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A few words on Kurt Volker, who appears to be the State Department contact that Giuliani keeps telling us is in his iPhone.
He is a highly respected former G.W. Bush administration official. He is a Republican from the neocon tradition with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe; in the 90s he worked for Richard Holbrooke during the Bosnia negotiations and for John McCain as a foreign policy aide.
In 2015-16, he worked for the Jeb Bush campaign before it collapsed, then sat out the rest of election. He declined to sign the Never Trump letters circulating in summer-fall 2016 because he thought Trump might in the end need some foreign policy professionals.
In spring 2017, Rex Tillerson asked him to come into the administration and work on the increasingly complex negotiations over the proposed settlement in Eastern Ukraine. He became Special Rep to Ukraine. According to most DC foreign policy people, he was doing a great job.
But also, according to the whistleblower complaint, he was trying to somehow contain the Giuliani-Trump conspiracy to shake down Ukraine for information, the DNC servers, bespoke prosecutions, and so on.
In short, another classic case of someone going into this administration to try to do the right thing (by their lights), getting caught up trying to "manage" the madness, and in the end getting totally slimed by association with these guys. The End.
A bit more on my August interview with him here: cjr.org/first_person/u…
