The White House continues to assure the public that American tax dollars aren’t being misspent in Ukraine, but Marjorie Taylor Greene isn’t buying it at face value.
The firebrand Republican lawmaker from Georgia is reintroducing a bill to force an audit of the tens of billions of dollars that have been sent to Kiev in support of Ukraine’s war effort against Russia.
“It’s going to force Congress to give the American people an audit,” she told Tucker Carlson on his Fox News program. “And that is exactly what the American people need, an audit of Ukraine, because we have no idea where all this money’s going.”
Greene’s push for accountability comes as the Russia-Ukraine conflict enters its one-year anniversary, and as the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is rocked by accusations of corruption.
“I’m introducing this resolution, and I’m looking forward to seeing my Republican colleagues support it,” Greene added.
She had introduced the same resolution in the previous Congress and had the support of every Republican in the House.
But that was when the GOP was in the minority. Now that they’re in a position of power to actually be able to pass the resolution, Greene says she expects some House Republicans to vote against it.
Greene’s push for accountability came as Samantha Power, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), said Ukraine is making progress toward eliminating corruption and that financial assistance from the U.S. is not being misused.
“Up until this point, we don’t have any evidence that U.S. assistance is being misused or misspent but, again, the key is not resting on anybody’s good will or virtue,” Power replied in a town hall when asked about corruption in Ukraine. “It’s checks and balances, the rule of law, the integrity of officials.”
The USAID chief further remarked that the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) began a new program to assist Ukraine in expanding its auditing. She went on to say that the U.S. does not hand out money or things like health-worker wages or disability support except on the basis of reimbursing expenditures for which receipts are presented.
Notably, Power was recently in Hungary in what may have been efforts to lay the groundwork for regime change in the country whose prime minister, Viktor Orban, has been critical of Zelensky.
As The New American reported, Zelensky removed several top members of his government last month amid revelations of corruption. This included governors from several front-line regions.
On the same day that Kirill Tymoshenko, the deputy head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, submitted his resignation, he was joined by Deputy Defense Minister Vyacheslav Shapovalov and Deputy Prosecutor General Alexey Symonenko.
Meanwhile, the regional heads who were forced out of their positions were Valentin Reznichenko, governor of Dnepropetrovsk; Alexander Starukh, governor of Zaporozhye; Yaroslav Yanushevich, governor of Kherson; and Dmitry Zhivitsky, governor of Sumy.
Shapovalov resigned after he was accused of buying food for the military at allegedly inflated prices. Vasiliy Lozinsky, deputy minister for the Development of Communities, Territories, and Infrastructure, was detained in a raid organized by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU).
And Pavel Khalimon, a member of parliament who leads Zelensky’s Servant of the People party in the legislature, is embroiled in a scandal involving the purchase of a $273,000 estate.
Despite these revelations, Washington is pushing ahead with more support for the Ukrainian war effort, and on Friday the Pentagon announced an additional $2 billion worth of weapons to be sent to Kiev.
As Fox News notes:
In a Friday statement, the Pentagon outlined the armaments being provided in the new package, including 155 mm artillery ammunition, mine clearing equipment, rocket system munitions, electronic warfare detection equipment, High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems ammunition, and more.
… [Secretary of Defense Lloyd] Austin boasted of U.S. spending on support of Ukraine over the past year, reflecting on $32 billion worth of assistance that includes “more than 1,600 Stinger anti-aircraft systems; more than 8,500 Javelin anti-armor systems; 232 howitzers and more than two million rounds of artillery ammunition; 38 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems and ammunition; a Patriot air-defense battery; eight National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems and other key air-defense capabilities; 109 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles; 31 Abrams tanks; and 90 Stryker Armored Personnel Carriers.”
Although for the moment Biden has ruled out sending F-16 fighter jets, defense manufacturer Lockheed Martin has plans to “ramp up” production of F-16 war planes as Kiev continues to plead for fighter jets from Western nations.
“The problem is that the war mongers and our supreme leaders in the Biden administration are so clueless,” Greene told Tucker Carlson. “They are so stupid, and they are so disconnected with what the American people want, that they are literally going to lead us into World War III.”
