Throughout this impeachment charade we’ve been told by the media and House Democrats that a cadre of unelected career bureaucrats in the State Department and the National Security Council who are cooperating with the impeachment inquiry are heroes, patriots, and paragons of virtue and self-sacrifice for defying President Trump and proclaiming the truth about Trump corruption and self-dealing in Ukraine.
Last week, the media portrayed former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch as a courageous martyr recalled from her post by Trump for no reason and then viciously attacked by him on Twitter while she was testifying before the House Intelligence Committee. Trump’s attack was immediately characterized as “witness intimidation” by House Democrats and the media, who played up the notion that Yovanovitch was a victim being punished for nothing more than her commitment to the truth.
We heard the same sort of praise for William Taylor and George Kent, the State Department officials who also testified last week, just as we’ve heard praise for all the career bureaucrats who have testified in closed-door sessions so far. Democrats and the media gave special praise to Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the NSC Ukraine expert who told impeachment investigators he was alarmed by what he heard on the July 25 phone call between Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. As one of the only officials to have heard the call first-hand, Vindman was immediately hailed as a “star” witness in the impeachment probe, treated to glowing profiles in the New York Timesand the Washington Post, which said the Soviet émigré escaped to America with his family as a small child and grew up “determined to be as American as can be.”
But of course the truth is more complicated. We learned last week, for example, that the Obama White House knew Hunter Biden’s lucrative appointment to the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma less than a month after his father was made the administration’s point man in Ukraine looked bad—looked like corruption. The administration was concerned enough about it that it coached Yovanovitch on how to answer questions about the Bidens and Burisma that might come up in her 2016 Senate confirmation hearing. This only came out under close questioning by Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik.
https://twitter.com/EliseStefanik/status/1195410804973195264
And yet earlier in the hearing, Yovanovitch claimed that no one in the Obama administration “ever raised the issue of either Burisma or Hunter Biden with me.”
Then over the weekend we got a different perspective on Vindman. Transcripts of the closed-door testimony of Tim Morrison, former Russia and Europe director at the National Security Council, released Saturday by the House Intelligence Committee, reveal that Morrison had reservations about Vindman. He was concerned Vindman would “not exercise appropriate judgment as to whom he would say what,” and that when Morrison informed Vindman he wouldn’t be included in a trip to Ukraine, he made sure to have a witness in the room for that conversation.
Morrison: 'I had concerns that [Vindman] did not exercise
appropriate judgment as to whom he would say what.' But Republicans not allowed to pursue; might reveal hints about whistleblower. pic.twitter.com/rzIBaOrfP9— Byron York (@ByronYork) November 17, 2019
Morrison further testified that Vindman was apparently concerned that not being included on the trip would make him less effective “because he would be seen by the interagency as not being relevant.”
In his closed-door testimony last month, Vindman had made reference to the “interagency consensus” about Ukraine policy—specifically, that the policies President Trump was pursuing through Rudy Giuliani, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, EU ambassador Gordon Sondland and others related to corruption in Ukraine ran counter to the “interagency consensus.”
But here we need to pause and ask whose policy priorities should count, the president’s or the career bureaucrats of the “interagency”? State Department diplomats and NSC experts serve at the pleasure of the president, not the other way around. What’s emerging in these hearings is an unmistakable attitude and ethos among career officials that their opinions and priorities about U.S. foreign policy should matter more than those of the president of the United States.
One thing we’ve learned from these hearings is that some in the NSC and foreign services developed their foreign policy regarding Ukraine and Trump didn’t follow it to the letter. We’ve learned that these people think this is improper, forgetting that what is improper is THEM formulating the foreign policy of the United States and trying to carry it out.
We’ve also learned that it is regarded as “unusual” to ask for a foreign country to investigate a political opponent. That’s probably a fact, but this is necessitated by the unusual circumstances of a sitting Vice President extorting a foreign country to end an investigation into a company that would eventually embarrass his son and, ultimately, the VP.
I guess it isn’t strange that Democrats would not want to know the facts about an apparent act of corruption, openly bragged about by one of their front-running candidates for President, but then again, they ignored perjury, mishandling of classified information and gross negligence in securing our Benghazi consulate by their last preferred candidate. In other words, ethics are of no interest to Democrats.