Former Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert said he was "deeply disturbed" by Trump's Ukraine phone call. Photo / Tom Brenner, New York Times
Former Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert said he was "deeply disturbed" by Trump's Ukraine phone call. Photo / Tom Brenner, New York Times
President Donald Trump's first homeland security adviser said Sunday that he was "deeply disturbed" by Trump's effort to pressure a foreign leader to investigate his political rival, while Democrats moved forward with their rapidly evolving impeachment inquiry into the president.
The comments by Thomas P. Bossert, who served Trump ashomeland security adviser from 2017 to 2018 until being forced out when John Bolton became national security adviser, amounted to a rare break with a president who prizes loyalty above all else. But Bossert tempered them, saying the central allegation against Trump — that he withheld military aid from Ukraine to advance his political interests — had not yet been proved.
"It is a bad day and a bad week for this president and for this country if he is asking for political dirt on an opponent," he said on the ABC program 'This Week.' "But it looks to me like the other matter that's far from proven is whether he was doing anything to abuse his power and withhold aid in order to solicit such a thing."
He also said another request Trump made to the Ukrainian president — that Ukraine investigate a US cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike, and the location of a Democratic National Committee server — was based on a conspiracy theory that had been "completely debunked."
That theory, prominent on the far right, holds that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that hacked into the server and intervened in the 2016 presidential election. But Bossert emphasised that US intelligence officials concluded that Russia was behind the hacking of the server, and he took the president's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to task for spreading the theory.
"At this point I am deeply frustrated with what he and the legal team is doing and repeating that debunked theory to the president," Bossert said. "It sticks in his mind when he hears it over and over again."
President Donald Trump pushed the leader of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden. Photo / AP
The comments came as the inquiry into the president rushed ahead at a dizzying pace. The Sunday talk shows — a staple of life in official Washington — were choked with lawmakers and other officials, even as Congress is on a two-week recess and most members are back in their home districts.
Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said a whistleblower whose complaint rocked Washington last week would testify "very soon."
Schiff, a former prosecutor who is the de facto chief of the inquiry, also issued a pointed warning to Trump and the White House, who have a history of stonewalling Congress and refusing to turn over witnesses and records. "If they're going to obstruct, then they are going to increase the likelihood that Congress may feel it necessary to move forward with an article of obstruction," he said on "This Week."
As Republicans struggled to defend the president Sunday, Bossert's remarks offered a hint of cracks in the Republicans' armor. A handful of Republicans, including Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah and Ben Sasse of Nebraska, have also said they were troubled by Trump's effort to push the leader of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.
The inquiry centres on what amounts to a shadow foreign policy in Ukraine by the president and Giuliani. Central to the complaint by a whistleblower was a July 25 telephone call between Trump and President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine, at a time when the White House was withholding military aid to Ukraine.
A summary transcript of the call, released last week by the White House, shows that Trump asked Zelenskiy to "do me a favour" by investigating corruption in Ukraine.
Trump later brought Biden into the conversation, urging Zelenskiy to have a prosecutor look into Biden and his son Hunter, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company when Joe Biden was vice president. The younger Biden's work has raised conflict of interest questions, but a former Ukrainian prosecutor said he found no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe Biden or his son.
In his complaint, which the inspector general for the intelligence community deemed credible, the whistleblower said the White House had tried to "lock down" all records of the call. Current and former White House officials have since confirmed that Trump used a secure system — intended for highly classified material — to store transcripts of that call and others with world leaders, even those that are not highly classified.
Democrats are accusing the White House of a cover-up, but Republicans have concentrated on another aspect of the call: Trump's insistence that Ukraine investigate leaks about his 2016 campaign. Bossert called the situation "a mess," and warned the president that if he did not end his fixation on what happened in the 2016 election, it would "bring him down."
Trump has long been suspicious of people in the federal bureaucracy — the so-called deep state — and the impeachment inquiry appears to be exacerbating the president's fears that his own administration is conspiring against him. Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to the president, complained Sunday of leakers who seek to destroy the president.
"If I don't invite the right people, the meeting will leak, if I don't say the right thing, they'll go to the Hill," Miller said, appearing on "Fox News Sunday." "They've been doing this continuously for nearly three years."
Republicans have had a tough time defending Trump, and have mostly been trying to redirect the conversation to insinuate that Joe Biden engaged in wrongdoing. Rep. Steve Scalise, the No. 2 Republican in the House, repeatedly changed the subject Sunday when Chuck Todd, the moderator of NBC's "Meet the Press," pressed him on whether he believed a summary transcript of the Ukraine call merited further investigation.
"Well, they've been investigating President Trump for two years, making way for baseless allegations," Scalise finally said. "They're investigating everything."
