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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 22, 2019)
OFF PAGE ONE Tuesday, October 22, 2019 East Oregonian A7 Trump viewed Ukraine as adversary, witnesses say LISA MASCARO AND MARY CLARE JALONICK Associated Press WASHINGTON — Behind closed doors, Pres- ident Donald Trump has made his views on Ukraine clear: “They tried to take me down.” The president, according to people familiar with testi- mony in the House impeach- ment investigation, sees the Eastern European ally, not Russia, as responsible for the interference in the 2016 elec- tion that was investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller. It’s a view denied by the intelligence community, at odds with U.S. foreign pol- icy and dismissed by many of Trump’s fellow Repub- licans. But Trump’s belief suggests the extent to which his approach to Ukraine — including his request, now central to impeachment, that the Ukraine president do him a “favor” and inves- tigate Democrats — was colored by a long-running, unproven conspiracy theory that has circulated online and in some corners of con- servative media. On Monday, Trump derided the impeachment probe anew as a “witch hunt,” insisting that he did nothing wrong in his phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. But those testifying in the impeachment inquiry, now entering its fifth week, are recalling that Trump’s views on Ukraine were seen as a problem by some in the administration. Some of those testify- ing recalled a May meeting at the White House when U.S. officials, just back from AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais President Donald Trump gestures while speakings during a Cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House on Monday in Washington. attending Zelenskiy’s inau- guration in Kyiv, briefed Trump. Ambassador to the Euro- pean Union Gordan Sond- land, special envoy Kurt Volker and other witnesses have described Trump as suspicious of Ukraine despite well-established American support for the fledgling democracy there. That’s according to pub- licly released transcripts, as well as people familiar with the private testimony to impeachment investigators. They were granted anonym- ity to discuss it. Several witnesses have testified that Trump believed Ukraine wanted to destroy his presidency. “President Trump was skeptical,” Sondland testi- fied, according to his written remarks. Sondland said that only later did he understand that Trump, by connecting the Ukrainians with his per- sonal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, was interested in probing the 2016 election as well as the family of his potential 2020 rival, Joe Biden. “It was apparent to all of us that the key to changing President Trump’s mind on Ukraine was Mr. Giuliani.” House Democrats launched the impeach- ment inquiry after a whis- tleblower filed a complaint that included Trump’s July call with Zelenskiy. The call was placed the day after Mueller testified to Con- gress and brought an end to the two-year Trump-Russia probe. “Our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it,” Trump told Zelenskiy, according to a rough transcript of the call released by the White House. “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowd- Strike,” Trump said. “The server, they say Ukraine has it.” Trump was airing the conspiracy-theory view, shared by Giuliani, that the security firm CrowdStrike, which was hired by the Democratic National Com- mittee to investigate the 2016 hack of its email, may have had ties to Ukraine. CrowdStrike determined in June 2016 that Russian agents had broken into the committee’s network and stolen emails that were subsequently published by WikiLeaks. The firm’s find- ings were confirmed by FBI investigators and helped lead to Mueller’s indict- ments of 12 individuals from Russia’s military intel- ligence agency. But the loose conspir- acy theory contends that the DNC email hack was a set-up, bolstered by fake computer records, designed to cast blame on Russia. Even the president’s Repub- lican allies have tried to dis- suade Trump from it. “I’ve never been a CrowdStrike fan; I mean this whole thing of a server,” said Republican Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina last week. Meadows, a confidant of Trump, said he’s sure Ukraine had some role in the U.S. election. But he views the search for the email server as farfetched. “I would not on my dime, send a private attorney look- ing for some server in a for- eign country,” Meadows told reporters. Perhaps contributing to the conspiracy theories sur- rounding CrowdStrike and the DNC is the fact that the FBI never took possession of the actual computer server that would have held the hacked emails. Instead, the FBI relied on the forensics provided by CrowdStrike. The FBI had “repeat- edly stressed” to the DNC its desire to have access to servers, former FBI Direc- tor James Comey testified at a March 2017 hearing before a House panel. But he acknowledged it is not unusual for the FBI to use such forensics in place of the actual hard drive during cyber investigations. Other Republicans have also tried to convince Trump it was not Ukraine that was involved. Trump’s former home- land security adviser, Tom Bossert, said Giuliani had done Trump a disservice by pushing the false story. “I am deeply frustrated with what he and the legal team is doing and repeat- ing that debunked theory to the president,” Bossert said in September on ABC. “It sticks in his mind when he hears it over and over again,” said Bossert, who also was an adviser to Presi- dent George W. Bush. “That conspiracy theory has got to go; they have to stop with that; it cannot continue to be repeated.” On the call, Trump went on to ask Zelenskiy to also look into Burisma, the Ukraine gas company with links to his 2020 presiden- tial rival, Joe Biden’s fam- ily. Biden’s son, Hunter, served on the board when the former vice president was the Obama adminis- tration’s main emissary to Ukraine. Last week, Trump’s act- ing chief of staff Mick Mul- vaney acknowledged that Trump essentially engaged in a quid pro quo in seeking Zelenskiy’s help in exchange for military aid the White House was withholding from Ukraine. Mulvaney said the request was not improper because Trump wanted help with the 2016 investigation rather than looking ahead to 2020. It is against the law to seek or receive help of value from a foreign entity in U.S. elections. Mulvaney later clarified his comments, saying, “The president never told me to withhold any money until the Ukrainians did anything related to the server.” Engineer: McBarron almost arrested over a faulty zipper Continued from Page A1 When McBarron went to school an hour south at the University of Dayton, he originally majored in phys- ics before his struggles in applied math caused his aca- demic advisor to suggest switching to geology. During high school and college, McBarron worked a series of odd jobs — car washer, Christmas tree lot salesman, movie theater usher, and bartender. When he caught on as a test subject for the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base Aeromedical Labora- tory in 1958, the work was a lot more exotic and much more grueling. To simulate the extreme conditions of space travel, McBarron was ordered to do tests like sitting in a hot box that could reach tempera- tures of 200 degrees or dip into an ice water tank that averaged minus-20 degrees. Staff photo by Kathy Aney Students try on an astronaut’s glove Monday morning at Pendleton High School during a presentation by retired NASA engineer Jim McBarron. McBarron did all this for $1.85 per hour, $3 per hour for hazardous tests, but he had found his career path. NASA offered him a job as an aerospace technolo- gist in 1961, changing his life trajectory. If he hadn’t joined NASA, McBarron told the audience he would likely take over his family’s restaurant, an Earthquake: Drop, cover and hold offer he declined once he found his passion for space engineering. While McBarron would go on to lead a distinguished career at NASA, it almost ended before it began. McBarron was working with a team of engineers on the space suit for Proj- ect Mercury, America’s first human spaceflight program, when they noticed a faulty zipper. McBarron acted quickly and sent the suit to NASA’s contractor to get it fixed, but when his boss found out that he did it without the proper authorization, he threatened to have McBarron arrested. “Every decision you make has a consequence,” he said as a word of advice to his young audience. McBarron never ended up in jail, and he contributed to the Apollo program and the International Space Sta- tion over the course of his 39-year career at NASA. Code: Time to crack down Continued from Page A1 Continued from Page A1 The drill typically involves three steps — drop, take cover and hold on — and only lasts from around 90 seconds to three minutes at most, simu- lating the time which an earthquake would shake the ground and struc- tures. Evacuation proto- cols would also be in place depending on a building’s seismic rating and age. While it seems like an easy concept to grasp, the point is to create muscle mem- ory so in the event of the real earthquake, shock and panic don’t set in. That’s especially import- ant for Oregon’s youth, and why Grogan and the state emergency agency were elated to see that more than 396,000 students practiced these techniques. “Oregon is doing a great job, not just at the govern- ment level, but the individ- ual and community level as well, in getting more peo- ple involved,” Grogan said. Some state agencies take these drills seriously because they have to be on the front lines of response should a major earthquake strike. The Oregon Depart- ment of Transportation, for example, rigorously prac- tices drop, cover and hold, as well as building evac- uation on a regular basis, according to spokesman Don Hamilton. “Everybody under- stands that when this earth- quake hits, it’s going to be a major job for all emer- gency service providers and transportation (work- ers) in the area,” Hamilton said. “It’s critical that we’re available to make sure that emergency supplies and medical assistance can get where it needs to go.” Early warnings While one-fifth of Ore- gonians were ducking for cover last week, research- ers at the University of Ore- gon continued their work to monitor the state’s early earthquake program called ShakeAlert. The system of 120 sensors from Grants Pass to Portland can detect shaking, characterize the quake and in seconds issue an alert to an affected area. Leland O’Driscoll, ShakeAlert project man- ager and seismic field tech- nician at the University of Oregon, oversees the state’s program. O’Driscoll explained that the system aims to improve human reaction to shaking caused by earthquakes to prevent injuries and deaths. “What we’re doing is going from a reaction of, ‘I feel shaking, I should pro- tect myself’ to an advanced notice that says, ‘It will be shaking, now I can calmly and coherently take pro- tective action,’” O’Driscoll said. For an example, say an earthquake strikes several miles off the Oregon Coast and is detected by Shake- Alert sensors. The Geo- logical Survey could issue a ShakeAlert that city offi- cials in Albany could use to warn residents up to 90 sec- onds before shaking begins. California’s Shake- Alert program actually went online last week, but O’Driscoll said Oregon needs another year to roll out its own. They’re hoping to bolster their number of sen- sors from 120 to around 250 spread throughout the Wil- lamette Valley and along the coast, O’Driscoll said. Portland’s Bureau of Emergency Management and Portland Fire & Res- cue recently partnered with ShakeAlert to install 10 sensors at each fire station to provide data in real-time to researchers at the Uni- versity of Oregon and the Geological Survey. “The reason we don’t roll it out now is we still find we need to educate the public on what this is,” he said. “We’re continuing to build that sensor network, so it’s functional in Oregon right now but it’s not, in our view, fully capable at elim- inating false alerts.” At 81, he still lends his expertise to NASA as a consultant on Project Arte- mis, NASA’s program to get Americans back on the moon by 2024. McBarron came to Pend- leton as a part of a tour of Eastern Oregon organized by Loftus, NASA, and the Pacific Power Foundation. The director of the Joseph Phillip Loftus Jr. Mobile Museum in Stayton, Loftus said the idea originated from a similar trip former NASA engineer Norman Chaffee made to Pendleton in 2017. Loftus said the hope is to do a trip to Eastern Oregon every other year. McBar- ron will visit La Grande and Baker City before con- cluding his trip in Wallowa County. Pendleton School Dis- trict Superintendent Chris Fritsch said the school invited students from Uma- tilla and Ukiah to partici- pate in the event. task force envision a proac- tive style of code enforce- ment, fueled by the installa- tion of a full-time equivalent code enforcement employee who patrols the county. At last week’s meeting, the group discussed the mer- its of housing that poten- tial employee in the plan- ning department or within the sheriff’s office, where code enforcement is currently being handled. Many voted in favor of a civilian employee with plan- ning — modeled after the code enforcement officer position in Pasco, Washing- ton — while Matlack cast a vote in favor of keeping the position in law enforcement. The task force discussed the financial realities of housing another full-time employee with the sheriff’s office, a move they stated would cost $92,500 yearly. Having a non-police code enforcement employee would cost an estimated $88,000 each year. According to Matlack, some people on the task force would prefer a plain-clothed code enforcement officer, who might come off as less intimidating to people. But in his eyes, having the posi- tion housed with the sheriff’s office would be like hitting two birds with one stone. “The other side of that claim is that when people are in uniform, they tend to be on better behavior,” he said. Matlack sees it as an opportunity to tackle other crimes. If the code-enforce- ment officer had police pow- ers, they could follow up on instances of potential drug use or theft while simultane- ously cracking down on the code violations. The task force is aiming to make a decision about the placement of the full-time employee and seek approval from county commissioners before the implementation of the 2020-21 fiscal budget. “We brought all those folks around the table, and talked about the purpose of code enforcement,” McLane said. “More questions need to be fleshed out over time.”
