Ambassador Gordon Sondland blocked U.S. officials from listening to President Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky because he didn’t want the conversation transcribed, a key impeachment witness said.
“The normal channel, where you would have staff on the phone call, was being cut out,” William Taylor, the chargé d’affaires for Ukraine, told House investigators on Oct. 22, according to a transcript released Wednesday. “That irregular channel didn’t have a respect for or an interest in having the normal staff participate in this call with the head of state.”
Taylor derived that view from his conversations with Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, in the course of scheduling the July 25 phone call that lit the fuse on the Democratic-led impeachment proceedings. Sondland resisted Taylor’s suggestion that they tell staff that the time of the call had been changed because Sondland wanted fewer government employees to hear the discussion, Taylor testified.
“I asked him something like, shouldn’t we let everybody else know who’s supposed to be on this call? And the answer was, don’t worry about it,” Taylor said.
The exchange reflected Sondland’s wish to keep staffers from making “a record of the discussion,” Taylor said.
“When he wanted to be sure that there was not, the State Department operations center agreed,” he said. “And they told us, they said in response to his request, they said, ‘we won’t monitor and will not — and we certainly won’t transcribe because we’re going to sign off.’”
Nevertheless, senior U.S. officials and White House National Security Council staff listened to the call. Among them were two staffers who testified before Congress behind closed doors. Trump released a rough transcript of the conversation, compiled by NSC staff after a whistleblower complaint sparked a domestic political uproar in September.
“Is anybody dumb enough to believe that I would say something inappropriate with a foreign leader while on such a potentially ‘heavily populated’ call,” the president tweeted.
The conversation is controversial because Trump urged Zelensky to work with Rudy Giuliani to find evidence implicating Joe Biden in a corruption scandal. Giuliani, who is Trump’s personal attorney, wanted Zelensky to announce publicly that he would launch an investigation into Biden and into whether Ukrainian officials interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Hillary Clinton.
“POTUS wanted nothing less than President Zelensky to go to a microphone and say investigations, Biden, and Clinton,” George Kent, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for Europe, testified in an Oct. 15 deposition. “And in shorthand, it was suggested that the Ukrainians needed — Zelensky needed to go to a microphone and basically there needed to be three words in the message, and that was the shorthand.”
Sondland maintained in his Oct. 17 deposition that he didn’t believe at the time that Trump was using security assistance as leverage to push the Ukrainians to unveil investigations that would help his 2020 reelection campaign. But the ambassador said, in an addendum correcting his testimony, that he told Ukrainian officials that “resumption of U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anti-corruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks.”
