Pretty thorough and fair canvassing of the Minority Report out of the House Intelligence Committee:
https://www.justsecurity.org/67658/seve ... peachment/
Here's an excerpt:
"Here is a list of the seven most damaging falsehoods included in the minority report:
1. “Although the security assistance was paused in July, it is not unusual for U.S. foreign assistance to become delayed.” (Minority at 32)
The minority report dismisses the hold on the security assistance to Ukraine as a routine quirk in the way government operates – “not unusual,” and nothing more than “a bureaucratic issue that would be resolved.” (Minority at 32)
This is a lie. The hold was not routine – nothing like it had ever happened before. (e.g., Cooper at 98; Sandy at 88) The hold was not bureaucratic – it was ordered directly by President Trump himself. (e.g., Hale at 180) And the hold was not due to any sort of interagency conflict – because “the unanimous view of all the agencies [involved in Ukraine and apportionment policy] was that the hold should be lifted and the aid should flow to Ukraine.” (Williams at 115)
In fact, witness testimony showed that, in the entirety of the U.S. government, there is exactly one person who is known to have been in favor of the hold on security assistance to Ukraine. And that is President Trump himself. Witnesses unanimously testified that the agencies were given no explanation for the hold (see Part II), or for the eventual decision to restore the aid.
What’s perhaps most devastating to the Minority’s argument is that the White House actually exceeded the deadline for all of the security assistance to be spent—despite the Pentagon’s warning this would occur (Cooper). It took a new act of Congress to restore the full aid, which occurred in September.
As multiple witnesses testified before the HPSCI, “[T]he provision of such assistance [to Ukraine] was uniformly supported at State, Defense, the National Security Council, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the expert community in Washington.” (Volker Depo at 20).[1] This universal support is due to the unanimous recognition that the assistance to Ukraine is critical to U.S. foreign policy and national security interests, and should be continued. (See, e.g., Kent at 319-320; Holmes at 154; Hale at 177; Cooper at 15-16)
As a result, when the hold was first announced to the broader interagency process during a July 18th meeting, it was met with “unanimous” opposition from the agencies in attendance. (Morrison at 264) The reaction from everyone was “[t]hat the aid is essential to Ukraine’s security, the U.S. relationship with Ukraine, and it should be released at the earliest opportunity.” (Morrison at 162) In the weeks following the announcement of the hold, multiple interagency meetings were held at all levels to discuss what it would take for President Trump to change his mind. Ambassador Hale described how, in an interagency meeting convened on July 26th to discuss the hold, the Deputy National Security Adviser “asked each agency, starting with me, as the State’s senior cabinet agency what our view was on this matter, and I advocated strongly for resuming the assistance, as did every other agency represented there with the exception of one, which was the OMB,” who “said that they had guidance from the President and from Acting Chief of Staff Mulvaney to freeze the assistance.” (Hale at 81) Even OMB did not offer support for the hold itself – instead, OMB “wasn’t expressing its policy views, [ ] they were relaying the President’s decision to withhold security assistance for Ukraine.” (Sandy at 99-100) But as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Cooper testified, OMB’s insertion of itself into this part of the process was itself a strange and remarkable occurrence: “I had never heard of OMB injecting itself into a purely policy discussion or decision-making process. What struck me about it especially is, first, that that position was in contrast to all of the traditional foreign policy-making agencies long held and long expressed views. And, secondly, that the objection or concerns expressed were not related to the money, the budget part of OMB, but rather to the policy part of the decision.” (Cooper at 9)
Efforts to reverse President Trump’s decision to freeze the security assistance were extensive, as were efforts to minimize the hold’s damaging effects. The Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and National Security Advisor were all personally involved in the campaign, and had series of meetings with Trump to try and convince him to reverse course, without success. (Taylor at 213) Both Secretary of State Pompeo and NSA Bolton had one-on-one meetings with President Trump in a failed effort to convince him to unfreeze the assistance. (Morrison at 172-173) At one point in mid-August, Ambassador Bolton even ordered that a draft Presidential Decision Memorandum be prepared, ordering the release of the aid. (Morrison at 166) Bolton’s plan was to arrange for a meeting in which the heads of the relevant executive agencies would all meet with President Trump in private, “to tell the President they endorsed the swift release and disbursement of the funding.” (Morrison at 166, 265) The hope was that in the face of the principals’ unanimous opposition to the hold, Trump might momentarily relent, at which point Bolton would already have the Presidential Decision Memorandum on hand for Trump to immediately sign and memorialize the release. (Morrison at 265)
The overwhelming consensus of Trump’s own cabinet officials was that the decision to halt the security assistance was dangerous, destructive, and indefensible. The minority report dismisses their concerns as nothing more than the discomfort of “unelected bureaucrats within the foreign policy and national security apparatus who fundamentally disagreed with President Trump’s style, world view, and decisions.” (Minority of 110)
The minority report takes the position that the hold was a sound policy decision, and never explicitly acknowledges the negative policy consequences. However, the minority report does suggest that, even if the hold was actually not a good idea, it still didn’t rise to the level of being a problem. At worse, it was no more than a minor hiccup that could be easily dealt with by government officials. In support of this point, the minority report argues that U.S. officials had “confidently predicted” the aid would eventually be release, and so was never a cause for concern. (Minority at 32)
This claim is without support. Although Ambassador Volker did testify, as the report notes, that “looking back” he thought the hold was “not significant” and that he was “confident we were going to get it fixed internally,” what the minority report does not include is why Volker had been so confident it would be fixed. (Volker at 80) As Volker explained, “In this case, here you had an instance where everyone that I spoke with in the policy side of the administration, [ ] Pentagon, military, civilian, State Department, National Security Council, they all thought this is really important to provide this assistance. And so, in that circumstance, for there to be a hold placed struck me as unusual. … And I just didn’t believe that this hold would ever be sustained because the policy community in the administration was determined to see it go forward.” (Volker at 79) (emphasis added) Similar testimony was given by Ambassador Hale, who stated that he “had confidence that the argument in favor of this assistance was so strong that, in the end, it would prevail and we would be able to resume the assistance” (Hale at 186), and also by FSO Croft, who “believed that [the hold would be released] because of both bipartisan support in Congress and the questionable sort of legality of OMB putting on an informal hold.” (Croft at 85)
In other words, to the extent some witnesses felt confident that this issue would ultimately be resolved, it was only because of their belief that the hold on the security assistance was so irrational, legally dubious, and bereft of any agency or Congressional support that it seemed impossible that President Trump’s decision would not, eventually, be reversed.
2. “The President’s initial hesitation [ ] to provide U.S. taxpayer-funded security assistance to Ukraine without thoughtful review is entirely prudent.” (Minority at ii)
The hold on the security assistance to Ukraine could have been neither “thoughtful” nor “prudent,” as the minority report alleges, because it was devoid of any policy purpose whatsoever. As the witnesses unanimously testified, in announcing the hold, President Trump made no attempt to explain what policy purpose it was intended to serve:
“The [OMB] official said that the order had come from the President and had been conveyed to OMB by Mr. Mulvaney without further explanation. … NSC counterparts affirmed that there had been no change in our Ukraine policy, but could not determine the cause of the hold on how to lift it.” (Holmes at 21)
“OMB did not really explain why they were taking the position, other than they had been directed to do so,” and “all that representative of OMB said was the President has instructed, through Mr. Mulvaney, that [ ] the military aid be suspended.” (Hale at 82, 105)
“OMB never [ ] provide[d] a detailed explanation for the reason behind the hold.” (Williams at 92)
“There was great confusion among the rest of us because we didn’t understand why that had happened.” (Kent at 304)
“I was adamantly [ ] opposed to any suspension of aid, as Ukrainians needed those funds to fight against Russian aggression. I tried diligently to ask why the aid was suspended, but I never received a clear answer; still haven’t to this day.” (Sondland public testimony)
“And I couldn’t tell [the Ukrainians why there was a hold]. I didn’t know and I didn’t tell them, because [ ] there’d been no guidance that I could give them.” (Taylor at 138)
“Nobody ever gave a reason why…. There should have been [an explanation], but there wasn’t.” (Volker at 122)
“Q: Was there any reason provided by the OMB reps on anyone else at the meeting for the hold? A: No.” (Morrison at 162)
The agencies involved “were just wanting to find out [why the freeze had occurred]. And they were in touch with OMB, and they weren’t getting much information apart from the fact there was a freeze.” (Hill at 226)
“The funds were held without explanation.” (Cooper at 45)
“
asically we were trying to get to the bottom of why this hold was in place, why OMB was applying this hold.” (Vindman at 181)
“It wasn’t clear where [the decision] was coming from as we pushed this into the PCC process, which is the best way to come to a decision, and if somebody is blocking this, they need to sort of show their hand.” (Reeker at 167)
At the time the hold was announced, the only known person to have knowledge as to why the hold was being implement was, once again, President Trump himself. Not a single other government official was able to offer an explanation as to why he had done this.
For weeks after the hold was announced, officials in the affected agencies sought an explanation for the hold, because without knowing why President Trump had done this, no one could figure out what needed to be done to change his mind. Efforts to persuade President Trump to reverse course were all failures. At one point, after Ambassador Bolton tried and failed to change President Trump’s mind during a one-on-one meeting to discuss the issue, the only explanation offered was that President Trump “was not yet ready” to release the assistance. (Morrison at 267-268.)
Eventually, in the face of sustained questioning by both Cabinet Secretaries and members of Congress, the Trump administration would come to offer two explanations for why the hold had been placed: (1) that President Trump was concerned about corruption in Ukraine, and (2) that President Trump was concerned about Europe not contributing enough to Ukraine. Neither of these after-the-fact justifications for Trump’s actions find support in the record.
“President Trump was ‘not prepared’ to lift the pause on security assistance to Ukraine, citing Ukrainian corruption” (Minority at 48)
The first explanation for why President Trump had ordered the hold came during a Deputies Committee meeting convened in late July or early August in order to figure out a way to have the hold released. (Morrison at 165) During this meeting, OMB informed the other agencies “that the President was concerned about corruption in Ukraine, and he wanted to make sure that Ukraine was doing enough to manage that corruption.” (Morrison at 165)
Neither President Trump nor the OMB have ever attempted to explain what sort of anticorruption reform measures President Trump was seeking, or what changes would be necessary to convince President Trump that Ukraine was “doing enough.” And at no point has President Trump or the OMB or anyone else offered an explanation for why the anticorruption reform measures that are already part of the obligation process were not sufficient to satisfy President Trump’s concerns.
In May, two months before the hold was announced, the federal government had already certified Ukraine’s compliance with the anticorruption benchmarks established and monitored by an interagency process. That process was complete. Both the Department of Defense and the Department of State had signed off on a certification that “Ukraine had met all the necessary anticorruption requirements as well as other benchmarks [ ] under U.S. law in order to obtain” the security assistance. (Cooper at 32)In the end, the security assistance was released without any attempts to monitor whether Ukraine was meeting additional benchmarks or meeting any newly imposed anticorruption requirements. The certifications had already all been completed, and the Department of Defense “did not conduct any sort of review [ ] about whether Ukraine was making any sort of progress with regard to its anticorruption efforts in July or August or beginning of September.” (Cooper at 92-93)
Finally, the idea that President Trump has some overriding concern with corruption in foreign states in unsupported by anything from his nearly three years in office. The minority report’s attempt to cast Trump’s motivations as the result of a “deep-seated and genuine concern about corruption in Ukraine” (Minority at 79) is contradicted by his failure to ever before demonstrate a concern with “corruption” before scheduling White House interviews or abiding by laws enacted by Congress requiring the provision of security assistance to foreign states. The word “corruption” never even appeared in either of President Trump’s calls with President Zelensky, despite the fact his advisors encouraged him to raise the issue in his communications with the Ukrainian president, and handing him talking points reminding him to raise the issue.
“President Trump was ‘not prepared’ to lift the pause on security assistance to Ukraine, citing … frustration that Europe did not share more of the burden.” (Minority at 48)
In late August, the Trump administration began to offer a second explanation for why a hold had been placed on the security assistance: that President Trump “wanted Europe to do more.” (Sondland at 105) This explanation seems to have been first offered by President Trump during a phone call on August 31st with Senator Johnson, who had called Trump to ask for him to release the hold. Additionally, in early September, OMB sent out “an email that attributed the hold to the President’s concern about other countries not contributing more to Ukraine.” (Sandy at 42)
As FSO Holmes testified, when the State Department heard that this might be President Trump’s concern, the staff immediately began trying to address it.
“After the hold was placed on the security assistance, many people I think were scrambling to try to understand why. I believe it was Senator Johnson who had said that the President was concerned about burden sharing, perhaps others as well, and so in trying to interpret why this might have happened, we were looking into the facts of what the Europeans have provided and what we have provided. It’s very illuminating, what we learned.” (Holmes public testimony)
As Holmes explained:
“The United States has provided combined civilian and military assistance to Ukraine since 2014 of about $3 billion, plus [ ] three $1 billion loan guarantees. [T]hose get paid back largely. So just over $3 billion. The Europeans, at the level of the European Union plus the member states combined since 2014, my understanding, have provided a combined $12 billion to Ukraine.” (Holmes public testimony)
Despite President Trump’s professed concerns with “burden sharing,” the data showed that Europe already provided substantially more monetary support to Ukraine than the United States did.[2] And, ultimately, the hold was released without any increase to the assistance provided by Europe to Ukraine.
The minority report does not identify any policy results achieved by President Trump’s decision to hold the security assistance to Ukraine, nor does it attempt to explain how the hold could have had a positive effect on either anticorruption reform or European assistance to Ukraine. There is also no record of President Trump raising the concerns with European states in the interim period, or informing them that the U.S. assistance to Ukraine would be suspended to encourage them to spend more."
