Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney admitted Thursday that President Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine in part because the president wanted the country to investigate a debunked conspiracy theory about the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s servers.
“As vocal as the Europeans are about supporting Ukraine, they are really really stingy when it comes to lethal aid. And they weren’t helping Ukraine and that’s still to this day are not. And the president did not like that … So those are the driving factors,” Mulvaney said. “Did he also mention to me in the past the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely. No question about that. But that’s it, and that’s why we held up the money.”
Trump directly referred to a “favor” he wanted from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the July 25 conversation that is the subject of a whistleblower complaint, but it apparently related to the 2016 election, not Joe Biden or his son, Hunter. According to the transcript, Trump asked Zelensky to look into cybersecurity company CrowdStrike’s conclusion that Russia hacked the DNC in 2016.
Jonathan Karl of ABC News followed up with Mulvaney today, asking, “So the demand for an investigation into the Democrats was part of the reason that he ordered to withhold funding to Ukraine?”
Mulvaney defended Trump’s decision to withhold the funding. “The look back to what happened in 2016 certainly was part of the things that he was worried about in corruption with that nation, and that is absolutely appropriate,” he said.
Trump linked Zelensky’s hopes for future purchasing of weaponry from the United States to Ukraine agreeing to look into CrowdStrike and other 2016 issues. The hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid appropriated by Congress for Ukraine, delayed by Trump for weeks, were released in September.
CrowdStrike, the firm hired by the DNC to investigate the hack in 2016, concluded it had been perpetrated by the Russians, and special counsel Robert Mueller concurred.
The president’s belief that a Ukrainian owns the California company and that the DNC’s server might be in Ukraine seems to be related to a long-standing debunked conspiracy theory. CrowdStrike was co-founded by Dmitri Alperovitch, a Russian-born U.S. citizen. A tenuous Ukrainian connection is that Alperovitch serves as a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, which receives funding from Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian billionaire who has donated to the Clinton Foundation. The DNC also had more than 100 servers, not just one.
Yesterday in the White House, Trump deflected questions about whether his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani had registered as a foreign lobbyist by bringing up CrowdStrike.
DOJ distanced itself from Mulvaney’s claim later in the press conference that U.S. military aid was tied to Ukraine agreeing to cooperate in DOJ’s investigation of the investigators related to the 2016 presidential election.
“If the White House was withholding aid in regards to the cooperation of any investigation at the Department of Justice, that is news to us,” a DOJ official told the Washington Examiner.
Thursday evening, Mulvaney tried to walk back many of his comments, claiming that “the media has decided to misconstrue my comments to advance a biased and political witch hunt against President Trump.”
“Let me be clear, there was absolutely no quid pro quo between Ukrainian military aid and any investigation into the 2016 election,” Mulvaney said.
