WARSAW, Poland — A veteran member of the U.S. Congress and an ardent critic of U.S. President Donald J. Trump said that Ukrainians shouldn’t worry about losing American support. John Garamendi, a Democrat from California and a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, said that Republicans and Democrats alike will keep backing Kyiv.
“With regard to American policy towards Ukraine, it will continue through the Trump administration and beyond,” Garamendi told the Kyiv Post on the sidelines of the annual Warsaw Security Forum that ends today. “We will continue to support the Ukraine government in its efforts to retrieve its territory and push back on Russia. That support will be political, economic, and certainly, military support.
“As to what the ultimate resolution of Russia’s invasion, it should be: Russia must get out of Ukraine,” he said. “That is our goal, that is U.S. policy and that should remain U.S. policy. We’re certainly putting more military equipment into Ukraine, economic support, all of those things are happening and will continue. I don’t see any way that will lessen.”
Garamendi said that “what the president did” in his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “was both illegal and disreputable.”
The Republican president is now facing impeachment hearings in the Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives over his attempts to get Zelensky to investigate ex-U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden and his son, Hunter, over the son’s involvement with Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter served for five years, until May of this year, for $50,000 a month. The Bidens have said they did nothing wrong.
The House is investigating whether Trump held up $391 million in aid to Ukraine unless Zelensky complied with his request for “a favor,” as he described it, in a transcript of the conversation released by the White House in response to public pressure.
In the conversation, Trump asked Zelensky to work with U.S. Attorney General William Barr and his personal lawyer, ex-New York City Mayor Rudolph Guiliani, who Democrats accuse of running “a rogue” foreign policy to distort and lie about events in Ukraine in ways that benefit Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign. Guliani has, for instance, accused Ukrainian leaders of trying to help Hillary Clinton’s election in 2016 and, specifically, accused Joe Biden of trying to get ex-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin fired for investigating Burisma. The opposite, in fact, is true: Shokin sabotaged the Burisma investigation, while Biden pressed for stronger action against corruption.
“The rogue foreign policy of Guiliani is totally inappropriate, it’s one of the principal issues in the impeachment and that will be determined, uncovered and exposed and hopefully no longer happen and will be stopped,” Garamendi said.
He said that momentum is building for removing Trump from office as more details come out about his abuses of office and obstruction of justice.
“All of us are watching the news every hour to see what’s breaking,” Garamendi said. “Clearly there’s a cascading effect; as more and more information is made public and the impeachment process moves forward in a rapid way.”
Garamendi has served in Congress since 2009 and is a former lieutenant governor of California.
