Trump's Ukraine envoy quits as president rages on Twitter over whistleblower revelations
Donald Trump‘s envoy to Ukraine has reportedly resigned after being named in the whistleblower complaint that has rocked the administration.
Multiple media sources said Kurt Volker, the president’s special representative for Ukraine, resigned on Friday.
A whistleblower complaint from within the intelligence community, released publicly on Thursday, described Mr Volker as trying to “contain the damage” from efforts by Mr Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, to press Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to to investigate Joe Biden and his son.
It said: “On 26 July, a day after the call, special representative for Ukraine negotiations Kurt Volker visited Kyiv and met with president Zelenskyy and a variety of Ukrainian political figures. Ambassador Volker was accompanied in his meetings by US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland.
“Based on multiple readouts of these meetings recounted to me by various US officials, ambassadors Volker and Sondland reportedly provided advice to the Ukrainian leadership about how to “navigate” the demands that the president had made of Mr Zelenskyy.”
Mr Volker, who had served in the position on a part-time, unpaid basis since 2017, had sought to help Ukraine’s government resolve its confrontation with Russia-sponsored separatists.
Meanwhile on Friday, Mr Trump unleashed a stream of furious outbursts over the whistbleblower revelations, just days after House speaker Nancy Pelosi announced an official impeachment inquiry that some believe could yield results as soon as October.
Ms Pelosi joined others in voicing concern over the president’s hints that the whistleblower should be executed for exposing his or her attempt to pressure the Ukrainian president into investigating a major rival in the 2020 election.
One of the whistleblower’s key complaints that the transcript of Mr Trump’s Ukrainian call was moved to a classified location by White House staff appears to have been vindicated by an insider, according to CNN. Mr Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who is central to the allegations, has further implicated the state department in the scandal, presenting Fox News with text messages that he claims prove his meeting with an aide of Mr Zelensky was ordered by officials in Mike Pompeo’s department, not by Mr Trump.
The first Republicans have come forward to publicly support the impeachment inquiry.
The governors of Vermont and Massachussets, Phil Scott and Charlie Baker respectively, have both been vocal critics of the Trump presidency.
Mr Scott said he wasn’t surprised by the whistleblower’s allegations because he’s “watched [Trump] over the years.
“I think the inquiry is important, yes, and where it leads from here is going to be driven by the facts that are established,” AP reported him as saying.
Donald Trump continues his offensive early this morning, claiming the "Fake News Media" and Democrats are working as a team to "fraudulently" make his phone call with Mr Zelensky look bad.
In Congress on Thursday, Californian Democrat Adam Schiff loosely paraphrased Mr Trump and Mr Zelesky's call, calling it "a betrayal of the president's oath of office".
Mr Giuliani went on Fox News on Thursday night, where he proposed several wild theories, including one that linked George Soros with Joe Biden's business in Ukraine.
His vitriol was mainly directed towards the state department. He shared several text messages with the broadcaster, which he claimed showed their influence in his meetings with top Ukrainian aides.
Mr Trump's lawyer told host Laura Ingraham: "The whistleblower falsely alleges that I was operating on my own. Well, I wasn’t operating on my own!"
Two state department officials are accused in the whistleblower's complaint.
Here's Rudy Giuliani telling Fox News Laura Ingraham that he knew "Washington swamp people" would "kill" him after he started looking into Joe Biden's actions in Ukraine.
Mr Biden claims he urged Ukraine to fire a chief prosecutor because he was corrupt, not because he was investigating natural gas company Burisma Holdings, which his son Hunter Biden was working for.
Nancy Pelosi joined others to condemn Donald Trump's "intimidation" of the whistleblower.
Pelosi told MSNBC she's "concerned” by the president’s rhetoric and said those conducting the impeachment probe would ensure there was no retaliation against people who provide information.
She also accused attorney general William Barr of “going rogue”, suggesting he was engaging in a “cover up of a cover up” for the president.
Mr Barr’s Justice Department first investigated the whistleblower’s complaint and opted not to send it to congress.
During the Zelensky call, Mr Trump said he would like the Ukrainian president to speak with Mr Barr about Joe Biden.
The Justice Department said Mr Barr had never been asked to contact Ukraine.
While impeachment dominates the news agenda, Chiaro Giordano sheds light on this Trump administration announcement to nearly halve its intake of refugees.
Vladimir Putin's spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has voiced hope that Mr Trump won't publish private conversations between the two nation's presidents, as he has done with Ukraine.
Asked if Moscow is worried that the White House could release transcripts of calls with the Russian leader, the Kremlin spokesperson said that "we would like to hope that it wouldn't come to that in our relations, which are already troubled by a lot of problems".
Donald Trump continues to make his fury known on social media.
Referring to a speech made in Congress by Californian Democrat Adam Schiff during which he paraphrased the potentially impeachable Zelensky call, the president again called for his resignation.
After likening the whistleblower to a spy and reminiscing on how the US used to deal with "traitors", the president continued his verbal assault on the person responsible.
Nancy Pelosi restated the importance of the ongoing impeachment inquiry.
"This is about the national security of our country, the president of the United States being disloyal to his oath of office, jeopardising our national security and jeopardising the integrity of our elections," she told MSNBC on Friday.
She declined to provide a timeline for the House impeachment investigation, saying "the facts will lead us."
"They will take the time that they need, and we won't have the calendar be the arbiter," she said, but added: "It doesn't have to drag on."
"I think we have to stay focused, as far as the public is concerned, on the fact that the president of the United States used taxpayer dollars to shake down the leader of another country for his own political gain."
Commentators and politicians are highlighting some serious flaws in Mr Trump's most recent attempts to discredit the whistleblower's complaint as "secondhand information that proved to be so inaccurate".
The New York Times came under heavy fire on Friday morning for publishing information about the whistleblower, saying sources had identified them as a CIA officer.
It came hours after Mr Trump demanded to know the individual's identity and hinted they should receive the death penalty for "treason".
AP reports that the White House had been made aware of an intelligence officer's concerns in August by the CIA, after the officer lodged a complaint about Mr Trump's dealings with Ukraine.
The individual then raised a second complaint, this time with the intelligence community's inspector general – a process that granted the individual more legal protections.
At this point, members of William Barr's Justice Department were alerted to the matter by the White House, and they spent several weeks deciding how to deal with the complaint before the department had been officially notified, sources familiar with the matter told AP.
More than 300 former national security professionals have signed a letter calling Mr Trump's Ukraine call an "unconscionable abuse of power".
They applauded the efforts of those in congress pursuing an impeachment inquiry.
If we fail to speak up — and act — now our foreign policy and national security will officially be on offer to those who can most effectively fulfill the President's personal prerogatives," they wrote here.
"All of us recognise the imperative of formal impeachment proceedings to ascertain additional facts and weigh the consequences of what we have learned and what may still emerge.
"We applaud those members of congress, including Speaker Pelosi, who have now started us down that necessary path,"
CNN is reporting that a White House official has admitted that officials did in fact give instruction for the transcript of Mr Trump's Ukraine call to be filed in a classified system – a key allegation in the whistleblower's complaint.
A senior White House official has reportedly told the network this action was taken at the behest of National Security Council lawyers.
"NSC lawyers directed that the classified document be handled appropriately," they said.
