Donald Trump withheld military assistance to Ukraine because he doesn’t like foreign aid. Donald Trump withheld military assistance to Ukraine because he didn’t think Europe was sending it enough. Donald Trump withheld military assistance to Ukraine because he was concerned about corruption.
Considering the amount of testimony to the fact that Trump withheld military assistance from Ukraine because he was extorting that nation to announce “investigations” into a pair of conspiracy theories designed to give him a personal political advantage, the litany of excuses—most of which seem to have appeared ex nihilo as Republicans representatives scrambled to provide some reason, any reason, for Trump’s action—has been a bit hilarious. Especially considering that the universal statement from everyone involved in the House, Senate, State Department, Defense Department, and Office of Management and Budget was that when they tried to get an answer on why Trump was holding back the support, all they got was silence.
Throughout the House impeachment hearings, Republicans asserted one or all of the theories above, even though doing so meant drawing a ludicrous set of inferences. Now, as it turns out, they needn’t have bothered.
Because the real reason Donald Trump withheld military assistance to Ukraine was that … he didn’t. He never withheld it at all. Instead, the delay of the assistance to Ukraine was entirely the idea of the Office of Management and Budget. As The Washington Post reports, a new legal memo maintains that the whole thing was just a “programmatic delay” generated when leaders at the OMB took it on themselves to conduct a double-check to make sure the assistance was in compliance with its own rules. And they’re just getting around to explaining that … now.
Sorry about that whole impeachment thing, nation. But now that it’s clear this was all done inside the OMB, Democrats can pack away the whole process and Republicans can stop trying to think of excuses.
However, the claims in the new legal memo—repeating: legal memo—don’t completely leave Trump out of the equation. Instead, they maintain that the decision to suspend assistance to Ukraine was made because Trump was clearly upset. Not over anything he was learning from the State Department or the review of the aid conducted by the Department of Defense—that was all completed on May 23 with a declaration that Ukraine both was making good progress on democracy and had met the legislative guidelines for handling corruption. Instead, the OMB says, it kicked off discussions on holding up hundreds of millions of dollars in vitally needed assistance because Trump got angry after he read an editorial in the right-wing Washington Examiner. Seriously.
The memo doesn’t really stop there. It doesn’t actually say that Trump got angry about the assistance after reading the Examiner editorial. It claims that Trump learned about the assistance from the editorial. Which then, according to the Post, “sent aides scrambling” to find some way to defuse Trump’s anger.
That way was to place a temporary hold on the military assistance. Eight times. In the process, two OMB officials resigned, though the legal memo denies that they resigned because of the delayed assistance. It doesn’t actually provide a reason for the resignations, but … come back soon. They’ll have one.
All of this seems amusing, and the kind of comedy of errors, everyone scurrying around the White House responding to a bellowing Trump, who doesn’t know what his own White House is doing until he reads about it in a right-wing rag, is all too believable. Don’t believe it.
Because this narrative takes Trump’s affirmative, knowledgeable, criminal actions, and turns them into bumbling nonsense. Which is awfully, awfully convenient.