Nope. That Doesn’t Sound Good Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

Nope. That Doesn’t Sound Good

Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 4h

There’s some new factual information in a piecethat just ran on the Fox News website. I know, I know. But these are real new facts. What’s interesting is that it is not entirely clear to me whether whoever leaked the encrypted text messages thought they were exonerating.

In any case, here we go …

You can read the whole piece here. But the portion I’m excerpting comes in the midst of a report on Ambassador Kurt Volker’s closed door testimony today on Capitol Hill. Volker was the special envoy for Ukraine, sort of the roving troubleshooter for the larger Ukraine crisis/issue, not the Ambassador to the country.

Meanwhile, new encrypted text messages obtained by Fox News show Volker and other U.S. officials battling internally last month over whether Trump was engaged in a “quid pro quo” with Ukraine as he pressed for the country to look into the Biden family, while holding back U.S. aid. The texts with Volker, U.S. Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland and Chargé d’Affaires of the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine Bill Taylor indicate that the nature of a potential arrangement between the U.S. and Ukraine was a matter of dispute.

“As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” Taylor said in a text exchange.

Sondland responded by saying that was not what was happening. “Bill, I believe you are incorrect about President Trump’s intentions. The President has been crystal clear: no quid pro quo’s of any kind. The President is trying to evaluate whether Ukraine is truly going to adopt the transparency and reforms that President Zelensky promised during his campaign.”

Both men then agreed to cease discussing the matter over text, noting that phone calls with the appropriate officials would be preferable.

As I interpret the piece, the point of these text messages is supposed to be that even among themselves it wasn’t clear that Trump was operating from bad motives. There was a difference of opinion even amongst these central players. If that is the thrust, that is, let’s say, a very generous thrust. (As I note below in a Late Update, this thrust seems to be Fox’s, not the source’s, based on a subsequent report from ABC News.)

Taylor is a career foreign service officer. He is actually a former full Ambassador to Ukraine. Now he’s Chargé d’Affaires. Sondland is a politically-wired hotel and private equity magnate who President Trump made Ambassador to the EU. We should be clear: appointing political power players and donors to ambassadorships is an established part of the US political system, for better or worse. It did not start with Trump. But Sondland is a political guy and at least to a significant extent a Trump guy. (He was in fact an early Trump supporterduring the 2016 campaign.) So his comments and Taylor’s come with very different contexts.

Taylor appeared to treat it as a given that the White House was holding up military aide to Ukraine to force a quid pro quo of military in exchange for 2020 campaign assistance. This isn’t a transcript. It’s text messages. So the words are as clear and complete to us as they would have been to the people on the text chain. We don’t need to wonder about intonation and nuance. It’s just text. What it certainly sounds like is Taylor says this just isn’t right. Sondland replies with a sort of starchy recitation that he’s wrong, that everyone agrees there’s no quid pro quo and that President Trump is just focused on Ukraine’s problem with endemic corruption. Quite notably, he then appears to say, hey, let’s not discuss this any more on text.

A fair reading of this exchange – and we clearly don’t have the whole exchange – is that everyone knew what was happening but there was some agreement or desire, at least among the President’s supporters not to say out loud what everyone knew.

Or at least, not to say it in texts which are retained for posterity.

Late Update: ABCNews has now run their own version of the story. And it answers a few of the questions I posed above. According to ABC, Volker shared the text messages as part of his closed door testimony. As for not texting anymore, after the disagreement about a quid pro quo, Sondland writes: “I suggest we stop the back and forth by text.” So my revised take on this would be that Volker knew what he was doing when he shared this information and Fox put a generous gloss on it. Meanwhile, the let’s not text about this anymore coda speaks for itself.

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