Pompeo Aides Warned Against Ukraine Conspiracies Trump Pursued
Watchdog Who Probed Clinton Emails to Brief Lawmakers on Ukraine
(Bloomberg) -- Aides to Secretary of State Michael Pompeo cautioned against unfounded reports suggesting that the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine was a hotbed of Democratic support, according to documents turned over to Congress Wednesday by the State Department’s watchdog.
The warnings were made even though President Donald Trump has echoed some of the claims.
Emails from March detailing the State Department staffers’ concerns were included in a package of files sent to State Department Inspector General Steve Linick and obtained by Bloomberg News. He shared them with congressional investigators pursuing an impeachment inquiry into Trump over allegations that he improperly tried to get Ukraine to investigate a political rival, Joe Biden, and his son Hunter.
The emails, sent to senior Pompeo adviser Ulrich Brechbuhl from Phil Reeker, the acting assistant secretary of State for Europe, show Reeker and other officials discussing a series of articles by conservative writers that suggested the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, was a Trump opponent and that Ukraine had worked to sway the 2016 American election for Hillary Clinton.
“This captures the basic fake narrative, [the assumption that Masha is some kind of ‘liberal outpost .... leading a political struggle’ is really without merit or validation],” Reeker wrote, referring to Yovanovitch, in one email to Brechbuhl on March 31, the date of the first round of Ukraine’s presidential election.
The briefing on Capitol Hill was the latest development in the accelerating House impeachment inquiry of the president over his July 25 phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. It came just a day after Pompeo denounced a request from House committees to take testimony from five department officials.
Another email from George Kent, the State Department official in Washington who oversees Ukraine policy, includes a series of articles labeled “the daily update of the fake news driven smear out of Ukraine.”
The State Department declined to comment Thursday on the authenticity of the documents.
Linick showed lawmakers the packet at a closed-door session on Capitol Hill.
“The documents provided by the inspector general included a package of disinformation, debunked conspiracy theories, and baseless allegations” three Democratic House committee chairmen said in a statement released Wednesday night.
Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel and Elijah Cummings, the chairman of Oversight & Reform, were among the lawmakers briefed by Linick.
The documents also contain notes that purport to be from interviews that took place at the office of Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani told CNN on Wednesday evening that some of the documents provided to Congress by the State Department’s inspector general had originated with him.
The documents comprise a disjointed collection of material, from an envelope sent to Pompeo marked with “the White House” as the sender’s address. Inside there are divider sheets marked with a Trump Hotels label.
“The briefing and documents raise troubling questions about apparent efforts inside and outside the Trump administration to target specific officials, including former Vice President Joe Biden’s son and then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Masha Yovanovitch, who was abruptly removed as ambassador in May after a sustained campaign against her by the president’s agent,” Giuliani, the chairmen said.
Relevant or Not?
“The inspector general stated that his office interviewed Secretary Pompeo’s counselor,” Brechbuhl, “who informed the inspector general that Secretary Pompeo told him the packet ‘came over,’ and that Brechbuhl presumed it was from the White House,” Cummings, Schiff and Engel said in their statement.
“Earlier this week, Pompeo attempted to block Brechbuhl, Ambassador Yovanovitch, and other State Department employees from testifying before Congress,” they added.
Trump’s former special envoy to Ukraine, Kurt Volker, is to testify to lawmakers behind closed doors on Thursday. Yovanovitch may do the same late next week. Volker, who previously served as the U.S. ambassador to NATO, resigned from the Ukraine post last week after he was named in the whistle-blower’s report.
Before the briefing, lawmakers had expected to hear about alleged efforts inside the State Department to punish officials who cooperate with the House impeachment inquiry, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Between Two Branches
Instead, Democratic Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, who was also in the meeting with Linick, said he was briefed about documents that appeared to be part of a “concerted, external effort” to discredit Yovanovitch.
Wednesday’s briefing put Linick, who served in both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, at the center of another contentious dispute between the executive and legislative branches. In 2015, he admonished Clinton for sending emails through her private server that should have been marked classified.
The controversy over Trump’s July call with Zelenskiy quickly engulfed the White House. Trump lambasted lawmakers pursuing a whistle-blower complaint about his call, accusing them of attempting a “coup” and demanding that he get to confront his accuser. The whistle-blower’s complaint, and a partial transcript of the call released by Trump, show the president sought Zelenskiy’s help investigating discredited accusations of corruption against Biden and his son Hunter.
Congressional investigators have been looking into whether Pompeo made inquiries within his agency’s personnel department about whether he could fire people complying with a congressional subpoena against the administration’s instructions.
‘Separation of Powers’
Pompeo has said he’s willing to allow officials to testify but that the request from the three committees gave them too little time to comply and amounted to an attempt to “bully” his department.
“What we object to was the demands that were put that deeply violate fundamental principles of separation of powers,” Pompeo said Wednesday while on a visit to Italy. “They contacted State Department employees directly. They told them not to contact legal counsel at the State Department. At least, that’s been reported to us.”
Five years ago, Linick testified to the Select Committee on Benghazi -- which Pompeo served on -- about security shortfalls that contributed to the deaths of four Americans at diplomatic compounds in Libya in 2012. Pompeo’s performance in those hearings bolstered his reputation among conservatives, eventually drawing him into Trump’s orbit as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Like most inspectors general at federal agencies, Linick, 56, reports to both the head of the department he works for -- in this case, Pompeo -- and Congress.
--With assistance from Erik Wasson, David Wainer and Jordan Fabian.
To contact the reporters on this story: Nick Wadhams in Washington at nwadhams@bloomberg.net;Billy House in Washington at bhouse5@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Bill Faries at wfaries@bloomberg.net, ;Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, John Harney
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