Ukraine Was Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Mick Mulvaney, President Trump’s acting chief of staff, said the quiet part out loud last week regarding the administration’s dealings with Ukraine.

“We do that all the time with foreign policy,” he told reporters after one pointed he’d just admitted to a quid pro quo when he explained the U.S. delivering military aid was contingent on investigations relevant to Trump’s political agenda. After the press conference concluded, Mulvaney attempted to walk back the comments by flatly denying he’d said what everyone heard (and recorded) him say flatly hours earlier. Trump reportedly was not pleased, and the palace whisperers have been a-whispering about Mulvaney’s possible demise.

But several developments this week pulled back the curtain a bit further on what Mulvaney was talking about when he said the Trump administration makes moves like it did in Ukraine “all the time.” On Wednesday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to hand over records of his contacts with Turkish officials as part of an inquiry into whether the Trump administration meddled in U.S. criminal investigation into Halkbank, a Turkish state-owned bank. “It’s clear that the Trump administration has become a one stop shop for foreign leaders looking to do shady business deals and engage in corruption,” Wyden wrote on Twitter. “This must end, and I won’t stop until I have answers for the American people.”

Link to tweet

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Wyden’s inquiry follows a Bloomberg report that Trump told Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in April that he would have Mnuchin and Attorney General William Barr “handle” an ongoing investigation into Halkbank’s alleged fraud, money laundering, and plans to illegally disregard U.S. sanctions on Iran. Nothing happened until last week, when an undated indictment was unsealed just as Trump imposed economic sanctions on Turkey in response to their military incursion into northern Syria. As Bloomberg points out, the fact that the indictment was undated could mean it was deliberately withheld, at Trump’s direction, until it was convenient for charged to be filed.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/ukraine-turkey-corruption-mulvaney-903441/