Exclusive: White House Ignored Pentagon Warning on Ukraine Funding

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Exclusive: White House Ignored Pentagon Warning on Ukraine Funding
by Kate Brannen
October 30, 2019


As the summer wore on, and President Donald Trump would not budge on his decision to withhold almost $400 million in military aid for Ukraine, the Pentagon warned the White House: If its portion of the money wasn’t released quickly, the Defense Department would not be able to spend it before the fiscal year ended on September 30.

The Pentagon even gave the White House a deadline. In late July, as panic spread within the administration over the president’s worrisome decision, the National Security Council led a series of interagency meetings to discuss what to do about the military assistance to Ukraine. At one of these meetings, Defense Department officials told the White House that if the $250 million in security assistance was not released by August 6, it would not be able to spend it all by the end of the fiscal year, according to two sources familiar with the deliberations.

The Defense Department’s message was clear: If the White House didn’t act, the Pentagon would be left with unobligated funds — money that would return to the U.S. Treasury and never make its way to Ukraine. And the Pentagon was also clear that providing Ukraine the security assistance was in the national security interests of the United States, on that point Trump’s Cabinet agreed.

“At every meeting, the unanimous conclusion was that the security assistance should be resumed, the hold lifted,” Bill Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, said in his opening statement to House investigators last week.

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But, the White House did not heed the Pentagon’s warnings. It continued to withhold the money through August and into September.

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https://www.justsecurity.org/66767/exclusive-white-house-ignored-pentagon-warning-on-ukraine-funding/