WASHINGTON - U.S. diplomat Gordon Sondland emphatically told the impeachment inquiry targeting President Donald Trump on Wednesday that despite the president's denial, there was a conditional deal with Ukraine in recent months, that Kyiv would not get the military aid it wanted unless it opened investigations to benefit Trump politically.
Sondland, the American ambassador to the European Union, told the House Intelligence Committee that impeachment investigators "have frequently framed these complicated issues in the form of a simple question: Was there a quid pro quo? As I testified previously ... the answer is yes."
Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can to view it offline.
Sondland, a million-dollar donor to Trump's inaugural celebration nearly three years ago before Trump tapped him for the posting to Brussels, said he worked with Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, named by the president to oversee Ukraine relations, even though he did not want to because it sidelined normal State Department channels with Kyiv.
Sondland said that Giuliani, acting at Trump's behest, told Ukrainian officials directly that the U.S. leader wanted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to publicly commit to investigations of former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, his son Hunter's work for Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company, and a debunked theory that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election to help Democrats against Trump. The U.S. intelligence community concluded Russia interfered to help Trump.
Trump on Sept. 11 released $391 million in U.S. military aid to Ukraine without Zelenskiy opening the Biden investigations.
As he left the White House for a trip to Texas in the midst of Sondland's testimony, Trump recited parts of the diplomat's original statement in private testimony a month ago, that there was no quid pro quo and that Trump did not want anything from Ukraine.
"That means it's all over," Trump said.
Sondland later amended that testimony to say there were conditions on the aid — the Biden investigations — before stating specifically Wednesday in the public testimony that there was a quid pro quo.
The president added of Sondland, “This is not a man I know well. He seems like a nice guy, though.”
White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said that Sondland's testimony "made clear" that in his calls with Trump, the president "clearly stated that he ‘wanted nothing’ from Ukraine, and repeated ‘no quid pro quo over and over again.’ The U.S. aid to Ukraine flowed, no investigation was launched, and President Trump has met and spoken with President Zelenskiy. Democrats keep chasing ghosts.”
While other witnesses at the impeachment inquiry had only second-hand accounts as the Ukraine aid drama unfolded in recent months and no contact with Trump, Sondland was a front-line participant with cell phone access to the president. He is the Democrats' star witness in their effort to impeach the country's 45th president.
But Sondland said the path to releasing the money was tortured. He detailed long behind-the-scenes talks involving Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Vice President Mike Pence, then national security adviser John Bolton and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and others during the 55-day delay in dispatching the money Kyiv wanted to help in its fight against pro-Russian separatists in the eastern part of the country.
“Everyone was in the loop,” Sondland said. “It was no secret.”
Sondland said Trump was particularly skeptical of helping Ukraine, believing it was generally engulfed in corruption. But Sondland said he came to believe that the aid would not be released without Zelenskiy making a statement that the Biden investigations were underway.
Sondland said, however, that he and Trump never specifically talked about the military assistance or that it was tied to the political investigations. Sondland said he presumed that the quid pro quo was in play because of his conversations with Giuliani, delegated by Trump to handle Ukraine relations.
"As my other State Department colleagues have testified, this security aid was critical to Ukraine's defense and should not have been delayed," he said. " I expressed this view to many during this period. But my goal, at the time, was to do what was necessary to get the aid released, to break the logjam. I believed that the public statement (about the investigations) we had been discussing for weeks was essential to advancing that goal. I really regret that the Ukrainians were placed in that predicament...."