Was told Don linked Ukraine funds to Biden
The acting US ambassador to Ukraine testified Tuesday that he was told President Trump would not release military aid to the country until its president publicly vowed to investigate Joe Biden and his son as well as the 2016 election.
The testimony from William Taylor contradicted Trump’s and other administration officials’ repeated denials that there was a quid pro quo and that Trump used the nearly $400 million as leverage for personal political gain, according to his 15-page opening statement, which was obtained by The Washington Post.
Taylor detailed conversations he had with other US diplomats who were pushing for what one called the “deliverable” of Ukrainian help investigating Trump’s political rivals, according to the statement.
Taylor said he spoke to Ambassador Gordon Sondland (inset), the US envoy to the European Union, about Trump’s demand that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky personally announce an investigation into the Bidens and the 2016 election before he would release nearly $400 million in congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine, which was under continued attack from Russia.
“During that phone call, Amb. Sondland told me that President Trump had told him that he wants President Zelensky to state publicly that Ukraine will investigate Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election,” Taylor said in the statement.
Burisma is a Ukrainian energy giant that put Hunter Biden on its board of directors while his father was US vice president, paying him up to $50,000 a month, leading Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to accuse both Bidens of corruption.
No one has proven that either Biden did anything illegal, though Hunter Biden faulted himself for using poor judgment by cashing in on his surname.
Sondland had earlier told Ukraine that only a Zelensky White House visit was on the line before upping the ante to include the aid, Taylor stated.
“Amb. Sondland also told me that he now recognized that he had made a mistake by earlier telling the Ukrainian officials to whom he spoke that a White House meeting with President Zelensky was dependent on a public announcement of investigations — in fact, Amb. Sondland said, ‘everything’ was dependent on such an announcement, including security assistance,” Taylor told the House investigators.
“He said that President Trump wanted President Zelensky ‘in a public box’ by making a public statement about ordering such investigations.”
Taylor also said that Sondland and Kurt Volker, special US envoy to Ukraine at the time, explained to him that Trump was a businessman who didn’t want to release the desperately needed aid until he got what Zelensky supposedly owed him.
“On Sept. 8, Ambassador Sondland tried to explain to me that President Trump is a businessman. 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. Ambassador Volker used the same terms several days later,” Taylor said.
“I argued to both that the explanation made no sense: the Ukrainians did not ‘owe’ President Trump anything, and holding up security assistance for domestic political gain was ‘crazy,’ as I had said in my text messages to Ambassadors Sondland and Volker on September 9.”
The assistance was released two days later, on Sept. 11.
He also described how officials from the Pentagon, State Department and CIA, along with then-National Security Adviser John Bolton, tried and failed to get a meeting with Trump to release the aid.
Taylor was subpoenaed after the State Department tried to block his testimony and was the latest witness to testify behind closed doors in the House impeachment probe.
He described how extensive Team Trump’s efforts were to tie an investigation of Burisma and 2016 election interference to a White House meeting and the security aid being released.
Taylor, a career diplomat and West Point grad who served in the US Army during the Vietnam War, replaced Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch after Trump recalled her at the urging of Giuliani, who was pressing the Ukrainians to dig for dirt on the Bidens.
Giuliani, Taylor testified, was heading up an “irregular” Ukraine policy that contradicted the official US policy of backing the troubled democracy in its fight with Russia, a situation he called “weird.”
Taylor soon found himself in the middle of the impeachment controversy after the release of a series of text messages he exchanged with Sondland, who gave $1 million for the president’s lavish inauguration.
After an exchange of text messages in which Taylor expressed concern about linking the aid and White House visit to Zelensky reopening the probes Trump wanted — including the one in which Taylor called the scheme “crazy” — Sondland wrote another text that he later said had essentially been dictated by the president.
“The President has been crystal clear no quid pro quo’s of any kind,” Sondland wrote. “The President is trying to evaluate whether Ukraine is truly going to adopt the transparency and reforms that President Zelensky promised during his campaign.”
Laura Cooper, deputy assistant secretary of defense whose portfolio includes Russia and Ukraine, is expected to testify in a closed session Wednesday.