House investigators plan to subpoena the records, texts, and testimony of the U.S. diplomat whom the Trump administration blocked from testifying Tuesday in the impeachment inquiry.
After Trump's Ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, declined to testify at the direction of the State Department, the chairs of three key House committees said they would subpoena the communications and texts that Sondland recovered and turned over to the State Department, according to Sondland's attorneys. Sondland, they said, received a voicemail from the State Department at 12:30 AM informing him that the Trump administration would not allow him to be deposed for the House impeachment inquiry.
"We consider this interference to be obstruction of the impeachment inquiry," wrote House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff, Oversight Chair Elijah Cummings, and Foreign Affairs Chair Eliot Engel.
There's a reason Trump and his allies, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, didn't want Sondland to testify—he knows too much.
"Text messages among senior State Department officials put Ambassador Sondland at the center of efforts to extract from the Ukrainians a pledge to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden and debunked conspiracy theories concerning the 2016 election in exchange for a White House visit the Ukrainian president desperately sought," Democrats noted in the background of their statement regarding Sondland's failure to appear.
Democrats charge that Sondland "routinely spoke" with Trump, including an exchange with Trump "a few minutes before" Trump had his July 25 conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
CNN's Gloria Borger also confirmed that Sondland called Trump in that mysterious five-hour gap between one diplomat saying it was "crazy" to withhold military assistance from Ukraine in exchange for political help and Sondland responding that Trump had been "crystal clear no quid pro quo's of any kind."