Special counsel Robert Mueller submitted a question to President Donald Trump about the Republican National Convention’s policy on arming the Ukrainian government, according to reports.
Last week, the president responded to Mueller’s questions, which are also said to have included inquiries about whether he had prior knowledge of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting and if political advisor Roger Stone provided an advanced warning of WikiLeaks releasing the emails of top Hillary Clinton presidential campaign officials.
While establishment media outlets have repeatedly reported that Republicans changed their convention policy regarding Ukraine to soften its stance on Russia, a closer look at the amended confirms the party’s hardline stance against the Kremlin.
The Washington Examiner‘s Byron York reported in November 2017:
The original draft of the platform — it has never been released publicly, but an insider shared the relevant passages with me — had strong language on Russia, and in particular on Russian aggression in Ukraine. Warning of “a resurgent Russia occupying parts of Ukraine and threatening neighbors from the Baltic to the Caucasus,” the platform vowed to increase U.S. pressure on a “reckless” Russia.
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When the platform committee met before the GOP convention in Cleveland, one delegate out of the 100 on the committee — a Texas political activist named Diana Denman — proposed an amendment. Denman, who came to the convention as a Ted Cruz delegate but later switched her support to Trump, was interested because she had traveled to Ukraine as an international election observer in 1998 and has ever since “kept an eye on the emerging democracies,” she told me in a conversation last March.
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At the behest of the Trump campaign, the platform committee took out the throat-clearing introduction and changed Denman’s reference from “lethal defensive weapons” for Ukraine to a pledge to provide “appropriate assistance to the armed forces of Ukraine.” They left intact Denman’s language on NATO, and on continued and possibly tougher sanctions on Russia.
In the end, the Trump campaign approved a passage vowing to bolster sanctions against Russia “until Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity are fully restored.”
“We also support providing appropriate assistance to the armed forces of Ukraine and greater coordination with NATO defense planning,” the passage continued. The strongly worded amendment was ultimately approved by the committee. Investigators are believed be investigating the platform tweak as the convention was organized by Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who worked as a “principal political consultant” for the Party of Regions, a pro-Russia Ukrainian party.
ABC News reports that President told the special counsel that, best to his recollection, he has no knowledge of the change in the platform’s language. In a 2016 interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, Trump said of the platform tweak, “I wasn’t involved in that. Honestly, I was not involved.”
Moreover, ABC News reported Trump’s legal team found Mueller’s questions to be “pretty obvious,” while the president’s responses were “consistent to what he’s been saying publicly.”
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