The little cover-up that got exposed
by digby
This piece at Just Security is making the rounds today and it’s quite intriguing. It appears that Gordon Sondland and Trump have created a little cover-up. You know that phone call where he supposedly said “I want nothing, I want nothing! There is no quid pro quo!” ? Well, the evidence suggests that the call actually took place two days earlier and outlined the quid pro quo:
At the heart of the impeachment inquiry, members of Congress may have been mistakenly led to believe that there were two phone calls between President Donald Trump and Ambassador Gordon Sondland in early September—with the second call having the possibility of helping the President’s case. That’s not what happened. There was only one call, and it was highly incriminating.
The call occurred on September 7th. In this call, Trump did say there was “no quid pro quo” with Ukraine, but he then went on to outline his preconditions for releasing the security assistance and granting a White House visit. The call was so alarming that when John Bolton learned of it, he ordered his’ deputy Tim Morrison to immediately report it to the National Security Council lawyers.
Sondland has testified there was a call on September 9th in which Trump said there was “no quid pro quo,” but that he wanted President Zelenskyy “to do” the right thing. A close reading of the publicly available evidence shows that the latter call was actually the very one that sent Morrison to the lawyers, and that Ambassador Bill Taylor foregrounded in his written deposition to inform Congress of the quid pro quo.
As this article was in the publication process at Just Security, the Washington Post published a report raising doubts about the existence of the September 9 call. The analysis that follows is consistent with the Post’s report and, among other points, shows why Sondland’s “no quid pro quo” call is in fact the same as the September 7th call that Morrison reported to NSC lawyers on September 7th.
Here’s the upshot:
[T]he White House and House Republicans have been forced to retreat to their current defense: that President Trump himself has not been proven to have done anything wrong, because there was no witness who testified to having personally heard the President announce that he was seeking a quid pro quo from Ukraine, in exchange for release of the security assistance.
This “defense,” it should be noted, is hardly a defense at all. There is no dispute that the President used the powers of his office to coerce a foreign state into investigating a domestic political rival, nor is there any dispute that the Ukrainians were informed by the Trump administration that the hold on security assistance would not be lifted until these investigation were publicly announced.
Multiple witnesses also testified that EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland had told them that, in his conversations with the president, Trump had described his requirement for Zelenskyy to publicly announce the investigations into Biden and 2016. However, to the extent that no witness testified to having personally heard Trump request a quid pro quo in regards to the security assistance, there are two reasons for this.
The first is that, with a single exception, every individual who interacted directly with President Trump refused to comply with House subpoenas for their testimony.
The second is that the single exception who did testify, Ambassador Sondland, did not testify accurately when he said that President Trump had never asked him for a quid pro quo from Ukraine. In fact, President Trump had personally informed Sondland of his specific demands for a quid pro quo from Ukraine – and the White House National Security Council is sitting on documents that confirm it.
This is a complicated story but it’s extremely interesting, if true. If you are of a mind to dig deeply into the testimony last week I encourage you to read it. Sondland seems to have left himself enough wriggle room to avoid a perjury charge by saying that he doesn’t remember specific dates and that he doesn’t dispute what all the other witnesses are saying he said because he doesn’t recall the conversations. Whether they will charge Trump with more obstruction is unknown.
I would also suggest you read this post by Marcy Wheeler in which she deconstructs how this little cover-up happened and how it got exposed. If her surmise is correct, there are others involved in this as well.
Look, forget the myths the media’s created about the White House–the truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand. — Deep Throat, All the President’s Men