Thread by @pleasesaveour

Two of Trump’s top envoys to Ukraine drafted a statement for the country’s new president in August that would have committed Ukraine to pursuing investigations sought by Mr. Trump into his political rivals
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nytimes.com/2019/10/03/us/…

The drafting of the statement is new evidence of how Trump’s fixation with Ukr and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories began driving senior diplomats to bend American foreign policy to the president’s political agenda in weeks after the July 25 call between the two leaders
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The statement was drafted by Gordon D. Sondland, the US ambassador to the EU, and Kurt Volker, then the State Department’s envoy to Ukraine

Volker disclosed a set of texts in September in which William B. Taylor Jr., the top American diplomat in Ukraine, alluded to
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Trump’s decision earlier in the summer to freeze a military aid package to the country. He told Sondland and Volker: “I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.”

The statement was written with the awareness of a top aide
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to the Ukr pres, as well as Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer and the de facto leader of a shadow campaign to push the Ukrainians to press ahead with investigations

The statement would have committed Ukraine to investigating the energy company Burisma, which had
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employed Hunter Biden, and it would have called for the Ukrainian gov to look into what Trump and his allies believe was interference by Ukrainians in the 2016 election in the US to benefit Hillary Clinton.

The idea behind the statement was to break the Ukrainians
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of their habit of promising American diplomats and leaders behind closed doors that they would look into matters and never follow through

It is unclear if the statement was delivered to Zelensky, but no statement was released publicly under his name. Around that time,
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the Ukrainian officials indicated to the Americans that they wanted to avoid becoming more deeply enmeshed in American politics.

The drafting of the statement, which came in the weeks after the July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelensky, was an effort to pacify Trump and
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Giuliani and normalize relations between the two countries as Ukraine faced continuing conflict with Russia. Sondland and Volker believed that Giuliani was “poisoning” Trump’s mind about Ukraine and that eliciting a public commitment from Zelensky to pursue the investigations
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would induce Trump to more fully support the new Ukrainian government

Giuliani said he was aware of the statement but that it was not written at his behest.

Giuliani said that the statement was being handled by Sondland and Volker, and that he was not sure if Trump
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was involved in it.

“I don’t have any information that would suggest that it was at his request, but I can’t tell you it wasn’t, either,” he said.

He said he thought that the statement was intended to be delivered as part of a series of announcements by Zelensky’s gov
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about the confirmation of new prosecutors and other officials.

💣 “He was supposed to do something, or say something, to assure everybody — meaning our people — that he was going to take serious action about corruption, I know that the investigations — which would be the
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collusion, the Burisma investigation — would be included in it, but it would have been part of an overall statement about dealing with corruption in an aggressive way.”

Rudy just threw Trump and himself under the bus