The White House wants to undercut the accounts of the witnesses who have testified in the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, giving the statements about President Trump’s contacts with Ukraine.
According to the White House, the testimonies of top Defense official Laura Cooper as well as Catherine Croft and Christopher Anderson “were filled with hearsay”.
Democrats had released the transcripts of their testimonies on Monday.
The White House claims that these were “based on second, third, and fourth hand information,” stating that none of the witnesses were on the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The White House was in particular interested in the claims made by Cooper, the deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, who expressed her dismay over the summer’s delay of nearly $400 million in U.S. military aid to Ukraine, painting a portrait of a Pentagon doing battle with the White House over the release of funding deemed “vital” to national security.
“The conversation with Ambassador Volker because it related to the security assistance needing to be lifted and the importance of that, and he was relating conversations he had had with Ukraine officials. It could have been my inference, yes, a very strong inference that there was some knowledge on the part of the Ukrainians,” Cooper testified.
The White House is disagrees and claims her statements are unfounded.
“Cooper’s comments about when Ukraine knew about the aid being withheld were conjecture based on information she heard from others,” the talking points memo reads. “Cooper’s conjecture about when Ukraine knew about the aid being withheld was based on hearsay – and even then she couldn’t recall specifics.”
The White House also claimed that Cooper “testified that she wasn’t on the call with Zelensky and doesn’t have direct knowledge about the call.”
The White House hammered the point that Taylor in his testimony said Ukraine did not know the aid was being withheld until late August, despite him testifying that it was “my clear understanding” that the aid was contingent on Zelensky pursuing an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden, one of Trump’s 2020 political rivals.
However, Croft challenged this claim when she told the White House investigators that Kyiv knew the aid was being withheld earlier than previously known.
She also mentioned that officials at the Ukrainian Embassy approached her two separate times to privately inquire about the decision to withhold aid, stating that these contacts occurred sometime after July 18 and before August 28, when Politico reported the hold.
“They found out very early on or much earlier than I expected them to,” she told investigators on Oct. 30.
In regards of Anderson, who was Croft’s predecessor, the White House also noted he was not on the July 25 phone call.
But the memo sought to twist Anderson’s words, claiming he said “the issue of investigations never came up in discussions over Zelensky coming to the White House.”
Anderson testified that while the specific investigations were not explicitly identified in July 18 meeting with Taylor, who was talking about “the need to avoid specific investigations,” the former Volker deputy testified that he was aware that Giuliani was pushing Ukraine to initiate these two investigations.
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