The public impeachment hearings led by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) concluded last week, yet the entirely unclassified deposition testimony of a top official at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) regarding the temporarily withheld military aid to Ukraine was only released to the public on Tuesday of this week, five full days after the hearings ended.
That official’s testimony, like that of several others before him, substantially undermined the Democrats’ impeachment narrative against President Donald Trump, and Breitbart‘s John Nolte is now accusing Schiff of deliberately hiding the exculpatory evidence solely because it wasn’t helpful to his goal of increasing support for impeachment.
Exculpatory transcript
It was on Nov. 16, while the public hearings were still ongoing, that the joint committees held the secretive deposition of Deputy Associate Director for National Security Programs Mark Sandy, a long-serving career bureaucrat at OMB with no obvious partisan axe to grind.
A review of the transcript of Sandy’s testimony not only called into question some of the timelines of events Democrats and their media allies have promoted regarding the temporarily withheld aid to Ukraine but also provided the one and only reason why OMB was ordered to place a hold on that aid in the first place, and it was far from any of the nefarious reasons speculatively put forth by Democrats.
The reason for the hold on the aid — which Sandy learned about via an official email in early September — was President Trump’s concern that other European nations were not pitching in to provide sufficient aid to Ukraine.
In other words, it had nothing whatsoever to do with requested investigations of 2016 election meddling, corrupt energy firms, or former Vice President Joe Biden and his ne’er-do-well son, Hunter.
Inconvenient truths
As for the timeline of events, Sandy testified that rumors had first begun to circulate in mid-June of a potential hold being placed on the aid to Ukraine, a hold that actually came into being at some point in mid-July, prior to President Trump’s July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president that is at the heart of the impeachment charade.
The reason for the hold wasn’t made clear until September, even as a number of people at OMB inquired about it, and Sandy noted that the temporary hold was repeatedly extended for brief periods until it was eventually lifted, as everybody rightly assumed it ultimately would be.
Sandy also testified that at one point, his staffers had been instructed to provide detailed data on the amount of aid that other nations provided to Ukraine in comparison to what the U.S. taxpayers were providing, something that further solidified the stated reason for the hold and was completely in line with President Trump’s long-standing and oft-stated distaste for the way in which America was viewed as the world’s piggy bank in terms of foreign aid.
Strategy of secrecy
Breitbart’s Nolte wondered why this wholly unclassified deposition was held in secret and was not a part of the then-ongoing public hearings, as well as why was not disclosed until many days after the hearings had concluded.
His theory is that Schiff, confident as he likely was that the public hearings would successfully boost public support for impeachment, deliberately intended to keep Sandy’s exculpatory testimony hidden from view until after the expected public swing in favor of impeachment had fully set in. Upon its eventual release, he assumed, the biased media would downplay it or spin it as bad news — which they attempted to do regardless — and it would be lost in the shuffle of the Thanksgiving holiday.
Alas, Schiff’s impeachment hearings didn’t go quite as planned, and public support for impeachment plummeted instead of increased, and Sandy’s exculpatory testimony only makes it more clear that the whole impeachment sham has been rigged in Schiff’s favor against Trump from the very start.
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