Trump-Ukraine:
John Bolton 'sounded alarm about Giuliani's actions'
Fiona Hill
testifies that Bolton called Giuliani a ‘hand grenade’
Hill says
Bolton likened lawyer’s operation to a ‘drug deal’
Trump
renews call for whistleblower to be unmasked - as it happened
Tom
McCarthy in New York and Julian Borger in Washington
Tue 15 Oct
2019 04.56 BSTFirst published on Mon 14 Oct 2019 19.13 BST
The former
US national security adviser, John Bolton, was reportedly so alarmed at a
back-channel effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate Donald Trump’s political
rivals that he told a senior aide to report it to White House lawyers.
The
revelation of Bolton’s involvement in the effort to block a shadow foreign
policy aimed at Trump’s political benefit emerged from congressional testimony
given by his former aide, Fiona Hill, the former top Russia expert in the White
House.
Hill, the
British-born former senior director for Europe and Russia on the National
Security Council, spoke to three House committees for 10 hours.
According
to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, Hill described a sharp
exchange on 10 July between Bolton and the US ambassador to the European Union,
Gordon Sondland, about the role played by Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to
persuade the Ukrainian government to open investigations into Democrats,
including former vice president Joe Biden.
Hill said
Bolton instructed her to tell the National Security Council’s attorney that
Giuliani was acting in concert with White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney,
in a rogue operation with legal implications.
“I am not
part of whatever drug deal Rudy and Mulvaney are cooking up,” Bolton instructed
Hill to tell the NSC lawyer, according to her testimony.
She said
that Bolton had told her on an earlier occasion: “Giuliani’s a hand grenade
who’s going to blow everybody up.”
Hill also
testified on Monday morning before three congressional committees about Trump’s
decision, taken despite strenuous objections from aides including herself, to
recall the US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch.
The
Washington Post reported that she had confronted Sondland over the Giuliani’s
activities, which were not coordinated with officials charged with carrying out
US foreign policy. Sondland is due to give his version of events on Thursday.
According
to Fox News, Hill told congressional investigators that she and other officials
went to the national security council lawyer with their concerns that the White
House was seeking to prompt Ukraine to open investigations into Trump’s rivals.
Hill’s
lawyer had earlier rejected arguments from the president’s attorneys that her
testimony on Ukraine was covered by executive privilege.
Former
White House adviser on Russia Fiona Hill leaves Capitol Hill after testifying
before congressional lawmakers.
In a letter
to the White House, the lawyer, Lee Wolosky, said much of the material was
already in the public domain and that “deliberative process privilege
“disappears altogether when there is any reason to believe government
misconduct occurred.”
The week
could deteriorate rapidly for Trump, whose effort to rally defenders in his own
party has been damaged by concerns about a growing disaster in northern Syria,
following Trump’s abrupt pullback there, and a sense that major secrets
attached to the Ukraine scandal are yet to come out.
Sondland’s
testimony on Thursday comes after a previous attempt by the
hotelier-turned-diplomat to testify was blocked by the state department, as
part of a blanket White House defiance of the impeachment inquiry.
Congress is
also due this week to receive relevant documents from an array of the most
powerful figures in the administration, including the vice-president, the
defense secretary and the White House chief of staff.
Out of the
flow of new information, congressional investigators hope to fill in the
picture of the Trump administration’s dealings in Ukraine, and answer the
question of whether Trump’s conduct rises to the “high crimes and misdemeanors”
cited in the constitution as grounds for impeachment.
The
impeachment inquiry was sparked by a whistleblower complaint filed in August
that in part described a 25 July phone call between Trump and the Ukrainian
president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in which Trump requested the “favor” of an
investigation into a potential 2020 rival, Joe Biden.
Trump and
Republicans have repeated unproven allegations of corruption against Hunter
Biden, the former vice-president’s son who was on the board of a gas company in
the eastern European country while his father was involved in international
efforts to curb corruption in its government.
The stark
nature of Trump’s request to Zelenskiy has boosted support for Trump’s
impeachment, according to polling averages.
The
administration has struggled to find a message to rebut the perception of its
own corruption, with the president, at times seemingly alone in his own
defense, lashing out on Twitter against Democrats, the whistleblower, the
media, Biden and more.
Hill’s
testimony could significantly add to allegations of wrongdoing by Trump and
Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor commonly described as the president’s
personal lawyer, who headed up the president’s personal agenda in Ukraine while
working on behalf of local clients of his own. Trump and Giuliani have denied
wrongdoing.
A good deal
of Hill’s testimony focused on Yovanovitch, a widely respected diplomat who
worked under six presidents and who defied the state department gag order to
testify herself last Friday.
Yovanovitch
said she had been the target of a smear campaign inside the administration
fueled by Giuliani.
“I do not
know Mr Giuliani’s motives for attacking me,” Yovanovitch said in an opening
statement released to the press. “But individuals who have been named in the
press as contacts of Mr Giuliani may well have believed that their personal
financial ambitions were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine.”
Two
Giuliani business associates from the former Soviet Union, Lev Parnas and Igor
Fruman, were arrested at a Washington DC-area airport last week on suspected
campaign finance violations regarding a large check they wrote to a political
committee supporting Trump and donations to at least one Republican
congressman, Pete Sessions of Texas.
On Monday,
Giuliani told Reuters he was paid $500,000 for work he did for a company
co-founded by Parnas. Giuliani said he was hired to consult and provide legal
advice to company Fraud Guarantee’s technologies.
After a May
2018 meeting between Parnas and Sessions, Sessions sent a letter to the
secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, urging Yovanovitch’s dismissal because she had
“spoken privately and repeatedly about her disdain for the current
administration’”.
Yovanovitch
denied the charge but she was dismissed nevertheless, in a move potentially
driven by Ukrainians elements she was ostensibly charged with confronting and
helping to dismantle.
It was also
reported last week that Giuliani himself is the subject of an investigation by
federal prosecutors in Manhattan.
Fiona Hill:
British-born Russia expert drawn into impeachment storm
The former
National Security Council official saw the struggle over US policy on Moscow
and Trump’s special bond with Putin
Former aide
to testify she opposed Zelenskiy call – live
Julian
Borger
Julian
Borger in Washington
Mon 14 Oct
2019 16.30 BSTLast modified on Mon 14 Oct 2019 19.05 BST
Fiona Hill,
a former adviser on Russia, arrives to be deposed behind closed doors amid the
US House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry into Trump.
Fiona Hill,
a coalminer’s daughter from County Durham who became the top Russia expert in
the White House, is the latest official to find herself at the eye of the
impeachment storm engulfing Donald Trump.
British-born
Hill arrived on Capitol Hill on Monday morning to give testimony behind closed
doors to congressional committees investigating Trump’s conduct in his
relations with his Ukrainian counterpart.
The
committees are looking for evidence on whether Trump abused his office to try
to persuade the government in Kyiv to provide compromising material on a
political opponent, former vice-president Joe Biden.
Hill is
likely to be interviewed on a much broader range of subjects, however. She was
senior director for Europe and Russia in the National Security Council (NSC)
for more than two years, giving her a front seat at the struggle over US policy
towards Moscow and Trump’s peculiar personal attachment to Vladimir Putin.
Hill was
brought into the White House by Trump’s second national security adviser, HR
McMaster, plucking her out of the Washington thinktank world, because of her
expertise on Putin and Russia. She had co-written a book on the Russian
autocrat, titled Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, that stressed the extent
that his KGB career had shaped his worldview.
“She went
in out of a sense of duty,” a friend said. “Once she was in the White House,
she tried to impose some sense of order and process on the chaos over Russia
policy. When there was a state department translator in meetings Trump meetings
with Putin, that didn’t happen by accident.”
Hill
planned to work at the NSC for a year but was asked to stay on by McMaster’s
successor, John Bolton, despite calls to get rid of her from Trump acolytes,
aware Hill was not a political loyalist.
She handed
responsibilities to her successor, Tim Morrison, on 15 July, and actually left
the White House on 19 July, six days before Trump’s infamous call with
Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in which the US president asked for “a favour” in carrying
out certain targeted investigations.
It is
unclear whether Trump’s efforts to use Ukrainian reliance on the US to his
political advantage affected the timing of Hill’s departure, but she is
expected to testify about the emergence of a parallel Ukraine policy run by
Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who is commonly described as Trump’s
personal lawyer.
Giuliani
clearly thought his channel, focusing on digging dirt on the Bidens, had
priority, and has sought to portray Hill as being out of the loop.
“Maybe she
was engaged in secondary foreign policy if she didn’t know I was asked to take
a call from President Zelenskiy’s very close friend,” he told NBC News.
Texts
released by Congress between two diplomats working with Giuliani, the
ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, and Kurt Volker, formerly
special envoy for Ukraine, suggest that they expected more flexibility from
Morrison, Hill’s replacement.
Hill was
born in Bishop Auckland, Durham, the daughter of a miner and a nurse, and
became a dual national after marrying an American she met at Harvard. She still
speaks with flat northern English vowels.
The
American chapter in her life opened quite by chance. After winning a
scholarship to St Andrews University, she was in Moscow during the 1988
Reagan-Gorbachev summit and got an internship making coffee for the NBC Today
Show. There, she met an American professor who suggested she apply for
postgraduate studies at Harvard.
Since it
became clear Hill would be an important witness in the House impeachment hearings,
she has been subjected to furious attack on hard-right talkshows and conspiracy
theories on social media, some pointing to the fact that she knows Christopher
Steele, the author of the famous 2016 dossier alleging Trump’s collusion with
the Kremlin, from a previous stint in government, in the National Intelligence
Council.
Such
attacks have become a routine form of intimidation aimed at stopping officials
like Hill saying what they know about the inner workings of the Trump White
House.
Hill’s manner
is understated, precise and discreet. Since entering the White House, she has
hardly talked to the press and not made appearances in the thinktank world. Her
deposition to Congress puts her into an unaccustomed limelight.
“She was
not looking forward to it but she knew she was going to testify. She will
answer the questions and says what she knows, but she is not going to give some
sweeping denunciation of the Trump administration,” her friend said.
“She has
respect for the people she worked for, even if she didn’t necessarily agree
with them. They have all been in the same foxhole together.”
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