Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the EU, said he carried out a campaign to pressure Ukraine to open politically motivated investigations at the direction of Donald Trump, and that other senior US officials, including Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, were “in the loop”.
Mr Sondland on Wednesday became the first member of the US president’s inner circle to say publicly that Ukraine was told it would have to announce investigations demanded by Mr Trump to secure a phone call and White House meeting for Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
“I know that members of this committee have frequently framed these complicated issues in the form of a simple question: Was there a ‘quid pro quo?’,” Mr Sondland said in his opening statement to a House impeachment hearing. “As I testified previously [in private], with regard to the requested White House call and White House meeting, the answer is yes.”
Mr Sondland, the only confidante of Mr Trump who has agreed to testify before the impeachment inquiry, said the president ordered him to work with his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who was leading an effort to pressure Mr Zelensky to open investigations demanded by Mr Trump.
“As a presidential appointee, I followed the directions of the president. We worked with Mr Giuliani because the president directed us to do so,” Mr Sondland said. “We had no desire to set any conditions on the Ukrainians. Indeed, my personal view — which I shared repeatedly with others — was that the White House meeting and security assistance should have proceeded without preconditions of any kind.”
Mr Sondland said that Mr Pompeo and other senior officials were aware of an arrangement that critics have called a “quid pro quo”.
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“We kept the leadership of the state department and the National Security Council informed of our activities,” Mr Sondland told Congress in his opening remarks for his highly anticipated public testimony on Wednesday.
“That included communications with Secretary of State Pompeo . . . and communications with Ambassador John Bolton,” Mr Sondland told the House intelligence committee, which is leading the public phase of the impeachment hearings. “They knew what we were doing and why.”
Mr Sondland, a hotelier who was rewarded with the ambassadorship after fundraising for Mr Trump, is a critical witness in the impeachment inquiry because he is one of the few officials to have had conversations with the president about the events that have sparked the fourth impeachment inquiry into a US president.
When Mr Sondland testified before the committee in private last month, he denied that there was any quid pro quo involved when the White House withheld $391m in military aid that Congress had designated for Ukraine to help the country defend itself from Russian aggression.
Following the testimony of other officials, Mr Sondland amended his testimony to make clear that there had been a quid pro quo.
In his statement, Mr Sondland included an email that he sent to Mr Pompeo and Mick Mulvaney, the White House chief of staff, and other top officials on July 19, one week before the controversial July 25 phone call between Mr Trump and Mr Zelensky that sparked the impeachment inquiry.
A summary of the call released by the White House showed that Mr Trump sought investigations into the business dealings of Hunter Biden, the son of former vice-president and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, as well as unfounded allegations of Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election.
“Everyone was in the loop. It was no secret. Everyone was informed via email on July 19, days before the presidential call. As I communicated to the team, I told President Zelensky in advance that assurances to ‘run a fully transparent investigation’ and ‘turn over every stone’ were necessary in his call with President Trump.”
