US envoy says followed Trump orders in Ukraine 'quid pro quo'

The US ambassador to the European Union told an impeachment hearing Wednesday that he was following the orders of President Donald Trump in seeking a "quid pro quo" from Ukraine.

[OCS: One, it was his job to follow the orders of the President which means he may have been one of the few people in the Department of State that actually performed his job. And two, “quid pro quo” diplomacy is a normal and customary modus operandi in the political realm.]

Gordon Sondland -- whose appearance before Congress is being watched especially closely as he was a Trump ally -- said he believed the president was pressing Ukraine to investigate his potential 2020 rival Joe Biden.

[OCS: No problem here! Being a current presidential candidate does not immunize you from being held responsible for your actions while occupying a previous political office – especially acts of a potentially criminal nature. One need to consider that the Obama Administration was embroiled in numerous illegal schemes and scandals and that Joe Biden, in all probability, knew about and engaged somehow in their execution. This includes the subversion of our intelligence, law enforcement, and diplomatic actions including spying on Americans and the active interference in the 2016 election – not to mention confessing to using a “quid pro quo” to assist a company that paid his son millions of dollars for doing literally nothing but introducing his associates to government officials.]

"We followed the president's orders," Sondland said in his prepared testimony to an open hearing of the House Intelligence Committee.

[OCS: Great!]

He said that Trump forced US diplomats to work with his personal lawyer, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.

[OCS: Historically, Presidents have always worked through back channels when they could not trust government actors to follow their orders. In some cases, like Gene Tunny directly seeking help from Moscow to help deny Ronald Regan the presidency, they are inappropriate. But, not when you are investigating corruption – even corruption that was directly aimed at you, your candidacy, and then your administration.]

"We did not want to work with Mr. Giuliani. Simply put, we played the hand we were dealt," he said.

[OCS: This is mostly true of any bureaucracy, both corporate and government, where the underlings believe they know better than the leadership and principal decision-makers.] 

Sondland said that Trump held off on offering a summit with Ukraine's new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as Giuliani demanded that Kiev publicly announce that it was investigating a gas company on which former vice president Biden's son Hunter held a paid board position.

[OCS: Demanding a public sign of progress is not problematical, especially given that presidents have given millions of dollars to foreign governments for photo ops and favorable activities which lead to favorable media coverage.

And, you will notice that there are three things happening here in the above paragraph: one, the President is holding off on a meeting, there is no mention of a direct quid pro quo, and it may have been Giuliani making the demand to impress the President given Giuliani’s previous antics.]

Giuliani also wanted Zelensky to investigate a widely discredited conspiracy theory in which Ukraine planted evidence on a server of Biden's Democratic Party to show that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

[OCS: Why did the Democratic National Committee deny the FBI the opportunity to forensically examine the server and turned to a private company with known political ties to the Democrats to make the announcement. The discredited part of the story may be that the company was partly owned by Ukrainians and they may have participated in the deception. The actual co-founders were Russian ex-pats and the idea that the actual DNC server was or is somewhere in the Ukraine is crazy-talk.]

"Mr. Giuliani's requests were a quid pro quo for arranging a White House visit for President Zelensky," Sondland said.

[OCS: So? What is so different between this and what the President is doing in North Korea to get face-time with Kim Jong Un? Or diplomacy anywhere else in the world?]

Sondland said he "never received a clear answer" on why the United States suspended security aid to Ukraine, which is battling Russian-backed separatists, but that he "came to believe" it was also tied to the investigations sought by Trump.

[OCS: Nobody can seem to identify who gave the actual order or provide a coherent reason why the aid was actually suspended. I would be more concerned about President Obama telling the then Russian President to tell Vladimir Putin he would be “more flexible after the election” and then seeing Obama deny lethal aid to the Ukraine during the time of the actual attacks and incursions.]

"I was adamantly opposed to any suspension of aid, as the Ukrainians needed those funds to fight against Russian aggression," he said.

[OCS: Almost everybody believed that Ukraine needed the aid – but many where challenging if it was wise to turn it over to a corrupt or pro-Russian government. The entire quid pro quo scheme may have simply been a test of the Ukrainian leadership. Who knows? Maybe not even Trump himself as he has been known to delegate important tasks to others and simply move on to other things.]

"In the absence of any credible explanation for the suspension of aid, I later came to believe that the resumption of security aid would not occur until there was a public statement from Ukraine committing to the investigations of the 2016 election and Burisma, as Mr. Giuliani had demanded," he said. 

[OCS: In the government, there does not have to be a credible explanation for anything as we  have historically witnessed. And, again, Sondland is speaking about an explanation that would satisfy him – which could be far from the actual reasoning involved.]

<Source>

Associated Press Deletes Tweet About Trump and Impeachment, Issues Correction

The agency, also known as the AP, wrote in a post on Twitter: “Contradicting the testimony of his own ambassador, President Trump says he wanted ‘nothing’ from Ukraine and says the #ImpeechmentHearings should be brought to an end.”

[OCS: This is a lie – FAKE NEWS – there was no contradiction from Trump.]

But Trump was quoting from what ambassador Gordon Sondland said during testimony to the House Intelligence Committee.

“I finally called the president… I believe I just asked him an open-ended question, Mr. Chairman,” Sondland told Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). “What do you want from Ukraine? I keep hearing all these different ideas and theories and this and that. What do you want?”

“It was a very short abrupt conversation, he was not in a good mood, and he just said, ‘I want nothing. I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo. Tell Zelensky to do the right thing,’ something to that effect,” Sondland added.

Speaking to reporters in Washington, Trump repeated Sondland’s words.

“Here’s my response that he gave—just gave. Ready? You have the cameras rolling? ‘I want nothing.’ ‘That’s what I want from Ukraine.’ That’s what I said. ‘I want nothing.’ I said it twice,” Trump said.

“Now, if you weren’t fake news, you’d cover it properly,” he added.

“An earlier tweet that didn’t make clear that President Trump was quoting from Gordon Sondland’s testimony in which he was quoting Trump has been deleted,” the agency wrote.

It did not apologize for the error.

The Trump 2020 campaign highlighted the false reporting, writing that the AP’s tweet was “quite simply false and blatantly ignores what Sondland actually testified Trump said.” <Source>