By all reasonable standards, U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland’s opening testimony in Wednesday’s impeachment hearing should be the final evidence necessary to impeach and remove President Trump from office.
Specifically and repeatedly, Sondland asserted that Trump demanded two quids pro quo from Ukraine involving Trump’s personal, political interests. One of them involved an absurd conspiracy theory that was not specifically part of any investigation by U.S. authorities, and the other involved nothing even subject to the pretense of any U.S. law enforcement action. Trump used the power of his office, in one sense directly counter to U.S. law, for no broader public interest but only to hurt his domestic political adversaries.
Sondland, a self-described “lifelong Republican,” said that he and other officials “worked with Mr. Rudy Giuliani on Ukraine matters at the express direction of the president of the United States … Mr. Giuliani’s requests were a quid pro quo for arranging a White House visit for President Zelensky. Mr. Giuliani demanded that Ukraine make a public statement announcing investigations of the 2016 investigations of the 2016 election/DNC server and Burisma. Mr. Giuliani was expressing the desires of the president of the United States, and we knew that these investigations were important to the president.”
Later, he was led to believe that U.S. security assistance to Ukraine also was dependent on those investigations.
Again he said, “We worked with Mr. Giuliani because the president directed us to.” He did so not by implication, but directly. Giuliani specifically mentioned both investigations. Worse, Giuliani was working not with a reformer in Ukraine, but with a “reportedly corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor.”
The day after Trump spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and specifically referenced his desire for investigations into the conspiracy theory and into the Bidens, Sondland confirmed, he spoke to Trump by phone from a restaurant in Kyiv. He said others present likely did hear Trump’s loud voice through the receiver, and that he has every reason to believe their recollections that Trump again pressed for the two (bogus) investigations.
Later, Sondland again addressed the issue of the quid pro quo. “The answer is yes,” there was one. And, he said, Giuliani also made this clear both to multiple U.S. officials and “directly to the Ukrainians … We all understood that these pre-requisites for the White House call and White House meeting reflected President Trump’s desires and requirements.” As early as July 19, six days before the two presidents spoke by phone, Sondland said Zelensky knew he was expected to open the investigations.
“Everyone was in the loop,” Sondland said. “It was no secret.” The Ukrainians themselves repeated those understandings multiple times in subsequent weeks.
So, why is this so bad?
It’s not just bad, but awful, because Trump was not pursuing any broader U.S. policy interest. He showed interest in no other “corruption” issues in Ukraine other than those purportedly involving his Democratic rivals. His administration opposed aid intended to bolster anti-corruption efforts; his own administration had already confirmed that Ukraine was satisfactorily quashing corruption, and multiple top officials, his own appointees, had told Trump there was absolutely no legitimacy to “the 2016 election/DNC server” issue.
As for the Bidens, the Justice Department has said through multiple channels that no U.S. investigation existed, and Trump has identified no U.S. law that was allegedly violated. Meanwhile, the legal counsel for both the State and Defense departments have said holding up the military assistance was illegal.
It is widely understood that the impeachment bar of “high crimes and misdemeanors” included both formal law-breaking and what Alexander Hamilton referred to as “the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL” [emphasis in original].
What Sondland and others have described is massive misconduct by Trump, abusing the public trust for his own political benefit. The man must be impeached and removed.
