On Thursday, U.S. Ambassador Gordon Sondland will take a seat in front of the House impeachment inquiry. He’s not the first to sit in that chair, but there’s a big difference between Sondland and former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch or former adviser Fiona Hill. Yovanovitch and Hill lost their positions expressly because they were standing in the way of the corrupt scheme that was being pressed by Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani. Sondland was deeply embedded in that scheme as one of those driving it, moving the pieces behind the scenes to make Trump’s extortion of Ukraine possible. Sondland’s testimony will put him in the position of spilling everything he was told and every action he took, or he can hold back—and ride this crash right down to the ground.
Sondland is not a career diplomat or an experienced politician. He’s a hotel magnate who grabbed the role of ambassador to the European Union in the most effective manner—by greasing Trump’s palm with a $1 million payment to his inaugural slush fund. As a series of released texts between members of Trump’s State Department team revealed, he played a central role in making it clear to Ukrainian officials that, if they wanted anything from the United States, the first step was to announce an investigation into the company where Joe Biden’s son sat on the board. No actual investigation was required, but the announcement was so key that Sondland even offered to provide a script for the event.
Early leaks concerning Sondland’s opening statement suggest that his intention would be to plead ignorance, to claim that he was pushing for an investigation, but didn’t really understand the nature of what he was asking for, or that it meant extorting an entire nation at risk to create political hay for Trump. However, that too-dumb-to-be-corrupt claim seems to have been blown away in the last few days as more details have come in. Not only has former charge d’affaires William Taylor been called to testify about phone conversations with Sondland in which they apparently discussed exactly the details of the extortion scheme, but the centrality of Sondland’s role was also underlined in Monday’s testimony from former White House adviser Fiona Hill.
And that included testimony that reportedly blows away Sondland’s claims of ignorance.
While the text messages may not include Sondland explicitly spelling out the details of what he wanted when he was asking those Ukrainian officials to launch “an investigation,” Hill’s testimony apparently included a scene in which Sondland followed the Ukrainians out of a meeting to make it absolutely clear that “investigation” meant investigation into Hunter Biden.
Sondland can either cling to his claims that he wasn’t part of the scheme launched by Trump and Giuliani to use a position of power for personal political and financial gain, or he can spill the details of that scheme and possibly keep himself from wearing an orange jumpsuit. Possibly.
In any case, Sondland’s testimony could represent the final collapse of any remaining effort to protect the details of what Trump and Giuliani were doing, and could lead to even more discoveries about the true extent of the scam.