This brings me to the topic of todays proceedings. I would like to recap my recollection of the timeline in which these events played out. I testified about all of this at length in my deposition. In july, i became aware of a hold being placed on obligation of the State Departments military financing or fmf and dods usai fund. In meetings i heard the president directed the Office Of Management And Budget to hold the funds because of his concern for corruption in ukraine. Let me say at the outset i have never discussed this or any other matter with the president and never heard directly from him about this matter. At a senior level meeting i attended july 26th chaired by National Council Security Leadership as in all other interagency meetings on this topic of which i was wear, the
national Security Community expressed unanimous support for resuming funding in the u. S. National security interests. At the July 26th Meeting there was also a discussion how ukrainian anticorruption efforts
reaches the point at which it does not have sufficient time to obligate all the funding by the end of the fiscal year, there were only two ways to discontinue obligation of usai, a president directed recision or dod directed reprogramming action, either of which would need to be notified to congress. i never heard either was being pursued. second wine was in communication with the dod assistance implementing community to try to understand exactly when they would reach the point at which they would be unable to obligate all the funds by the end of the fiscal year. i received a series of updates. in a serptember 5th update i an other senior leaders were informed over 100 million could not be obligated by september 30th and, third, i was advocating with levels with the president to explain why
the funding on contract. that contract starting the process. those contracts will be fulfilled fourth quarter perhaps or whatever it was? sir, i have to say, i m a policy official, i am not a contracting expert. but my understanding is we will be able to make up for lost time in the contracting process. fantastic. you go through three or four steps you went through because you disagreed with the hold being placed on the assistance and i certainly agree with that. did you get any kind of criticism with the folks you dealt with because you were going against omb s direction for putting a hold on that? did you get criticized for that? absolutely not. my entire chain of command was supportive of advocating for removing the hold on the funds? you weren t restricted on full throating advocating getting this hold lifted, were you? no, sir. i faced no restrictions.
directed the omb to withhold for concerns of ukraine. i served a year in iraq. it was important and i think it s something the army always does, as i have seen, we don t want to deliver aid or assistance if it s going to some corrupt or being delivered in some corrupt way, in other words, if we re going to build a medical treatment facility for the iraqis, we want to make sure we re not getting charged 10 times as much. we are concerned in general when we re delivering funds through the dod, is that correct? yes, sir. i think that s a normal thing to want to be concerned about. we would do that in iraq and especially if we re providing payment for something. i just want to go through a few things with you because multiple witnesses have testified that the action to provide javelins
the conditions we had requested of them, and congress had appropriate the funds, is that not the case? ma am, i and my dod colleagues advocated strenuously for the lease of these funds because of their national security importance. basically, the entire interests of the department of defense and state department were consistently supportive of releasing the funds. everyone was mystified as to why the funds had been withheld and everyone s running around trying to get an answer and you re getting kind of obtuse responses, saying, it now what we see is that president zelensky gets elected in april. the expectation is that vice president pence is going to attend the inauguration in september and then the president pulls the carpet out from under him in terms of him going and then he proceeds in june or july