Page:Impeachment of Donald J. Trump, President of the United States — Report of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives.pdf/110

 withheld military and security assistance, and demanded these two investigations due to his "deepseated, genuine, and reasonable skepticism of Ukraine" for "pervasive corruption." This after-thefact contention is not credible.

To start, it is inconsistent with President Trump's own prior conduct respecting Ukraine. Under the previous Ukrainian administration of President Petro Poroshenko, which suffered from serious concerns about corruption issues, President Trump approved $510 million in aid in 2017 and $359 million in 2018; he also approved the sale of Javelin missiles to Ukraine in December 2017. It was not until 2019, after Ukraine elected President Zelensky, who ran on a strong anti-corruption platform, that President Trump suddenly punished Ukraine by refusing a White House meeting and military and security assistance. If his goal were to fight corruption, President Trump would have withheld assistance from a corrupt leader and provided it to a reformer. Instead, he did the opposite, just a few months after former Vice President Biden announced his candidacy.

Nor did President Trump take any other steps one would expect to see if his concern were corruption. He was given extensive talking points about corruption for his April 21 and July 25 calls, yet ignored them both times and did not mention corruption on either call. President Trump's staff uniformly agreed that President Zelensky was a credible anti-corruption reformer, yet President Trump suspended a White House meeting that his entire policy team agreed would lend support and cache to President Zelensky's anti-corruption agenda in Ukraine. He withheld military and security assistance without any stated explanation, yet his own Department of Defense, in coordination with the Secretary of State, had certified in May that Ukraine satisfied all anti-corruption benchmarks necessary for that assistance to be released. He continued to withhold the assistance, yet the White House never