Gordon Sondland, President Trump’s envoy to the European Union, informed Ukrainian officials they would not receive security assistance unless they investigated a company that hired Joe Biden’s son, according to a key U.S. diplomat.
“Ambassador Sondland tried to explain to me that President Trump is a businessman,” Bill Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, told House investigators. “When a businessman is about to sign a check to someone who owes him something, he said, the businessman asks that person to pay up before signing the check.”
That conversation took place on Sept. 8, one day before Taylor warned Sondland that it would be “crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign” in a text message provided to House investigators. Sondland replied that Taylor was “incorrect about President Trump’s intentions.” Taylor’s statement reveals what prompted him to protest such an idea, as he testifies that Sondland had told the Ukrainians they faced a quid pro quo.
“Ambassador Sondland told Mr. Yermak that the security assistance money would not come until President Zelensky committed to pursue the Burisma investigation,” Taylor told lawmakers in his opening statement.
That conversation between Sondland and Andrey Yermak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, took place in Warsaw, where western leaders gathered on Sept. 1 to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland and the beginning of World War II. Taylor’s account of Sondland’s conversation with Yermak is technically hearsay — the conversation, he said was described to him by Tim Morrison, the White House National Security Council’s senior director for Russian and Eurasian affairs.
Morrison’s report of Sondland’s conversation spurred Taylor to protest the idea in the text message to the EU envoy and Kurt Volker, the State Department’s lead negotiator for the war in Ukraine. Sondland replied by instructing Taylor to call him.
“During that phone call, Ambassador Sondland told me that President Trump had told him that he wants President Zelensky to state publicly that Ukraine will investigate Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election,” Taylor said. “[Sondland] said that President Trump wanted President Zelensky ’in a public box’ by making a public statement about ordering such investigations.”
Burisma is owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who has been implicated internationally in corruption scandals. In 2014, the company hired Hunter Biden in an apparent effort to win the favor of then-Vice President Joe Biden. But the vice president advocated intensifying pressure on that company, by calling for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor who had been rebuked publicly by U.S. officials for failing to investigate the younger Biden’s patron.
Sondland testified that he believed Trump sought a legitimate investigation into the scandals that Biden had denounced.
“I understood that Burisma was one of many examples of Ukrainian companies run by oligarchs and lacking the type of corporate governance structures found in Western companies,” Sondland told lawmakers last week. “I did not know until more recent press reports that Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma.”
Sondland was referring specifically to his understanding of the situation in August. Taylor testified that by early September, the GOP campaign donor-turned-diplomat was clear that Trump wanted an investigation of Biden. Taylor based that understanding on yet another conversation with Morrison, the NSC official, who relayed to him the details of a conversation between Sondland and Trump.
“According to Mr. Morrison, President Trump told Ambassador Sondland that he was not asking for a ‘quid pro quo,’” Taylor testified. “But President Trump did insist that President Zelensky go to a microphone and say he is opening investigations of Biden and 2016 election interference and that President Zelensky should want to do this himself.”
