November 8, 2019

Top NSC Official Says Mick Mulvaney Was Key Player in Trump-Ukraine Quid Pro Quo

AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

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On Friday afternoon, the House committees conducting the impeachment inquiry released the deposition of Fiona Hill, the former top Russia staffer on the White House National Security Council. The transcript is hundreds of pages long and covers many key areas of the Trump-Ukraine scandal. 

Our own David Corn has been poring over it and has some instant take-aways. As he notes, Hill’s testimony is significant because it depicts acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney as central to the administration’s efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate Trump’s domestic political enemies. Hill testified that Rudy Giuliani, who is Trump’s lawyer, was helping Russian disinformation efforts by spreading the debunked (but Trump-favored) conspiracy theory that Ukraine intervened in the 2016 US election. She also told lawmakers that Giuliani and his now-indicted business associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, mounted a campaign to oust US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch to advance their own business interests—and that she suspected Giuliani might have been involved in criminal activity. And Hill described how she has become the target of conspiracy theories that have led to death threats. More from David: 

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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