A wrench is thrown into Trump’s defense
Former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch’s testimony was the big public spectacle on Friday. The bigger news in the Ukraine scandal appears to have come later in the day in a private deposition.
It came from David Holmes, an aide to the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, William Taylor. Taylor said this week that Holmes overheard President Donald Trump speaking with Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland the day after Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president in July.
And it turns out Holmes fills in a number of key details that Taylor didn’t.
Below are some key points from his opening statement, which CNN obtained.
1. Sondland’s testimony continues to crumble
Holmes undermines a central claim in Sondland’s testimony: That Sondland didn’t know Trump’s and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s interest in investigating a Ukrainian company that employed Joe Biden’s son Hunter had anything to do with the Biden family.
“I noted that there was ‘big stuff ’ going on in Ukraine, like a war with Russia,” Holmes says of his conversation with Sondland on July 26, “and Ambassador Sondland replied that he meant ‘big stuff ’ that benefits the president, like the ‘Biden investigation’ that Mr. Giuliani was pushing.”
The quote about the “Biden investigation” is key. Sondland said in his deposition that he had pushed for an investigation into Burisma Holdings, which had employed Hunter Biden, but that he didn’t know there was any connection to the Bidens.
“But I did not understand, until much later,” Sondland said as of late May, “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 re-election campaign.”
Giuliani’s efforts to target the Bidens were reported by the New York Times in early May — and Trump himself lodged his Biden conspiracy theory publicly on May 19. Yet even as of August, Sondland claimed, “I did not know until more recent press reports that Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma.”
Holmes’s testimony quotes Sondland explicitly referring to this as the “Biden investigation” in July.
2. Another quid pro quo confirmation
Holmes says Taylor told him that on a June 28 call he had with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and the “three amigos” — Sondland, special envoy to
Ukraine Kurt Volker and Energy Secretary Rick Perry — “it was made clear that some action on a Burisma/Biden investigation was a precondition for an Oval Office meeting.”
This detail, notably, was not part of Taylor’s own testimony, though Taylor quickly came to believe such a meeting indeed was conditioned on Ukraine launching such an investigation.
Taylor testified that on the June 28 call, before Zelenskiy was added to the line, Sondland said he didn’t want interagency officials on the call, because “he wanted to make sure no one was transcribing or monitoring as they added President Zelenskiy to the call.”
Taylor added: “Also, before President Zelenskiy joined the call, Ambassador Volker separately told the U.S. participants that he, Ambassador Volker, planned to be explicit with President Zelenskiy in a one-on-one meeting in Toronto on July 2. In that meeting, Ambassador Volker planned to make clear what President Zelenskiy should do to get the White House meeting.”
3. He was spurred by GOP defenses of Trump
Holmes’ account is something he says he didn’t consider to be relevant — until he saw some of the defenses of Trump.
Holmes mentions that Trump defenders have argued that perhaps Trump himself wasn’t personally involved in the quid pro quos. He also mentions a GOP argument that was prominent during Wednesday’s hearing featuring Taylor and top State Department aide George Kent: that the witnesses didn’t have firsthand knowledge of some of the key events.
“I came to realize I had firsthand knowledge regarding certain events on July 26,” he said, referring to the date of his overhearing the Sondland-Trump call, “that had not otherwise been reported and that those events potentially bore on the question of whether the president did, in fact, have knowledge that those officials were using the levers of our diplomatic power to induct the new Ukrainian president to announce the opening of a particular criminal investigation.”