The White House argued for weeks that there was no quid pro quo—and then it admitted otherwise
AT A PRESS conference just over two weeks ago, Donald Trump could not have been clearer. His call with Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, was “perfect...There was no quid pro quo.” In other words, Mr Trump may have asked a foreign leader to investigate Joe Biden, a Democratic presidential candidate, but it was a simple request. He did not make military aid conditional on it. Mike Pence, Mr Trump’s vice-president, was quick to back him up.
But Mr Sondland appeared to have one quality essential to survive in Trumpland: a willingness to defend the president. In a text message to Bill Taylor, America’s top diplomat in Ukraine, who worried that military aid was being made conditional on Mr Zelensky’s willingness to investigate Mr Biden, Mr Sondland wrote, “The president has been crystal clear no quid pro quo’s of any kind.”
His understanding that there was no quid pro quo, he testified, came from Mr Trump. “I called President Trump directly,” he said in his opening statement. “I asked the president: ‘What do you want from Ukraine?’ The president responded, ‘Nothing. There is no quid pro quo.’ The president repeated: ‘no quid pro quo’ multiple times. This was a very short call.
The second event was a televised White House briefing with Mr Mulvaney. A reporter asked him whether the administration withheld military aid to Ukraine until Mr Zelensky investigated “the Democrats”—referring to a groundless, debunked conspiracy theory that a hacked server belonging to the Democratic National Committee is somewhere in Ukraine, and that some Ukrainians somehow helped Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
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