Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the EU, testified behind closed doors that Trump told senior U.S. officials to talk directly to his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, about U.S. policy in Ukraine
WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump’s withholding of $391 million in military aid to Ukraine was linked to his request that the Ukrainians look into a claim - debunked as a conspiracy theory - about the 2016 U.S. election, a senior presidential aide said on Thursday, the first time the White House acknowledged such a connection.
In a July 25 call, Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for “a favor” to look into the server as well as the California-based cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which was hired by the DNC in 2016 to investigate hacking of Democratic emails that it later determined was done by Russia. Mulvaney said Trump did not like foreign aid, thought Ukraine was corrupt and was annoyed at how little “lethal aid” European nations provided to Ukraine as it combated Russia-backed separatists in the eastern part of the country.
Representative Gerald Connolly said: “I guess having failed at discrediting the facts of this case, they’ve decided on a new tactic, which is to admit them and basically say: ‘So what’? In prepared testimony, Sondland said he and two other officials - Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Ukraine Special Envoy Kurt Volker - were disappointed in Trump’s May order, but they followed it anyway. Sondland said he felt foreign policy should be the work of the State Department, not the president’s personal lawyer.
His testimony underscored the pivotal role of Giuliani in the Ukraine scandal. Before the president’s July call with Ukraine’s president, Giuliani had been working to persuade Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. “It was apparent to all of us that the key to changing the president’s mind on Ukraine was Mr. Giuliani,” he said.
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