The Government Accountability Office (GAO), a nonpartisan U.S. Congressional watchdog, says the administration of President Donald Trump violated federal law by withholding security assistance to Ukraine.
The GAO said in a January 16 report that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) violated the law last year when it withheld the aid that had been appropriated by Congress – a key focal point of the impeachment proceedings into Trump.
The nine-page report, written by the agency’s general counsel, Thomas Armstrong, concluded that “the law does not permit the president to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law.”