...or as Fritz would say more evidence of no proof Trump is guilty.
A senior White House official plans to tell House impeachment investigators on Tuesday that he believed President Donald Trump undermined U.S. national security when he listened in on Trump’s appeal to Ukraine’s president to investigate his political rivals, according to a copy of his opening statement obtained by POLITICO.
“I did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen, and I was worried about the implications for the U.S. government’s support of Ukraine,” Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council official overseeing Ukraine policy, plans to tell lawmakers, referring to Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden.
“I realized that if Ukraine pursued an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma, it would likely be interpreted as a partisan play which would undoubtedly result in Ukraine losing the bipartisan support it has thus far maintained,” Vindman plans to say. (Burisma is a Ukrainian energy company of which Biden’s son Hunter was previously a board member.)
“This would all undermine U.S. national security,” Vindman adds. “Following the call, I again reported my concerns to NSC’s lead counsel.”
Already, a handful of State Department officials and diplomats have described alarm at Trump’s handling of Ukraine and worried that he had withheld military aid and a White House visit from Zelensky in order to pressure him to launch the Biden probe.
Vindman plans to echo those concerns on Tuesday — in particular, efforts by “outside influencers” to promote “a false narrative of Ukraine inconsistent with the consensus views of the interagency.”
“This narrative was harmful to U.S. government policy,” Vindman writes in his opening statement. “While my interagency colleagues and I were becoming increasingly optimistic on Ukraine’s prospects, this alternative narrative undermined U.S. government efforts to expand cooperation with Ukraine.”
Vindman plans to testify that he first reported his Ukraine-related concerns to the NSC’s lead lawyer in early July, after a meeting between Ukraine’s top national security official and cadre of senior Trump administration officials, including Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Ambassadors Kurt Volker and Gordon Sondland.
Vindman says that when the Ukrainians raised the prospect of a Trump-Zelensky meeting — a crucial step for Ukraine as its newly elected leader sought to showcase a united front against Russia — Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, interjected “to speak about Ukraine delivering specific investigations in order to secure the meeting.” At that moment, Vindman says, then-national security adviser John Bolton “cut the meeting short.”
At a subsequent debriefing, Vindman says, Sondland “emphasized the importance that Ukraine deliver the investigations into the 2016 election, the Bidens, and Burisma.” Vindman says he confronted Sondland and called his statements “inappropriate,” and said the NSC would not become involved in the push. Those concerns, he said, were echoed by Fiona Hill, who at the time served as the NSC’s top Russia policy official.
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