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Newly revealed communications between White House staffers and officials at the Pentagon are shedding additional light on the Ukraine scandaleven as the Senate prepares for President Donald Trumps trial following his impeachment by the House of Representatives last month. Just Security reported Thursday that Michael Duffey, a political appointee who oversees defense spending at the White House Office of Management and Budget, told Pentagon Comptroller Elaine McCusker in an August 30 email that he had clear direction from POTUS to continue to hold vital military aid that was supposed to be sent to Ukraine. That statement was one of a number of redacted lines in 300 pages of emails the administration released last month to the Center for Public Integrity after a court order in aFreedom of Information Act lawsuit. Just Security says it reviewed unredacted copies of the emails.

The emails obtained by Just Security also raise questions about Vice President Mike Pences role in Trumps efforts to pressure Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky to announce investigations of Trumps political enemies. Pence met with Zelensky on September 1. Prior to this meeting, Eric Chewning, chief of staff to acting Defense Secretary Mike Esper, told McCusker, in reference to the hold on Ukrainian aide: The Ukrainian PM speaks with VPOTUS on Tuesday. We expect the issue to get resolved then. (The email appears to misstate Zelenskys job; he is Ukraines president, not its prime minister.)

The emails dont say why officials thought Pence could resolve the matter. But Trump reportedly pushed Pence to urge Zelensky to take more aggressive action on corruption. It has since become clear that Trumps references to corruption in Ukraine were actually calls for investigations into Joe Biden and bogus allegations about Ukrainiansinterfering in the 2016 election to help Hillary Clinton. And Gordon Sondland, Trumps ambassador to the European Union, testified in November that he told Pence just before the vice presidents meeting with Zelensky that Ukraine would receive its stalled aid money only if it announced the investigations Trump sought. Pence, through an aide, has denied Sondlands account and has asserted he did not know that Trumps references to corruption related to Biden and the 2016 election. But the same day that Pence met with Zelensky, Sondland told a Zelensky aide, Andriy Yermak, that security assistance money would not be released until Zelensky agreed to announce an investigation related to Biden, according to Sondland and former White House national security official Tim Morrison. Pences office is resisting congressional calls for more information on the VPs role in Ukraine, refusing to declassify details of a September 18 call he had with Zelensky.

The Just Security account describes repeated emails from McCusker to Duffey and others warning that the ongoing hold might be illegala potential violation of a law requiring the executive branch to spend money as appropriated by Congress or to tell lawmakers why it refused to do so, which the administration did not do. Duffey enforced the hold by inserting a footnote in budget documents. It said in part that the pause in obligations will not preclude DODs timely execution of the final policy direction. By August 9, though, McCusker warned him in an email that the hold could prevent the Pentagon from transmitting the money before the end of the fiscal year on September 30 and pushed for changing the footnote to reflect that reality.

Yet in a December 11 letter to the Government Accountability Office, OMB General Counsel Mark Paoletta claimed that at no point during the pause in obligations did DOD [Office of General Counsel] indicate to OMB that, as a matter of law, the apportionments would prevent DOD from being able to obligate the funds before the end of the fiscal year. This seems misleading. McCusker, while not in DODs Office of General Counsel, had asked Duffey if OMB had cleared its actions with that office and had repeatedly raised concerns about the departments ability to pay out the funds. The Trump administration released the aid to Ukraine after a whistleblower exposed the the matter, though some of funds remain unpaid.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement Thursday that the newly revealed emails undermine efforts by the Senates Republican leadership to hold a trial for Trump without key documents or testimony from witnesses, including Duffey, White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, former national security adviser John Bolton, and Robert Blair, another top OMB official. Importantly, that Mr. Duffey said there was clear direction from POTUS to continue to hold only further implicates President Trump and underscores the need for the Senate to subpoena the witnesses and documents weve requested at the onset of a trial, Schumer said. The American people deserve a fair trial that gets to the truth, not a rigged process that enables a cover-up.

Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) are sparring with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has said hopes to acquit Trump after a brief, limited Senate trial. McConnell said he plans to work closely with the White House during the process and stated last month that he is not an impartial juror. Senate rules require members to pledge to do impartial justice at the outset of an impeachment trial.

Thursdays report is part of a stream of revelations that makes it clear the Trump administration is still sitting on a substantial amount of relevant information that has not been made available to Congress or the public. Trump and his backers say he did nothing wrong. So what are they hiding?

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Emails Reveal Clear Direction From POTUS on Ukraine Scandal - Mother Jones

SANIBEL ISLAND

Sanibels Best Homemade Ice Cream is hoping a scoop of its new, delectable desert starting on Friday afternoon can make an impact our eliminating our Southwest Florida water crisis.

Laurie Verme, who owns Sanibels Best Homemade Ice Cream, said water quality is near and dear to her heart. She is donating all the proceeds from the shops new ice cream, Dolphin Tracks, to Captains for Clean Water.

Verme has made trips to Tallahassee to support the non-profit, which advocates for the elimination of large-scale Lake Okeechobee discharges into the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie River Estuaries.

Our chamber, as well as our community, Verme said, have really stepped forward in going up to Washington.

Verme told WINK News that the launch on Friday, coinciding with a visit by Vice President Mike Pence, is a happy accident. She said it would be wonderful for him to stop by as he is a great supporter.

Gloria Garrett, a huge supporter of Captains for Clean Water, said the heart of the island depends on having clean water. She said clean water is vital to the economy. It affects the Everglades and healthy estuaries.

What Id like to say to Vice President Mike Pence, Verme said, is come on down come on down and have some dolphin tracks!

Read more:
Sanibel ice cream shop hopes to give message to visiting vice president - Wink News

I support President Donald John Trump, he is the only president who has done what he promised to do. Our economy is booming, unemployment is low. Now the Democrats want Trump and Vice President Mike Pence out of the White House so guess who becomes president if they are gone? An angry speaker of the house. What crime have Trump and Pence committed? None. Plus, what about Obama when he gave money to Iran or Hillary when she never sent support to our Embassy in Libya? Now it has come down the Democrat party who has become the Democrat National Socialist party. I support Trump and his administration 100 percent and I pray for him and his cabinet unlike speaker Pelosi. How could she say that as a Christian with such hate in her tone of voice and her demeanor? Sure no one is going to agree with the president 100 percent. Half the time I dont totally agree with people and elected officials in Des Moines, does that mean I dont pray for them? Of course not. The Bible instructs me to pray for everyone in authority. So if youre like me youll look past Trumps tweets and pray for him and also vote for him in November of this year and if you are tired of all the shenanigans the Democrats are playing, I invite you to come to the Republican caucus on Feb 3.

Richard Stimmel

Maquoketa

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Support the president and pray for him - The Gazette

Gov. Eric Holcomb last month joined a growing list of governors endorsing refugee resettlement in their states, rejecting an opportunity to close their doors to any of the 18,000 refugees the Trump administration will allow in 2020. An executive order requires state leaders to provide written consent for resettlement by Jan. 21.

Our long tradition of welcoming and helping to resettle refugees with support from our federal partners, shows the world the compassion of Hoosiers and our willingness to give others the ability to grow and prosper in the great state of Indiana, Holcomb wrote in a Dec. 13 letter.

The Indiana governoris among 30-pluswho have now issued letters in support of resettlement. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio has also sent a letter of consent. While16 governors have yet to respond to this month's deadline, none have specifically said they will reject refugees. Daniel Horowitz, writing for the Conservative Review, called out Holcomb and other GOP governors for quietly undermining Trump's promise to shut down the refugee resettlement racket.

Indiana resettled 865 refugees in fiscal 2019, according to federal data. That was close to 3% of all refugees resettled in the U.S.

In Fort Wayne, Catholic Charitiesoversees resettlement. In the last fiscal year, the agency assisted 208 refugees in resettling here: 176 Burmese, 14 from the Democratic Republic of Congo, 10 from Russia, five from Ukraine and three from Burundi.

The requirement for written consent to continue participatingis also required by local government, which the Allen County commissioners also have submitted. In Marion County, Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett submitted a letter of consent.

In 2015, Gov. Mike Pence shut the door on Syrian refugees fleeing violence in their war-torn country. Hoosiers spoke loudly against his heartless response to a humanitarian crisis. In enthusiastically approving refugee resettlement, his successor better reflects our values.

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The Hoosier heart | Opinion - Fort Wayne Journal Gazette

ZOOLOGISTS USE a mild-sounding termdisplacementsfor moments when a strong, young mountain gorilla confronts the dominant male in his group. Behind the jargon lies a brutal reality: a drawn-out, bloody conflict looms. Chinas leaders similarly use prim, technical-sounding terms to describe their confrontation with America. In closed-door briefings and chats with Western bigwigs, they chide the country led by President Donald Trump for responding to Chinas rise with strategic anxiety (ie, fear). They insist that Chinas only crime is to have grown so rapidly.

However, behind that chilly, self-serving analysis lurks a series of angrier, more primal calculations about relative heft. These began before Mr Trump came to office, and will continue even if an initial trade truce is made formal (Mr Trump says he will sign one on January 15th). They will endure long after November, when American voters next choose a president. China has spent decades growing stronger and richer. It already senses that only one countryAmericacan defy Chinese ambitions with any confidence. Its leaders have a bleak worldview in which might makes right, and it is a fairy tale to pretend that universal rules bind all powers equally. Increasingly, they can imagine a day when even America ducks a direct challenge, and the global balance of power shifts for ever.

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China does not seek a fight now. Like a powerful juvenile warily sizing up a silverback gorillahis age and status marked by the silvery fur on his back, and his mighty muscles and teethChina knows that America can inflict terrible damage, as it wields still-unrivalled economic, financial and military might. But officials and scholars in Beijing no longer bother to conceal their impatience and scorn for an America they viewwith a perilous mix of hubris and paranoiaas old, tired and clumsy.

When addressing foreigners, Chinas leaders talk piously of their commitment to free trade, market opening and globalisation. Their domestic actions betray a different agenda: namely, to make Chinese companies dominant in high-value manufacturing sectors, and to hasten the day when they no longer depend on America for vital technologies. Long before Mr Trump was elected, China pursued such policies as indigenous innovation and civil-military fusion. Since Mr Trumps tariff war with China began in 2018, President Xi Jinping and his underlings have accelerated efforts to make China self-sufficient in high-value sectors, creating supply chains that are autonomous, controllable, safe and effective, in Mr Xis words.

For decades Chinese officials have seen bilateral relations swinging, pendulum-like, between periods of hostility (notably during American elections, when candidates promise to shield workers from unfair Chinese competition) and a profit-driven willingness to engage. Now Chinese and American insiders talk of a downward spiral. Both countries have become quick to assume the other has malign motives. Where relations were once balanced between co-operation and competition, and Chinas rise seemed on balance to benefit both countries, Chinese officials accuse Mr Trump and his team of seeking co-operation only when it serves a coercive, short-sighted America First agenda. They do not see this changing soonfar from it. They view relations with sour fatalism, and America as a sore loser.

Chinese experts talk wistfully of the scores of dialogues and mechanisms that used to underpin co-operation with Americas government before Mr Trump scrapped most of them. But, when pressed, they struggle to explain what a useful agenda for future talks might be. Instead, they prefer to count the ways in which America is to blame for todays tensions. In Chinas telling, American companies became accustomed to making fat profits in China, but see Chinese rivals catching them up and potentially setting global standards for future technologies. Now American businesses are crying cheat, and demanding that trade rules designed for the rich world be used to keep China down.

Populist election victories in the West are ascribed to domestic failures in the countries concerned. Chinese officials say that America failed to educate workers, allowed inequalities to yawn and never built social safety-nets to help victims of globalisationand is now scapegoating China for those ills.

In public, Chinese officials call Mr Trumps tariffs self-defeating and stress their countrys economic resilience. In private, they are both less confident and less focused on tariffs than they pretend. They are less bullish because economic sentiment in China was fragile before the trade war. Worse, the tariff feud has planted seeds of uncertainty about the country in the heads of every chief executive pondering where to place a new factory.

Chinese officials are less focused on tariffs than they maintain in public because they believe Mr Trump will lose his leverage over time, as he frets about the impact on American farm states and other places where he needs votes. Chinese officials fear other forms of competition more than any tariff fight. In Beijing leaders do worry about the consequences of a technology war with America or of an all-out struggle for global influence.

It is not just a figure of speech when officials in Beijing divide foreign grandees into friends of China, and anti-China forces. Chinas rulers take an intensely personalised view of foreign relations. Communist Party bosses have learned over decades that individual foreign envoys, CEOs and political leaders can be turned into reliable advocates for China with the right blend of high-level access and reasoned appeals, financial incentives and flattery.

But Chinese officials feel sadly short of influential friends in the corridors of American power. Within the Trump administration, only the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, is seen as representing the old, familiar American approach of putting profit first when engaging with China. There are firms that rely heavily on China as a supply base and market, from Apple to General Motors, which sells more cars in China than in America. But the profit motive itself is under suspicion in the new, populist Washington, where even Republican members of Congress urge businessmen to weigh Americas national interests in dealings with China, and not just their shareholders dividends.

After much study, leaders in Beijing have decided that Mr Trump is neither a friend of China nor a traditional anti-China hawk, in the sense of someone who disapproves of the partys policies on grounds of principle. In essence, Mr Trump is seen as a friend of Mr Trumpa man whose self-interest is his only reliable guiding instinct. Famous scholars at elite universities in China who have studied America for years tut-tut about how that makes Mr Trump unpredictable and liable to break any promise he makes to Mr Xi. More cynical figures, including some close to the national security bureaucracy, unblushingly root for Mr Trump to win re-election in 2020, so that he can continue to upset allies and cast into doubt decades-long American security guarantees in Asia. Their great fear is that Mr Trump may be captured by sincerely hawkish aides. That includes economic nationalists with trade portfolios, like Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro. But unique animus is aimed at the two Mikes: the vice-president, Mike Pence, and the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo. In Beijing both are called anti-communist, evangelical Christian zealots, with ambitions to succeed Mr Trump in 2024.

China is sure it is in a worldwide influence war, in which its propaganda about Xinjiang, Hong Kong or Huawei is pitted against an anti-China story. Mr Pence and Mr Pompeo are semi-openly reviled as crazy, ignorant warriors in that conflict. They are accused of slandering China over its iron-fisted rule in the western region of Xinjiang, and of egging on pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, whom China calls terrorists and separatists. Mr Pence and Mr Pompeo are also condemned for leading a diplomatic charge to warn smaller countries to beware of Chinese loans and technology (the results have been mixed). Chinese officials have not missed the factor that links all successful efforts at American arm-twisting. Countries have proved most tractable when America has real co-operation to offer or to withhold, whether that involves Poland and its yearning for a permanent garrison of American troops to act as a tripwire against Russian aggression, or Brexit Britain dreaming of a free-trade deal with Mr Trump. Where American envoys merely nag countries to shun Chinas investments without offering concrete alternatives, they have fared less well. As one Chinese insider crows, America under Mr Trump looks self-isolating.

Chinese officials who favour Mr Trumps re-election hope that he will feel free in his second term to disavow hawks around him and pursue transactional policies. They fret that a Democratic president may place more weight on human, labour and environmental rights.

All this fulminating does not mean that China seeks to match the hawks in Washington and drag their two countries into a new cold war, in which the world is divided into rival camps. China believes that most other nations do not want to choose between it and America, at least for now. China is playing for time, as it builds its strength and tries to construct alternatives to such potent tools of American power as the dollar-denominated financial system. Chinas interest in developing its own blockchain technology and international payment systems is in part a sign of its fear of American sanctions that would expel Chinese banks from American markets.

Some Chinese voices say their country has not lost interest in an offer China made to Mr Trumps predecessors, involving a new model of great-power relations: code for carving the world into spheres of geopolitical influence, and an end to American carping about Chinas ways. Others stress Chinas right to help write the rules of globalisation. That would be reasonable, were it not that Chinas aim is to make the world safe for techno-authoritarian state capitalism. Chinese officials want to avoid confronting America for now. But few silverbacks gracefully retire. Increasingly, America is seen as an obstacle to Chinas rise. That means trouble looms.

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China views Donald Trumps America with growing distrust and scorn - The Economist