WASHINGTON — A senior Pentagon official said that legal experts at the U.S. Department of Defense and the State Department judged a White House freeze on nearly $400 million in assistance approved by the American Congress for Ukraine to be illegal.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Laura Cooper, responsible for Ukraine and Russia, said that she and other officials learned in mid-June that the White House had started asking questions about the aid package for Ukraine, a month before President Donald Trump ordered the suspension of critical military aid for the country.
But it was only in August that she came to understand, after conversations with the American special envoy for Ukraine, Kurt Volker, that the funds would be resumed if the new Ukrainian government was willing to issue a statement about alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. At that time, Volker, who, like her, also wanted the money released to Ukraine, was not more specific about what Kyiv was required to do, she said.
The information was disclosed in the latest batch of testimonies made public by three Congressional committees involved in an impeachment inquiry about whether Trump held U.S. aid to Ukraine hostage in an attempt to dig up dirt on a political rival, Joseph Biden, the vice president during President Barack Obama’s administration.
That concern was first raised by a White House official who filed a formal whistleblower complaint, which led the Democratic Party-dominated House of Representatives to launch an impeachment inquiry into Republican Trump.
Most of the testimonies made public so far have borne out the whistleblower’s version of a July 25 telephone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Witnesses have testified that Trump wanted to use the threat of withholding aid to force Kyiv to announce publicly that it would investigate the Bidens — something the Trump camp apparently calculated would undermine Biden’s chances to win the 2020 presidential race.
The testimonies have also revealed how Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, tried to enlist Ukrainian officials to help with constructing a false narrative to discredit Biden.
Giuliani has claimed that Biden forced the Ukrainian government to fire its prosecutor general in order to protect his son, Hunter Biden, who had taken a job with a controversial Ukrainian energy company that faced corruption investigations.
While the younger Biden did indeed serve on the board of directors of the company, Burisma, there is no evidence indicating that the U.S. vice president used his position to benefit him.
If the Congressional inquiry gathers enough evidence to impeach Trump, he will be tried by the Senate, where the Republicans have the majority. Two thirds of the 100 members of the Senate would be needed to convict Trump and, at present, most observers believe that is unlikely to happen.
Cooper said in her testimony, delivered behind closed doors last month, that providing critical security assistance “was vital to helping the Ukrainians be able to defend themselves… If you go back to 2014, when Ukraine found itself under attack by Russia, the state of the Ukrainian Armed Forces was significantly less capable than it is today, and that capability increase is largely the result of U.S. and allied assistance.”
In reply to questions by members of Congress, Cooper emphasized that helping Ukraine was in line with U.S. national interests because Ukraine and Georgia are the two front-line states facing Russian aggression.
“In order to deter further Russian aggression, we need to be able to shore up these countries’ abilities to defend themselves. That’s, I think, pure and simple, the rationale behind our strategy of supporting these countries. It’s in our interest to deter Russian aggression elsewhere around the world.
Based on her conversations with Ambassador Volker and acting Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor, Cooper understood that Ukrainian officials were aware that security assistance had been frozen as of August 2019 — before that fact was publicly reported.
Damaging signal
Cooper said that she and her colleagues were worried that delaying security assistance to Ukraine would send a damaging signal about “a wavering in our commitment” that would weaken a strategic partner.
Both Washington and Kyiv did not want the withholding of funds to be made public while there was a chance that the money would be restored. A withdrawal of aid would potentially strengthen or embolden Russia, Cooper said.
“We did not want for this to be a big public discussion… because we didn’t want to signal any lack of support…,” she said. “They [Ukraine] are trying to negotiate a peace with Russia, and if they are seen as weak, and if they are seen to lack the backing of the United States for their Armed Forces, it makes it much more difficult for them to negotiate a peace on terms that are good for Ukraine.”
She said that, although Trump couched his reasons for withholding aid in concerns about corruption, the Department of Defense had “certified in May 2019 that Ukraine met the anti-corruption benchmarks set by the Pentagon to make it eligible to receive security assistance.”
Cooper said that, by July, she and others at the Pentagon and State Department questioned the legality of withholding the assistance, which had been voted through by Congress and which she and her colleagues considered essential.
The committee also released transcripts of testimony from two diplomats, Christopher Anderson, a senior Ukraine specialist at the State Department, and Catherine Croft, who succeeded Anderson in that job.
They both described their mounting concerns that Giuliani would influence Trump to change America’s supportive policy for Ukraine.
The testimonies were released at the start of a week that is supposed to herald a new, public phase of the inquiry. On Nov. 13, Ambassador Taylor and senior State Department official George Kent will testify in televised hearings. Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine who was abruptly removed from her post earlier this year will give evidence before the cameras on Friday.
Meanwhile former National Security Adviser John Bolton and White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney are seeking a court ruling on whether they should defy White House orders not to testify and comply with Congressional subpoenas to give evidence.
According to other testimony made public, Bolton was distressed by Trump and Giuliani’s attempts to force Ukraine to discredit the Bidens. He worried about the consequences of Giuliani’s “unofficial diplomacy” in Ukraine and compared the former New York mayor to a hand grenade waiting to explode.
