By John Hudson / The Washington Post
The State Department’s inspector general arrived on Capitol Hill Wednesday to meet with key lawmakers and committee staffers amid a brewing standoff between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and House Democrats over President Trump’s dealings in Ukraine.
House Democrats are hoping the independent watchdog will provide more information related to U.S. interactions with Ukrainian officials, in particular Trump’s July phone call with the president of Ukraine that was the subject a whistleblower complaint and became a crucial element of lawmakers’ impeachment inquiry.
Pompeo on Wednesday confirmed that he listened in on the phone call and reiterated his complaint that the demands by Democrats for interviews with State Department officials amounted to an act of intimidation.
“We won’t tolerate folks on Capitol Hill bullying and intimidating State Department employees — that’s unacceptable,” he said during a news conference in Italy.
Pompeo’s objections to Democratic requests came as the office of the inspector general, led by Steve Linick, sent a letter Tuesday to Congress requesting a meeting “to discuss and provide staff with copies of documents related to the State Department and Ukraine.”
Linick’s office operates independent of the secretary of state and is responsible for investigating abuse and mismanagement within the department. It obtained the documents related to Ukraine from the acting legal adviser of the State Department, the letter said.
Linick has nurtured a strong working rapport with Republicans and Democrats in prominent positions in the George W. Bush, Obama and Trump administrations. The request for a meeting surprised Democratic lawmakers, who believed extracting any materials on Ukraine would be arduous given Pompeo’s aggressive pushback against their requests.
Democrats have seized on Pompeo’s pushback, with some accusing him of obstructing the investigation and others calling for him to recuse himself from all Ukraine-related matters.
“You have a direct conflict of interest given your participation in the now-infamous Trump-Zelensky call, and there are serious questions concerning your role in the leveraging of U.S. security assistance — taxpayer dollars — to advance President Trump’s personal political agenda,” Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s top Democrat, wrote in a letter sent to Pompeo on Wednesday.
The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Pompeo has been drawn further into the impeachment inquiry as more becomes known about his awareness of Trump’s phone call and the involvement of his aides in Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate former vice president and 2020 presidential hopeful Joe Biden.
According to a rough transcript of the call, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed appreciation for U.S. help defending Ukraine against Russia, and said he wanted to buy more U.S. weapons. Trump froze hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine a few days before the call. He replied to Zelensky “I would like you to do us a favor though,” and requested that he investigate the 2016 election.
The whistleblower claims that the call and other U.S. interactions reveal that Trump abused his office to pressure a foreign country to damage a political opponent in the 2020 election. The White House denies the charge saying there was no “quid pro quo” and that Trump withheld aid to Ukraine out of frustration over Europe’s lack of support for Ukraine and continued problems related to corruption in the country.
When asked whether he thought anything was improper on the phone call, Pompeo said Wednesday that everything the Trump administration has done related to Ukraine has been “remarkably consistent” and focused on confronting the “threat that Russia poses” and rooting out “corruption” in Ukraine.
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