‘We followed the president’s orders’
EU ambassador testifies that Trump directed Ukraine quid pro quo, and top administration officials were ‘in the loop’
WASHINGTON — An ambassador at the center of the House impeachment inquiry testified Wednesday that he was following President Donald Trump’s orders with the full knowledge of several other top administration officials when he pressured the Ukrainians to conduct investigations into Trump’s political rivals, detailing what he called a “clear quid pro quo” directed by the president.
Gordon Sondland, a wealthy Republican megadonor appointed by Trump as the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, told the House Intelligence Committee that he reluctantly followed Trump’s directive. He testified that the president instructed him to work with Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer,
as he pressured Ukraine to publicly commit to investigating former Vice President Joe Biden and an unsubstantiated theory that Democrats conspired with Kyiv to interfere in the 2016 election.
“We followed the president’s orders,” Sondland said.
In testimony that amounted to an act of defiance by an official who has been described by other witnesses as a point man in the push to extract the investigations, Sondland linked the most senior members of the administration to the effort — including the vice president, the secretary of state, the acting chief of staff and others. He said they were informed of it at key moments, in an account that severely undercut Trump’s frequent claims that he never pressured Ukraine.
Instead, Sondland described an expansive effort at the highest levels of his administration to help the president do just that.
Later Wednesday, a Defense Department official testified that Ukrainian officials may have known as early as late July that a $391 million package of security assistance was being withheld by the Trump administration. The testimony by Laura Cooper called into question another central element of the president’s defense in the Ukraine matter: that he could not have been using the funding as leverage to pressure the country for investigations because Ukrainian officials were unaware that the money was frozen.
Almost two months after House Democrats began their impeachment inquiry, Sondland’s account came as close as investigators have gotten to an admission from an official who dealt directly with Trump. But it came with the blemishes of Sondland’s shifting accounts, which have evolved since the committee first deposed him in October, opening him up to criticism from Republicans who claimed he was unreliable and not credible.
Sondland has repeatedly claimed not to have recalled key episodes and conceded before the committee that he did not take notes that could give him certainty about precisely what happened. He blamed the State Department for not providing him with all his emails, call logs and other records.
Still, the revelations he offered, along with emails corroborating them, were stunning.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo signed off on parts of the pressure campaign, Sondland testified, and Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, was deeply involved. They understood, as he did, that there was a “quid pro quo” linking a White House meeting for President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine to a promise by him to announce investigations into Trump’s political rivals, he said.
“I know that members of this committee have frequently framed these complicated issues in the form of a simple question: Was there a ‘quid pro quo’?” Sondland said. “As I testified previously, with regard to the requested White House call and White House meeting, the answer is yes.
“Everyone was in the loop,” he said. “It was no secret.”
And Sondland testified that he came to believe that there was another linkage being made by Trump, between vital military assistance approved by Congress for Ukraine and a public commitment by its president to investigate Trump’s political adversaries. Sondland said he informed Vice President Mike Pence of his concern about that connection during a Sept. 1 meeting in Warsaw, Poland.
Cooper testified Ukrainian officials had reached out to the State and Defense Departments with questions about the status of the military funding July 25, just hours after Trump pressed President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine during a phone call to investigate the Bidens and 2016. Republicans have insisted that Ukraine did not know about the hold until it was reported in the press in late August.
Beyond the evolving timeline, Sondland’s testimony raised questions about whether the other top administration figures he mentioned — including Pompeo, Mulvaney and John Bolton, the president’s former national security adviser — will come forward to testify in the inquiry and push back on Sondland’s version of events. Pence’s office was quick to counter Sondland’s account Wednesday.
The Trump administration tried to block the testimony of Sondland, Cooper and David Hale, the No. 3 State Department official who also appeared Wednesday, and refused to allow Sondland access to certain documents, which it also withheld from the committee despite a subpoena.
Democrats pointed to the administration’s stonewalling as yet another piece of evidence for an impeachment article against Trump for obstruction of Congress. And they quickly seized on what Sondland did say as bombshells.
“It goes right to the heart of the issue of bribery, as well as other potential high crimes and misdemeanors,” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., chairman of the Intelligence Committee, told reporters during a brief break in the hearing.
Republicans, moving to discredit Sondland, seized on his assertion that Trump never personally or explicitly told him about preconditions on the White House meeting or the security assistance being released.
“President Trump never told me directly that the aid was conditioned on the investigations,” Sondland said under questioning, adding that he came to the conclusion on his own.
Rep. Michael Turner, R-Ohio, hammered on the point, his voice rising as he sharply questioned the ambassador.
“No one told you? Not just the president — Giuliani didn’t tell you, Mulvaney didn’t tell you, nobody?” Turner demanded. “Pompeo didn’t tell you?
“No one on this planet told you that President Trump was tying aid to investigations,” he added. “Yes or no?”
“Yes,” Sondland responded.
The ambassador, who smiled often during his appearance in the stately committee room and cheerfully admitted to a flair for colorful language and frequent use of “four-letter words” in his conversations with Trump, appeared to relish pulling other top officials into the spotlight with him after weeks of being cast by Republicans as a rogue actor.
“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.
But some of the senior officials who figured promptly in Sondland’s testimony quickly challenged his account.
Standing on the South Lawn of the White House while Sondland was still at the witness table, Trump tried to distance himself from the ambassador.
“I don’t know him very well — I have not spoken to him much,” Trump told reporters before departing on a trip to Texas.
Holding a page of notes scrawled in marker in large block letters, Trump read aloud from a section of Sondland’s closed-door deposition in which the ambassador described a phone call in which the president had told him he did not want a quid pro quo.
“This is the final word from the president of the United States,” Trump said, shouting to be heard over the hum of helicopter rotors. “‘I want nothing.’”
The White House press secretary later put out a statement saying that Sondland’s testimony “Completely Exonerates President Trump of Any Wrongdoing.”
Through an aide, Pence denied that the two men had spoken in a one-on-one setting.
“There was never a time when Sondland was alone with the vice president in Warsaw, and if he’s recalling the pre-briefing, I was in that, and he never said anything in that venue either,” said Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff.
Defying the State Department’s wishes, Sondland shared previously unseen emails and texts that demonstrated how he kept Pompeo and other administration officials apprised of his efforts to push the Ukranians. They showed that Sondland told Pompeo about a statement the Ukranians were considering putting out that would commit them to the investigations and a plan to have Zelenskiy speak directly with Trump about the matter.
“The contents will hopefully make the boss happy enough to authorize an invitation,” Sondland wrote in an email to Pompeo.