Hold on---the story will change
From the WSJ this afternoon:
WASHINGTON—A top White House official said President Trump’s decision to hold up aid to Ukraine this summer was tied to his demand that Kyiv investigate events related to the 2016 U.S. election, the first time the White House has acknowledged a link between the withheld aid and probes that Mr. Trump was seeking.
Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said that Mr. Trump’s concerns about alleged corruption in Ukraine—including an unfounded suspicion the president has expressed that the hacked Democratic National Committee server has since been hidden in Ukraine—were partly responsible for Mr. Trump’s order to hold nearly $400 million in aid to Ukraine in July.
“We do that all of the time with foreign policy,” Mr. Mulvaney said, referring to the decision to withhold aid out of corruption concerns. “The look back to what happened in 2016 certainly was part of the thing that he was worried about in corruption with that nation. And that is absolutely appropriate.”
The president has repeatedly said that the driving force behind his decision to hold up the aid was that he felt European nations weren’t doing enough to help Ukraine, a concern that Mr. Mulvaney repeated on Thursday. The Europeans are “really, really stingy when it comes to lethal aid,” Mr. Mulvaney said. “Did [the president] also mention to me in passing the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely. No question about that. That’s it, and that’s why we held up the money.”
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” ---Sir Winston Churchill
"Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all." ---John W. Gardner
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ---C. S. Lewis