During his planned testimony before the House committees investigating impeachment on Thursday, U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland plans to tell lawmakers that he wasn’t aware that Hunter Biden was at the center of the Trump pressure campaign he was helping to orchestrate.
According to the Washington Post, Sondland will testify that he didn’t know that Hunter Biden was a member of the Ukrainian gas board until after the whistleblower complaint came out and was unaware that some fellow government officials were concerned that Trump was trying to push for an investigation into his political rival.
According to a person with knowledge of Sondland’s testimony, the U.S. diplomat will be sure to paint Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani as the most central figure in the pressure effort and that Sondland, as well as the other U.S. diplomats at the center of the pressure campaign, were just trying to “understand through Rudy what the President’s concerns were and try to address them.” During Sondland’s discussions with Giuliani about Ukraine and Burisma, Giuliani never mentioned Biden, the person familiar with Sondland’s testimony told the Post.
That claim may face tough scrutiny, given Giuliani’s public appearances at the time in which he repeatedly raised Hunter Biden’s role on the board of Burisma.
Whitewash. Thin coat. Useless.
There sure are a lot of different stories floating around that all ostensibly should match a single fact pattern.
I’m sympathetic to regular John and Jane Does who get nailed for inadvertently telling falsehoods to federal investigators, but this lot seems to have only one gear to their criminal exposure generator, and it’s overdrive.
Yep. Sondland is for the high jump, knows it, and is desperately trying to throw Rudy under the bus first. But Rudy insists he has “texts and emails”–e.g., protection against betrayal by the other capos.
#MOB
Total CYA.
He’s throwing Trump under the bus while claiming he had didn’t know so what he did wasn’t illegal. Oh i believed him when he gave me that phony cover story about no quid pro quo…i totally would have said something if i knew he was doing bad things…i’m just an innocent person caught in Trump and Rudy’s criminal act…have mercy!
" he wasn’t aware that Hunter Biden was at the center of the Trump pressure campaign"
Sondland’s Contortionist audition for Cirque Du Soleil is already off to a rocky start.