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Sondland Details 'Quid Pro Quo' with Ukraine

Ken Bredemeier

   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."

   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.

   Front-line participant
   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.

   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.

   "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...."

   Trump's July 25 White House call with Zelenskiy, in which the U.S.
   leader asked Zelenskiy to "do us a favor," to undertake the politically
   tinged investigations, is at the center of Democrats' impeachment
   inquiry against Trump, only the fourth time in the country's 243-year
   history such an investigation has been opened.

   It is against U.S. campaign finance law to solicit foreign government
   help in a U.S. election, but it will be up to lawmakers to decide
   whether Trump's actions amount to "high crimes and misdemeanors," the
   standard in the U.S. Constitution sets for impeachment and removal of a
   president from office. Trump could be impeached by the full
   Democratic-controlled House of Representatives in the coming weeks,
   which would be similar to an indictment in a criminal trial. He then
   would face a trial in the Republican-majority Senate, where his
   conviction remains unlikely.

   Sondland confirmed the essence of a cell phone conversation he had with
   Trump on July 26, the day after Trump's conversation with Zelenskiy, as
   he sat at a Kyiv restaurant with other State Department officials.

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