Day 1,035: Sondland impeachment testimony directly implicated Trump, Pompeo and good chunk of administration
The White House was nervous about the ambassador’s testimony. It was worse than they could have imagined.
The impeachment hearings have been overwhelmingly incriminating for Donald Trump. One-by-one the witnesses have raised their right hand and testified to various parts of the same story: Trump wanted to pressure Ukraine to announce an investigation in to the Biden family, and in return Ukraine would get Congress-approved military aid and a White House visit for their president.
Those witnesses, however, had limited interaction with Trump. That gave him, at least temporarily, a tiny window of far-fetched deniability.
That window was slammed shut Wednesday by Trump-appointed U.S. Ambassador to the European Union and lifelong Republican Gordon Sondland. He testified about quid pro quo and operating strictly on Trump’s orders. He also testified that many top members of the administration — including Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and then-Secretary of Energy Rick Perry —were acutely aware of the operation, saying “everyone was in the loop.”
More forcefully than he has before, Sondland declared that the Trump administration would not give Ukraine’s newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a chance to visit the White House — unless Zelensky agreed to announce investigations that could help the president politically.
“I know that members of this committee frequently frame these complicated issues in the form of a simple question: Was there a ‘quid pro quo’?” Sondland said. “. . . With regard to the requested White House call and the White House meeting, the answer is yes.”
By the time Sondland was done, Republicans had little else to do but try to score points by cherry-picking misleading snippets from his testimony. Meanwhile, the entirety of the record shows that virtually all of their defenses were shattered in a few hours by Sondland.
Unsurprisingly, Trump’s feelings about Sondland have done a 180.
Trump was just implicated in a criminal conspiracy by one of his co-conspirators. That witness also implicated dozens more aides, including multiple Cabinet members and the vice president. Sondland’s testimony will likely go down as the most damning of all witnesses, especially considering the first-hand nature of most of his knowledge. What Sondland testified to Wednesday could almost single-handedly trigger articles of impeachment, notwithstanding the scores of other witnesses, documents, transcripts and other evidence already presented that support his claims.
As Rep. Justin Amash (I-MI) — the former Republican ousted from the GOP after speaking out against Trump — noted, Trump would be indicted by any grand jury in the country based on the evidence already presented.
1,035 days in, 427 to go
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