President Trump has claimed that he only blocked military aid to Ukraine in order to pressure that country to crack down on corruption. But his administration has repeatedly tried to slash billions from anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine and around the world.
The Trump administration has tried to frame the president’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate the Bidens and the 2016 election as an anti-corruption effort. Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told Fox News on Sunday that the primary reason the administration held up nearly $400 million in military aid “was the rampant corruption in Ukraine.” Trump similarly defended his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by insisting he was only concerned about corruption in the country.
“It's very important to talk about corruption. If you don't talk about corruption, why would you give money to a country that you think is corrupt?" Trump told reporters last month, before adding, “what Biden did was wrong.” There is in fact no evidence that former Vice President Joe Biden or his son Hunter did anything illegal in Ukraine.
If stamping out corruption in Ukraine was an administration priority, the administration’s budget office did not get the memo. Trump’s annual budget requests to Congress have repeatedly sought steep cuts to anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine and other countries.
The Trump administration has sought to cut the International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement program, whose goals include “helping U.S. partners address threats to U.S. interests by building resilience and promoting reform in the justice and law enforcement sectors through support to new institutions and specialized offices, such as Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau and Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office,” according to White House budget documents obtained by The Washington Post .
Trump tried to slash the program’s funding to Ukraine to $13 million, but the idea was rejected by Congress, which approved $30 million, according to The Post. Trump’s 2020 budget proposal includes a similar cut, though lawmakers are unlikely to go along.
The administration also sought to cut more than $2 billion from the Economic Support and Development Fund, which aims to tackle overseas corruption, among other things. The administration specifically sought to slash the program’s funds for Ukraine from $250 million to $145 million.
The White House told The Post that the cuts to anti-corruption programs were a byproduct of Trump’s aim to slash spending overseas, not a targeted effort.
“The president has consistently sought across-the-board cuts to foreign aid, and has proposed more cuts in his budgets than any other president in history,” said Rachael Semmel, a spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget. “He has also strongly encouraged other countries to contribute their own efforts and resources to their defense and reform efforts.”
The repeated attempts to slash anti-corruption funding, and funding for Ukraine in particular, stand in stark contrast to Trump’s self-professed concern about corruption in that country.
“This is about corruption, and this is not about politics,” Trump told reporters earlier this month. “This is about corruption. And if you look and you read our Constitution and many other things, we — I have an obligation to look at corruption. I have an actual obligation and a duty.”
Anti-corruption advocates said that claim is contradicted by his own policies.
"That just doesn't comport with anything that's gone before in his administration," Alexandra Wrage, the president of anti-bribery group TRACE, told NPR . "To claim that this is springing from some heartfelt concern about international corruption just doesn't hold water."
Among Trump’s first moves in office was to squash transparency efforts aimed at international oil and gas companies. The administration has also limited the enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits companies from paying bribes to foreign officials, The New York Law Journal reported.
"It's ironic to hear President Trump talk about his work fighting against corruption, because he essentially shut down these very clear-cut initiatives that have been endorsed the world over, that are not radical by any stretch of the imagination," Oxfam America’s Isabel Munilla told NPR.
With Trump facing his own allegations of corruption for mixing his presidency with his personal financial interests, experts say it isn’t just his policies that send the message that the United States is no longer interested in policing corruption.
"The president's willingness to do this, plus the United States public's willingness to tolerate this, is the greatest harm that's coming out of this administration," Andy Spalding, a University of Richmond professor who specializes in international anti-corruption law, told NPR. "That's the loudest and clearest signal that we're sending to the world right now."
BreakfastSammy on October 25th, 2019 at 12:25 UTC »
We all know he withheld aid to get them to fabricate dirt on Biden. It's not even a mystery anymore.
Spencerforhire83 on October 25th, 2019 at 12:05 UTC »
The Impeachment inquiry is revealing more and more that Trump blatantly violated the law in his pressure on Ukraine. He withheld funding that had been approved for no reason other than to force that country into serving him politically for his re-election campaign going into 2020. That is flat out ILLEGAL and everyone knows it. And Just to Note, witholding federal funding is Trumps Favorite leverage Tactic
Running out the clock on foreign aid — Acting White House budget director Russ Vought and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney presented Trump with a proposal last month to freeze more than $4 billion in foreign aid by tying up the funds in the last days of the fiscal year
Diverting Homeland Security cash — Besides the national emergency declaration the president handed down earlier this year, his administration has also quietly transferred hundreds of millions of dollars to help with immigration enforcement. This summer, the Department of Homeland Security informed Congress it is diverting $271 million — including $155 million in federal disaster aid — to beef up funding for its immigration efforts
Slow-walking State Department funds — Despite abandoning the idea of yanking back foreign aid as the fiscal year draws to a close on Sept. 30, the Trump administration is still keeping State Department spending on a short leash. Initially, OMB said that cash could only be spent at a daily rate of 2 percent, more recently shifting to a weekly rate that varies in amount.
Shifting money to the border wall — The president notched a victory this summer when the Supreme Court allowed his administration to continue taking money from other accounts to build the border wall. This involved taking money for infrastructure repair, and school buildings on military bases, more than 400 Million.
Dipping into National Parks fees — During the five-week government shutdown earlier this year, the Trump administration siphoned cash from National Park Service fees to keep services going as the president held the line on demanding border wall funding. From the beginning, lawmakers warned that the move was out of bounds. And now the government’s own watchdog has ruled that the administration violated federal laws with that money grab.
un0m on October 25th, 2019 at 10:07 UTC »
Trump is incapable of not lying.