journal story was published, Johnson said that during the Aug. 31 talk, he asked Trump to "give me the authority to tell [Ukrainian] President [Volodymyr] Zelinskiy that we were going to provide that" aid.
"I didn't succeed," Johnson said, according to audio of the interview posted by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
In a statement provided to NBC News, Johnson's office stressed that the term "quid pro quo" was not used.
"Senator Johnson does not recall in any meeting or discussion with the president, or any member of the administration, that the term 'quid pro quo' was ever used. Nor does he recall any discussion of any specific case of corruption in the 2016 election, such as Crowdstrike, the hack of the DNC servers, Hillary Clinton campaign involvement, or Hunter and Joe Biden, during general discussions of corruption, which is endemic throughout Ukraine," the statement said.
Johnson told The Wall Street Journal that he’d reached out to Sondland after discovering the aid, which Johnson had advocated for, had been frozen. Sondland said the administration had been working on an arrangement with Ukraine in which the country would appoint a new prosecutor general and move to “get to the bottom of what happened in 2016—if President Trump has that confidence, then he’ll release the military spending,” Johnson told the paper.
The senator said the suggestion made him "wince." "My reaction was: 'Oh, God. I don’t want to see those two things combined,'" Johnson told the paper.
The money was released in September after news of the freeze became public and led to bipartisan push from Congress.
Remember the good old days when people on the other side of the aisle had kittens when Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton met for 15 minutes on a plane in Arizona during the 2016 campaign? Now *that* was a real scandal....
Here are some interesting text messages...but it's OK because no one says quid pro quo...wink, wink, nudge, nudge is ok...
Note how everyone goes offline after the story breaks connecting the withholding of military aid and an investigation into Burisma, etc...but *of course* that's not because they felt the need to hide anything...
