U.S. ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland disputes the most damning portions of Acting Ukraine Ambassador William Taylor’s impeachment testimony.
And here we go again… Welcome to Russia Collusion 2: The Star Chamber, where Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) holds secret basement impeachment hearings hoping to overturn a presidential election using selective leaks, and our corrupt media play right along.
Who didn’t see this coming…? Hey, raise your hand if you slept through all three years of the Russia Collusion Hoax.
Time and time and time again, this is how it works… Some Deep State Never Trumper delivers a “bombshell” testimony that is certain to see the Orange Bad Man removed from office, and then it appears to fall apart once all the facts come to life, once the full context becomes clear…
This is even worse than Russia Collusion, though. This process is somehow more corrupted, because this time Democrats and their media allies are coordinating impeachment testimony in secret, and then running for a touchdown carrying selective leaks chosen by Schiff — the serial liar who looked America in the eye for three years to tell us he had concrete evidence Trump colluded with Russia.
We already know that the only thing leaked from Taylor’s testimony was his opening statement, while not one moment of the cross examination he faced from Republican congressmen has been made public. And we now have three congressmen who were there saying Taylor’s allegations fell apart as soon as they were challenged.
Don’t get me wrong… We might find out Taylor told the absolute truth… No one knows how this will shake out… My issue is only with the following: The media slavishly reporting on Schiff’s selective leaks from a secret, partisan proceeding as gospel.
Anyway, according to Taylor’s opening statement, this man who has never met or spoken with Trump, claims he heard third- and fourth-hand information proving there was a dastardly quid pro quo between Trump and Ukraine: i.e., Ukraine gets no military assistance unless Ukraine publicizes the opening of an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden.
According to Taylor’s opening statement, he was told the following by Tim Morrison, the National Security Council’s senior director for Europe and Russia:
Ambassador Sondland told Mr. Yermak [adviser to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky] that security assistance money would not come until President Zelensky committed to pursue the Burisma investigation. I was alarmed by what Mr. Morrison told me about the Sondland-Yermak conversation. This was the first time I had heard that the security assistance — not just the White House meeting — was conditioned on the investigations.
This is important because while the White House admits aid was delayed, the White House also claims there can be no quid pro quo when Ukraine did not know about the delay. What’s more, because we have the transcript, we know for a fact the delay was not mentioned during Trump’s July 25 phone call, and there is no evidence showing Ukraine knew about the delay prior to August.
But what you have here is Taylor saying he discovered through Morrison, who says he heard it from Sondland, that Trump outright told Sondland there was a direct quid pro quo, not just about Ukraine cleaning up its overall corruption problems, but directly attached to investigating the Bidens and Burisma, the shady energy company that paid Hunter Biden $50,000 a month — a month! — to sit on its board, even though Hunter has no experience with Ukraine or energy.
Taylor also says that after he spoke to Morrison, he spoke directly to Sondland, and Sondland told him…
…that President Trump had told him that he wants President Zelensky to state publicly that Ukraine will investigate Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Ambassador Sondland also told me that he now recognized that he had made a mistake by earlier telling the Ukrainian officials to whom he spoke that a White House meeting with President Zelensky was dependent on a public announcement of investigations — in fact, Ambassador Sondland said, ‘everything’ was dependent on such an announcement, including security assistance. He said that President Trump wanted President Zelensky ‘in a public box’ by making a public statement about ordering such investigations.
Taylor then testified he spoke to Morrison the next day (September 7) about his call with Sondland and the two men commiserated.
The day after that, September 8, Taylor says he spoke again to Sondland, who told him:
President Trump was adamant that President Zelensky, himself, had to ‘clear things up and [announce the Biden investigation] in public.’ President Trump said it was not a ‘quid pro quo.’ Ambassador Sondland said that he had talked to President Zelensky and Mr. Yermak and told them that, although this was not a quid pro quo, if President Zelensky did not ‘clear things up’ in public, we would be at a ‘stalemate.’ I understood a ‘stalemate’ to mean that Ukraine would not receive the much-needed military assistance.
To begin with, all of this contradicts Sondland’s earlier testimony in Schiff’s secret Star Chamber, and on Thursday, Sondland again reiterated that none of this happened.
Through his attorney, among other things, Sondland told the far-left Washington Post he “did not recall conversations recounted by Taylor in his House deposition.” That includes Taylor’s claim that Sondland told Yermak there would be no assistance without a Biden probe or Taylor’s fourth-hand claim that — see if you can follow this — Morrison told Taylor that Sondland told Morrison that Trump told Sondland there would be no aid without Zelensky announcing a Biden investigation.
So now we have entered the land of he said/he said; we have entered an ethereal world that has NOTHING to do with the July 25 phone call, has nothing to do with the transcript of an actual phone call or the word of the Ukrainian president, who has now said twice he was never pressured to investigate the Bidens.
Schiff’s Star Chamber of Selective Leaks now resides in a land where we only have disputed conversations with no transcripts, with no evidence to back them up.
Yes, the goalposts are on the move… in secret. What had been about a whistleblower complaint regarding a specific phone call is now about disputed, third-hand and fourth-hand phone calls that all supposedly took place after Adam Schiff met secretly with the so-called whistleblower.
This is the stuff of banana republics, of coups, and this is what is allowed to happen when a media is so corrupted they are in on the conspiracy.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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