peacefare.net

Time to spill the beans

Yes, I do know both Bill Taylor and Kurt Volker. Bill and I worked together at USIP for several years. We were good colleagues, not personal friends. Kurt I know less well, but he was for a while a colleague at SAIS in the Center for Transatlantic Relations. Both are bright, devoted, distinguished professional diplomats, but like all of us they have their distinct personalities and foibles. Bill is more moderate and cautious, Kurt more daring and political, in the sense of making known his Republican affiliation. I have no idea what party Bill prefers.

That is the rule among Foreign Service officers: they keep their professional interactions apolitical, even if many of us have strong preferences. I have been a registered Democrat since my last years in the State Department in the 1990s, but I rarely mentioned that while in the Service and I never asked anyone else about political affiliation.

Bill’s contribution in the now-public text messages exchanged among US officials concerned with Ukraine is clear: he questioned whether the effort to squeeze Ukraine into conducting a judicial investigation of former Vice President and now presidential hopeful Biden by denying military assistance was proper. To the even modestly practiced eye, it looks like the use of public office for private gain, which is the definition of corrupt abuse of power. It might have been legitimate had the Trump Administration provided any credible evidence of wrongdoing by Biden, or asked through judicial channels, but they didn’t. This was what President Trump often accuses his opposition of doing: a witch hunt intended to knock the strongest candidate (at least in current polling) out of the race.

My guess is that Bill’s days in Kiev, where he is serving as an interim ambassador in a post he occupied from 2006 to 2009, are numbered. Trump will want to be rid of him as soon as possible but may hesitate for a while fearing what testimony Bill will give in Congress once he is freed from government service. I can’t imagine Bill will want to stay, though his devotion to Ukraine might weigh in that direction. In any event, he won’t have much influence after questioning the President’s corrupt attempt to get a Ukrainian judicial investigation going by leveraging US military assistance.

Kurt is already out of government service and was deposed Friday behind closed doors in the House, which saw fit to make public some of the unclassified text messages. His situation requires a bit more explication.

Kurt was an unpaid Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations. In my view, he has done good things in that role most notably getting the State Department to declare that the US would not recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea, which Moscow seized by force from Kiev in 2014. He has also advocated successfully for the US to ship lethal, even if defensive, weapons to Kiev’s forces, which are still battling an insurgency Russia supports in southeastern Ukraine.

So when President Trump held up on Congressionally authorized arms shipments to Ukraine, Kurt would have been understandably anxious to get them moving. That was what he was trying to do when he engaged with the Ukrainians and the President’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. There is nothing inherently wrong with Kurt having helped Giuliani. Diplomats often help Americans and American companies to do things that are consistent with US policy. The problem here is not his making an appointment or arranging a phone call, per se, but rather what the President’s personal lawyer was up to: he was using the arms shipments to get the Ukrainians to do what Trump wanted for his campaign. Kurt clearly understood this and might have objected, but let’s remember: he wanted the arms shipments to restart. The President’s purpose he might well have considered above his pay grade.

There is one other wrinkle in Kurt’s story: while unpaid in his government role, he continued to be affiliated with a consulting firm that had business with the Ukrainian government. He is reported to have “recused” himself from contact with that aspect of the business. I don’t know whether his dual role violated the law, and there have been no allegations of wrongdoing of which I am aware. But it doesn’t pass my smell test, which also dislikes Hunter Biden’s roles in China and Ukraine, even if there was no wrongdoing. Appearances matter. Kurt might have known better.

Whatever foibles Kurt and Bill may display, the bigger picture is clear: the President of the United States thinks he has the right to demand foreign investigations of his political opponents, which amount to illegal foreign assistance to his campaign. He did it with Russia, which he encouraged to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. Now he is doing it again with Ukraine and China. He said so yesterday:

The lesson here is clear: even consummate professionals end up getting sullied if they serve with this Administration. It is time for those who can afford to do so to leave, spilling the beans to Congress as well as the press and helping to liberate from Trump’s grip the 20 Republican Senators needed to remove this President from office after he is impeached in the House.