All the President’s Men, Ukraine edition
Consider some of the gentlemen working for President Donald Trump.
Trump presides over an administration unusually tainted by political, financial and legal opportunism and malfeasance, and l’affaire Ukraine offers heightened examples of that troika. It is also true, as the adage goes, that a fish rots from the head. Trump ignores conflicts of interest so those in his Cabinet and elsewhere in his administration follow suit.
• Energy Secretary Rick Perry told Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, earlier this year to ponder a slate of Americans, including a former political donor and a Houston oil executive, as advisers on energy sector reform. President Trump has said that his now-infamous July call to Zelensky seeking dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden came about, in part, at Perry’s urging — and because the energy secretary wanted Trump to inquire about Ukraine’s resources.
The Associated Press reported that individuals tied to Trump and his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, pushed for influence over Ukraine’s biggest energy company during this same time frame, raising “questions about whether Trump allies were mixing business and politics just as Republicans were calling for a probe of Biden.” [After push from Energy Secretary Rick Perry, backers got huge gas deal in Ukraine]
• Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, repeatedly pushed a career civil servant and military attache, William Taylor, who was the U.S.’s top diplomat in Ukraine, to strong-arm Zelensky into improving his relationship with Trump. Texts between Sondland and Taylor indicate that the diplomat worried, quite properly, that Zelensky was being told a meeting with Trump and military aid hinged on the Ukrainian president launching a Biden investigation. So Taylor pushed back.
Sondland, a wealthy hotel operator who had no previous diplomatic experience anywhere in the world, was a generous donor to Trump’s 2016 presidential bid and he appears to have secured his ambassadorship as a quid pro quo. Ever the optimist, he told Taylor that Trump’s decision to withhold about $400 million in military aid from Ukraine while also pressing Zelensky to investigate Biden had nothing to do with quid pro quos.
• Secretary of State Mike Pompeo waited two weeks to publicly acknowledge he participated in what Trump has described as the “perfect call” to Zelensky in July. It’s still not entirely clear why Pompeo waited so long to disclose that fact if the call was entirely aboveboard. Pompeo, who works for the most financially conflicted president of the modern era, said that one of his goals for the call was to cleanse Ukraine of “graft” and “corruption.” He hasn’t disclosed if he helped prepare Trump for the July call or whether the two men discussed investigating Biden prior to the call.
• Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department opted not to consider criminal charges stemming from the July phone call even though the Central Intelligence Agency reportedly requested as much when it referred the matter to the law enforcement agency. Instead, the Justice Department simply considered more mild charges related to campaign finance violations — and then dropped them entirely after determining all was well.
Barr was mentioned by name in the whistleblower’s complaint that first set the Ukraine scandal and an impeachment inquiry in motion but he didn’t recuse himself from the matter when it arose (still hasn’t).
Trump’s presidency has been equally animated by a war on facts, expertise and experience and the Ukraine scandal showcase the consequences of devaluing all three when you’re a president who prefers “speaking with myself, number one because I have a very good brain.”
It’s too easy, however, to lay this on Trump alone. All of the men who stick out from the pack thus far in the Ukraine debacle didn’t simply choose their path because of Trump’s cult of personality. They joined the administration because they had a bit of Trump in them already and they saw the president as a useful vehicle for some of their own ambitions.
Ambassador Bill Taylor is an inspiring counterpoint to the others who have intersected with Ukraine thus far. Like Pompeo, he is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Pompeo noted during a campaign speech in early 2016 that American soldiers “don’t swear an allegiance” to individual presidents.
Rather, he said, “They take an oath to defend our Constitution.” Ambassador Taylor chose to follow that credo, in the most basic and honorable of ways. Pompeo didn’t — and he, along with others on his team, can’t blame Trump for that.
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