Many people have pilloried Gordon Sondland for his cell phone call to Donald Trump from a Ukraine cafe. It sounds just like a rookie mistake, and I think people believe he did this because of his lack of care for diplomatic security or because he let his pride at being able to phone The President override any prudence.
After consideration, though, I am starting to wonder if Sondland wasn’t ordered or encouraged to make this call from his cell phone.
Why would anyone want him to break protocol and do something so obviously nuts? I mean, doesn’t everyone know phones in Ukraine are bugged by Russian intelligence services?
But possibly that’s exactly the point. Suppose someone wanted to tell Russia that Zelensky had been compromised. It would make perfect sense to put this message on an unsecured phone call to the White House. It would be a lot easier to hide than Donald Trump calling up Vladimir Putin from the White House and announcing that he’d corrupted Zelensky.
Sondland will be appearing before the House Intelligence Committee tomorrow. I think a good question to pose to him is this:
Did anyone else suggest or discuss how you should report to Trump after your meeting with Zelensky? Were you encouraged in any way to get this message out right away, even if it didn’t mean going through a secure line?
Because, I’d really like to know whether Sondland is an idiot or a useful idiot.
Note: For a few days I didn’t give this call much thought. I just thought Sondland was careless. But then I happened to see a re-run of The Deadly Years. In this episode of the original Star Trek series Captain Kirk uses his quick thinking to save the Enterprise. (I’m not spoiling much by saying the series didn’t end with this episode.)
And then, I got to thinking about whether Sondland’s mistake might not be intentional.