Ukraine Leader ‘Loves Your Ass,’ Aide Heard Diplomat Tell Trump
The call was recounted to House impeachment investigators by David Holmes, the political counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine.
(Bloomberg) -- An unsecured mobile phone call to Donald Trump from his top diplomat in Europe, who was sitting in an open-air restaurant, could yield the most direct evidence yet that the president himself pressured a foreign power to conduct politically motivated investigations.
The call was recounted to House impeachment investigators by David Holmes, the political counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, during a closed-door hearing on Friday, adding direct knowledge about Trump’s conduct to the case Democrats are building against him.
Holmes’s opening statement, reported by CNN, also raises the stakes for Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, who was on the other end of the telephone call with Trump and is set to testify in public next week.
After a July 26 meeting in Kyiv with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Holmes said he, Sondland and two other embassy staffers went to a restaurant where the ambassador called Trump and said Zelenskiy “loves your ass.”
Trump, who was speaking loudly enough for Holmes to hear, then asked, “So, he’s gonna do the investigation?” -- an apparent reference to probes of former Vice President Joe Biden and the 2016 election, which Trump and his allies wanted Ukraine to pursue.
According to Holmes, Sondland replied “he’s gonna do it,” adding that Zelenskiy will do “anything you ask him to.”
Holmes said he later asked Sondland if the president cared about Ukraine, and Sondland said Trump did not “give a s--- about Ukraine.”
“I asked why not, and Ambassador Sondland stated that the president only cares about ‘big stuff,’” Holmes testified, according to the document posted by CNN. “I noted that there was ‘big stuff’ going on in Ukraine, like a war with Russia, and Ambassador Sondland replied that he meant ‘big stuff’ that benefits the president, like the ‘Biden investigation.”’
Holmes’s testimony undercuts two main thrusts of the Republican defense in the impeachment inquiry: That witnesses thus far didn’t have firsthand knowledge of events, and that Trump wasn’t directly implicated.
He spoke to investigators on the same day that the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, testified before the House Intelligence Committee at a dramatic public hearing.
Grounds for Impeachment
Sondland’s call to the president came the day after Trump spoke with Zelenskiy by phone and asked the Ukrainian leader about investigating Biden and an unfounded conspiracy theory about a Democratic email server.
Other witnesses testified that Trump was withholding congressionally-mandated aid for Ukraine and a White House visit for Zelenskiy in exchange for those investigations.
Democrats this week began describing those allegations of pressure as “bribery,” an offense that the Constitution specifically names as grounds for impeachment.
The Trump-Sondland call was first made public on Wednesday by William Taylor, currently the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, during the first public impeachment hearing of the Intelligence Committee. Taylor said one of his staff members overhead the call, although Taylor wasn’t aware of that when he gave his private deposition last month.
Republicans on the Intelligence Committee dismissed Taylor’s testimony as hearsay. That will be harder to say about Holmes’s deposition, since he was present with Sondland. He described the call in detail, which took place on “an outdoor terrace,” with a bottle of wine shared between Sondland, Holmes and the two other aides.
“While Ambassador Sondland’s phone was not on speakerphone, I could hear the president’s voice through the earpiece of the phone,” Holmes said. “The president’s voice was very loud and recognizable, and Ambassador Sondland held the phone away from his ear for a period of time, presumably because of the loud volume.”
‘Dammit Rudy’
This call will be among the main questions for Sondland in his public hearing next week. Sondland, a hotel executive who donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, answered many of the questions during his closed-door testimony last month by saying he didn’t recall relevant details.
He later submitted a letter to the committees to amend his testimony with a more direct connection between the investigations Trump sought and aid for Ukraine that the administration was withholding.
“The best thing he can do for himself, for this investigation and for his duty to the Constitution is to just continue to be forthcoming with us,” Representative Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said of Sondland’s upcoming appearance. “It’s not unusual in investigations that witnesses hold back information or don’t have a full account and then their account changes for a variety of reasons.”
Holmes in his testimony also detailed the general frustration among State Department officials about the role that Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, was playing in U.S. foreign policy.
In addition to the pressure Giuliani was putting on U.S. and Ukrainian officials to investigate Trump’s political rivals, he often spoke about Ukraine during media appearances, claiming that he was working on behalf of his client, the president.
Recalling a conversation about one of Giuliani’s television interviews, Holmes said: “My recollection is that Ambassador Sondland stated, ‘Dammit Rudy. Every time Rudy gets involved he goes and f---s everything up.’”
To contact the reporters on this story: Daniel Flatley in Washington at dflatley1@bloomberg.net;Steven T. Dennis in Washington at sdennis17@bloomberg.net;Evan Sully in Washington at esully2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kevin Whitelaw at kwhitelaw@bloomberg.net, John Harney
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