Regardless of where one stands on impeachment, two facts are indisputable: President Trump asked Ukraine to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden, and his administration delayed Congressionally-appropriated aid to the country. It’s the potential link between these actions that has emerged as a central question.
Sure, there are those who would argue that Trump’s request to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the country look into the Bidens itself is impeachable. And there are those who may take a “so what?” attitude even if aid were used as leverage. But undoubtedly, if it were established that Trump withheld aid as leverage to coerce a foreign government to investigate a political rival, it would move more people into the impeachment column, and would make the politics of defending Trump much more difficult for Republicans to navigate.
As of now, there are multiple pieces of contradictory evidence that can lead one to different conclusions about the relationship between the aid cut off and the request for investigating the Bidens.
Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney was at the heart of the effort to delay aid to Ukraine, and if we dismiss his subsequent backtracks, he seemed to provide strong support for the idea of a “quid pro quo” involving the aid.
Mulvaney was asked to explain the rationale for the delay in aid, and he named three considerations: Corruption in Ukraine, concerns about inadequate contributions from other countries, and an investigation into “what happened in 2016” and with the DNC server.
In case there was any doubt about him referring to those three things, he later summarized by saying, “I was involved with the process by which the money was held up temporarily, okay? Three issues for that: the corruption of the country; whether or not other countries were participating in the support of the Ukraine; and whether or not they were cooperating in an ongoing investigation with our Department of Justice.”
At one point when ABC’s Jonathan Karl reacted by saying, “what you just described is a quid pro quo,” instead of correcting him, Mulvaney replied, “We do that all the time with foreign policy.”
Under grilling from Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, Mulvaney narrowed the rationale for the aid delay down to two reasons: corruption and the contributions of other countries.
However, complicating factors for Mulvaney is that we know from the transcript of the call that Trump saw the “corruption” issue as a look into 2016, and an investigation into the Bidens. Those were the only two specific areas of corruption that he mentioned.
Viewed in isolation, Mulvaney would appear to have provided the smoking gun. However, other information we have complicates this simple narrative.
One important piece of information is that there was no mention of a delay in aid in the transcript of the July 25th call — either by Trump bringing it up as leverage, or from Zelensky expressing concern.
Now, it’s theoretical possible that a verbatim transcript of call, if one exists, would include some sort of mention of the aid. It’s also possible that Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, brought up aid in private conversations with Ukrainian officials. But as of now, we don’t have evidence to support either of those possibilities.
Even those possibilities are complicated by the texts of former special representative to Ukraine, Kurt Volker, that were released by Democrats. They showed that U.S. officials and Ukranians were communicating with each other about investigating 2016 and Burisma (the company that paid Hunter Biden). To the extent there was quid pro quo, it involved the Trump team dangling a potential White House visit in front of the Ukrainians in exchange for an assurance these two matters would be investigated. While this supports the idea that there was pressure being put on Ukraine, it does not help the case that the form of pressure being exerted was the aid delay. In fact, neither Ukrainians nor any Americans on the text chains mention the delay in aid until Aug. 29th, after Politico reported on it.
So how can we reconcile Mulvaney’s statements that the aid delay was tied to corruption (which to Trump meant investigating 2016 as well as the Bidens), and the fact that we don’t have evidence of the delay being a concern of Ukrainians until late August?
One possible theory that would be consistent with both sets of facts is that Trump initially tried to use the prospect of a White House visit as a way of getting Ukraine to play ball, but that he was keeping the aid in his back pocket as a way of ratcheting up the pressure if Ukraine didn’t deliver. We have no way of knowing how that would have played out, however, because on Sept. 9, House Democrats released a “Wide-Ranging Investigation into Trump-Giuliani Ukraine Scheme” and then on Sept. 11, Trump released the aid.
Regardless, at this point, we’ll require more information to understand how Mulvaney’s statements on the reasons for the delay of aid square with the fact that there’s just a two-week window between the Ukrainians learning about the aid delay and its release.
