Concerning the commentary of Bill Davnie (Nov. 6, 2019), I offer the following comments:
Mr. Davnie exhorts us to be “grateful” for career diplomats. It's hard to understand why we should be, despite his long exposition of all the wonderful things that diplomats do and how they do it. My impression from his description was a lot of people (70,000 plus Department of State employees!) having lots of meetings and shuffling lots of paper for mostly useless purposes.
For example, Lt. Colonel Vindman, one of the star witnesses in the Schiff Impeachment Show Trial, is one of those employees and described his job duties in his recent deposition thusly:
“…over the course of…my tenure there…, the interagency, as per normal procedures, assembles under NSPM-4, the National Security Policy Memorandum 4, process to coordinate U.S. government policy. We, over the course of this past year, probably assembled easily a dozen times at my level, which is called a Sub Policy Coordinating Committee - and that’s myself and my counterparts at the Deputy Assistant Secretary level - to discuss our views on Ukraine.”
After droning on for nine paragraphs or so, Mr. Davnie finally gets to what he really wants us to know: President Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, went rogue and undermined congressional intent and approved U.S. policy “in pursuit of the financial and political interests of his clients”. Really? I don’t think all the evidence is in yet on what Mr. Giuliana was doing, or not doing, vis a’ vis Ukraine. When Mr. Davnie’s career bureaucrat buddies face cross-examination, we will know more about that.
We do have a much clearer understanding, however, of what Joe Biden did when he was Vice President. In fact, he bragged about it on camera! He threatened to withhold U.S. aid, authorized and directed to be provided by Congress, unless a certain prosecutor in Ukraine was immediately fired. That prosecutor was investigating a Ukraine natural gas company for corruption (Burisma) on whose board sat his son and who was pocketing at least $50,000 per month. After the prosecutor was fired, Ukraine got the money. What about that Mr. Davnie? Did you write a commentary about that? Did your vaunted colleagues at the state department blow the whistle on that?
Lt. Colonel Vindman was asked what he knew, and what he did, concerning Biden’s intervention that derailed the corruption investigation that threatened his son’s huge monthly income for doing nothing. The colonel responded that he did nothing and further explained that “I wasn’t going to ask questions”.
Or what about Hillary Clinton’s private, illegal, email server? Lots of those upstanding state department employees knew all about that. I didn’t hear any whistles blown exposing the blatant illegal conduct of Mrs. Clinton.
Once again, our fearless editor has demonstrated his poor editorial judgment by publishing this idiotic propaganda piece designed to fool us rubes into believing the leftists running the State Department are impartial people doing important, serious work. Give us a break!
