Three Foreign Service officers testified last week in public House impeachment hearings that while they were pursuing American foreign policy objectives in Ukraine — opposing Russian aggression and misinformation, promoting democracy and freedom, and fighting corruption — the Trump administration and Rudy Giuliani were working against them.
It’s an unsettling allegation to have lain before the feet of the American public. The implications of these accusations, if true, are staggering for the future of public trust in the White House.
But, if the accusations are false, either a misunderstanding by these bureaucrats or, as the president has intoned, an orchestrated attack meant to bring down his presidency, it’s not an understatement to say the entire bedrock of the nation will be shaken to its core.
Because to believe that William Taylor, George Kent and Marie Yovanovitch are lying, you must believe that there is such disdain for the president among our intelligence officials and state department officials that they’re participating in a political coup.
That is the very argument that Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee were trying to make last week. “By undermining the president who they are supposed to be serving, the elements of the FBI, the Department of Justice and now the State Department have lost the confidence of millions of Americans who believe that their vote should count for something,” said U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes in his opening remarks defending Trump.
To be clear, the testimony we have heard so far does not prove Trump is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors or bribery – the threshold for removal from office – but the testimony does align precisely with other evidence that Democrats have brought forward in a way that makes the stories these officials are sharing seem extremely credible. If Nunes and Republicans in the House have evidence that supports their theory — that these officials are conspiring against the president — now would be the time to bring that evidence forward.
Democrats, on the other hand, have ample evidence indicating that what Trump was pursuing in Ukraine was not a strong ally against Russia but his own political goals. We know from the not-verbatim transcript of a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky that Trump wanted the president to get in touch with Rudy Giuliani to discuss two things: an investigation into CrowdStrike, a company that played a role in the 2016 investigation into the hacking of Democrat’s emails and an investigation into whether former Vice President Joe Biden “stopped the prosecution” of his son, Hunter Biden, who was on the board of a Ukrainian company suspected of corruption.
We have text messages between senior officials expressing concern over Trump and Giuliani’s pursuit of those investigations, and concern over the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Ukraine had been delayed for an unknown reason. And we have indictments accusing two Russian Americans of using illegal foreign campaign donations to push for the removal of Yovanovitch when she was serving as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine “at least in part, at the request of one or more Ukrainian government officials.” Trump removed Yovanovitch as ambassador in May.
All of this evidence supports last week’s testimony and the accusation that Trump used the power of his office not as a force of good in a volatile region but as a force for self-gain at the expense of important U.S. goals.
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