revolver | August 16, 2020
One of the most frustrating features of the Trump Administration is its tendency to hire, and even promote, personnel who are either indifferent or actively opposed to President Trump and the America First agenda he ran on in 2016.
Although the Administration remains crawling with such subversives, saboteurs, and so-called “Never Trumpers,” one especially interesting case is State Department employee George Kent.
George Kent was a star witness at the Trump impeachment hearings, in which he described Trump’s actions in Ukraine and the United States as “injurious to the rule of law.”
Highlights of his testimony include defending fellow star impeachment witnesses Marie Yovanovitch, Fiona Hill, and Lt. Col. Vindman, and accusing the President’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, of conducting a “campaign of lies.” Perhaps most damningly, Kent directly attacked President Trump on precisely the issue at question in the impeachment trial when he gave a second-hand description of President Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinsky.
Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was so unusual that a National Security Council official — Lt. Col. Alex Vindman, who also has testified for the inquiry — didn’t want to get into the details with Kent. That call is now at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.
“It was different than any read-out call that I had received,” Kent told investigators. “He felt — I could hear it in his voice and his hesitancy that he felt uncomfortable. He actually said that he could not share the majority of what was discussed because of the very sensitive nature of what was discussed.”
Kent told investigators that, based on his conversations with other senior American diplomats, Gordon Sondland relayed that Trump “wanted nothing less than President Zelensky to go to microphone [sic] and say investigations, Biden, and Clinton.” [Politico ]
Unlike his former boss and star impeachment witness Yovanovitch, or his fellow impeachment witnessses Lt. Colonel Vindman and William Taylor, George Kent was not fired from his position within the Trump Administration. Far from being fired, Kent was promoted within the Trump Administration’s State Department subsequent to his impeachment testimony against the President.
George Kent, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, testifying as an impeachment witness.
That Kent not only kept his job but was promoted after providing such impeachment testimony is a surprising and lamentable fact, especially given the President’s strong and largely successful commitment to clean house in the aftermath of impeachment proceedings in which many State Department officials connected with Ukraine and Eastern Europe testified as witnesses against the President.
That a key impeachment witness against the President not only remains within the Trump Administration, but was actually promoted, is remarkable enough. He should be removed from his position just like his colleagues and fellow impeachment witnesses Yovanovitch, Vindman, and Taylor.
But once one takes a look at what George Kent’s job actually is at the State Department, the story becomes far more suggestive—even explosive. Kent just happens to be Deputy Assistant Secretary in the European and Eurasian Bureau. This bureau is generally known as the State Department hub for so-called “Color Revolutions,” through which the State Department, together with covert agencies and a constellation of allied NGOs influence, and at times overturn, elections in foreign countries. Indeed, one former senior state department official has told Revolver News that Kent is a “color revolution expert” — a designation that has been corroborated to Revolver by two current senior State Department sources.
Prior to his current role, Kent served as Deputy Chief of Mission in Kyiv, Ukraine (2015-18), working directly under the ousted star-impeachment witness Ambassador Yovanovitch. Prior to this, Kent was working as a “deputy political counselor” in Ukraine during the infamous “Orange Revolution” — arguably the most famous of the State Department and NGO-facilitated “Color Revolutions.” In essence, the Orange Revolution refers to a continuous barrage of protests, mass demonstrations, and other acts of civil disobedience in Ukraine in response to the contested election of Russia aligned Viktor Yanukovych, who defeated the Western-backed Viktor Yushchenko.
What is relevant here is not whether Yanukovych rigged the election, or whether he would have been a better ruler for Ukraine. What is relevant is that the State Department’s preferred candidate did not win, and the State Department, with the help of its constellation of friendly NGOs, helped to facilitate the overthrow of Yanukovych by contesting the legitimacy of the election, organizing mass protests and acts of civil disobedience, and leveraging media contacts to ensure favorable coverage to their agenda in the Western press — all tactics eerily similar to those used against President Trump beginning the day after he was elected.
Of course, the principal figure associated with this Orange Revolution in the US Government is none other than Victoria Nuland, who served as President Obama’s point person on Russia during the Color Revolution in Ukraine.
Nuland was a year into her role as Obama’s assistant secretary for Europe. She had been in Kiev, frantically working behind the scenes to put in place a new governing coalition in Ukraine as it teetered on the brink of revolution against its Russia-backed leader, Viktor Yanukovych. [Politico ]
Nuland took the extraordinary step of personally speaking to the mass of protesters organized against the Russian-backed President Yanukovych.
Nuland’s highly symbolic appearance in the square came a day after Secretary of State John Kerry issued a strong statement, expressing the United States’ “disgust with the decision of Ukrainian authorities to meet the peaceful protest … with riot police…” [CBS News]
“Peaceful protest” sounds mighty familiar, doesn’t it? That’s because organizing mass demonstrations against a target government and criticizing and provoking that target government into cracking down on said protests is part and parcel of the Color Revolution playbook.
Careful observers of recent events will note that it is no coincidence that this is precisely the playbook being run right now in Belarus.
Indeed, the entire constellation of State Department-aligned and Atlanticist-aligned NGOs have been questioning in advance the legitimacy of the newly-elected Lukashenko, who won decisively with over 80 percent of the vote, compared to his rival, who received less than 10 percent.
These same State Department and NGO-aligned groups have been encouraging mass protests against Lukashenko. Perhaps most notably, they’ve referred to the demonstrators specifically as “peaceful protestors,” and used any attempts to control the riots as a pretext to further undermine the legitimacy of the target government. … Full article