WASHINGTON — Dramatic information emerged on the first day of the public phase of the impeachment inquiry against U.S. President Donald Trump which seemed to establish a new, direct link between him and attempts to pressure Ukraine to help discredit one of his political rivals in return for U.S. military assistance worth nearly $400 million.
The live televised hearings on Nov. 13 were the first chance for Americans to see witnesses give their accounts live to a U.S. House committee investigating whether there are sufficient grounds to impeach Trump.
The first two witnesses were America’s top diplomat in Ukraine, acting Ambassador William Taylor, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent.
Both had previously been questioned by congressional committees behind closed doors about a whistleblower’s allegations that Trump improperly asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to order an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden, who at that time looked set to be Trump’s foremost rival in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
Taylor and Kent’s depositions, given in October, along with those of other witnesses, had been released over the past week.
However, Taylor said that he learned only last week about an additional important piece of information which he shared on Nov. 13 with the House Intelligence Committee, which is taking the lead in the congressional impeachment inquiry.
Taylor said that one of his aides overheard a cellphone conversation between Trump and U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, which indicated the American president’s main interest was to get Kyiv to launch investigations that would perpetuate the discredited narratives about Biden and Ukrainian interference in the 2016 American elections.
Sondland donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. The president sent Sondland to Kyiv to join his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and U.S. special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, in taking charge of his foreign policy to Ukraine.
Three amigos ride into Kyiv
The trio was dubbed “the three amigos” and they engaged in what Taylor described as “highly irregular” behavior, outside normal diplomatic routines, to persuade Zelensky to launch the investigations.
Taylor’s aide, political officer David Holmes, was with Sondland in a Kyiv restaurant on July 26, the day after Trump and Zelensky had a telephone conversation in which the Ukrainian president said Ukraine wanted to buy more U.S. made Javelin anti-armor missiles for defense against Russian invaders.
A reconstructed transcript of the fateful conversation shows Trump linked the request for Javelins to his “favor” for Zelensky to start investigations into Biden and the Ukrainian election interference conspiracy.
Taylor’s aide said he could hear Trump’s side of the conversation in which he asked Sondland about the investigations and was told “that the Ukrainians were ready to move forward.”
The staff member asked Sondland what Trump thought about Ukraine and Taylor said Sondland “responded that President Trump cares more about the investigations of Biden, which Giuliani was pressing for.”
Sondland testified behind closed doors to the inquiry last month. In transcripts released by the investigating committees, he originally denied that Trump was seeking to trade U.S. military aid in return for Ukrainian consent to launch the investigations – the alleged illegal “quid pro quo” at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.
When Taylor and others testified that the three amigos were trying to engineer exactly that sort of arrangement, Sondland amended his testimony to accord with theirs.
It now seems certain Sondland will be asked to speak about his overheard telephone conversation when he provides public testimony next week. Taylor’s aide, whose identity was not made known during Wednesday’s hearing, is also being subpoenaed to appear.
Taylor, a top graduate from America’s prestigious West Point military academy and a decorated Vietnam War veteran who went on to become one of his country’s senior diplomats, initially believed the only thing Ukraine would forfeit for not launching investigations was the White House meeting with Trump that Zelensky desired.
He was appalled when he understood, from his conversations and phone text exchanges with Sondland and Volker, that “everything was at stake” including the U.S. military aid package.
Trump wouldn’t sign the check
He said Sondland used the analogy of a businessman not signing a check for someone until that person had paid what they owed to explain that Trump, as a businessman, would not release the military aid for Kyiv until Ukraine had paid what he felt it owed to him.
Taylor said that in Trump’s perception Ukraine had “wronged him” because he believed Kyiv tried to undermine his presidential campaign and thus ought to launch the investigations “to fix” that wrong.
Taylor said it was “crazy” to withhold security assistance from Ukraine in order to gain political advantage for an election campaign.
He outlined to the committee members that U.S.-provided training and equipment such as counter-battery radar and sniper rifles provide a deterrent effect to keep further Russian aggression at bay.
His voice departed from its otherwise calm tones when he spoke about the thousands of Ukrainians who had lost their lives defending their country from Russian aggression – a fight, he said, that continues to take more lives each week.
He said how “uncomfortable” he felt during an August visit to Ukrainian front lines last August when Ukrainian commanders were thanking him for U.S. help while he was aware Trump was blocking it.
He told Congressmen that he had visited the Donbas front lines again just last week on a day when pro-Moscow forces killed a Ukrainian serviceman.
He said that Russia and China were America’s adversaries and that Moscow had violated all the rules that had kept peace in Europe for 70 years after World War II. Taylor held that Russian aggression posed a risk for the entire world, including U.S. national interests and Ukraine was in the front line of the conflict.
Russia, he said, was “watching closely” to gauge the level of U.S. support for Ukraine.
“Ukrainians are eager to end the war in a way that Russians leave their territory. Part of Ukraine’s ability to negotiate from a position of at least a little strength depends on our security assistance,” said Taylor. “The Russians are looking for any sign of weakness or that we are withdrawing support from Ukraine.”
The impeachment inquiry has been launched against Republican Party leader Trump by the Democratic Party-dominated House of Representatives. If the House of Representatives decides to impeach Trump it will be the Republican-dominated Senate that will try him and it is doubtful enough senators will vote to convict and remove the president from office.
Republican members of Congress and legal counsels questioning the two veteran diplomats did not challenge their honesty or the essence of the allegations against Trump but they challenged Democratic conclusions that the president’s conduct amounted to a “quid pro quo.”
They said that as the Ukrainian side did not know that Trump had ordered a suspension of the military aid until a month after the July 25 telephone conversation between the two presidents, there could not have been a “quid pro quo.”
Republican Jim Jordan mocked Taylor and Kent’s testimonies because he said they had not spoken to Trump and their conclusions were based on hearsay. He said that even though Trump withheld military aid for a time it was eventually released without Ukraine launching investigations.
Representative Devin Nunes, the senior Republican member of the intelligence committee, complained that the Democrats were refusing to call 12 people his party wanted to testify.
Republican legal counsel Steve Castor suggested that as corruption was “endemic” in Ukraine, Trump had only wanted to delay U.S. taxpayer-funded aid to Ukraine until the White House had a chance to check on whether Zelensky and his administration were genuine about their promises to fight corruption.
Nunes tried to portray Democrats as desperate to find something to pin on Trump and said “this is an impeachment process in search of a crime.”
Referring to the two-year probe by Robert Mueller investigating whether there were ties between Trump’s election campaign and the Kremlin, Nunes told Taylor and Kent: “The main performance, the Russia hoax, has ended, and you’ve been cast in the low-rent Ukrainian sequel.”
He criticized a “politicized bureaucracy” in which civil servants felt they knew better than Trump, who had been elected by the American people.
Kent, who joined the Foreign Service in 1992, said he concluded last summer that Giuliani’s efforts to make Kyiv launch investigations into the Bidens and the discredited conspiracy theory “were now infecting U.S. engagement with Ukraine, leveraging President Zelensky’s desire for a White House meeting.”
Democratic Party legal counsel Daniel Goldman asked Kent: “To your knowledge, is there any factual basis to support the allegation that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election?”
Kent replied: ”To my knowledge, there is no factual basis, no………I think it’s amply clear that Russian interference was at the heart of interference in the 2016 election cycle.”
Kent also refuted allegations that Joe Biden had abused his position while vice president to improperly influence anything in Ukraine. On the contrary, he had helped in U.S. embassy efforts there to combat corruption.
However, he said he had raised concerns that Hunter Biden’s job with Burisma would be seen as a conflict of interest issue.
The Democratic chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, who is leading the impeachment inquiry, referred to what he called attempts to obstruct the process by the White House and warned that if that went unchallenged than “the balance of power between the two branches of government [Congress and the president] will be irrevocably altered.”
He referred to an admission, later retracted, by Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, who defended Trump’s attempt to strong-arm Ukraine by saying that sort of political trade-off was commonplace and told journalists to “get over it.”
Schiff said: “If he sought to condition, coerce, extort or bribe an ally into conducting investigations to aid his re-election campaign, and did so by withholding official acts — a White House meeting or hundreds of millions of dollars of needed military aid — must we simply ‘get over it’? Is this what Americans should now expect from their president?”
Schiff suggested Trump only released the military assistance to Ukraine because he found out that Congress was about to learn about the whistleblower’s allegations.
Democrat Joaquin Castro believed that Zelensky was desperate to secure the military aid in order to protect his country and demonstrate to Moscow that Ukraine had U.S. support. Otherwise, he said, Russia might have seen it as an invitation to “pounce” and grab more Ukrainian territory. Castro contended that even if unsuccessful, attempted extortion was still a crime.
Schiff said the inquiry must decide whether the president “abused his power and invited foreign interference in our elections……If this is not impeachable conduct, what is?”
Former Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who was abruptly moved from her post last April by Trump, will give her public testimony on Nov. 15.
