More testimony:
Embassy aide confirms Trump call asking about probe.
WASHINGTON — An official from the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv confirmed to House impeachment investigators Friday that he had overheard a call between President Trump and a top U.S. diplomat in July in which the president asked whether Ukraine was going to move forward with an investigation he wanted, according to three people familiar with the testimony.
The official, David Holmes, testified privately that he was in a restaurant in Ukraine’s capital when he heard Trump during a cellphone call loudly asking Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, if Ukraine’s president had agreed to conduct an investigation into his political rivals. Sondland, who was in Kyiv at the time for meetings with top Ukrainian officials, including the country’s president earlier in the day, replied in the affirmative.
“So, he’s going to do the investigation?” Trump asked, according to the testimony.
Sondland told Trump, that President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine “loves your ass,” and would conduct the investigation and do “anything you ask him to,” according to two of the people, who described the testimony on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss it.
After the call ended, Holmes asked if it was true that the president did not care about Ukraine, the people said. The ambassador replied that Trump cared only about the “big stuff.” Holmes noted Ukraine had “big stuff ” going on, like a war with Russia. But Sondland had something else in mind.
Sondland told Holmes he meant “‘big stuff ’ that benefited the president,” like the “Biden investigation” that his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani was pushing for, because they affected him personally.
Holmes’s account could be crucial to Democrats’ case because it illustrates how preoccupied Trump was with persuading Ukraine’s president to go along with his demand that the country commit publicly to investigating former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading political rival, and how he actively used his power and the instruments of U.S. foreign policy to see that it happened.
It also adds significant new details to a conversation that was first revealed on Wednesday during public testimony by Holmes’ boss, William Taylor, the top U.S. envoy in Ukraine. Taylor said then that he had only recently learned of the episode. It raised the possibility that Holmes could be called to testify publicly in the impeachment inquiry and presented Democrats with new leads to track down even as they conduct a string of highprofile public hearings with other witnesses.
Holmes, a career Foreign Service officer who is the political counselor in the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, said he had been following the impeachment inquiry from afar in recent weeks and came to understand only belatedly that he had pertinent information to share. He testified under subpoena after the State Department directed him not to appear, according to an official working on the inquiry.
“I came to realize I had firsthand knowledge regarding certain events on July 26 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 induce the new Ukrainian president to announce the opening of a particular criminal investigation,” he testified.
The conversation between Trump and Sondland took place July 26, one day after Trump personally pressed
Zelensky in a nowfamous phone call to investigate Biden and his son, Hunter, as well as unproven allegations that Ukraine conspired with Democrats to interfere in the 2016 election.
Sondland did not mention the episode to investigators last month when he answered their questions in private. He will almost certainly be asked about it next week when he appears for public testimony before the House Intelligence Committee.
He has already revised his initial testimony once, admitting to the panel last week that he told a top Ukrainian official that the country would probably not receive a package of nearly $400 million in security assistance unless it committed publicly to the investigations Trump sought. And Republicans have argued that he may be overstating his access to and influence with the president.
On Thursday, two people familiar with the matter said that a second embassy official, Suriya Jayanti, also overheard the call and could corroborate Holmes’ account. It is unclear if investigators will also call her to testify.