The impeachment depositions tell a story about how diplomacy in the national interest became distorted into deal-making in the personal & political interest of Donald Trump

Margaret Taylor, Benjamin Wittes, The Story the Impeachment Depositions Tell, Lawfare, November 12, 2019.

In fact, the voluminous pages of the impeachment depositions tell a number of stories. One is about Ukraine itself, as seen through the eyes of the American diplomats and policy analysts who interface with the country: its struggle to defend itself against Russia, its battle with corruption, and its potential for renewal under new political leadership and an electorate that is demanding change. There are a variety of more personal stories as well, stories of public servants with literally decades of service trying to do their jobs under extremely difficult circumstances.

For present purposes, the relevant story—the one on which we will focus—concerns how the president’s personal lawyer influenced Donald Trump’s views on Ukraine and pursued the president’s personal and political goals in that country outside of the regular channels of government. It is a story about how the institutions and actors within the U.S. government struggled to deal with the president’s pursuing his inappropriate objectives, fueled by phony disinformation they all rejected, through an outside actor. And it is a story about how this deviation from the normal policy process ultimately corrupted interactions with a foreign government, leading to extortionate demands of the Ukrainians that actors within the U.S. government regarded as highly inappropriate and actors in Congress regard as impeachable.

The story these depositions tell has countless details, many of them fascinating, but it has four major components.

First, the transcripts show how Rudy Giuliani pursued objectives in Ukraine for the benefit of his business partners, as well as the political interests of his client, President Trump. These activities lead to the president being fed bad information over a long period of time and they ultimately result in the meritless dismissal of Yovanovitch, as well as to a concerted attack on Deputy Secretary of State George Kent.

Second, against the backdrop of the election of a new president in Ukraine, the transcripts show the development of an irregular channel for achieving Trump’s objectives in that country—a channel that was not always playing by the usual rules of diplomacy or bureaucratic lines of communication. The transcripts show the members of both the regular and irregular channels trying to figure out what was really going on and how to navigate the unprecedented situation of Giuliani’s influence on Trump, in order to help the new Ukrainian president solidify a relationship with the United States—a relationship that is crucial for Ukraine’s continued existence as a fully independent sovereign country.

Third, in this broader context, the transcripts tell a specific story of the development of conditionality regarding a White House meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. What began as a mere hostility on the part of Trump toward Ukraine and an unsubstantiated conviction that the Ukrainians had interfered in the 2016 election, came to involve demands to investigate that theory. And it came as well to involve demands that the Ukrainians investigate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and his connection to the Ukrainian natural gas company, Burisma, on whose board the younger Biden sat. Those demands, over the course of the summer, came to be linked to the desire of the new Ukrainian government for a White House meeting between Zelensky and Trump.

Finally, the transcripts tell a related story of how the provision of military assistance to Ukraine similarly came to be conditioned on U.S. demands—because what Ukraine ultimately needs is U.S. support in an ongoing military conflict with a more powerful neighbor that is occupying its territory. The narrative is ultimately one of how an irregular actor’s behavior—circumventing the normal policy process and feeding bad information and conspiracy theories to a president—led to that president demanding political smears of an embattled, struggling democracy as a condition of U.S. support.