While Donald Trump nullifies the nation's foreign policy in efforts to wring a bit of gain for himself, and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani continues a partnership with Ukrainian ex-officials and indicted criminals seemingly intended to destabilize the existing Ukraine government for the benefit of those new allies, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will be traveling to Ukraine later this week to ... well, we really don't know.
If we're being honest about it, we can't say we really know why he's going. The official reason for Pompeo's brief visit, which will include a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is to "reaffirm U.S. support for Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity." But Pompeo will also be meeting with other officials to, The Washington Post reports, "discuss the [Ukrainian] government's reform agenda."
That last part, an alleged concern that the Ukrainian government show its commitment to anticorruption "reforms," is the exact phrasing the Trump White House used throughout its effort to extort the Ukrainian government into opening "investigations" of Democrats, and notably of Joe Biden. And there's the catch: This White House is notoriously dishonest, Trump himself has proven absolutely unable to stop committing unethical acts even when caught outright, and Mike Pompeo personally remains implicated in the original extortion effort against Ukraine. One that, for all we know, may yet be ongoing: One of Pompeo’s actions earlier this month was to order Ambassador William Taylor, who testified in the congressional impeachment inquiry, to leave Ukraine before Pompeo’s arrival.
The Trump White House's Ukraine policy is vastly different from the nation's Ukraine policy as understood by our nation's diplomats and functionaries. Official U.S. policy is to stand by Ukraine, a NATO ally, as Putin's Russia continues its military assaults on that nation. Unofficially, however, multiple Trump Cabinet members have each assisted in a White House scheme to stall Ukraine aid, weaken congressional sanctions against Russia, and withhold most public messages of U.S. support for Ukraine until and unless that government was willing to do personal favors for the Oval Office tweeter. Pompeo is among them.
Which policy is Pompeo traveling to Ukraine to push forward? The State Department policy, or Rudy Giuliani's version? None of us, in the press or in the public, truly knows. Pompeo is so compromised, by testimony against him and by his own refusal to testify to Congress, that he cannot be trusted as a noncorrupt player. He ought to have stepped down the moment he refused to answer Congress' demands for his own testimony.
