Diplomats Detail Pressure on Ukraine to Investigate Biden Family
Holmes and Hill were the witnesses closing out the second week of public hearings in the impeachment inquiry.
(Bloomberg) -- Ukrainian officials understood that they would only get a White House meeting and security aid in exchange for investigations into Joe Biden’s family, two witnesses said Thursday in testimony that undercuts a key Republican defense of President Donald Trump.
David Holmes, the Kyiv embassy’s political counselor, corroborated earlier testimony about an effort orchestrated by Rudy Giuliani at Trump’s direction to get Ukraine to commit to politically motivated investigations in return for U.S. aid and a White House meeting. He said Ukraine’s president had planned to make the announcement in an interview with CNN.
“In short, everyone thought there was going to be an interview, and that the Ukrainians believed they had to do it,” Holmes told the House impeachment inquiry. The interview was canceled after the U.S. aid was released amid an uproar in Congress over the delay.
Holmes and Fiona Hill, the former National Security Council senior director for Ukraine, offered additional evidence of how Giuliani sowed confusion about the who was running U.S. policy. Over time, it became clear that Ukrainian leaders were listening to him, not diplomats who were nominally in charge of policy.
Hill said a split also developed in the White House between the national security team and the officials working with Giuliani. She said she had been upset that U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland wasn’t informing the NSC staff about who he was meeting with on Ukraine, but now realizes why he didn’t.
“He was being involved in a domestic political errand and we were being involved in national security, foreign policy and those two things had just diverged,” Hill said. ”But I was irritated with him and angry with him that he had not been fully coordinated and I said to him, Ambassador Gordon Sondland, I fear this is all going to blow up.”
“And here we are,” she said.
Holmes and Hill were the witnesses closing out the second week of public hearings in the impeachment inquiry. While several witnesses have bolstered the Democrats’ case that Trump sought to use U.S. power for political gain, Republicans have remained solidly behind the president. Trump and the GOP argue that none of those who testified have linked Trump directly to a pressure campaign on Ukraine.
Republicans also have argued that Trump did nothing wrong because Ukrainian leaders said they felt no pressure to announce investigations in exchange for aid and the White House meeting. Hill and Holmes made clear that U.S. officials -- including Giuliani and Sondland, told Ukrainian leaders repeatedly about the demand, and Ukraine got the message.
Giuliani’s role even caused consternation those in the U.S. he was working with. Holmes quoted Sondland as saying, “Every time Rudy gets involved he goes and f---s everything up.”
On Wednesday, Sondland, a Trump donor with a direct line to the president, testified that Giuliani worked at Trump’s direction to press Ukraine to publicly announce an investigations into Ukraine’s role in 2016 and Democrat Joe Biden’s dealings with the country when he was vice president. The leverage was holding up a White House meeting for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as well as military aid.
Sondland and former special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker both testified that they didn’t initially realize references by Giuliani and others to investigations involving Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings really meant Biden and his son Hunter, who sat on its board. But Hill and Holmes testified there was no doubt about the connection.
“It was very apparent to me that was what Rudy Giuliani intended, yes, intended to convey that Burisma was linked to the Bidens and he said this publicly, repeatedly,” Hill said.
Under questioning from Democratic counsel Dan Goldman, Holmes said he agreed that Burisma was “code” for the Bidens.
One damning element of Holmes’s testimony was that even after Trump decided on Sept. 11 to give Ukraine the aid, leaders there still felt they would need to make the announcement he wanted. U.S. Officials believed it would happen just days later at a conference in Ukraine where CNN’s Fareed Zakaria was a moderator.
That spurred a last minute effort to head off the announcement, including when temporary ambassador to Ukraine, William Taylor, urged Zelenskiy adviser Andriy Yermak on Sept. 13 not to do it.
“Mr. Yermak did not answer, but shrugged in resignation as if to indicate they had no choice,” Holmes said. Ultimately, the statement was never made.
Hill led off by chastising Republicans, and by extension Trump, for buying into a “fictional narrative” propagated by Russian security services that Ukraine rather than Russia was involved in U.S. election interference in 2016. The impact of Russia’s campaign continues today, she said.
“I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests,” she told the committee.
The conspiracy theory of Ukraine’s involvement in the 2016 election -- that the country aided Democrats and worked against Trump -- was a central pursuit of Giuliani, who witnesses have testified was orchestrating the pressure campaign on the new government in Ukraine.
Hill said she is proudly non-partisan and that those “who have information that the Congress deems relevant have a legal and moral obligation to provide it.”
‘Hand Grenade’
Among those who haven’t testified is her former boss, ex-National Security Adviser John Bolton, who left the White House after a series of policy disagreements with Trump. Other witnesses have said Bolton referred to the shadow Ukraine policy being run by Giuliani and others as a “drug deal.”
Hill said Bolton called Giuliani “a hand grenade that was going to blow everybody up.”
Holmes said the pressure on Ukraine came to a head with the controversial July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelenskiy that has become focus of the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.
At a meeting the next day, Zelenskiy told Holmes and Sondland that Trump “‘three times’ raised ‘some very sensitive issues,’ and that he would have to follow up on those issues when he and President Trump met ‘in person,”’ Holmes said.
Holmes recounted overhearing a phone call between Trump and Sondland later the same day. Holmes said that Trump spoke so loudly that Sondland “winced” at least twice and pulled the phone away from his ear, allowing others at the table in a Kyiv restaurant to hear parts of the conversation.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in my foreign service career,” he said of Sondland’s call in a non-secure place, a call with the president that even he could overhear, and colorful language over a sensitive suspect.
He repeated his earlier testimony that he heard Trump ask, “So, he’s gonna do the investigation?”
Afterward, he asked Sondland if it was true that Trump didn’t care about Ukraine. “Ambassador Sondland agreed that the president did not “give a s--t about Ukraine,” Holmes said. “I asked why not, and Ambassador Sondland stated that the President only cares about “big stuff.”
Sondland said the “big stuff” meant things that benefit Trump, “like the ‘Biden investigation’ that Mr. Giuliani was pushing,” Holmes said.
Sondland on Wednesday didn’t dispute most of Holmes’s recollection, though he said he didn’t recall using Biden’s name.
To contact the reporters on this story: Billy House in Washington at bhouse5@bloomberg.net;Laura Litvan in Washington at llitvan@bloomberg.net;Nick Wadhams in Washington at nwadhams@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net
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