U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland is expected to testify before the House impeachment inquiry on Thursday. Sondland has already been revealed as one of the “three amigos” put in position to direct the Ukraine scam. He’s had a starring role in the text messages showing how Ukrainian officials were being steered into announcing an investigation into Joe Biden. And his claims to ignorance about what was happening have already been blown by other testimony. So it’s not surprising that the professionals in the State Department and the White House saw Sondland not just as a know-nothing dilettante, but as a threat to national interest.
The New York Times is reporting as part of her testimony before the impeachment committees, former White House foreign policy adviser Fiona Hill did not go all the way to accusing Sondland of “acting maliciously or intentionally putting the country at risk.” However, that doesn’t mean that she didn’t think Sondland did not put the country at risk. Because she definitely did. Sondland’s clueless—and lawless—bumbling through “diplomacy” not only created the possibility to directly damage U.S. foreign relations, but also raised direct issues of security. As seen in the series of texts exchanged with Special Envoy Kurt Volker and Charge d’Affairs William Taylor, Sondland wasn’t exactly subtle in discussing his attempts to manipulate Ukrainian leadership, and he often did so using a personal cellphone.
Everything Sondland was doing generated enough alarm that Hill raised concerns with other officials inside the White House. And reports say that she wasn’t the only one. Others shocked by what they were seeing from Sondland included former NSA and long-time favorite of conservative Republicans John Bolton.
But these reports didn’t result in Sondland or the other “amigos” being reigned in. Instead, it was Hill, Bolton, and others who expressed their concerns who took a hit—including being sidelined from discussions, cut off from their topics of expertise, and ultimately forced from their positions. And the result of that was that Sondland and those who had no concerns other than getting Trump what he wanted, were given clear field to run roughshod over policy, relationships, and the truth.
For that, Trump bears by far the bulk of the blame, but a share also has to go to those like Mick Mulvaney and Mike Pompeo who took an active role in both putting Trump’s goons in positions to destroy American foreign policy, but punished the professionals who had the temerity to actually point out the potential damage to the nation.