Former Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker abruptly resigned last weekend after Rudy Giuliani threw him under the bus in the snowballing whistleblower scandal. On Thursday, Volker appears to have gotten his revenge.
In closed-door testimony given earlier today, Volker reportedly told investigators of the House Oversight, Intelligence, and Foreign Affairs committees that he personally warned Giuliani that he was “receiving untrustworthy information from Ukrainian political figures about former vice president Joe Biden and his son,” according to the Washington Post. The Post reports:
Kurt Volker, who resigned last week after being named in a whistleblower complaint that sparked the House impeachment inquiry of Trump, said he tried to caution Giuliani that his sources, including Ukraine’s former top prosecutor, were unreliable and that he should be careful about putting faith in the prosecutor’s stories, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the closed door meeting.
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Volker also said that he and other State Department officials cautioned the Ukrainians to steer clear of U.S. politics. Getting involved, he said he told them, would open the nation up to allegations that they were interfering in an election and could be detrimental to Ukraine long-term, according to these two individuals.
It appears no one heeded that advice!
We don’t know exactly everything that was said during the closed hearing, but congressional Republicans are already predictably spinning it as nothing big. “Nothing he has said supports the narrative you’ve been hearing from Mr. Schiff and the Democrats,” Oversight ranking member Jim Jordan told reporters, on the same day that House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy called for an end to the impeachment probe. “Nothing.” Jordan also complained about the process:
Meanwhile, we now know that Trump has encouraged at least three different world leaders to investigate either the Bidens or the origins of the Mueller report in private phone calls, and today he just walked out in front of a bunch of cameras and publicly asked Ukraine and China to start investigating the Bidens on the White House lawn, before standing in front of a bunch of boomers and claiming Big Pharma is out to get him, presumably for all of that incredible work he’s done to stop drug prices from increasing.
And earlier today, CNN reported on a bipartisan letter from 2016 that a bunch of Republican senators signed—including Sens. Ron Johnson and Rob Portman, and former Sen. Mark Kirk—imploring the Ukrainian government to “press ahead with urgent reforms to the Prosecutor General’s office and judiciary.” (Trump continues to allege that Biden got that prosecutor fired in order to take some heat off of Biden’s admittedly sketchy son.)
So the investigation continues, but it seems like it’s only a matter of time before either of these old dummies—Trump or Rudy—have an episode where they go on Fox & Friends and just spit it out themselves.