Here’s what you need to know:
- Sondland testifies he worked with Giuliani to pressure Ukraine “at the express direction of the president.”
- As Sondland begins testifying, he discloses that Pence, Pompeo knew about the Ukraine pressure campaign.
- Sondland will be pressed to explain conflicting accounts after other witnesses put him at the center of the case.
- The loud talker on the phone: Sondland confirms an indiscreet conversation with Trump.
- Sondland disputes other descriptions of key July 10 meeting at the White House.
- Catch up on some important background on the impeachment inquiry.
Sondland testifies he worked with Giuliani to pressure Ukraine “at the express direction of the president.”
Gordon D. Sondland, the Republican megadonor turned ambassador to the European Union, told the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday that he and other advisers to President Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate Democrats “because the president directed us to do so.”
In much-anticipated testimony opening the fourth day of public impeachment hearings, Mr. Sondland said that he, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Kurt D. Volker, the special envoy for Ukraine, were reluctant to work with Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, on the pressure campaign and agreed only at Mr. Trump’s insistence.
“Secretary Perry, Ambassador Volker and I worked with Mr. Rudy Giuliani on Ukraine matters at the express direction of the president of the United States,” Mr. Sondland said in his prepared opening statement delivered in writing to the committee as he made his appearance on Wednesday morning. “We did not want to work with Mr. Giuliani. Simply put, we played the hand we were dealt.”
While Republican lawmakers have derided other officials who have testified in the impeachment hearings because they had only secondhand information and had not spoken with the president, Mr. Sondland had direct contact with Mr. Trump and cannot be easily dismissed as a hearsay witness. But in his written opening statement, Mr. Sondland gave away few details of any conversations with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Sondland rejected the notion that he was part of an illicit shadow foreign policy that worked around the normal national security process. “The suggestion that we were engaged in some irregular or rogue diplomacy is absolutely false,” he said, pointing to messages and phone calls in which he kept the White House and State Department informed of his actions. He added: “Any claim that I somehow muscled my way into the Ukraine relationship is simply false.”
Mr. Sondland acknowledged that he told a senior Ukrainian official that to get Mr. Trump to release $391 million in American security aid suspended by the president, the Kyiv government would likely have to publicly commit to investigating a debunked conspiracy theory involving Democrats in the 2016 election as well as former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son’s ties to Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company.
But the ambassador did not attribute that linkage to any explicit direction by Mr. Trump, instead saying he came to that conclusion on his own based on the fact that the money had been held up for so long.
“In the absence of any credible explanation for the suspension of the aid,” Mr. Sondland said, “I later came to believe that the resumption of security aid would not occur until there was a public statement from Ukraine committing to the investigations of the 2016 election and Burisma, as Mr. Giuliani had demanded.”
While he was concerned about what he called a “potential quid pro quo” tying security aid to Ukraine’s willingness to undertake the investigations that Mr. Trump wanted, he said there definitely was a clear “quid pro quo” linking a coveted White House meeting for Ukraine’s president to the investigations.
Republican lawmakers may try to portray Mr. Sondland as acting on his own, taking initiative beyond anything the president explicitly told him to do.
As Sondland begins testifying, he discloses that Pence, Pompeo knew about the Ukraine pressure campaign.
Mr. Sondland said in his opening statement that he told Vice President Mike Pence in late August that he feared the military aid being withheld from Ukraine was tied to the investigations Mr. Trump sought into his political rivals and that he kept Secretary of State Mike Pompeo apprised of his efforts to pressure Ukraine.
The revelations suggested that Mr. Sondland is prepared on Wednesday to implicate the senior-most members of Mr. Trump’s administration in the matter.
“Everyone was in the loop,” he said in the statement. “It was no secret.”
The striking account — a major departure from Mr. Sondland’s initial closed-door testimony in the impeachment inquiry last month also indicated that the ambassador who played a central role in the pressure campaign was eager to demonstrate that he did so only reluctantly with the knowledge and approval of the president and top members of his team.
“I mentioned to Vice President Pence before the meetings with the Ukrainians that I had concerns that the delay in aid had become tied to the issue of investigations,” Mr. Sondland said in his written testimony. He said the conversation occurred shortly before Mr. Sondland and Mr. Pence traveled to Warsaw for a meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
At that meeting, Mr. Zelensky brought up the issue of the withheld aid and Mr. Pence said he would discuss the matter with Mr. Trump. Afterward, Mr. Sondland said he informed Andriy Yermak, a top Ukrainian official, that the money would probably not flow without the public commitment to the investigations.
Sondland will be pressed to explain conflicting accounts after other witnesses put him at the center of the case.
Mr. Sondland is expected to face tough questions on Wednesday about gaps and misleading statements in his initial closed-door interview with impeachment investigators on Oct. 17, an account that he has already been forced to revise once in response to other witness testimony.
After initially testifying that he “never” thought there was any precondition on $391 million in American security aid to Ukraine frozen by Mr. Trump, Mr. Sondland later submitted a three-page declaration saying “I do now recall” telling a senior Ukrainian official that “resumption of the U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anticorruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks.”
The “anticorruption statement” would commit Ukraine to investigating Mr. Biden and the 2016 conspiracy theory involving Democrats, a statement that Ukrainian officials had resisted making.
In the statement, Mr. Sondland said that he did not know why Mr. Trump suspended the aid and that he “presumed” the connection after weeks went by without the money being released. Democrats will certainly press him about whether the president himself ever linked the aid to the investigations the way Mr. Sondland did in his Sept. 1 conversation with the Ukrainian official.
Mr. Sondland only offered this new account after William B. Taylor Jr., the top American diplomat in Ukraine, and Timothy Morrison, then the top Europe adviser at the National Security Council, told House investigators about it.
The loud talker on the phone: Sondland confirms an indiscreet conversation with Trump.
Mr. Sondland in his prepared testimony confirmed a conversation with Mr. Trump that he did not volunteer during his original testimony, one that came at a key moment in the timeline and that House investigators also learned about from other witnesses, although he said he did not recall the details.
David Holmes, the political counselor at the American Embassy in Ukraine, told investigators last Friday that he was at lunch with Mr. Sondland and a couple of other officials on the outdoor patio of a Kyiv restaurant on July 26, the day after Mr. Trump’s phone call asking for “a favor” from Mr. Zelensky in the form of investigations of Democrats.
“So, he’s going to do the investigation?” Mr. Trump asked, according to Mr. Holmes, who could overhear the conversation because the president was speaking so loudly that Mr. Sondland held the cellphone away from his ear.
Mr. Sondland told him yes. Mr. Zelensky “loves your ass” and would do “anything you ask him to,” Mr. Sondland said, according to Mr. Holmes’s statement.
After the phone call, Mr. Holmes said he asked Mr. Sondland about the president’s feelings toward Ukraine. The ambassador said that Mr. Trump did not care about Ukraine but was interested only in “big stuff that benefits the president” like the “Biden investigation.”
In his testimony, Mr. Sondland did not challenge the account, while insisting that they did not discuss classified information.
“It is true that the president speaks loudly at times,” he said. “It is true that the president likes to use colorful language,” he added. The call did not strike him as significant at the time. “Actually, I would have been more surprised if President Trump had not mentioned investigations,” he said.
Sondland disputes other descriptions of key July 10 meeting at the White House.
Mr. Sondland denied that a July 10 meeting at the White House with Ukrainian officials turned sharply tense, as others have testified in recent days.
Fiona Hill, then the senior director for Europe and Russia at the National Security Council, and her deputy for Ukraine policy, Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, previously told lawmakers that the meeting led to a confrontation over Mr. Sondland’s unconventional role in Ukraine policy.
When Mr. Sondland mentioned the need for investigations, the two officials said, John R. Bolton, then the national security adviser, abruptly ended the meeting. When the others then went down to the Ward Room in the White House, Ms. Hill said she challenged Mr. Sondland about who put him in charge of Ukraine policy. The president, he replied. When she told Mr. Bolton what happened, Ms. Hill said, he directed her to report the matter to a White House lawyer.
Mr. Sondland said he did not remember that.
“Their recollections of those events simply don’t square with my own or with those of Ambassador Volker or Secretary Perry,” he said in his prepared testimony. “I recall mentioning the prerequisite of investigations before any White House call or meeting. But I do not recall any yelling or screaming as others have said.”
Catch up on some important background on the impeachment inquiry.
Mr. Trump and his advisers repeatedly pressured Mr. Zelensky and his aides to investigate people and issues of political concern to Mr. Trump, including the former vice president. Here’s a timeline of events since January.
A C.I.A. officer who was once detailed to the White House filed a whistle-blower complaint on Mr. Trump’s interactions with Mr. Zelensky. Read the complaint.
transcript
Who Are the Main Characters in the Whistle-Blower’s Complaint?
President Trump’s personal lawyer. The prosecutor general of Ukraine. Joe Biden’s son. These are just some of the names mentioned in the whistle-blower’s complaint. What were their roles? We break it down.
Congressman: “Sir, let me repeat my question: Did you ever speak to the president about this complaint?” Congress is investigating allegations that President Trump pushed a foreign government to dig up dirt on his Democratic rivals. “It’s just a Democrat witch hunt. Here we go again.” At the heart of an impeachment inquiry is a nine-page whistle-blower complaint that names over two dozen people. Not counting the president himself, these are the people that appear the most: First, Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani. According to documents and interviews, Giuliani has been involved in shadowy diplomacy on behalf of the president’s interests. He encouraged Ukrainian officials to investigate the Biden family’s activities in the country, plus other avenues that could benefit Trump like whether the Ukrainians intentionally helped the Democrats during the 2016 election. It was an agenda he also pushed on TV. “So you did ask Ukraine to look into Joe Biden.” “Of course I did!” A person Giuliani worked with, Yuriy Lutsenko, Ukraine’s former prosecutor general. He pushed for investigations that would also benefit Giuliani and Trump. Lutsenko also discussed conspiracy theories about the Bidens in the U.S. media. But he later walked back his allegations, saying there was no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens. This is where Hunter Biden comes in, the former vice president’s son. He served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company run by this guy, who’s had some issues with the law. While Biden was in office, he along with others, called for the dismissal of Lutsenko’s predecessor, a prosecutor named Viktor Shokin, whose office was overseeing investigations into the company that Hunter Biden was involved with. Shokin was later voted out by the Ukrainian government. Lutsenko replaced him, but was widely criticized for corruption himself. When a new president took office in May, Volodymyr Zelensky, Zelensky said that he’d replace Lutsenko. Giuliani and Trump? Not happy. They viewed Lutsenko as their ally. During a July 25 call between Trump and the new Ukrainian president, Trump defended him, saying, “I heard you had a prosecutor who is very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair.” In that phone call, Trump also allegedly asked his counterpart to continue the investigation into Joe Biden, who is his main rival in the 2020 election. Zelensky has publicly denied feeling pressured by Trump. “In other words, no pressure.” And then finally, Attorney General William Barr, who also came up in the July 25 call. In the reconstructed transcript, Trump repeatedly suggested that Zelensky’s administration could work with Barr and Giuliani to investigate the Bidens and other matters of political interest to Trump. Since the whistle-blower complaint was made public, Democrats have criticized Barr for dismissing allegations that Trump had violated campaign finance laws during his call with Zelensky and not passing along the complaint to Congress. House Democrats have now subpoenaed several people mentioned in the complaint, as an impeachment inquiry into the president’s conduct continues.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced in September that the House would open a formal impeachment proceeding in response to the whistle-blower’s complaint. Here’s how the impeachment process works, and here’s why political influence in foreign policy matters.
House committees have issued subpoenas to the White House, the Defense Department, the budget office and other agencies for documents related to the impeachment investigation. Here’s the evidence that has been collected so far.
Read about the Democrats’ rules to govern impeachment proceedings.
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2019-11-20 14:26:15Z
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