According to Gordon Sondland in his impeachment inquiry testimony Wednesday afternoon, he only had one formal meeting with acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, “and it had nothing to do with Ukraine.” Rather, “most of our communication were the stream of emails which others were on generally, and I may have seen him at the White House casually and said hello and kept in touch.”
Former National Security Council official Fiona Hill’s closed-door deposition also suggests that those casual contacts might have amounted to more than Sondland implied. According to Hill, Sondland “was certainly meeting with Mulvaney on a regular basis.” In fact, according to Hill, “I could be wrong, but there were often times when he said he’d been in to see the president when other staff indicated to me that they did not believe that he had”—instead, those were times he had been seeing Mulvaney.
In other words, the “formal” in “formal meeting” is doing a lot of work when it comes to how much Sondland was talking to the guy who did a press briefing in which he asserted that of course Trump had withheld aid from Ukraine to get the investigations he wanted, and, “Get over it. There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy.”