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“I wouldn’t say he hung up me,” Sondland recalled, “but it was almost like he hung up on me.”
In the transcripts, which have dropped each day this week, Trump emerges as fickle, susceptible to flattery and prone to grudges.
“They tried to take me down,” the President said of Ukraine during a now-scrutinized Oval Office meeting in May, venting it was Kiev that had attempted to damage him during the 2016 election — a theory rooted in conspiracy that, despite efforts by his advisers to debunk, Trump ran with.
Far from acting as guides to his foreign policy, diplomats and senior officials working for him are shown struggling to ascertain his positions and bracing for groundbreaking policy shifts to come without warning. Professional diplomats — some of whom still work in the administration — emerge from the testimony appearing shell-shocked by what was happening in Washington, at least at the moments when they could actually learn what that was.
At others, they describe futile efforts — including by watching Fox News — to learn what Trump’s associates were doing in the countries where they were posted, and after-the-fact realizations that they were being undercut by their own employer.
“With the advantage of hindsight, you’re going to think that I’m incredibly naive, but I couldn’t imagine all of the things that have happened over the last five or seven months,” the onetime US ambassador in Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, said during her interview. “I just couldn’t imagine it.”
The realization came only over time to the professionals responsible for Ukraine.
“I worked extraordinarily long days, so the last thing that I wanted to do when I went home was watch television,” said Fiona Hill, the onetime senior director for Europe and Russia on the National Security Council. “But I would have to go home in the evening and try to look on the news to see what Giuliani was saying.”
Even Trump’s top diplomat, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, seemed to acknowledge that the parallel diplomacy being carried out by Giuliani was a distraction — at one point rolling his eyes at the mention of Giuliani’s name — but still a necessary evil in the Trump administration.
“Yes, it’s something we have to deal with,” Sondland recalled Pompeo telling him about Giuliani.
Chaotic atmosphere
As Yovanovitch — who was recalled in May from her post in Kiev — confronted Giuliani’s effort to undermine her standing with the President, the response from Washington reflected the chaotic atmosphere that pervades as Trump officials muddle through conflicting messages and impulsive decision-making.
She asked her superiors at the State Department to issue a statement of support amid claims she was disloyal to Trump. But after a drawn-out deliberation, the answer from officials was no.
“I was told that there was caution about any kind of a statement, because it could be undermined,” she told investigators last month.
How? the investigators asked.
“A tweet or something,” she said. “I mean, that was not made specific to me.”
Throughout the pages of interviews, Twitter was portrayed as a looming outsized force, charged either with menace or potential depending on the day. As others in the administration sought to counsel Yovanovitch on how to avoid falling afoul of the President, Twitter emerged again — this time as a tool to be exploited.
“You need to go big or go home,” Yovanovitch said was the advice given her by Sondland, who was a major donor to Trump’s inauguration and maintains a somewhat close relationship to him. “You need to, you know, tweet out there that you support the President.”
Yovanovitch declined — “It was advice that I did not see how I could implement in my role as an ambassador,” she said — and was recalled soon after.
Fearing policy shifts
Her colleagues in the foreign service, while not removed from their jobs by Trump, fared little better in decoding his policies. One described fearing he would wake up one morning to learn the President had dramatically altered US policy toward Ukraine.
“I was worried that there could be some dramatic change where we would agree with the Russians, that, well, maybe Crimea is Russian after all, you know, or something like that,” said Bill Taylor, the top US diplomat in Ukraine.
To her colleagues, Yovanovitch’s experience illustrated a phenomenon in Trump’s administration where loyalty — real or perceived — drastically outweighed experience or expertise. Backbiting and attempts at sabotage appear regularly, including against onetime national security adviser H.R. McMaster. As senior officials with years of experience were summarily discharged, those with almost no experience filled the void.
At every turn, the officials seem perplexed at who was responsible for the Ukraine portfolio, with multiple people given wide leeway by the President to represent him and the US in their dealings in the country.
Sondland told colleagues he was overseeing the Washington-Kiev relationship, even though Ukraine isn’t in the European Union. The message didn’t always go over well.
“I said, who has said you’re in charge of Ukraine, Gordon?” Hill recounted in her testimony. “And he said, the President. Well, that shut me up, because you can’t really argue with that.”
The blurry lines of reporting and general lack of protocol led, in some cases, to farcical chaos. Hill said Sondland had a habit of handing out her personal cell phone number to European officials hoping to set up meetings at the White House. But because her personal phone was kept in a lockbox during the day at the White House, she often missed their calls.
“I’d find endless messages from irate officials who’d been told that they were supposed to meet with me by Ambassador Sondland,” she testified. “I mean, some of it was comical, but it was also, for me and for others, deeply concerning.”
The issue, he said, “took up a lot of energy in the NSC.”
“That’s disturbing for a whole different reason,” House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said.
“Different story,” Taylor responded, “Different story.”
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