Updated Dec. 21, 2019
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Late on Dec. 20, the Department of Justice sent a batch of documents to the Center for Public Integrity showing communications between the White House and the Pentagon regarding U.S. military aid to Ukraine.
The documents were delivered under court order after Public Integrity won a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Defense Department, seeking details on President Donald Trump’s delay of the aid after he pressed Ukraine’s prime minister to open investigations on the 2016 presidential election and former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.
As was the case with a similar document dump Dec. 12, large swaths of the 146 pages Public Integrity received were blacked out. Nonetheless, the documents contained nuggets that shed light on the episode that led to Trump’s impeachment Dec. 18.
Two emails jumped out at us. A June 19 message from a White House Office of Management and Budget official queried the Pentagon’s chief financial officer about the aid. “The President has asked about this,” he wrote, including an article that had appeared that day in the Washington Examiner discussing the funds. That’s the first indication of the White House taking a focused interest in military aid to Ukraine.
And a July 25 email to the Pentagon from the same official shows how quickly OMB acted to block the aid – within 91 minutes – of the end of the now-infamous call between Trump and Ukraine’s Prime Minister Vlodymyr Zelensky that morning. The email, sent at 11:04 a.m., instructs the Pentagon to “please hold off on” distribution of the funds and says that “given the sensitive nature of the request” the information should be “closely held.”
Join in on Twitter using the hashtag #UkraineDocs to let us know if you find something we should look at more closely. Questions or tips? Email us at tips@publicintegrity.org.
You can read our main story with a summary of what was contained in the documents here.
https://publicintegrity.org/national-security/digging-ukrainedocs-omb-foia/
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