Thursday’s witnesses will be Fiona Hill, formerly the National Security Council senior director in charge of Ukraine policy, and David Holmes, a career Foreign Service officer who overheard a July 26th phone call between Trump and Gordon Sondland, the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union. On Wednesday, Sondland testified that he, along with the former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry and the diplomat Kurt Volker, had worked with Rudy Giuliani to pressure the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, into launching investigations that personally benefited President Trump. Sondland emphasized that it had not been his idea to work with Giuliani but did so “at the express direction of the President of the United States.” In earlier testimony, Sondland had said that there had not been any quid pro quo between Trump and Zelensky, but he later revised that testimony. On Wednesday, he testified that he believed Trump withheld military aid from the Ukrainian government because he wanted Zelensky to investigate unsubstantiated Ukrainian ties to the Democratic National Committee and a Ukrainian company that employed Joe Biden’s son Hunter. David Rohde wrote that Sondland’s testimony “all but assured President Trump’s impeachment.”
Hill, in testimony that she gave in October, said she had been alarmed by Sondland’s role in Ukraine policy and recalled asking him why he, as the Ambassador to the E.U., was involved in Ukraine’s affairs at all. Susan Glasser wrote that Hill’s testimony meant that Trump “was putting together a rogue foreign-policy team, run by Giuliani, the President’s private attorney, that would go outside normal N.S.C. and State Department channels to pressure Ukraine.”
David Holmes was added to the schedule of witnesses after giving closed-door testimony on Friday. In that hearing, he recounted a phone call that he had overheard between Trump and Sondland, who was talking to the President on his cell phone while out to lunch at a restaurant in Kyiv with Holmes and two other diplomats. John Cassidy predicted that Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee would likely try to poke holes in Holmes’s testimony, writing that they “have already tied themselves to the mast of Trump’s pirate ship, and it’s probably too late to reverse course—even if they had the inclination, which they don’t.”
As Adam Schiff put it in his opening statement on Wednesday, what comes next is up to Congress: “If the President abused his power and invited foreign interference in our elections, if he sought to condition, coerce, extort, or bribe an ally into conducting investigations to aid his reelection campaign . . . it will be up to us to decide whether those acts are compatible with the office of the Presidency.” You can watch Hill and Holmes deliver their testimony on the live stream, above.
