William Taylor, the acting ambassador to Ukraine, made a damning new claim in his testimony during Wednesday’s House impeachment hearing, and it’s going to require a response from Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union who already was forced to change his testimony.
Much of Taylor’s public testimony reiterated the account he gave during a closed-door session, in which he said that in early September he became aware that security assistance to Ukraine was being withheld by the Trump administration to pressure the government into publicly committing to investigations related to the 2016 election and Joe and Hunter Biden.
But he added this bombshell:
The core of this information is incredibly damaging. It affirms that Trump, a day after his phone call with Ukraine’s president, was myopically focused on investigations that would benefit him personally rather than the broader interests of the United States in the region. It also undercuts defenses that try to distance Trump from the back and forth with Ukraine by suggesting that orders to push for the investigations were coming directly from him. But it’s also easy to see how Trump’s defenders can poke holes in the account. After all, Taylor communicated information he claims to have heard after the fact from an unnamed staffer who he says was eavesdropping on a phone call with Trump to which the staffer was not a party.
That’s why it’s crucial to ask Sondland for his direct account of the call.
In his prior testimony, Sondland acknowledged he spoke to Trump, but he said the call “was very short, non-substantive, and did not encompass any of the substance of the July 25, 2019 White House call with President Zelensky.”
Sondland already made a substantive change to his original testimony, conceding that he did, in fact, convey to the Ukrainians “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.” He claimed that his memory was “refreshed” by Taylor’s testimony as well as that of National Security Council aide Tim Morrison. Time to ask him whether Taylor has refreshed his memory once again.
