Year of the Rat
Pompeo’s lousy timing, Ukraine’s pivot east and the tale of the tape vs Bangladesh
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo began his first visit to Kyiv yesterday, and what a time he’s picked. Back home, the Senate is holding an impeachment trial of his boss on charges President Trump abused his powers to squeeze Ukraine for political gain, then obstructed the resulting congressional scrutiny.
The meticulously documented impeachment case rests on the detailed accounts of several of Pompeo’s senior subordinates who defied Trump in testifying about what they knew, and who have unequivocally implicated the secretary as the president’s co-conspirator in the extortion scheme. Despite all the testimony and documentation, Pompeo in Kyiv continued to deny that the administration conditioned military aid and a White House invitation on the announcement of probes legitimizing manufactured claims about Trump’s political opponents.
Pompeo’s visit was already postponed once, with the State Department citing Mideast developments. Perhaps it wasn’t delayed long enough. Just a week ago, Pompeo was shouting at the reporter, “Do you think Americans care about fucking Ukraine,” after refusing to answer questions about undercutting the professional diplomats in Kyiv. He tried to take that back in a brief Q&A with his traveling press pack before flying to the Ukrainian capital. Of course the American people care, Pompeo said.
He was contradicting his own words as well as Trump’s well documented and freely admitted actions. Trump wanted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce probes into Hunter Biden’s seat on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma and the prior government’s purported interference on behalf of Hillary Clinton in 2016. To obtain these illicit favors of dubious value, Trump illegally withheld military aid that had already been appropriated, as well as the White House meeting Zelensky sought.
(In fact, Ukraine’s “interference” on Clinton’s behalf amounted to the entirely warranted criticism by Ukrainian diplomats of statements by candidate Trump defending the Russian seizure of Crimea, as well as a lawmaker’s leak of a document corroborating Paul Manafort’s already indisputable work for Ukraine’s pro-Putin party.)
In other news this week, it emerged that in the same 2018 conversation in which Trump instructed his associates to “get rid of” the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine he also wrote off the country. “How long would they last in a fight with Russia,” Trump asks on the secretly recorded audio, seemingly ignorant of Russia’s hybrid war against Ukraine since 2014, when it annexed Crimea and used military force to carve out two puppet breakaway states in eastern Ukraine.
In a 2019 meeting with Energy Secretary Rick Perry and two senior State Department officials who were trying to persuade him to invite Zelensky to the White House Trump refused, according to their testimony, calling Ukraine “a corrupt country, full of terrible people…[who] tried to take me down.”
So, yeah, this Pompeo visit comes at an awkward juncture. Both sides are trying to keep up appearances, something especially important to Ukraine as it seeks to show a skeptical world that the U.S. remains an ally. Still, the secretary of state is likely not especially popular in Kyiv just now.
No, that’s not Pompeo, of course. Though you can’t deny an eerie resemblance.
Russian Thaw?
It is not to Pompeo’s credit that Ukrainians now understandably view their relationship with the U.S. as fraught with danger, while glimpsing opportunities in Putin’s recent big revamp of his government. Zelensky’s team has let it be known (here via a friendly Western scholar, but elsewhere too) that it views newly promoted Putin troubleshooter Dmitry Kozak as a reliable negotiating partner, in contrast to the supposedly sidelined former curator of the occupied territories in eastern Ukraine and noted chaos fan Vladislav Surkov. Kozak negotiated the Russian end of the recent prisoner exchanges with Zelensky’s government, which controversially sent to Russia five riot policemen accused of killing pro-democracy protesters in 2014, as well as a prisoner of war sought by the Netherlands as a witness to the shootdown of the MH17 passenger jet by Russian forces.
Although Surkov’s departure was subsequently denied by the Kremlin, there’s no doubting Kyiv’s newfound hope that Putin might be ready to wind up the frozen contract in the east on terms that preserve Ukraine as a unitary state. His reward would be sanctions relief and presumably faster economic growth to smooth the end of the aging dictator’s presidential term in 2024.
In contrast, the U.S. has little to offer at the moment besides more anti-tank missiles, and their entirely symbolic value has been almost entirely devalued by Trump’s revealed contempt for a needy ally, especially one reluctant to get involved in his campaign for re-election.
Very Implicated Person
Pompeo met with Zelensky Friday and profaned the memorial to slain pro-democracy protesters with his presence. Those martyrs of the fight against corruption and autocracy were definitely not his people.
I’d rather honor their sacrifice by detailing Pompeo’s involvement in the Ukraine extortion scheme, as revealed to Congress by his own staff.
On Nov. 23, The New York Times reported on newly released State Department documents that “further implicate Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a campaign orchestrated this year by President Trump and his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to pressure Ukraine for political favors.”
The NYT found that “the documents, [congressional] testimony and interviews with Mr. Giuliani paint a portrait of a secretary of state who not only had intimate knowledge of the pressure campaign against Ukraine and the effort to undermine and remove a respected ambassador, but took part in her ouster despite warnings about the campaign from lawmakers and a half-dozen former ambassadors to Ukraine.”
According to the documents, Pompeo spoke twice with Giuliani in March just as Giuliani was starting his smear campaign against U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.
Late that month, Yovanovitch told a senior State Dept. official that she could no longer continue to effectively represent the U.S. unless the department publicly backed her. The official testified he relayed the message to Pompeo, who looked into the claims floated by Giuliani (presumably about Yovanovitch’s undermining of Trump) and found them groundless. But Pompeo rejected the subordinate’s request that he publicly state so.
A month later Yovanovitch was abruptly pulled out of Ukraine and told she’d lost President Trump’s confidence. After a 1 a.m. phone call from the State Department telling her to get on the next plane to Washington for unspecified “security” reasons, she left on the day of Zelensky’s inauguration. Back at the State Department, she was told Pompeo “was no longer able to protect me.”
In her own congressional testimony, Yovanovitch “expressed grave concerns about the degradation of the Foreign Service over the past few years, and the failure of the State Department leadership to push back as foreign and corrupt interests apparently hijacked our Ukraine policy.”
“I remain disappointed that the department’s leadership and others have declined to acknowledge that the attacks against me and others are dangerously wrong,” she continued.
Just a month after dumping Yovanovitch, Pompeo would be telling her emergency replacement, Ambassador William B. Taylor, that “that the policy of strong support for Ukraine would continue and that he would support me in defending that policy,” according to Taylor’s testimony.
Pompeo failed to mention to him that by then the Ukraine policy of the under the control of Giuliani and several U.S. officials working to legitimize false corruption claims meant to aid Trump.
Though he would later have trouble admitting it, Pompeo was the sole cabinet secretary listening in on the infamous July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelensky during which Trump personally asked Zelensky “to do us favor” in announcing the probes Trump and Giuliani had been seeking.
In the same phone call, Trump called Yovanovitch “bad news” and said “she’s going to go through some things.” Pompeo kept quiet about all of it.
On August 22, Pompeo received an email from one of his subordinates negotiating the probes-for-aid arrangement with the Ukrainians, suggesting Zelensky could personally assure Trump his demands would be met. “Yes,” Pompeo quickly responded.
By then, Taylor had realized he was not in control of the U.S. relationship with Ukraine, and that the military aid appropriated by Congress as well as the White House invitation Zelensky sought were being withheld until Ukraine cooperated in smearing the Bidens and the Democratic Party.
The ambassador confided to then-National Security Advisor John Bolton, who counseled him to cable Pompeo with his concerns directly.
“I wrote and transmitted such a cable on August 29, describing the ‘folly’ I saw in withholding military aid to Ukraine at a time when hostilities were still active in the east and when Russia was watching closely to gauge the level of American support for the Ukrainian government,” Taylor later testified. “The Russians, as I said at my deposition, would love to see the humiliation of President Zelenskyy at the hands of the Americans.”
[Mission accomplished! -IG]
Pompeo never responded.
“I told the Secretary that I could not and would not defend such a policy. Although I received no specific response, I heard that soon thereafter, the Secretary carried the cable with him to a meeting at the White House focused on security assistance for Ukraine.”
The same day Trump’s hold on military aid became public, leaving an embarrassed Taylor unable to explain why to a senior Zelensky aide.
As recently as late November, Pompeo was still spreading the thoroughly debunked claim that Ukraine had “interfered” in the 2016 election to aid the Democrats.
Asked again this week about those claims, Pompeo would neither defend nor disown them. “I don’t want to talk about particular individuals. It’s not worth it. It’s a long list in Ukraine of corrupt individuals and a long history there. And President Zelensky has told us he’s committed to it. The actions he’s taken so far demonstrate that and I look forward to having a conversation about that with him as well.”
In November, Ambassador Michael McKinley testified that he asked Pompeo on three separate occasions to publicly defend Yovanovitch, ultimately resigning because Pompeo refused to do so. That contradicted Pompeo’s claims that he’d never been asked to give Yovanovitch a public vote of confidence.
In late November, Wired ran a Pompeo profile documenting the damage the Ukraine scandal did to his reputation and political prospects. “Pompeo’s fingerprints appear to be all over both the initial conspiracy and the Trump administration’s attempts to stonewall congressional investigators,” the story noted. It also foreshadowed the fit Pompeo threw at NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly. “Pompeo seems to particularly bristle under tough questioning from female reporters,” the male author wrote, offering several examples.
But it is Pompeo’s refusal to defend the unfairly maligned Ukraine ambassador or to put a stop to the political extortion scheme Trump and Giuliani hatched that have cost him the most respect from the people who work for him.
“I’ve run out of words to appropriately convey how horrified, dispirited, and disgusted we all are,” an anonymous State Department official told Vox. “We have tens of thousands of people who work for State, most of whom aren’t even Americans, who show more loyalty to the U.S. than that guy. He dishonors us all.”
By the numbers
In honor of Pompeo’s brave recent assertion that “Bangladesh is NOT Ukraine,” I decided to investigate further.
Sources: World Bank, CIA World Factbook, Our World in Data, World Economic Forum
Yup, Pompeo might have been on to something there.