U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland | Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Democrats and Republicans battled over testimony Tuesday, but both parties are waiting for the next key witness to finally get some answers.
WASHINGTON — There’s a Gordon Sondland-sized gap in the House’s impeachment inquiry.
The unconventional ambassador to the European Union — deployed by U.S. President Donald Trump to help squeeze Ukraine to investigate his political adversaries — has been the omnipresent shadow behind the series of witnesses who have testified publicly so far.
In fact, across nearly 12 hours of testimony on Tuesday by four witnesses — in turns exhausting, exhilarating and excruciating — Democrats and Republicans really succeeded only in underscoring the growing set of unknowns that can be resolved by Sondland on Wednesday.
He’s the inexplicable actor who confounded career diplomats and seemed to push an agenda that wasn’t shared by the officials actually carrying out U.S. foreign policy — but often seemed aligned with Trump’s own private views on Ukraine. He’s the force behind many of the moments that led more practiced foreign policy hands like Fiona Hill to alert national security lawyers.
Sondland alarmed national security officials, like Lt. Col. Alex Vindman, by pressuring Ukrainians during a White House meeting to conduct Trump’s favored investigations — including a probe of former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Sondland left Vindman’s boss Tim Morrison with a “sinking feeling” after suggesting that Trump appeared to want to condition $400 million in military assistance on Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s willingness to personally announce those probes.
And he kept his ally Kurt Volker, then a special envoy to Ukraine, in the dark about some of his private talks with Trump.
Vindman, Morrison and Volker all testified Tuesday, and all faced sharp questions from lawmakers that remained at least somewhat unanswerable without Sondland’s own insights.
Sondland also flummoxed Trump’s current top envoy to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, when he asked colleagues to exclude notetakers from a June call with Zelensky. And he later relayed to Taylor, who testified last week, that “everything” — a White House visit and military aid — depended on the opening of Trump’s favored investigations.
If the testimony from the seven witnesses who have addressed the publicly underscore anything, it’s that Sondland can pull together all of the far-flung elements of Democrats’ impeachment investigation and provide clarity — or sink the probe into further confusion — with his testimony on Wednesday.
And despite the high expectations for Sondland, there’s reason to be wary. The testimony to this point has raised serious questions about Sondland’s credibility. Some witnesses nicked Sondland for boasting about his close ties to Trump and said they wondered at times whether it was puffery.
Morrison said Tuesday that when he succeeded Hill in her senior position on the National Security Council, she warned him to beware of “The Gordon Problem.” It was a reference to Sondland’s intense effort to secure the politically motivated Ukraine investigations for Trump, he recalled.
But Morrison and others also attested that when Sondland claimed to speak to Trump, he truly had spoken to Trump.
Unlike many of the other witnesses who have already testified, Trump hasn’t attacked Sondland, who won the EU ambassadorship after contributing $1 million to the president’s inaugural committee.
In fact, Trump took to Twitter to praise Sondland ahead of his closed-door testimony. Trump called him “a really good man and great American,” and highlighted Sondland’s text messages to Volker and Taylor that claimed Trump denied any “quid pro quo” with Ukraine.
Congressional Republicans also once thought Sondland would play a critical role in their defense of Trump.
But all that was before Sondland amended his testimony to declare that he now “presumed” Trump was attempting to establish quid pro quo, for military aid. And it was before other witnesses said Sondland impugned Trump’s motives for seeking the investigations — out loud at a restaurant in Kyiv — in front of at least three State Department officials.
At that meeting, per Taylor aide David Holmes, who is slated to testify publicly Thursday, Sondland affirmed that Trump doesn’t “give a shit” about Ukraine but rather only cares about “big things” that advance his personal interests.
That exchange, which Taylor first hinted at in his opening statement a week ago, started the crescendo building toward Sondland’s testimony.
With a few words Wednesday morning, Sondland can turn the screws on those resisting Trump’s impeachment, or complicate Democrats’ momentum as they barrel closer to drafting articles and calling for the president’s removal.