New Report Details Internal Trump Admin Scrambling Over Push to Halt Ukraine Aid: ‘I Am Speechless’

Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

A new report from the New York Times this afternoon gives another behind-the-scenes look at the internal scrambling within the Trump White House and the Pentagon in the 84 days between President Donald Trump first asking about Ukraine aid and said aid being released.

The Times reviews a number of details laid out by witnesses in testimony in the impeachment inquiry, and provides some new details on how the president’s push “sent shock waves” and “created deep rifts within the senior ranks of his administration”:

In many ways, the havoc Mr. Giuliani and others Trump loyalists set off in the State Department by pursuing the investigations was matched by conflicts and confusion in the White House and Pentagon stemming from Mr. Trump’s order to withhold the aid.

Opposition to the order from his top national security advisers was more intense than previously known. In late August, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper joined Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and John R. Bolton, the national security adviser at the time, for a previously undisclosed Oval Office meeting with the president where they tried but failed to convince him that releasing the aid was in interests of the United States.

Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney reportedly emailed an aide in June asking, “Did we ever find out about the money for Ukraine and whether we can hold it back?”

That aide, Robert Blair, said very likely Congress would “become unghined” if they did it. Per the Times, “And, he wrote, it might further fuel the narrative that Mr. Trump was pro-Russia.”

Mulvaney also apparently “stepped out of the room whenever Mr. Trump would talk with Mr. Giuliani to preserve Mr. Trump’s attorney-client privilege.”

The president has since been impeached, and Democrats have been pushing for Mulvaney and others to testify in the Senate trial.

The Times also details an email budget office official Michael Duffey sent on September 10th, the day before the hold was lifted, reportedly arguing DOD “had the authority to do more to ensure that the aid could be released to Ukraine by the congressionally mandated deadline of the end of that month, suggesting that responsibility for any failure should not rest with the White House.”

The Pentagon official he emailed reportedly responded, “You can’t be serious. I am speechless.”

You can read the full report here.