White House budget official who could prove key impeachment witness to testify Saturday by alexnazaryan
The official, Mark Sandy, is currently the deputy associate director of the Office of Management and Budget, a White House agency that coordinates federal government spending. Sandy would have had a unique vantage point from which to observe any political machinations that went into withhold the Ukraine funds—and then releasing them.
If he appears on Capitol Hill on Saturday, Sandy will be the first OMB official to field questions from the impeachment panel, which wants to know how, and why, critical aid to a crucial ally was delayed for several months throughout the spring and summer of 2019, before being abruptly released in mid-September. That release, President Trump has said, came at the behest of Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who headed OMB in the administration of George W. Bush.
In a July 25 phone call with Zelensky, Trump directly asked the Ukrainian president for those investigations. That call became the basis of a whistleblower complaint that sparked the impeachment inquiry. It is not yet known what Sandy will say to impeachment investigators—or, for that matter, if he speaks to them at all. But some observers are predicting that should he describe how Vought and Duffey overrode the concerns of career staffers in order to keep the funds on hold, it would bolster Democrats’ argument that military aid was withheld from Ukraine only because Trump wanted to extract concessions from Zelensky.
Duffey is the former head of the Republican Party in Wisconsin. He was appointed to Trump’s national security transition team, despite not having any significant experience in the national security sector. He later moved to a high-ranking position within the Pentagon, eventually moving to OMB, where he would oversee national security programs.
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