White House violated the law by freezing Ukraine aid, GAO says

The White House budget office violated the law when it froze U.S. military aid to Ukraine, the Government Accountability Office concluded in a new report.

President Donald Trump ordered the hold on the critical security assistance in July, a slew of senior White House officials testified to House impeachment investigators late last year. It was a move that coincided with an effort by the president and his allies to pressure Ukraine to investigate Trump’s Democratic rivals.

“Faithful execution of the law does not permit the president to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law,” the GAO wrote in an eight-page report released on Thursday.

Trump’s decision to withhold nearly $400 million in military aid, which he reversed in September after House investigators began probing the move, is at the heart of the articles of impeachment the House passed last month, and it will be a central focus in the Senate’s impeachment trial that begins laterThursday.
The report undercuts an oft-stated defense of Trump’s decision to hold the aid back: that it was a lawful exercise of the president’s authority.

“I have never seen such a damning report in my life,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee. “I mean, this is a nonpartisan thing. I read it twice. ... To have something saying this is such a total disrespect of the law. It’s unprecedented.” 

Leahy said the conclusion “screams” for the need to force impeachment testimony from White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also said it “reinforces, again, the need for documents and eye witnesses in the Senate. You see this more and more and more in all of this — this tangled web to deceive that the administration is engaged in.” 

But Republicans were unmoved by the findings, either claiming that they haven’t read GAO’s analysis or that it doesn’t mean much for the Senate impeachment trial. 

“I wouldn’t think that a GAO opinion, per se, would change anything,” said Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.). “But we’ll listen to it, we’ll look at it and we’ll evaluate it.“


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