The Washington Post reported Sunday that White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney scrambled to come up with a reason that President Donald Trump was holding military aid allocated by Congress to Ukraine. It's the second document dump in the past few days that reveal the corruption inside Trump's White House.
The documents cited by The Post suggests "that there may have been -- at least what Democrats will look at, of a cover-up," said NBC News reporter Josh Lederman. "Not only there were problematic interactions why the aid was held up to Ukraine, but in the fact that in the immediate aftermath, as the aid was being withheld that lawyers and others in the White House were trying to backfill legal explanations for why that happened. And we know from the testimony of several witnesses who is testified before the House Intelligence Committee there were legal concerns that folks involved -- officials had with whether the White House could unilaterally decide not to give aid already appropriated by Congress."
He went on to say that more of these documents are likely to reveal how much effort was happening behind the scenes to justify what Trump was working to do.
Hill columnist Niall Stanage explained that this report asks an important question about a "consciousness of guilt," due to the sense that officials and lawyers were working to cover-up for the president.
It poses the question of whether "people are trying to, frankly, cover their asses in all of this, once it has gone wrong, once a whistle-blower has come forward. That, to me, seems the central issue here and the issue that has the potential to cause real problems not just for President Trump but for people like Mick Mulvaney and others in and around who have tried to minimize their own involvement in this story, almost, 'Ukraine? Where is that?' attitude that may become untenable."
Watch the full panel discussion below:
