Acting chief of staff says Ukraine aid tied to 2016 probe
Mulvaney, amid uproar, later releases denial of his remarks
Mick Mulvaney speaks during a news conference at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 17.Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
Mick Mulvaney set out to offer an impassioned defense of
President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, but he may have only
made matters worse for his boss -- and himself.
Mulvaney,
the acting White House chief of staff, on Thursday seemed to admit what
Trump had been denying for weeks: that the president offered Ukraine a
quid pro quo for badly needed military aid in exchange for investigating
his political opponents.
He later denied it, but his words from a press briefing --
“get over it” and “there’s always going to be political influence in
foreign policy” -- belied his later statement.
Democrats quickly seized on Mulvaney’s comments at the
briefing. One of Trump’s lawyers disowned them, people at the Justice
Department expressed confusion and chagrin at what he said about its
role, and Republicans expressed disquiet.
House
Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff of California, one of the leaders of
the impeachment inquiry against Trump, tweeted, “Things just went from
very, very bad to much, much worse.”
When Mulvaney was asked about Ukraine, he commented as a key
player in a disputed chain of events: He suspended aid to the country
shortly before a July phone call where Trump told Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelenskiy that he wanted him “to do us a favor” and that
“there’s a lot of talk” about Vice President Joe Biden’s son, and that
Biden had stopped” a prosecution in Ukraine. The uproar over that phone
call led to the impeachment inquiry.
In his news conference
Thursday, Mulvaney insisted that he never held up U.S. aid to get
Ukraine’s president to investigate Biden. But he was more forthright
about another quid pro quo: that the president used the funds partly to
force Ukraine to look into a conspiracy theory about Democrats plotting
to manipulate the 2016 election and a missing computer server.
“The
look back to what happened in 2016 certainly was part of the thing that
he was worried about in corruption with that nation,” Mulvaney told
reporters. “And that is absolutely appropriate.”
Hours later,
Mulvaney denied his own remark. “Let me be clear, there was absolutely
no quid pro quo between Ukrainian military aid and any investigation
into the 2016 election,” Mulvaney said in a statement emailed by the
White House. “The president never told me to withhold any money until
the Ukrainians did anything related to the server. The only reasons we
were holding the money was because of concern about lack of support from
other nations and concerns over corruption.”
Mulvaney speaks to reporters in Washington.
Those
remarks were released after Trump’s personal lawyer Jay Sekulow issued a
terse statement that “the president’s legal counsel was not involved in
Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney’s press briefing.”
Many Republican lawmakers have been ducking questions about
whether tying aid to a political goal was appropriate, but Alaska
Senator Lisa Murkowski was more direct after Mulvaney’s performance.
“You
don’t hold up foreign aid that we had previously appropriated for a
political initiative. Period,” she told reporters. She said she hadn’t
heard Mulvaney’s remarks and wanted to study them before commenting on
whether the situation he described amounted to an impeachable offense.
Mulvaney had called the White House press briefing to make an
unrelated announcement that itself was sure to touch off an outcry --
that Trump would host next year’s Group of Seven summit at his Doral
golf resort in Miami. Word of the decision immediately reignited claims
that Trump is violating a constitutional prohibition against profiting
from the presidency.
When
questions turned to Ukraine, Mulvaney tried to rebut half the
Democrats’ case against Trump. Mulvaney said the delay in aid to Ukraine
was related instead to what he described as Trump’s legitimate concerns
about “corruption of the country,” which he said included “corruption
related to the DNC server.”
Trump and other conservatives have
suggested that Ukrainians and Democrats -- not Russian operatives --
were involved in the breach of a Democratic National Committee server in
2016 that resulted in the release of internal emails. On his call with
Zelenskiy, Trump brought up “the server -- they say Ukraine has it.”
Thomas
Bossert, Trump’s first homeland security adviser, has said he told the
president there was no basis for the idea that Ukraine was somehow
involved with the server and that he was “deeply disturbed” that Trump
couldn’t distinguish truth from fiction.
DOJ Investigation
Mulvaney
said one reason Trump ordered aid withheld from Ukraine was to get the
country to cooperate with a continuing investigation by U.S. Attorney
John Durham, who is looking into Republican assertions that the
investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election was tainted
in its early stages by anti-Trump bias.
But the Justice Department has no idea what Mulvaney was
referring to, according to a department official who said that Attorney
General William Barr hasn’t been asked by the White House to investigate
anything concerning Ukraine. The department has never said whether
Durham is looking into the DNC server.
Officials at the department
were confused and angry that Mulvaney invoked the Justice Department
inquiry, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Mulvaney, who technically remains the White House budget
director, cited assertions that holding up the aid “would be illegal.”
He allowed that there’s “a little shred of truth in it” and that the
budget office was concerned that the holdup in funds would amount to a
prohibited “impoundment” if it had continued past the end of the fiscal
year in September without “a really, really good reason.”
Mulvaney
also defended the role of Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, in
Ukraine-related matters. “You may not like the fact that Giuliani was
involved. That is great, that’s fine. It’s not illegal, it is not
impeachable,” he said. “The president gets to use whoever he wants to
use.”
He said Trump’s biggest reason to withhold aid is that “as
vocal as the Europeans are on supporting Ukraine, they’re really, really
stingy when it comes to lethal aid. The president did not like that.” — With assistance by Chris Strohm, Billy House, and Steven T. Dennis
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