Pompeo Heads to Ukraine With Bolton Book Rocking Senate Trial

(Bloomberg) -- Secretary of State Michael Pompeo travels to Ukraine this week to persuade the country that U.S. support remains undiminished in the wake of the impeachment saga. President Donald Trump’s continued hostility toward Kyiv -- and Pompeo’s own recent comments -- make that a harder sell.

Pompeo will meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other senior officials during a day of meetings on Friday following his arrival on Jan. 30. The top U.S. diplomat will “highlight U.S. support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” the State Department said. He’ll also go to the U.K. -- where a key decision on using Chinese 5G technology upset the U.S. this week -- as well as Belarus, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

The trip begins Wednesday in London, where Pompeo will hear directly about Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s decision on technology built by Huawei Technologies Co. Pompeo and other American officials say the company’s equipment can be used for espionage -- a charge it denies. The U.K. announced Tuesday it believes it could work with Huawei on some technology while keeping it out of the most sensitive parts of its 5G mobile networks.

“We’ll evaluate what the United Kingdom did,” Pompeo told reporters on his plane en route to London on Wednesday. “But our view is we should have Western systems with Western rules and American information should only pass across a trusted network.”

But it’s the Ukraine visit, which Pompeo earlier canceled following an attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, that will generate the greatest focus. The visit will be clouded by questions surrounding the U.S. commitment to Ukraine given Trump’s continued insistence that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interferred in the 2016 election.

Pompeo will be the highest-ranking administration official to travel to Ukraine since Trump’s July 25 call with Zelenskiy evolved into the impeachment debacle. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, whose inquiries and lobbying prompted the U.S. to withdraw former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch from Ukraine, was there in December.

Another Ukraine bombshell dropped on Sunday night: in a forthcoming book, former National Security Adviser John Bolton says Trump wanted to freeze $391 million in aid to Ukraine until its government helped with investigations into his political rivals. That claim comes as senators begin debate on whether to call witnesses such as Bolton to testify in Trump’s impeachment trial.

The strength of U.S. support for Ukraine, caught in a deadly border conflict with Russia, has also been undercut by Pompeo’s own words. In an expletive-filled exchange with a National Public Radio reporter last week, Pompeo asked derisively if she thought Americans really cared about Ukraine, according to the outlet.

That prompted former Ukraine envoy Bill Taylor -- who was handpicked by Pompeo last year but emerged as a key witness for Democrats in the House impeachment hearings -- to write an essay in the New York Times outlining the reasons why they should.

At stake in the impeachment trial is whether the president withheld support in an effort to press for a probe into the family of former Vice President Joe Biden, a potential opponent in the 2020 election.

Hundreds of hours of debate and testimony in the impeachment saga haven’t clarified the true nature of current U.S. policy toward Ukraine. Senior officials in Kyiv may still have reason to question whether the Trump administration sees their nation primarily as a fledgling democracy and bulwark against Russian aggression, or just a pawn in a political effort to attack Democrats before the 2020 elections.

Pompeo and other officials say Ukraine -- which has been in conflict with Russia since Russian forces invaded Crimea in 2014 -- is a national security priority and point to the delivery of almost $400 million in aid as proof.

But critics says the actions of Trump and his personal lawyer outside normal diplomatic channels suggest all they cared about was obtaining political dirt.

Pompeo will have to navigate the divide between official and unofficial U.S. policy without upsetting Trump or providing more fodder to the president’s critics.

Here’s the Story on Trump, Ukraine and Impeachment: QuickTake

Pompeo has stonewalled and scoffed at questions from reporters about his role in Ukraine policy, including his eventual acceptance of the demands to oust Yovanovitch. Many State Department employees have been frustrated that Pompeo -- who often boasts that he’s put the “swagger” back in the demoralized department he inherited -- has repeatedly failed to offer explicit support for Yovanovitch, Taylor or other career officials pulled into the impeachment vortex.

“I’ve defended every single person on this team,” Pompeo told NPR in the Jan. 24 interview that prompted his outburst. “I’ve done what’s right for every single person on this team.”

(Updates to add Pompeo comments in fourth paragraph. An earlier version of this story corrected the sixth paragraph to say Giuliani has traveled to Ukraine once in recent months.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Nick Wadhams in Washington at nwadhams@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Bill Faries at wfaries@bloomberg.net, John Harney

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