Envoy: Link between aid, Biden
Diplomat to Ukraine says Trump pushed quid pro quo deal
WASHINGTON — William Taylor, the United States’ top diplomat in Ukraine, told impeachment investigators privately Tuesday that President Donald Trump held up vital security aid for the country and refused a White House meeting with Ukraine’s leader until he agreed to make a public pledge to investigate Trump’s political rivals.
In testimony built around careful notes he took during his tenure and delivered in defiance of State Department orders, Taylor sketched out in remarkable detail a quid-pro-quo pressure campaign on Ukraine that Trump and his allies have long denied, in which the president conditioned the entire U.S. relationship with Ukraine on a promise that the country would investigate former Vice President Joe
Biden and his family, along with other Democrats.
His account implicated Trump personally in the effort, citing multiple sources inside the government, including a budget official who said that during a secure National Security Council conference call in July she had been instructed not to approve a $391 million security assistance package for
Ukraine, and that, Taylor said, “the directive had come from the president.”
Taylor described the situation as “a rancorous story about whistleblowers, Mr. Giuliani, side channels, quid pro quos, corruption and interference in elections,” to which Ukraine was subjected by the Trump administration, with Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, at the center of what he called an “irregular policy channel” that operated outside of — and at odds with — normal U.S. foreign policymaking.
When he objected to Trump’s efforts to tie security aid and a White House meeting to the investigations, Taylor said in his opening statement obtained by The New York Times, Gordon D. Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union and a Trump campaign donor, said there was no quid pro quo. But then Sondland described just that, telling Taylor to think of Trump as a businessman looking to make sure he would benefit before he closed a deal.
“‘When a businessman is about to sign a check to someone who owes him something,’ he said, ‘the businessman asks that person to pay up before signing the check,’ ” Taylor testified, quoting Sondland.
Taylor’s testimony directly contradicted repeated assertions by Trump and his Republican allies that there was never a direct linkage involving investigations into Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company that employed Hunter Biden, the vice president’s son, or other Democrats.
It also raised questions about the veracity of the testimony of other prominent impeachment witnesses, including Sondland and Kurt D. Volker, the special envoy to Ukraine, who have said behind closed doors they had not been aware of any improper pressure tactics.
That is not true, Taylor told the committee. He said the president had explicitly made it clear that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, would not be invited to the White House or secure muchneeded security aid unless the Ukrainian leader made a public announcement that his country would start the investigations that Trump so badly wanted.
Taylor testified that he was told of Trump’s demands for investigations during a telephone call with Sondland, whom Taylor described as part of a “highly irregular” diplomatic effort aimed at pressuring Ukraine.
“Ambassador Sondland said that ‘everything’ was dependent on such an announcement, including security assistance,” Taylor told lawmakers. “He said that President Trump wanted President Zelenskiy ‘in a public box’ by making a public statement about ordering such investigations.”
Taylor added that: “During that phone call, Ambassador Sondland told me that President Trump had told him that he wants President Zelenskiy to state publicly that Ukraine will investigate Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election,” Taylor said.
One lawmaker described the testimony as drawing a “direct line” between U.S. foreign policy and Trump’s own political goals.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., who sat in on the deposition as a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, said that Taylor relied in part on detailed “notes to the file” that he had made as he watched the pressure campaign unfold. His testimony shed new light on the circumstances around a previously revealed text message in which Taylor wrote to colleagues that he thought it was “crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.”
He “drew a very direct line in the series of events he described between Trump’s decision to withhold funds and refuse a meeting with Zelenskiy unless there was a public pronouncement by him of investigations of Burisma and the so-called 2016 election conspiracy theories,” Wasserman Schultz said.
In his statement, Taylor described a July 18 call in which he learned that the directive to withhold Ukraine’s aid had come to the White House budget office directly from Trump, through his chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney.
“In an instant I realized one of the key pillars of our strong support for Ukraine was threatened,” Taylor said in his testimony.
In his statement, Taylor described with almost cinematic sweep his return to Ukraine in mid-June, after a long diplomatic career in the country, only to discover with dismay in the months that followed “a weird combination of encouraging, confusing and ultimately alarming circumstances.”
The intelligence whistleblower’s complaint that prompted the impeachment inquiry said that Trump’s effort to pressure Zelenskiy during a July phone call to open an investigation of Burisma was part of a concerted effort to use the power of his office to enlist foreign help in the 2020 election.
As Taylor made his way to Capitol Hill to testify early Tuesday, the president sought to discredit the inquiry with attention-grabbing rhetoric, comparing the impeachment investigation against him to a “lynching.”
His comment on Twitter drew bipartisan outrage in public as the ambassador made his case behind closed doors.
Several Democrats who participated in Taylor’s questioning described his testimony as stunning.
Wasserman Schultz called it “one of the most disturbing days” she has had in Congress.
Republicans accused Democrats of exaggerating, but they declined to share details of the testimony.
“I don’t know that any of us, if we are being intellectually honest, are hearing revelations that we were not aware of,” said Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C. “The bottom line is no one has yet to make the case for why the aid was withheld or even if the Ukrainians knew about it.”