Volker Not A Good Guy After All Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

Volker Not A Good Guy After All

Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 20min

We have another rush of news tonight. President Trump allegedly raised Biden and Warren in a call with Chinese President Xi in June. Chinese government officials have reportedly been reaching out to Trump associates today to get clarification on whether the President is serious about wanting the Chinese to investigate Joe Biden. (Thumbs ups seem to have been the response.) Critically, though not terribly surprisingly, the Journal is now reporting that President Trump ordered the firing of Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch because Rudy Giuliani told him that she was an obstacle to plans to force the government of Ukraine to intervene in the 2020 election. But the biggest news, or at least the most surprising, is about Kurt Volker, the special envoy for Ukraine who resigned last week and testified today in a closed door session on Capitol Hill.

The versions of events I had heard suggested that Volker wasn’t a prime actor in any of this, more trying to help the US and Ukraine navigate the shenanigans of Rudy Giuliani, who of course has and had the ear of the President. For instance, we know that Volker helped arrange a meeting in Madrid between Giuliani and Andriy Yermak, a top aide to Zelensky. But what I had heard is that the Zelensky team got spooked after Giuliani appeared to turn against them a few months ago and told reporters they were anti-Trump. The Ukrainians asked Volker, the US envoy, to put them in touch with Giuliani so they could meet and smooth the waters. That wouldn’t be great for Volker. But one could certainly argue it was making the best of a bad situation not of his creation. At least that is what I’d understood.

New information from the Times presents a much darker picture.

The Times reports that in the “weeks after” the July 25th phone call between Trump and Zelensky, Kurt Volker and Gordon Sondland (the Ambassador to NATO discussed in this postthis afternoon) drafted a statement which President Zelensky was supposed to release committing his government to investigating Burisma Holdings, the gas company on whose board Hunter Biden sat, and collusion between Ukraine and the Democratic party in 2016. Both an unnamed top aide to Zelensky and Rudy Giuliani were aware of the statement being written for Zelensky, though they apparently did not directly participate in writing it. The Times is unclear on whether the statement was ever delivered to Zelensky. Regardless, he never released it.

The last two grafs of the piece contain what amounts to Volker’s and Sondland apologia for the memo.

The drafting of the statement, which came in the weeks after the July 25 phone call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky, was an effort to pacify Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani and normalize relations between the two countries as Ukraine faced continuing conflict with Russia. Mr. Sondland and Mr. Volker believed that Mr. Giuliani was “poisoning” Mr. Trump’s mind about Ukraine and that eliciting a public commitment from Mr. Zelensky to pursue the investigations would induce Mr. Trump to more fully support the new Ukrainian government, according to the people familiar with it.

Mr. Giuliani said he was aware of the statement but that it was not written at his behest. He said the statement would include a commitment to investigations of Burisma and the circumstances around the 2016 election.

The idea here is that this would end Ukraine’s practice of not following through on verbal commitments and secure Trump’s support for Ukraine. That seems sort of plausible as far as it goes. But that’s only another way of saying they’d solve the problem by finalizing and effectuating Trump’s gross abuse of power. It’s hardly a justification.

It should also be noted that the President of Ukraine publicly announcing his intent to investigate Burisma and 2016 collusion by Ukraine on behalf of the Clinton campaign would probably have been all the Trump campaign and the White House really ever wanted. This has never been about investigations. It’s about validating conspiracy theories for consumption in US domestic politics. That would have been quite a lot of validating.

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