Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insisted that rooting out corruption in Ukraine has been a hallmark of official U.S. policy in Europe as a congressional investigation into relations between the two countries hangs over the department.
“We had a very clear policy with respect to Ukraine, and we executed it successfully,” Pompeo said Tuesday during a briefing with reporters. “There are still many challenges. Still have Russians in the Donbass. We still have the president in Ukraine working to make sure we move through the challenges the country has had with corruption for an awfully long time now.”
This is an objective, Pompeo explained, that President Trump’s State Department had been working on well before Democrats launched a formal investigation into what they allege to be a campaign of shadow diplomacy orchestrated by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
“The State Department has been working on that for a year-and-a-half plus here,” Pompeo said. “We’ll continue to work on it. And every action that I took and have taken will continue to be driven towards that objective.”
It was announced this week that Giuliani is the subject of a potential criminal investigation seeking to discover whether he registered as a foreign agent on behalf of the United States and whether he sought to profit directly from his work in Ukraine. The former New York City mayor pushed Ukrainian officials to investigate 2020 Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden and a conspiracy theory that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election.
As for allegations from leading Democrats that Pompeo and other top Trump cabinet members have obstructed their oversight by ignoring subpoenas and claiming “absolute immunity” over thousands of pages of documents, Pompeo deadpanned.
“I don’t have much to say with respect to the Ukraine investigation other than this: We continue to comply with all the legal requirements,” he said.
During sworn testimony last week, Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland complained that he did not have access to State Department records documenting his relations with Ukrainian diplomats, who, an Intelligence Community whistleblower says, were pressured by Trump to investigate Biden’s son Hunter, who sat on the board of Ukrainian oil company Burisma when his father was still vice president.
“Everybody was in the loop,” Sondland said of Pompeo and other top State Department officials.
Investigating Burisma, Trump’s defenders have argued, was part of the administration’s overall goal of making sure the country roots out corruption.
“You saw we released documents, I guess it was last week now,” Pompeo said. “We’ll continue to do that as required by law and as appropriate so that appropriate oversight can be conducted.”
