As Joy Reid explained it this morning, Volker traveled to Kiev the day after Trump’s now-infamous phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in order to “guide the Ukraine officials on how to handle Trump’s demands” to dig up dirt on Joe Biden’s son.

But Volker appears to have been one of the few good guys in Trump World.. Reid’s guest, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Evelyn Farkas, said she doesn’t know Volker’s exact involvement in Trump's Ukraine scandal but she unequivocally vouched for his integrity:

I will say that he is an outstanding, upstanding professional, consummate professional and I actually believe what the whistleblower wrote was that he was trying to do damage control. That is what I know of the man. I mean he cares about American democracy and he cares about Ukrainian democracy and I think understanding — I don’t know whether Ambassador Volker knew the context of the conversation, the context within which he was jumping in to talk to the Ukrainians but clearly he knew that Rudy Giuliani was up to no good and he was trying to help the Ukrainians because, as you know, President Trump says to him, “Do me a favor,” and the poor guy he’s not going to say, no, I’m not going to do you a favor because he needs the almost $400 million of military assistance for the hot war he’s fighting.
So, he’s stuck. He has to kind of do something, right? And I think that probably what Volker wanted to do was try to help the Ukrainian president not get in hot water with our president, not get in hot water with the law and certainly not interfere with American democracy.

According to The New York Times, which also describes Volker as “widely respected,” Volker “spent much of the year trying to bring Mr. Trump together with Mr. Zelensky to bolster the government elected in April.” Volker resigned yesterday because he thinks it’s “impossible to be effective in his assignment given the developments of recent days,” according to the Times’ source.

In other words, Volker is no Trump puppet. He is also scheduled to appear before Congress next week. He obviously knows a lot about the Ukraine situation and his resignation suggests he’s willing to talk about it.