The transcript of Ambassador Bill Taylor’s testimony released on Wednesday makes clear a central fallacy of President Trump’s defenders.
Namely, Trump and lawyer Rudy Giuliani never were interested in having Ukraine fight institutional corruption of the sort that would have any bearing on the effectiveness of U.S. aid. Instead, they were interested only in prompting investigations, no matter how spurious, that could help Trump politically.
This isn’t legitimate foreign policy; it’s a misuse of federal power and the federal purse for tawdry personal politics.
Asked directly if it was ordinarily legitimate policy to ask Ukraine to reopen closed cases that could touch on the Biden family, Taylor said this (p. 88):
Later, on page 123 of the transcript, Taylor repeated the point that “individual cases … may not get us to a reformed, less corrupt system.” Unfortunately, he said, the “irregular channel” of diplomacy directed by Trump’s personal lawyer, “under the influence of Giuliani, wanted to focus on one or two specific cases, irrespective of whether it helped solve the corruption problem, fight the corruption problem.”
Indeed, as early as July 20, five days before the now-famous phone conversation between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, an aide to Zelensky told Taylor he was worried that Zelensky was being used as a pawn for a U.S. reelection effort. The Ukrainians understood very well that Trump wasn’t asking about broad-scale corruption.
As noted in my Nov. 5 column, the request itself violated important norms. Taylor explained, “A formal U.S. request to the Ukrainians to conduct an investigation based on violations of their own law struck me as improper, and I recommended to Ambassador Volker that we ‘stay clear’ … It struck me as improper that the United States would be asking Ukraine to investigate violations of Ukrainian law, that would be improper. If, on the other hand what is proper and what happens frequently is the United States goes to Ukraine and asks for their help to pursue an investigation of violations of American law, of U.S. law. That’s what we have a mutual legal assistance treaty, an NLAT, for. But this is different. This would be what [Volker] was asking for was examples or precedent for asking the Ukrainians to investigate a violation of their own law.”
There apparently is no such precedent.
Moreover, as the Washington Post reported on Oct. 23, the Trump administration has made it more difficult, not less, for Ukraine to fight institutional corruption because “the Trump administration has sought repeatedly to cut foreign aid programs tasked with combating corruption in Ukraine and elsewhere overseas, White House budget documents show, despite recent claims from President Trump and his administration that they have been singularly concerned with fighting corruption in Ukraine.”
Now that at least five administration officials have acknowledged that Trump wanted one or both of two quids for the quo of specific investigations into American Democrats, without any broader expressed interest in battling corruption in Ukraine or other foreign lands, what remains is a Trumpian shakedown. In common parlance, it was extortionary, and it should not go unpunished.
