Pompeo Cornered as Ukraine Envoy’s Testimony Forces Hard Choice
Pompeo Cornered as Ukraine Envoy’s Testimony Forces Hard Choice
(Bloomberg) -- The acting U.S. envoy to Ukraine said he was told President Donald Trump wanted Ukraine’s president “in a public box” in order to get him to investigate Joe Biden’s son in exchange for military aid.
Instead, it was Secretary of State Michael Pompeo who got boxed in.
After the White House disparaged the testimony Tuesday by Ambassador William Taylor as the work of “radical unelected bureaucrats,” Pompeo must choose between backing a career diplomat and fellow West Point graduate he installed in the job just five months ago or sticking with the president at the risk of alienating the foreign service officers he leads.
That dilemma became even more visible after Trump sent a series of tweets on Wednesday calling Taylor a “Never Trumper Diplomat” and -- in what may have been a shot across the bow at Pompeo -- added, “It would be really great if the people within the Trump Administration, all well-meaning and good (I hope!), could stop hiring Never Trumpers, who are worse than the Do Nothing Democrats. Nothing good will ever come from them!”
Earlier in the day, Trump called Never Trumpers -- a reference to Republicans who opposed Trump during the campaign or who criticize his presidency -- “human scum.”
The president’s tweets were the latest evidence that Taylor’s testimony damaged Trump’s version of the Ukraine crisis.
In a detailed 15-page opening statement to lawmakers in the House impeachment inquiry, Taylor said he saw a clear “quid pro quo” in Trump’s decision to withhold military aid to Ukraine as leverage to extract political favors. He also recounted how it was Pompeo who personally asked him to serve as acting ambassador after the previous envoy, Marie Yovanovitch was recalled to Washington a few months early after running afoul of Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
While Taylor said he initially hesitated on the job offer, he decided to accept it after Pompeo “assured me that the policy of strong support for Ukraine would continue and that he would support me in defending that policy.”
Taylor’s statement and hours of testimony were swiftly met with vitriol from the White House.
“President Trump has done nothing wrong -- this is a coordinated smear campaign from far-left lawmakers and radical unelected bureaucrats waging war on the Constitution,” White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said. “There was no quid pro quo.”
As Pompeo weighs Tuesday’s developments, Taylor is still the charge d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv, the outpost’s highest-ranking diplomat. Sending him back to Ukraine to keep doing his job would be seen as an implicit rebuke of Trump and risk Pompeo’s potential bid for a Senate seat next year, but not doing so would further damage the secretary’s standing with the State Department rank-and-file he needs to carry out the president’s foreign policy agenda.
Pompeo has already passed up repeated opportunities to speak up for Yovanovitch, whom Trump denigrated in a July 25 phone call with Zelenskiy, or other current and former staff who have testified to the impeachment inquiry committee -- and later been insulted by Trump or his advisers.
Pompeo so far has largely kept silent, saying he doesn’t discuss “personnel issues,” a strategy that appears calculated to keep Trump close and satisfy the conservative voters whose support will be essential if he goes on to run for a U.S. Senate seat next year in Kansas, where he was a three-term congressman.
In an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last Sunday, Pompeo again refused to defend his employees beyond a tepid remark that Yovanovitch was still employed by the State Department and was a diplomat in “good standing.”
“When a president loses confidence in an ambassador, it’s not in that ambassador, the State Department, or America’s best interest for them to continue to stay in their post,” Pompeo said.
State Department ‘Swagger’
The move is a risky one for a secretary who pledged in his first days of office to bring “swagger” back to the department and restore morale that was undermined by previous Secretary Rex Tillerson’s attempts to freeze hiring and restructure the department.
The impeachment inquiry is making that harder. Channeling Trump, Pompeo has argued that the investigation, led by Democrats, is unfair. Former department officials who have testified to the impeachment inquiry committee, including Taylor, Yovanovitch, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent, all did so under subpoena and despite White House refusals to cooperate with the probe.
‘Auditioning’ for Warren
Pompeo’s silence about his current staff has been accompanied by an increased willingness to jab at former officers. On Sunday, in the Stephanopoulos interview, he was asked to respond to an article in which former Undersecretary of State Bill Burns wrote that he “sat on his hands as Trump slandered Yovanovitch,” Pompeo responded that Burns “must be auditioning to be Elizabeth Warren’s secretary of state.”
Burns, widely seen as a possible secretary of state had Hillary Clinton beaten Trump in 2016, served under both Republican and Democratic presidents dating to the Reagan administration.
A similar issue emerged last week with another career diplomat, Michael McKinley, who resigned because Pompeo had not stood up to support his diplomats. The State Department had initially planned a statement wishing McKinley well, but in the end, after the reason for McKinley’s departure leaked, the secretary withheld that statement.
For the time being, Pompeo and his advisers believe he’s making the right move. Yet many Republicans have privately voiced horror at Trump’s behavior and some have even gone on Twitter to express their shock
“So yeah the Bill Taylor testimony is damning,” Erick Erickson, a conservative blogger who has been critical of the president, said in a tweet Tuesday. “No way around it except by saying it doesn’t say what it says.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Nick Wadhams in Washington at nwadhams@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Bill Faries at wfaries@bloomberg.net, John Harney
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