Taylor: Zelensky Told Me ‘Call Was Fine, I Was Happy with the Call’ the Day After

Ambassador Bill Taylor testified Wednesday that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told him July 26 that his July 25 call with President Donald Trump had been “fine” and that he was “happy” with it.

Taylor, appearing alongside the State Department’s George Kent, was answering questions from Republican counsel Steve Castor in the House Intelligence Committee on the first day of public hearings in the “impeachment inquiry.”

Q: You were with President Zelensky the very next day?

Taylor: We were. We had a meeting with him the very next day.

Q: And did President Zelensky raise any concerns about his views of the call?

Taylor: He said — so, right, so — so I, Ambassador [Kurt] Volker, Ambassador [Gordon] Sondland, were in his office, and we asked him, I think, how the call [went]. He said, “The call was fine. I was happy with the call.”

Taylor’s admission came as Democrats strove to paint the call as an effort by President Trump to pressure Ukraine to conduct investigations in exchange for U.S. aid.

Taylor was not personally on the call, and testified in his deposition that he did not think there was any connection between the investigations and the aid — even after he saw an August 28, 2019 Politico article that indicated the aid had been stalled.

Taylor said that he was opposed to linking aid to the investigations, but also that he had been told by Sondland that the president told him there was no “quid pro quo.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.