President Trump’s national security team lifted a hold on security assistance to Ukraine without permission from the White House budget office, a top U.S. diplomat testified last month during impeachment hearings.
“I don’t know if they’ve ever done that before,” William Taylor, the chargé d’affaires for Ukraine, told House investigators on Oct. 22, according to a transcript released Wednesday. “This was a big decision for them.”
Taylor was called back to Washington from Kyiv as part of the investigation into whether Trump used American aid as leverage to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden for corruption. Taylor’s testimony underscores the Pentagon and the State Department’s “astonishment” when an official at the White House Office of Management and Budget announced that Trump wanted the Ukraine aid frozen — and how the national security team nevertheless released the aid.
“The State Department and maybe the Defense Department decided they were going to move forward with this assistance anyway, OMB notwithstanding,” Taylor testified.
“All that the OMB staff person said was that the directive had come from the President to the Chief of Staff to OMB,” Taylor said, recalling a July 18 video conference hosted by the National Security Council. “In an instant, I realized that one of the key pillars of our strong support for Ukraine was threatened.”
The hold applied to a $250 million grant from the State Department’s Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative and another $141 million through the Pentagon’s Foreign Military Financing program. Taylor wasn’t given an explanation for the hold, which was at odds with Trump’s broader policy towards Ukraine. Zelenksy’s team learned about the hold in late August, but Taylor was “embarrassed,” he said, when he had to admit to Ukrainian officials on Aug. 29 that he didn’t know why the aid was delayed.
“It had still had not occurred to me that the hold on security assistance could be related to the investigations,” he testified. “That, however, would change.”
Taylor perceived the White House delay as part of an effort to push for politically explosive investigations due to his conversations with Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union and a key figure in the effort to orchestrate a quid pro quo. But the State Department’s legal team, after “some debate as to whether or not they could do it without OMB’s clearance,” decided to approve the aid in September after another huddle with Defense Department and White House officials.
More recently, a White House official defended Trump by saying that Ukraine did in fact get the aid. “They have the aid, they’re using the aid,” White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said Sunday during a televised interview. “Here’s what’s unimpeachably true: Ukraine has that aid, they’re using the aid.”
In October, House investigators asked Taylor if he could recall if “there was any communication from the White House or from OMB” about whether the hold would remain in place.
Replied Taylor: “I don’t.”
