美国国家公共电台 NPR Diplomat Kurt Volker Caught Up In Whirlwind Of Impeachment Inquiry（在线收听）

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Well, today is a first in the impeachment inquiry. The first State Department official will testify before three congressional committees behind closed doors. It is Kurt Volker, who is U.S. special envoy for Ukraine. He resigned last week after being named in a whistleblower complaint about President Trump's dealings with Ukraine. So who is Volcker? What role did he play in all this? And what might his deposition reveal?

Let's turn to NPR diplomatic correspondent Michele Kelemen, who's with us this morning. Hi, Michele.

MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: Hi there, David.

GREENE: OK. What should we know about Kurt Volker?

KELEMEN: Well, Volker's a former foreign service officer. He served briefly as U.S. ambassador to NATO at the end of the Bush administration - George W. Bush that is. He's since led the McCain Institute in Washington and has consulted for a lobbying firm. And he was tapped two years ago for this part-time job of being special representative for Ukraine negotiations.

The job was really to promote negotiations to end a war in eastern Ukraine and to push back against Russian aggression. But he ended up doing much more than that, really. He oversaw a shift in policy to start sending defensive weapons to Ukraine. That's something he advocated before. And now he's caught up in this political battle back home.

GREENE: Probably not exactly where he expected to be when he came into this job. So help me work through what role he played here. According to the whistleblower complaint, it looks like as President Trump was interested in getting Ukrainian officials to investigate Joe Biden's son, Volker may have put Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, in touch with Ukrainian government officials. Is that right?

KELEMEN: Yeah. That's right. It was Volker, along with the ambassador to the European Union - another Trump appointee - who are facilitating these contacts. And now, let me just set the scene for you...

GREENE: Yeah.

KELEMEN: ...About what's happening in Ukraine. You had a comedian and a political novice, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, winning elections. That surprised a lot of people. At the same time, you have Rudy Giuliani trying to dig up dirt about Joe Biden's son and looking into the origins of the Robert Mueller investigation. You have a president who's fixated on that and has a negative view of Ukraine.

And then you have Volker, who seems to be trying to help this new Ukrainian leader get his footing. So he puts Giuliani in touch with aides to the Ukrainian president. The whistleblower, as you mentioned, painted it as Volker trying to help the Ukrainian government navigate - that was the word that was used - navigate the president's demands. The whistleblower also said that Volker was in Kyiv a day after that very well-known phone call that Trump had with Zelenskiy.

GREENE: So a lot for lawmakers to question Volker about. And Volker's one of the State Department officials, we should say, whose deposition Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tried to delay. So now this deposition is happening. Do you have a sense for exactly what questions lawmakers are going to be focusing on?

KELEMEN: Well, I think they need to get a - kind of an accurate picture of what he was trying to do there, what he knew about Giuliani's ask and what he knows about the president's decision to hold up military aid to Ukraine during this time - you know, was the president using that aid as leverage to pressure Ukraine to dig up dirt? - and also just what the State Department's role in all of this was.

Secretary of State Pompeo says U.S. policy was clear. That's what his team was focused on. But there seems to have been this sort of separate side policy happening at the same time.

GREENE: Let me ask you, Michele, about another State Department involvement here. The State Department's inspector general gave some documents to Congress yesterday. Giuliani admitted on CNN some of the documents came from him. What exactly were these documents?

KELEMEN: Well, the staffers and the one lawmaker who were there said they were shown a package of documents containing debunked conspiracy theories about the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. You know, this smear campaign was certainly getting a lot of play in the right-wing media at the times, and none of that's really a surprise.

But since Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador, was abruptly fired in May, this provides some context to that. And she's also going to be one of the people expected to speak to the Hill committees on this impeachment inquiry.

GREENE: All right. NPR diplomatic correspondent Michele Kelemen for us this morning. Thanks, Michele.

KELEMEN: Thank you.