An official at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine testified U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland told him President Trump “doesn’t give a shit about Ukraine” and only cared about “big stuff” benefiting his own presidency.
David Holmes, a political counselor based in Kyiv, spoke with congressional investigators behind closed doors on Nov. 15, and his 213-page interview transcript was released Monday evening.
Holmes recounted a July 26 phone call between Sondland and Trump he overheard while sitting at a restaurant in Kyiv with Sondland and two other staffers. Holmes told the House that Sondland told Trump that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “loves your ass,” and when Trump asked if Zelensky was going to do the investigation, Sondland told him “he’s going to do it” and “will do anything you ask of him.”
The call took place the day after Trump’s controversial phone call with Zelensky, which sparked a whistleblower complaint. In the call, immediately after Zelensky expressed interest in purchasing anti-tank weaponry, known as Javelins, from the United States, Trump asked Zelensky “to do us a favor” by looking into a CrowdStrike conspiracy theory. The president also urged Zelensky to investigate “the other thing,” referring to allegations of corruption related to Joe and Hunter Biden stemming from the younger Biden’s lucrative position on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company. Trump told Zelensky to speak with Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr.
Holmes said Sondland called Trump on his cellphone and appeared to connect through the White House switchboards. Holmes said he could overhear what Trump was saying because Trump was speaking so loudly, Sondland had to move the phone away from his ear.
When asked whether he was concerned foreign actors such as the Russians may have intercepted the call, Holmes said, “It was surprising to me that he — yes.”
“In my experience, generally, phone calls with the president are very sensitive and handled accordingly,” Holmes told Congress, adding, “We generally assume that mobile communications in Ukraine are being monitored.”
Following the call, Holmes said he pressed Sondland about Trump’s feelings toward Ukraine.
“Ambassador Sondland agreed the president did not give a shit about Ukraine. I asked why not, and Ambassador Sondland stated, the President only cares about, quote, unquote, big stuff. I noted that there was, quote, unquote, big stuff going on in Ukraine, like a war with Russia,” Holmes testified. “And Ambassador Sondland replied that he meant, quote, unquote, big stuff that benefits the president, like the quote, unquote, Biden investigation that Mr. Giuliani was pushing.”
Holmes said he was “shocked” when he learned about the freeze on U.S. military aid to Ukraine on July 18 and said he was never given an official reason for the halt.
“I think the Ukrainians gradually came to understand that they were being asked to do something in exchange for the meeting and the security assistance hold being lifted,” he said.
Holmes said he viewed investigations into Burisma or the Bidens pushed by Giuliani “as being motivated primarily by a domestic U.S. political concern, because we were not aware of another reason, new facts, or other reasons to initiate a new investigation.”
He also claimed he was essentially told to ignore efforts to push Ukraine to investigate the Bidens or claims of Ukrainian election interference in 2016.
“We were told to do our jobs, to implement policy, kind of, as we understood it, and to disregard all that other stuff as stuff that was relevant to Washington politics,” Holmes said. “The themes that Mr. Giuliani was promoting and his associates were promoting were in that basket, in my view. And so that was my understanding. In my mind, those were — those were things — those were political things that were not related to the implementation of our policy.”
Holmes worked for U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch from his arrival in Ukraine in August 2017 until she was officially recalled on May 20 this year, saying she was “incredibly professional, dedicated, determined,” and he was taken aback by the attacks on her.
“The media, the intensity and consistency of the media attacks of her personally by name as a U.S. ambassador and the scope of the allegations that were leveled against her, the intensity of that, I’ve never seen anything like that,” Holmes told investigators. “And then, to have an ambassador recalled because of this media campaign, I had never seen anything like that.”
Vice President Mike Pence’s special adviser Jennifer Williams, former National Security Council Russian expert Tim Morrison, the National Security Council’s Ukraine expert Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, and former U.S. Special Envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker will testify in public Tuesday.
Sondland, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs Laura Cooper, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs David Hale, and the National Security Council’s former Senior Director for Europe and Russia Fiona Hill will publicly testify later in the week.
