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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nLater in the day: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the\n impeachment inquiry started, a little more than three weeks ago, there \nwere only an anonymous whistle-blower\u2019s complaint and the summary that \nTrump released of his July 25th phone call with the Ukrainian President.\n Because the investigation has moved so quickly, it is easy to lose \nsight of how much has been learned since then. Day after day, in fact, \nthe House\u2019s impeachment inquiry has produced significant revelations \nthat point directly to Presidential culpability. The revelations come \nfrom inside the Trump Administration, from professional diplomats and \nexperts who were dismayed that the President and his private attorney, Rudy Giuliani<\/a>,\n would conduct a shadow foreign policy toward Ukraine that seemed to \nhave, as its sole motive, personal political benefit. Even those who \nparticipated in the scheme, such as the U.S. Ambassador to the European \nUnion, Gordon Sondland, who testified on Thursday, placed the blame \nsquarely with Trump and Giuliani in his written testimony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ever \nsince Democrats took control of the House in January, Trump has sought \nto block them from conducting investigations and oversight of his \nAdministration, defying subpoenas, refusing to send officials to Capitol\n Hill, and fighting Congress in court. The impeachment inquiry, however,\n has finally breached the Administration\u2019s blockade. Just this past \nweek, the fired U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch; the \nformer National Security Council senior director in charge of Ukraine \npolicy, Fiona Hill; the current State Department deputy assistant \nsecretary in charge of Ukraine policy, George Kent; the Secretary of \nState\u2019s senior adviser, who quit in protest over the Ukraine affair, \nlast week, Michael McKinley; and Sondland, a wealthy Trump donor turned \nAmbassador to the E.U., all testified, defying Trump in order to do so, \nand at considerable risk to their careers. McKinley ended nearly forty \nyears at the State Department to have his say. Kent, Sondland, and \nYovanovitch remain U.S. government officials, and could be fired. Both \nKent and Yovanovitch are professional diplomats who have given decades \nof service to their country at the State Department. This is bravery of a\n sort that has become so rare in our public life as to be almost \nunimaginable. Denny Heck, another Democrat who sits on the impeachment \npanel, called Kent and Hill \u201ctrue American heroes\u201d after listening to \ntheir closed-door testimony. According to the House Intelligence \nCommittee chairman, Adam Schiff<\/a>,\n those depositions will eventually be made public. The history books \nthat Cummings invoked at the start of the investigation will very likely\n take note of his final week on this earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Partway\n through her gruelling ten-and-a-half hours of testimony on Monday, \nFiona Hill was asked how she came to understand that, despite her formal\n duties as the top National Security Council adviser on Russia and \nUkraine, she was not only not in charge of the policy but no longer \nbeing kept in the loop about it. Neither, she would learn, was her boss,\n John Bolton<\/a>,\n who was then the national-security adviser. According to a source \npresent for her deposition, Hill described a meeting in her White House \noffice with Gordon Sondland, whose murky role in Ukraine had alarmed her\n since an earlier meeting they\u2019d attended in May. Now she asked Sondlond\n directly: Why was the American Ambassador to Brussels inserting himself\n in the affairs of a country that fell outside of his diplomatic \nportfolio and wasn\u2019t even a member of the E.U.? \u201cShe challenged him on \nwho gave him her portfolio, and he said the President,\u201d the source told \nme. \u201cIt was news to her, and it was news to Bolton.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trump \nhimself, in other words, was putting together a rogue foreign-policy \nteam, run by Giuliani, the President\u2019s private attorney, that would go \noutside normal N.S.C. and State Department channels to pressure Ukraine.\n The effort would eventually result in Trump abruptly firing \nYovanovitch, the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, at Giuliani\u2019s behest, and \nwithholding a White House meeting<\/a> from Volodymyr Zelensky, the new Ukrainian President, until he agreed to investigate unsubstantiated allegations involving Biden\u2019s son<\/a>, and also discredited conspiracy theories involving Ukraine working against Trump in the\n 2016 U.S. Presidential election. At the same time, Trump was refusing \nto release hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine, \nalthough it had been legally authorized by Congress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The basic \noutlines of the plot have been known since the start of the impeachment \ninquiry, but the testimony by Hill and others this week both confirms \nkey details and adds important information that shows how much the \nPresident was directly implicated. Trump ordered Sondland, a \nmillion-dollar contributor to his Inauguration; Kurt Volker, his Ukraine\n special envoy; and Energy Secretary Rick Perry to take control of \nUkraine policy. (Kent, the State diplomat who was, like Hill, cut out of\n the loop, said that they called themselves \u201cthe three amigos.\u201d) Trump \npersonally ordered Yovanovitch\u2019s firing. Trump personally ordered the \nwithholding of military aid. The scandal, as this week showed, is about a\n lot more than saying \u201cdo us a favor though\u201d in a phone call<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today I read all the 18 pages of opening testimony by Ambassador to EU Sondland. I can see why he is an ambassador. The published testimony was so convincing you just have to believe it, in spite of the fact that I do not believe that is actually how it really went down. I guess […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3783"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3783"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3802,"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3783\/revisions\/3802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}