Day 1,006: Former ambassador to Ukraine details level of Trump complicity, corruption in military aid scandal
Corruption, quid pro quo, complicity at various governmental levels: it was all detailed to Congress by former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, on Tuesday.
The testimony by Taylor, as part of the House’s impeachment inquiry, was damning.
The top American diplomat in Ukraine on Tuesday gave impeachment investigators a vivid and impassioned account of how multiple senior administration officials told him that President Trump blocked security aid to Ukraine and refused to meet the country’s leader until he agreed to publicly pledge to investigate Mr. Trump’s political rivals.
In testimony to impeachment investigators delivered in defiance of State Department orders, the diplomat, William B. Taylor Jr., sketched out in remarkable detail a quid pro quo pressure campaign on Ukraine that Mr. Trump and his allies have long denied. He said the president sought to condition the entire United States relationship with Ukraine — including a $391 million aid package whose delay put Ukrainian lives in danger — on a promise that the country would publicly investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his family, along with other Democrats, in an effort to incriminate his adversaries.
His account implicated Mr. Trump personally in the effort, citing multiple sources inside the government. Those include a budget official who said during a secure National Security Council conference call in July that she had been instructed not to approve the security assistance for Ukraine, and that, Mr. Taylor said, “the directive had come from the president.”
Members of Congress acknowledged the gravity of the testimony.
Donald Trump treated American taxpayers’ money as if it was his own cash he could use to pressure foreign nations to do his personal bidding.
The analogy by Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the E.U., is nonsensical. Ukraine owed Trump nothing. Congress allocated aid, and it wasn’t contingent on doing personal, political favors for Trump. Taylor is describing quid pro quo to a tee.
The corruption laid out by Taylor is utterly devastating to Trump and everyone in involved in facilitating it and trying to cover it up.
Taylor’s testimony was thorough and covered a number of interactions with various White House and Ukrainian officials, according to reports on his remarks. The administration’s effort was not a small one, he said, and Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani seemed committed to something hard to describe as anything other than quid pro quo. The picture he painted was clear: Trump had used his office to try to help himself win reelection.
These aren’t merely impeachable offenses, but could and should be crimes that people are charged with in courts of law.
1,006 days in, 456 to go
Follow us on Twitter at @TrumpTimer
