The House impeachment inquiry has issued a full 376-page transcript as well as another document highlighting critical moments in the testimony provided by Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland.
In response to several questions, Sondland touches on the frustration involving the way in which the State Department was forced to deal with Donald Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani blundering around in Ukraine, making problems for everyone.
Sondland: Listen, the State Department was fully aware of the issues, and there was very little they could do about it if the President decided he wanted his lawyer involved.
Sondland also makes it clear that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was unwilling to stand up to Trump when it came to Giuliani. And as time went on, Giuliani not only wielded more and more control of the situation in Ukraine, but his requests became more “insidious.”
Sondland: ... let’s get the Ukrainians to give a statement about corruption. And then, no, corruption isn’t enough, we need to talk about the 2016 election and the Burisma investigations.
Sondland makes it clear that how this was being discussed in the State Department and White House wasn’t just in terms of getting Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, but was built on the presumption that Biden had done something wrong.
Sondland: it was always described to me as ongoing investigations that had been stopped by the previous administration and they wanted them started up again. That’s how it was always described.
That was a lie. But it didn’t stop there.
Sondland claims to not really have made the connection between Biden and Burisma until after this demand had been made several times. But he makes it clear he was told to demand both investigation into Burisma and the elaborate conspiracy theory concerning the 2016 elections as part of securing a conversation between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Over time, what he was being asked to do became more and more clear to him and “it kept getting more insidious as [the] timeline went on ...”
Sondland claims it was relatively late in the game, some time after Trump’s July 25 call with Zelensky, before he “became aware that there might be a link between the White House visit and aid to the Ukraine that was being held up” and that he “couldn’t get a straight answer” about why the assistance had been delayed. During further questioning, Sondland agreed that the conditions he was bringing to Ukrainian officials were really “demands” that had to be met, and that the bar for meeting those demands kept rising. It became clear to Sondland that unless Ukraine agreed to both investigations, there would be no meeting between Trump and Zelensky—and no military assistance.
And while Republicans were ready to rush to the press with one statement on legality from a non-lawyer, they may not be as excited about this one:
Staff Attorney: When you said … you did not understand until much later that Mr. Giuliani’s agenda might have also included an effort to prompt the Ukrainians to investigate Vice President Biden or his son or to involve Ukrainians directly or indirectly in the President’s 2020 reelection campaign, why did you—why do you think that either of those activities are problematic?
Sondland: Because I believe I testified that it would be improper to do that.
Staff Attorney: And illegal, right?
Sondland: I’m not a lawyer, but I assume so.
Sondland got a chance to hit this one again when asked directly about the efforts to entangle Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.
Sondland: Again, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know the law exactly. It doesn’t sound good.
Sondland also repeated his claims that he could “never get a straight answer” about why military assistance to Ukraine was on hold. That led into his conversation with Ambassador William Taylor, in which Taylor called tying assistance to securing a political favor “crazy.”
That’s when Sondland went straight to Trump, who was “in a bad mood” but not so bad that he couldn’t produce the phrase “no quid pro quo” for Sondland to repeat back to Taylor. (Note: this was on Sept. 9, 2019—a month after the whistleblower complaint was originally submitted, and well after Trump was awaree of the contents.)
As for most of the tweets, phone calls, and other conversations that were recorded by others, there was a standard answer: “Ambassador Sondland does not recall.” He did not recall talking to Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch to tell her to say more good things about Trump. He didn’t recall a June phone call with President Zelenksy and the other “amigos.” He didn’t even recall the meeting with Mick Mulvaney in which he, Volker, and Rick Perry were put together as an unofficial Ukraine team. His non-recall was … impressive. Most impressively, he didn’t recall a White House meeting with Ukrainian officials in which he was ejected from John Bolton’s office, continued the talk in the White House basement, and was upbraided by National Security Council official Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman for his efforts in extorting favors from a Ukrainian official.
All that non-recall has now led Sondland to provide a giant oopsie-I-just-remembered addendum.