Today, Explained - Impeachment TV: Mr. Sondland Goes to Washington

Episode Date: November 21, 2019

The most-anticipated testimony of the House impeachment inquiry was held today on Capitol Hill. It did not disappoint. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The show's about to start in a moment, but I just want to tell you about another show first. It's called Bad With Money. It's a podcast where New York Times bestselling author comedian Gabby Dunn breaks down everything about money and our complicated relationship with it. On Bad With Money, Gabby talks to journalists, activists, and everyday people about everything from universal basic income to student loan debt to weed. This season, Gabby is going international. The show dissects how Americans talk about money and how money is valued by people in countries and cultures around the world.

The all-new season of Bad With Money is out now. If you are bad with money, you should go check it out. Or if you're good with money too, maybe you'll learn something. Find it in your podcast app and subscribe so you never miss stories about people being bad with money. You cry, you cry next night. Ukraine, Ukraine Explained. It's Ukraine Explained.

You know, this whole Ukraine Explained thing started with this whistleblower scandal on September 23rd. Son of a Biden. A whistleblower in the intelligence community sparked a political scandal involving President Trump. The President of the United States wanted dirt on his political rival, and he wanted another country to dig it up for him. The very next day, September 24th, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi called for an impeachment inquiry of the President.

In short order, we got the so-called transcript, we got the whistleblower complaint, we got piece after piece of a puzzle that featured more names, more names, more texts, more phone calls. But it wasn't until last week that this impeachment inquiry became a public-facing televised event. And the event of this event, the one that everyone has been waiting for, today's testimony of EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland. Today, we devote our entire show to his televised testimony and what it means for this story. There are so many characters in this story. Taylor, Kent, Yovanovitch,

Williams, Vindman, Volker, Morrison. But it's Sondland who was on the phone with the president while nudging Ukraine. Our show today, in three acts, Mr. Sondland goes to Washington. From WVOX Washington, it's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos for him. Stay with us. Act one, the third amigo. Amigo one, former special envoy to Ukraine, Kurt Volker. Amigo 2, Energy Secretary, Rick Perry. Amigo 3, Ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland. Amigo 14, Andrew Prokop. He takes it from here. Sondland is a luxury hotel magnate, and he's been a longtime Republican donor. I expect that few Americans have heard my name before these events.

So before I begin my substantive testimony, please let me share some of my personal background. What seems to have happened is that around 2016, Sondland wanted to upgrade his status. Sondland decided to donate a million dollars to Trump's inauguration committee in early 2017. And he was rewarded for this by being nominated by Trump to be the U.S. ambassador to the European Union and assumed that post in 2018. How does he go from being ambassador to the EU to getting involved in Ukraine? Sondland claims that Ukraine was always part of his mandate. But what really seems to have happened is that after the most recent U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who testified last week in the inquiry, was ousted from her post, Sondland took on a rather outsized role in U.S. diplomacy toward Ukraine. And he did so alongside two other people,

Kurt Volker, who testified on Tuesday, and Rick Perry, the Secretary of Energy, and Sondland famously named them the Three Amigos. The Three Amigos! Did you know you were part of the Three Amigos? I am. I'm a proud part of the Three Amigos. Volker, his fellow amigo, turned over an extensive set of text messages related to communications with and about Ukraine throughout 2019.

And in these texts, Sondland plays a starring role. He is often the one who is most blatantly pushing for a quid pro quo with Ukraine. The texts made clear that Sondland was a lot more involved in this than you might think the ambassador to the European Union would be. So Democrats were really eager to hear what he had to say when he went behind closed doors in October. So what did he initially say behind closed doors? His initial story was that it was mainly because of Rudy Giuliani, that Sondland himself had little role. And he was also vague on the topic of whether that military aid to Ukraine was being linked to this push as well. So the problem for Sondland is that other witnesses, notably Bill Taylor, also National Security Council staffer

Tim Morrison, went on to testify within weeks that Sondland seemed to be a lot more heavily involved in all this than he was fully explaining. And is this when he starts to sort of roll back his initial testimony? Yes. So after the other witnesses testify, Sondland made the rather unusual move of submitting an addendum. He said that actually, he now does recall that on September 1st, he told a top advisor to the Ukrainian president that they probably wouldn't get their military aid unless they agreed to the investigations Trump wanted. What's going on when he's rolling this back? Is he afraid of being caught in a perjury situation, going to jail maybe? Sondland was definitely the witness that Democrats had the most doubts about his credibility because his testimony seemed to conflict so much with that of other witnesses and documents.

And this is sworn testimony. So yes, Sondland really would be risking a possible criminal prosecution. And he may have paid attention to the trial of Roger Stone, which just wrapped up the longtime Trump advisor who was just convicted of lying to Congress in sworn testimony. The stakes were pretty high for Sondland's testimony in the public setting on Wednesday, both because of the doubts about his credibility and because Sondland is currently the only witness on Democrats' lineup to have had several conversations with President Trump personally about this topic. So everyone was

wondering, what would Gordon Sondland say? The stage is set. Ambassador Gordon Sondland has a seat in front of the cameras. He talks about his early life, his passion for politics, his support of Republicans, even some Democrats. And then he sings like a soprano. That's in a minute from WVOX and the Vox Media Podcast Network when our program continues. To be continued... in Spain that's actually called Vox and the rise of far-right parties across Western Europe and even the world and certainly impeachment and impeachment and impeachment. We've talked about impeachment a lot, but I want to tell you about our sort of cousin podcast, Reset. It's all about technology and how it's changing our lives. It's from Recode and Vox. And in the past week, they have talked about SMS texting and how a bunch of people sent texts on like Valentine's Day 2019, but they didn't get delivered until this month and how that caused some serious consternation for some people who were like no longer in relationships with the people who the text finally got sent to.

It's very complicated and interesting. They talked about a big Airbnb scam. They talked about why Google has your health records. Google has partnered with one of America's large hospital networks and gained a bunch of access to millions of health records. Does that freak you out? If so, maybe you want to listen to Reset right now from Recode and Vox. Check it out wherever you listen to your podcasts. They cover other things than the impeachment inquiry. It's This Ukrainian Life. I'm Sean Ramos from each day in our show. Of course, we do an episode about the news, bring you all sorts of sounds about that news, songs, archival audio interviews.

Today's show, Mr. Sondland goes to Washington. We are breaking down the long-awaited testimony from the EU ambassador. We have now arrived at Act 2, Act 2, Song of Sondland. No one really knew what he would say. Would he plead the fifth? Would he contradict his prior testimony? Would he reveal new information? Our story continues with Vox's Andrew Prokop. Andrew, how did Ambassador Sondland open up today? So Sondland gave testimony that was very bad to the Republican defenses of this overall. He said that there was absolutely a quid pro quo involving a White House meeting being withheld from the Ukrainians until they committed to investigations.

He said that he was following the president's orders in talking to Rudy Giuliani about all this and helping try to get the Ukrainians to go along with what Giuliani was pushing. And he really, really wanted to make clear that this was not just him, Gordon Sondland, that there was lots of involvement from others in the Trump administration, from the State Department to the White House to the Vice President's office. So he was basically throwing everyone under the bus. Okay, let's talk about everyone who got run over one by one, starting with Giuliani. So Sondland said that he and the other amigos worked with Giuliani on Ukraine matters at the express direction of the president. And we did not want to work with Mr.

Giuliani. Simply put, we were playing the hand we were dealt. We all understood that if we refused to work with Mr. Giuliani, we would lose a very important opportunity to cement relations between the United States and Ukraine. So we followed the president's orders. And he also explained that 2016 election, DNC server, and Burisma. Mr. Giuliani was expressing the desires of the president of the United States, and we knew these investigations were important to the president. So as we already knew, Giuliani is key to all this, and Sondland is saying, I didn't want to work with this guy, but basically I had to. After he made it clear that he was not a big fan of Giuliani, nor his later work, he moved on to Mike Pompeo and the State Department.

What do you have to say about the State Department's involvement in Ukraine? updated Secretary of State Pompeo and advisors close to Pompeo on what he was telling the Ukrainians, that he was really trying to get President Zelensky to commit to these investigations. And Sondland brought receipts. He read out quotes from emails he sent to Pompeo and Pompeo's aides. These emails show that the leadership of the State Department, the National Security Council, and the White House were all informed about the Ukraine efforts from May 23rd, 2019, until the security aid was released on September 11th, 2019. And we should note here that Pompeo was actually on the phone call

between Trump and Zelensky on July 25th, when Trump himself made these same demands to Zelensky and framed it as investigating the Bidens. So Pompeo knew what this was all about. And Sondland presented a good deal of evidence suggesting that his involvement was deeper than we previously knew. And this is significant because this House impeachment inquiry isn't going to hear from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, yeah? Yeah. So while a host of State Department officials have shown up to testify complying with subpoenas. Pompeo has not agreed to testify. And more than that, he has decreed that the State Department should not hand over any documents to the House impeachment inquiry. And after Sondland's testimony today, that looks a whole lot more like it could be something like

obstruction rather than just the ordinary political stonewalling. It seems that Pompeo may not want to hand over evidence that relates to his own personal knowledge of what was happening here. Where did Sondland go once he was done with Giuliani and Pompeo? So the Sondland bus made a brief stop over White House acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney. But the bus made a particularly interesting stop after that when he went over Vice President Mike Pence. Sondland explained that on September 1st, when he and Mike Pence were both in Warsaw and had a meeting with Zelensky, Sondland said that before the meeting, he told Pence that he was worried that Trump was holding up the security assistance unless Ukraine committed to the investigations. And he said

that Pence kind of nodded in response, but didn't really engage much with the topic. And the Democratic questioner attorney, Daniel Goldman, said. And Vice President Pence just nodded his head. Again, I don't recall any exchange or where he asked me any questions. I think he it was sort of a duly noted. Well, he didn't say. Gordon, what are you talking about? No, he did not. He didn't say, Gordon, what are you talking about? No, he did not. He didn't say what investigations?

He did not. So again, this speaks to the broader point that Sondland was trying to express, which is that everyone's not the freelancing of one ambassador and perhaps the president's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, but that people at the highest levels of the administration in the State Department, in the National Security Council, in the vice president's office, in the White House, they all knew about this and they were all going along with it. And that, of course, means that President Trump knew about it. Sondland's treatment of President Trump is a bit more complicated, in my view. Sondland claimed that Trump never directly told him that the holdup in military aid for Ukraine

was linked to the demand for investigations. Rather, Sondland continued to insist that this is something he just presumed, that as Daniel Goldman, the Democratic questioner, put it, that it was something that he figured out sort of logically, like a math problem. And you understood the Ukrainians received no credible explanation. Is that right? I certainly couldn't give them one. So is this kind of a two plus two equals four? And he kept returning to that metaphor. This was not something Trump told him. It was rather something that became very clear to him, something that seemed obvious. So he did not present the smoking gun of President Trump told me that he was withholding the military aid for Ukraine unless

they did the investigations. Rather, it was something that was unspoken by the president in his telling. And after you get Giuliani and Pompeo and Mulvaney and Pence and Trump, I guess there's nowhere else to go but ASAP Rocky? Yeah, what triggered my memory was someone's reference to ASAP Rocky. When he mentioned ASAP Rocky, then all of a sudden it came back to me. Well, the whole thing sort of came back to me after he mentioned ASAP Rocky. I was talking about ASAP Rocky, then all of a sudden it came back to me. Well, the whole thing sort of came back to me after you mentioned ASAP Rocky. I was talking about ASAP Rocky. Yeah, so this related to another phone call between Sondland and Trump that Sondland initially did not recall, but that another witness has now testified to overhearing. And this occurred on July 26th in a restaurant in Kiev and Sondland called Trump.

The other witness to this call testified that Sondland told Trump it hadn't worked out to free ASAP Rocky just yet, but you can tell the Kardashians you tried. In the end, ASAP Rocky was in fact released and returned to the U.S. about a week later, which meant that ASAP Rocky was freed about a month before the military aid for Ukraine was freed. Long live ASAP Rocky. RIP ASAP, yams. We've arrived at the third and final act of our show. It's been a journey. We've been at it since September, almost completely, the whole time, with one guy, you know who, senior correspondent at Vox. Act three, the final act, quid pro cop. So the funny part was that when Devin Nunes gave his opening statement, he talked a lot about how this is a carefully orchestrated media smear campaign. But then things took a turn with Sondland's opening statement.

And the Republicans seem to have realized that his testimony was not so friendly to Trump after all. So the GOP decided to shift gears. And in the end, they were the ones trying to really attack Sondland. So Republicans had to come up with this plan on the spot because they had no idea whether this Sondland testimony would go their way or not. Was it effective? They did come up with some aspects of what Sondland said that were somewhat helpful to them. For instance, Sondland saying that he only presumed that Trump was linking the military aid to the investigations. But overall, the bigger picture is that this was not good testimony for Republicans and for President Trump.

And the president was watching along, taking notes in giant black Sharpie. He brought them outside to the South Lawn to address the press under helicopter. What did he have to say? So Trump picked out just one piece of what Sondland said that he thought was helpful to him. Toward the end of the saga on September 9th, Sondland says he called Trump. And it was a very short, abrupt conversation. He was not in a good mood. So he's going, what do you want? What do you want?

I hear all these theories. What do you want? Right. And according to Sondland, Trump responded. I want nothing. I want nothing. I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo.

Tell Zelensky to do the right thing. Trump seemed to think that, you know, this gets him off the hook, even though it comes very late in the process. It comes after months of quid pro quo demands on the Ukrainians. And it happened just as news of the scandal was threatening to get out. So it's unclear how much of an exoneration it really is. But at least in this one instance, Sondland says that Trump said he wanted no quid pro quo. Andrew, it occurs to me as this public facing impeachment inquiry, the televised testimonies wind down this week, that this is probably the most engaged the country's been in our national politics since the hearings of Brett Kavanaugh. And who knows, maybe the most engaged we'll all be

until the 2020 election. How did American democracy look up there on the TV over the course of the past two weeks? You know, it's been encouraging in some respects, despite the polarization and dysfunction in our politics. Impeachment investigators here have managed to shake loose a lot of useful and relevant factual information. And I think that is kind of the takeaway here that, you know, the executive branch is not simply one monolith that's defending President Trump, that there are people working there who are willing to speak up when they see something that they feel is wrong, or even if they don't think it's wrong, that are willing to provide information and testimony about what they know.

Despite the efforts on the part of the president to obstruct and impede this inquiry, it has resulted in genuine information and revelations. And it's been good for informing the public overall about just what their president has been up to. Well, Andrew Prokop, thank you for being our guide through this saga that is Ukraine Explained. It's been my pleasure. Our program was produced today by Bridget McCarthy and Noam Hassenfeld with me, Halima Shah and Amina Alsadi. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our engineer is Afim Shapiro. Our fact checker is Olivia Ekstrom.

And our music consultant is the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Special thanks this week to Laia Balcells, professor of government at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Laia contributed to our episode on Spain that ran earlier this week. Our email, todayexplained at vox.com. Our Twitter, today underscore explained. Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher, Vox Media Podcast Network Management Oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Ezra Klein, who has never publicly acknowledged his early hip-hop work as A$AP Klein.

Yeah, what triggered my memory was someone's reference to A$AP Rocky. I'm Sean Ramos for him. Back tomorrow with another explanation of today.