Kurt Volker, the State Department’s special envoy for Ukraine who got caught in the middle of the pressure campaign by President Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to find damaging information about Democrats, abruptly resigned his post on Friday.
Volker offered no public explanation, but a person informed about his decision said he concluded that it was impossible to be effective in his assignment given the developments of recent days.
His departure was the first resignation since revelations about Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine’s president to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and other Democrats.
The disclosures have triggered a full-blown House impeachment inquiry, and House leaders announced on Friday that they planned to interview Volker in a deposition on Thursday.
Volker, a widely respected former ambassador to NATO, served in the part-time, unpaid position of special envoy to help Ukraine resolve its armed confrontation with Russia-sponsored separatists.
He was among the government officials who found themselves in an awkward position because of the search for dirt on Democrats, reluctant to cross the president or Giuliani yet wary of getting drawn into politics outside their purview.
The unidentified intelligence official who filed the whistle-blower complaint that brought the president’s actions to light identified Volker as one of the officials trying to “contain the damage” by advising Ukrainians how to navigate Giuliani’s campaign.
Volker facilitated an entree for Giuliani with the newly elected government in Ukraine, acting not at the instruction of Trump or Secretary of State MikePompeo, but at the request of the Ukrainians, who were worried because Giuliani was seeking information about Biden and other Democrats and had denounced top Ukrainian officials as “enemies of the president.”
The Ukrainians were concerned about the impact of their relationship with the United States, their most important patron against Russia. Andriy Yermak, a close aide to President Volodymyr Zelensky, asked Volker in July to connect him with Giuliani, a former mayor of New York, so the Ukrainian government could hear out his issues.
Volker agreed to reach out to the former mayor to see if he would sit down with the Ukrainian official.
Volker then contacted Giuliani to ask if he would want to speak with Yermak, and the mayor agreed.
Volker and Giuliani had breakfast to discuss Ukraine.
“Mr. Mayor — really enjoyed breakfast this morning,” Volker wrote in a text later that day that Giuliani posted this week on Twitter.
Volker set up a conference call between Giuliani and Yermak, who then later met in person in Madrid, on Aug. 2.
Giuliani has seized on Volker’s call to him to assert that he was acting at the behest of the State Department.
He said he spoke with Volker eight times and displayed the texts on Thursday night on Laura Ingraham’s show on Fox News, calling on Volker to confirm that the department initiated contact.
“He should step forward and explain what he did,” Giuliani said on the show. “The whistle-blower falsely alleges that I was operating on my own. Well, I wasn’t operating on my own!”
Referring to Volker and Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, Giuliani added: “They basically knew everything I was doing. So, it was being done with the authorization and at the request — and then I have a final one in which they — there is a big ‘thank you’ about how my honest and straightforward discussion led to solving a problem in the relationship.”
Reacting to Volker’s resignation on Friday night, Giuliani said his release of the texts was not intended to get him “in trouble,” and he defended the special envoy’s role in facilitating the talks with Yermak.
“I was in the unique position to help them,” Giuliani said of the State Department, adding that he kept both Volker and Sondland apprised of the talks.
Just days after Giuliani’s breakfast with Volker and the follow-up phone call with Yermak, Trump spoke on the telephone with Zelensky.
After the Ukrainian president described his need for more American assistance against Russia, Trump asked him to “do us a favor, though” and look into Democrats.
Volker was not on that call, and he was neither shown a copy of the transcript reconstructed from the conversation nor told that the president mentioned Biden, according to one person informed about the series of events.
Volker participated in Trump’s meeting with Zelensky on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly session this week in his last official duty.
“Kurt was one of the good ones who went in to the administration to stave off disaster,” said Thomas Wright, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “They all have to speak out now about everything they know and let the chips fall where they may.”
Volker’s departure, which was first reported by The State Press, the student newspaper at Arizona State University, leaves the Trump administration with few senior officials versed in Ukraine’s struggles with Russia.