At least four national security officials raised alarms about Ukraine policy before and after Trump call with Ukrainian president
(WaPo)
At least four national security officials were so alarmed by the Trump administration’s attempts to pressure Ukraine for political purposes that they raised concerns with a White House lawyer both before and immediately after President Trump’s July 25 call with that country’s president, according to U.S. officials and other people familiar with the matter.
The nature and timing of the previously undisclosed discussions with National Security Council legal adviser John Eisenberg indicate that officials were delivering warnings through official White House channels earlier than previously understood — including before the call that precipitated a whistleblower complaint and the impeachment inquiry of the president.
At the time, the officials were unnerved by the removal in May of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, by subsequent efforts by Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to promote Ukraine-related conspiracies, as well as by signals in meetings at the White House that Trump wanted the new government in Kiev to deliver material that might be politically damaging to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Those concerns soared in the call’s aftermath, officials said. Within minutes, senior officials including national security adviser John Bolton were being pinged by subordinates about problems with what the president had said to his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky. Bolton and others scrambled to obtain a rough transcript that was already being “locked down” on a highly classified computer network.
“When people were listening to this in real time, there were significant concerns about what was going on — alarm bells were kind of ringing,”
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...new details about the sequence inside the White House suggest that concerns about the call and events leading up to it were profound even among Trump’s top advisers, including Bolton and then-acting deputy national security adviser Charles Kupperman.
Officials said that within hours of the 9 a.m. conversation, a rough transcript compiled by aides had been moved from a widely shared White House computer network to one normally reserved for highly classified intelligence operations...At the same time, officials were seeking ways to report what they had witnessed, an undertaking complicated by the lack of a White House equivalent to the inspector general positions found at other agencies.
As a result, one official who had listened on the call went “immediately” to Eisenberg. By the end of the next day, at least two others who had either heard the call or seen the rough transcript had also done so...
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Those involved in sounding alarms “were not a swamp, not a deep state,” said a former senior official. Rather, they were White House officials “who got concerned about this because this is not the way they want to see the government run.”
Officials traced the origins of their initial concerns about Trump and Ukraine to the abrupt and unexplained removal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, after she became the target of a right-wing smear campaign that accused her — with no apparent evidence — of undermining Trump and his policies.
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Concerns about the administration’s interactions with Ukraine ticked up further when the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, asserted that he had been put in charge of relations with Kiev by the president. Sondland, who had operated a hotel company, got the Brussels-based ambassadorship after donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.
Sondland’s agenda in Ukraine, which is not part of the European Union, began to clarify during a meeting at the White House in early July with Bolton, then-U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker and a pair of advisers to Ukraine’s new president.
Amid a broader discussion in which White House officials were encouraging Ukraine to continue its work to eliminate corruption in the country’s energy sector, Sondland blurted out that there were also “investigations that were dropped that need to be started up again."
Senior officials understood Sondland’s statement to be a reference to Burisma and Biden. “Bolton went ballistic”...
Those worries were also shared with Bill Taylor, who had been dispatched to Ukraine to serve as acting ambassador...
“As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” he wrote to Sondland.
Sondland backed out of a scheduled appearance before House impeachment investigators this week after being ordered not to participate by the administration.