American officials are not demanding that Ukraine open investigations that Rudy Giuliani had hoped would help President Trump’s reelection effort, a top American diplomat said.
“It is not our policy,” Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan said during his Wednesday confirmation hearing to become U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federation. “Our policy has been to encourage anti-corruption reform generally in Ukraine.”
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Sullivan’s comments were in response to questions about the two investigations that Trump mentioned in the July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Sullivan rejected “the concept of investigating a political rival” and emphasized that the United States seeks a general overhaul of Ukraine’s political and legal system.
“That’s something that I’ve worked on for over two years but never with respect to a particular investigation or company or individual,” Sullivan told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“Is it currently the policy of the United States that Ukraine must conduct investigations into Burisma and Crowdstrike?” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, asked during the hearing.
Burisma is the company that hired Hunter Biden when Vice President Joe Biden was responsible for Ukraine policy under Barack Obama. Crowdstrike is the security company that worked with federal officials to assess whether Russian cyberattackers had hacked the Democratic National Committee and stolen embarrassing emails to leak to the press.
Sullivan told lawmakers he did not instruct American officials to look into Burisma and Crowdstrike.
Murphy pressed Sullivan on the propriety of such investigations.
“In this case, they were specifically requesting investigations connected to a political rival of the president of the United States, and so your testimony is that those requests were improper?” Murphy asked.
“I’ve said, as a general matter that … asking a foreign government to investigate a domestic political rival as opposed to as part of a larger anti-corruption campaign, which we’ve been engaged in encouraging the Ukrainians for years, those are two different things.”
Sullivan does not know first hand whether U.S. officials made the requests, he testified. “To the extent that they were made, I’m going to have to assume that what I read in the paper [is true],” Sullivan said. “I’m not present at the depositions but what has been reported in the press.”
