“Let me be clear, there was absolutely no quid pro quo between Ukrainian military aid and any investigation into the 2016 election,” said acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney just minutes shy of 6 p.m. on Thursday evening. “There was never any condition of the flow of the aid related to the matter of the DNC server.”
More from Mulvaney:
Mulvaney has issued a statement essentially blaming the media for reporting what he said. pic.twitter.com/FzHSg8Gcmq
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) October 17, 2019
There’s just one problem. Not six hours earlier, when asked why funding to Ukraine was held, Mulvaney responded:
When the press followed up to get Mulvaney to clarify if “an investigation into the Democrats was part of the reason that he ordered to withhold funding to Ukraine,” Mulvaney responded that 2016 was “certainly was part of the thing that he was worried about in corruption with that nation.”
When a reporter explicitly called the withholding a quid pro quo, Mulvaney said, “We do that all the time with foreign policy.”
No matter how hard the White House tries to spin Mulvaney’s response, there’s no way to contort his press briefing from earlier today as anything other than an admission of a quid pro quo in the form of withholding congressionally approved aid in Ukraine in exchange for the nation investigating the 2016 election.
Presidents, Trump included, withhold aid all the time to get nations to comply with our demands. Just months prior, the White House withheld aid from Northern Triangle nations to cajole them into cracking down on immigration into our southern border. That was a quid pro quo, but one enacted in service of the country, not Trump’s reelection campaign.
The Ukraine bid is different.
It is theoretically possible that as Mulvaney stated, the only “quo” intended by Trump was investigating the Democratic National Committee’s server, not Hunter Biden. It is also — again, very theoretically — possible that Trump genuinely cares about whether or not Hunter Biden made some corrupt cash half a decade ago and half a world away.
But is it likely?
