Mulvaney emerges as a key facilitator of the campaign to pressure Ukraine

[Dennis Donovan]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/mulvaney-emerges-as-a-key-facilitator-of-the-campaign-to-pressure-ukraine/2019/10/15/9d46b7ae-ef76-11e9-89eb-ec56cd414732_story.html


Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney listens in July as President Trump speaks in the Oval Office. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

By Greg Miller, Josh Dawsey and Greg Jaffe

Oct. 15, 2019 at 10:25 p.m. EDT

In late May, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney organized a meeting that stripped control of the country’s relationship with Ukraine from those who had the most expertise at the National Security Council and the State Department.

Instead, Mulvaney put an unlikely trio in charge of managing the U.S.-Ukraine account amid worrisome signs of a new priority, congressional officials said Tuesday: pressuring the fledgling government in Kiev to deliver material that would be politically valuable to President Trump.

The work of those “three amigos,” as they came to call themselves — diplomats Gordon Sondland and Kurt Volker, plus Energy Secretary Rick Perry — has come to light in recent days through newly disclosed text messages and the testimony of government witnesses appearing before an impeachment inquiry in Congress.

But Mulvaney’s connections to the administration’s troubled interactions with Ukraine are also beginning to surface. Mulvaney’s role in enlisting Sondland and the others to take over relations with Ukraine was revealed Tuesday in testimony by George Kent, the State Department’s Ukraine expert, according to Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), who participated in the closed-door hearing before the House Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees.

“I don’t remember any substantive conversation with Mick. I don’t remember him approving, disapproving, getting involved, having an interest,” said Rudolph W. Giuliani, who, as Trump’s personal lawyer, also served as the president’s emissary to Ukraine. “Mulvaney was not a big player in this. I dealt with Volker and Sondland.”

But current and former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters, said Mulvaney contributed substantially to the unfolding political crisis, both through his connection to key events related to the attempt to pressure Kiev and through his general approach to the chief of staff job, which was driven by a perceived reluctance to displease the president.

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[dem4decades]

1. So he goes to jail right?

[dalton99a]

2. His life's purpose is to kiss Trump's ass and help Trump commit crimes

U.S. officials said Mulvaney met frequently with Sondland and that details of their discussions were kept from then-National Security Adviser John Bolton and other officials who were raising internal concerns about the hidden Ukraine agenda.

Perhaps most significantly, Mulvaney — at the direction of the president — placed a hold on nearly $400 million in aid to Ukraine in the weeks before Trump used a July 25 phone call to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to pursue Giuliani’s agenda. The impeachment probe was triggered in August by a whistleblower complaint submitted by a CIA employee to the U.S. intelligence community’s inspector general; the complaint focused in part on the July 25 call.

When some in the White House questioned the legality of blocking funds to Ukraine — funds approved by Congress to help fend off Russian attacks on its sovereignty — U.S. officials said Mulvaney told staff that he had determined that the money could be turned on and off with no legal consequence.

Sondland, Volker and Giuliani had laid the groundwork for that call over months of meetings with Ukrainian officials, texting one another the need to secure a commitment to produce what Sondland described as Trump’s “deliverable.”

That largely off-the-books effort could not have proceeded, current and former administration officials said, without Mulvaney facilitating meetings, halting the flow of aid and circumventing the national security bureaucracy.

[Major Nikon]

3. I reckon Perry was the brains of the trio

[flying_wahini]

4. I would love to be a fly on John Kelly's wall right about now.....

[real Cannabis calm]

5. recommended to publicize