“A domestic political errand”
by Tom Sullivan
The key moment in Thursday’s impeachment hearing came when Dr. Fiona Hill, the former National Security Council official, began explaining that the Trump administration had steered American foreign policy into the weeds.
Hill described a couple of “testy” encounters with Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. In one, she was angry that Sondland was not coordinating with the rest of the NSC team and career diplomats in the field. Sondland had insisted during his testimony that he was following the president’s orders in pursuing an arms-for-political dirt deal with Ukraine. “Everyone was in the loop,” the newly minted diplomat testified. That is, everyone Sondland thought mattered: President Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, White House acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.
But Sondland’s assignment and Hill’s were very different.
Hill explained:
But it struck me when yesterday, when you put up on the screen Ambassador Sondland’s emails, and who was on these emails and he said “These that these people need to know,” that he was absolutely right. Because he was being involved in a domestic political errand. And we were being involved in national security foreign policy. And those two things had just diverged. So he was correct.
And I had not put my finger on that at the moment, but I was irritated with him and angry with him that he wasn’t fully coordinating. And I did say to him, Ambassador Sondland, Gordon, I think this is all going to blow up. And here we are.
This was not going the way Republicans on the panel wanted. Hill continued, explaining in a slight-of-hand way she’d been unfair to Sondland:
And after I left to my next meeting, our director for the European Union talked to him much further for a full half-hour or more later, trying to ask him about how we could coordinate better or how others could coordinate better after I had left the office. And his feeling was that the National Security Council was always trying to block him.
What we were trying to do was block us from straying into domestic or personal politics. And that was precisely what I was trying to do.
But Ambassador Sondland is not wrong that he had been given a different remit than we had been.
And it was at that moment that I started to realize how those things have diverged. And I realized, in fact, that I wasn’t really being fair to Ambassador Sondland because he was carrying out what he thought he had been instructed to carry out. And we were doing something that we thought was just as or perhaps even more important, but it wasn’t in the same channel.
Ranking member Devin Nunes jumped in, cut off staff attorney Steve Castor, and launched into 2016 conspiracy theory questions. He needed to change the subject. Now. The rest of the Republican bench tried to discredit Holmes or stalled for time, trying to avoided giving Hill more rope.
The Ukraine scandal has unfolded like a Quentin Tarantino film. Different time frames. Different characters with different viewing points. Same arms-for-political-dirt story.
Hill was based in the White House. David Holmes, a State Department political aide, works at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine. Both told the same story from different angles thousands of mile apart. Sondland told the same story from his perspective. As did Amb. William Taylor and George Kent. As did former Amb. Marie Yovanovitch, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, and others. How many career professionals (and one, millionaire Trump donor) have to tell the same story before Republicans sworn to uphold the Constitution acknowledge they are not part of a Never-Trump conspiracy? Trump abused his office to direct an international smear campaign against a domestic political rival.
Perhaps headlines will convince them? As Digby (and TPM) noted on Thursday, headlines from coast to coast blared that Sondland implicated Trump. “We followed the president’s orders.” “Diplomat acknowledges ‘quid pro quo’.” “Envoy Says Trump Directed Effort.” “Trump directed Ukraine pressure campaign, EU envoy says.” And as MSNBC’s Chris Hays pointed out Thursday evening, many of the subheads implicated Pompeo by name.
And today’s online headlines?
Impeachment Hearing Takeaways: A ‘Domestic Political Errand’
Hill Calls Investigations A “Domestic Political Errand”; Holmes Details Trump Call
Impeachment hearings: Sondland was ‘involved in domestic political errand’, Hill testifies
Fiona Hill: Trump Ukraine Dealings a ‘Domestic Political Errand’
In her opening statement, Hill chastised those (Republicans) peddling “politically driven falsehoods.” She refused “to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a U.S. adversary, and that Ukraine — not Russia — attacked us in 2016.” She requested they “please” not aid the Russian security services’ propaganda campaign,
I say this not as an alarmist, but as a realist. I do not think long-term conflict with Russia is either desirable or inevitable. I continue to believe that we need to seek ways of stabilizing our relationship with Moscow even as we counter their efforts to harm us. Right now, Russia’s security services and their proxies have geared up to repeat their interference in the 2020 election. We are running out of time to stop them. In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.
The narrative Republicans advance is professionals such as Hill, Holmes, et. al. mean to undermine Donald Trump. In fact, such career patriots mean to defend the U.S. from being undermined by him, by those in his thrall, and by foreign adversaries with agendas hostile to U.S. interests and to democracy itself.