Trump implicates Vice President Pence in a conspiracy to extort Ukraine (Updated)

The New York Times and the Washington Post both report that Trump ordered hold on military aid days before calling Ukrainian president, officials say:

President Trump told his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to hold back almost $400 million in military aid for Ukraine at least a week before a phone call in which Trump is said to have pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate the son of former vice president Joe Biden, according to three senior administration officials.

Officials at the Office of Management and Budget relayed Trump’s order to the State Department and the Pentagon during an interagency meeting in mid-July, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. They explained that the president had “concerns” and wanted to analyze whether the money needed to be spent.

Administration officials were instructed to tell lawmakers that the delays were part of an “interagency process” but to give them no additional information — a pattern that continued for nearly two months, until the White House released the funds on the night of Sept. 11.

Trump’s order to withhold aid to Ukraine a week before his July 25 call with Volodymyr Zelensky is likely to raise questions about the motivation for his decision and fuel suspicions on Capitol Hill that Trump sought to leverage congressionally approved aid to damage a political rival.

During a brief press conference at the United Nations with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Trump was asked why he cut off aid to Ukraine. ‘I told it to Mike — two Mikes’: Trump launches into indecipherable rant when asked about Ukraine:

“Why is it always the United States that’s paying? I made that loud and clear. I told that to Mick Mulvaney, I told to a lot of people,” the president continued. “I told it to a lot of different people. I told it to Mike, two Mikes. I it told to Steve. I keep asking Wilbur Ross.”

Trump ranted on: “I said, hold it up, let’s get other people to pay, and then everybody called me, ‘Oh please, can we pay?’ — and they said — and there was never any quid pro quo, the letter was beautiful, it was a perfect letter, unlike Biden.”

Trump just implicated in a conspiracy to extort Ukraine to manufacture “dirt” on Joe Biden’s son in a quid pro quo to receive military security aid his chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and the “two Mikes,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo expands on Trump implicating Vice President Mike Pence. Pence Gave Ukraine the Message Too:

I mentioned below that the key thing about this latest and most egregious Trump scandal is that his senior team was clearly in on it, aware of it, participated in it. One key person here is Vice President Mike Pence. Earlier this month Pence flew to Poland to fill in for President Trump in meetings with European leaders on the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II. On September 1st, he met in Warsaw with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The next day he held a press conference with President Duda of Poland at which he was specifically asked whether he had pressed Zelensky to manufacture damaging information about Joe Biden and whether military aid was being held up until he did.

Pence started by saying he hadn’t and then proceeded to give an answer that made it pretty clear that he had, even if he had not mentioned the former Vice President by name. It caught the ear’s of everyone who was already following this story. It’s even more clear with what we learned last week.

Here’s the text of the question and answer from the official White House transcript, with my emphasis added.

Q: Thank you very much, Mr. Vice President. I wanted to ask you about your meeting yesterday with the Ukrainian President and for an update on Ukrainian security aid money.

Specifically, number one, did you discuss Joe Biden at all during that meeting yesterday with the Ukrainian President? And number two, can you assure Ukraine that the hold-up of that money has absolutely nothing to do with efforts, including by Rudy Giuliani, to try to dig up dirt on the Biden family?

VICE PRESIDENT PENCE: Well, on the first question, the answer is no. But we — with President Zelensky yesterday, we discussed — we discussed America’s support for Ukraine and the upcoming decision the President will make on the latest tranche of financial support in great detail.

The President asked me to meet with President Zelensky and to talk about the progress that he’s making on a broad range of areas. And we did that.

We, as I said yesterday, especially since Russian aggression — the illegal occupation of Crimea and Russian aggression in Eastern Ukraine — the United States has stood strong with Ukraine and we will continue to stand strong with Ukraine for its sovereignty and territorial integrity.

But as President Trump had me make clear, we have great concerns about issues of corruption. And, fortunately, President Zelensky was elected decisively on an anti-corruption message. And he and I discussed yesterday that as he’s assembled his cabinet, and as his parliament has convened, that even in the early days, he informed me that there have been more than 250 bills filed for — that address the issue of public corruption and really restoring integrity to the public process.

I mean, to invest additional taxpayer in Ukraine, the President wants to be assured that those resources are truly making their way to the kind of investments that will contribute to security and stability in Ukraine. And that’s an expectation the American people have and the President has expressed very clearly.

We also talked in some detail about what other European nations are doing for Ukraine. The simple fact is that the United States has carried the load on most of the security investments in Ukraine. And we have been proud to do that, but we believe it’s time for our European partners to step forward and make additional investments to stand with the people of Ukraine as they assert their territorial integrity and sovereignty.

President Zelensky and I talked in great detail about ongoing discussions about resolving the ongoing violence and occupation of Ukraine. And those were the issues that we covered.

But I assured him that the people of the United States stand with Ukraine for their sovereignty and territorial integrity. But I called on him to work with us to engage our European partners to participate at a greater level in Ukraine, and also told him that I would carry back to President Trump the progress that he and his administration in Ukraine are making on dealing with corruption in their country.

Corruption is a longstanding issue in Ukraine. Rooting out that corruption has been a central focus of US policy in the country for decades. That is why the United States and the European Union were so focused on removing that prosecutor back in 2015. But in the context of what we know was happening and especially the call we know took place a month earlier, these repeated references to progress on corruption and holding up military aid until Zelensky acted could scarcely be more clear.

In the earlier post Marshall references, The Whole Team is In on It (excerpt), he writes:

The point is that something this egregious happened. It directly involved in the President in explicit demands to a foreign leader. Some or all of the President’s top advisors and certainly his top foreign policy team (National Security Advisor, Secretary of State, et al.) knew this was happening. And they were apparently okay with it. At a minimum, they allowed it to happen and participated in it and made no attempt to stop it. There is only a story because some unknown whistleblower decided to blow the whistle. Just as importantly, a Trump appointee, Inspector General Michael Atkinson, decided to force the matter by informing Congress of the existence of the whistleblower complaint even though administration officials prevented him from disclosing its substance.

* * *

This new episode suggests that the President can personally commit the most egregious wrongdoing, clearly impeachable offenses, in full view of his most senior advisors, and we hear nothing about it. We only know about this because of this whistleblower, who is him or herself now being attacked publicly as a Deep State partisan. Could Trump have made financial demands of Gulf monarchies to help his private businesses? Could he have asked Vladimir Putin for election assistance in 2020? Given that the demand on Ukraine was considered acceptable and is now being affirmatively defended, there’s no reason to think that these actions wouldn’t have been deemed acceptable and within the President’s purview as well.

Why would a demand for election assistance from Ukraine be acceptable and ones of Russia or Saudi Arabia wouldn’t? Why would demands for assistance to his personal businesses be worse than ones for election interference? (To me, they’d be less problematic. The President profiting personally from the presidency is wrong but it’s less damaging to the country than preventing a free and fair election.) Clearly I can hypothesize any kind of wrongdoing and say that it’s now possible and that his team would go along with it. But that’s the point: whatever in extremis guard rails we may have been thinking existed, at least for what the President does in full view of the chiefs officers of state, clearly don’t exist.

We know the President wants to do all manner of bad acts and sees nothing wrong with them. This new development suggests he probably has, that his top advisors know about those bad acts and decided it was okay.

Trump’s cabinet members are co-conspirators or at a minimum accessories after the fact to Trump’s crimes. Just as no one in the Trump campaign notified the FBI of 272 contacts between Trump’s team and Russia-linked operatives in the 2016 campaign, no one in the Trump White House did their patriotic duty to their country to report that Trump was extorting Ukraine to manufacture “dirt” on Joe Biden’s son to interfere in the 2020 election. It took a “whistleblower” complaint to the inspector general to bring his latest crime to light.

These individuals are not private citizens, they are officers of the executive branch who owe a legal duty, and who can be held accountable by Congress for their role in this conspiracy. They are all equally legally culpable.

UPDATE: Trump says a transcript of his call with the Ukrainian president will be released tomorrow: President Trump just tweeted that he has “authorized the release tomorrow of the complete, fully declassified and unredacted transcript of my phone conversation with President Zelensky of Ukraine.”

Trump will argue that he never made an explicit quid pro quo demand to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He will claim that it is innocuous and benign. Pro tip: a quid pro quo can be implied from surrounding circumstances and understandings (“Nice little place you got here, it’d be a shame if anything happened to it.”). Plenty of felons have been convicted of bribery and extortion without an explicit quid pro quo demand.

More importantly, the media should not lose sight of the forest for the tree of the July 25 phone call. It is the whistleblower complaint that the Trump administration is withholding that is important. The whistleblower complaint alleged a series of events – not one phone call – that the inspector general found “credible and urgent.” Whistleblower Filed Complaint Over Multiple Trump Actions:

A complaint forwarded to the inspector general of America’s top spy agencies that involved President Donald Trump concerned more alleged instances of misconduct than previously thought, according to a report from The New York Times.

The Times reported Thursday that Atkinson told lawmakers in a private briefing Thursday that the whistleblower’s concerns involve multiple instances rather than a single promise.

On Thursday afternoon, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, shared with reporters two letters Atkinson sent to the committee expressing concern about the whistleblower’s allegations and claiming they fall within the jurisdiction of the director of national intelligence.

One of the letters, sent to the Intelligence Committee on Sept. 17, said the whistleblower’s disclosure of potential misconduct “not only falls within the DNI’s jurisdiction, but relates to one of the most significant and important of the DNI’s responsibilities to the American people.”

So don’t fall for Trump’s “banana in the tailpipe.” It’s the whistleblower who is critical, not the phone call.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff announced Tuesday that his committee could have testimony from the whistleblower at the center of the latest allegations against President Trump as soon as this week.Intelligence Chairman Schiff: Whistleblower looking to testify: