Washington — The U.S. ambassador to the European Union revised sworn testimony to the impeachment committees to say he now remembers telling a top Ukrainian official that the release of delayed military aid was “likely” dependent on the country announcing investigations that would benefit President Trump politically, according to documents released Tuesday.
Gordon Sondland also told the House committees leading the impeachment inquiry that a coveted White House meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Mr. Trump was contingent on Ukraine investigating supposed Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election and an energy company that had employed former Vice President Joe Biden’s son.
The 375-page transcript of Sondland’s October 17 deposition was released Tuesday. A three-page declaration from Sondland, along with a letter from his attorney dated November 4, appears at the end, and includes several revisions to his earlier testimony.
Sondland said accounts from other witnesses “have refreshed my recollection about conversations involving the suspension of U.S. aid.” He said he now remembers discussing the issue of military aid with Andriy Yermak, a top aid to Zelensky, during a “brief pull-aside conversation” in Warsaw in early September.
“I now recall speaking individually with Mr. Yermak, where I said that resumption of U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anti-corruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks,” Sondland says in the revision. He also said he later learned that such an announcement would have to come from Zelensky himself.
Since Sondland’s deposition, several other officials told the committees that Sondland told the Ukrainians that the release of aid was tied to the investigations, one of the central alleged quid pro quos in the Democratic case against the president.
Read the full text of Sondland’s testimony here
A White House meeting
Sondland told the committees he believed an initial invitation for Zelensky to visit the White House came with no preconditions. By August, he came to believe the White House wanted an “innocuous” press statement from Zelensky about “pursuing corruption” as a precondition for holding a meeting.
“My only recollection is that the White House visit was conditioned on the press statement involving the 2015 and Burisma,” he said. “That was the only condition.”
Sondland also said he can’t recall if he ever spoke to White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney about a potential meeting, because Mulvaney is “almost impossible to get a hold of.”
According to the transcript, Sondland denied the White House saw opening investigations as a prerequisite for the meeting: “I’ve always said this was about a press statement” about anti-corruption efforts, he said.
Sondland said he understood “that breaking the logjam with getting the President to finally approve a White House visit was a public utterance by Zelensky” about pursuing transparency, and that conditions about investigating Burisma and the 2016 election were added to a draft of the statement by Giuliani. The statement was never delivered.
Sondland said when he spoke on the phone with Mr. Trump on September 6, the president said he wanted nothing from Ukraine in order to have the meeting.
