“Everyone was in the loop.'
Prior to Wednesday, the testimony in the impeachment inquiry had added up to a collective finger pointed in the direction of Gordon Sondland, a Republican donor whom President Donald Trump rewarded with an ambassadorship to the European Union.that Sondland had been overheard in July babbling to the president from a Kyiv restaurant about how Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would do “the investigations.
Sondland was being set up, in other words, to be the fall guy—the rogue nincompoop so desperately eager to win Trump’s affections that he was freelancing a back channel American policy toward Eurasia.
That meant implicating the policy chain and proving, to use Sondland’s most memorable quote, that “everyone was in the loop.” The request for “investigations”—pushed by Rudy Giuliani, and “expressing the desires of the president of the United States”—was, Sondland said, a “quid pro quo for arranging a White House visit for President Zelensky,” and no one up the official command chain objected to these efforts.
With that timeline well-established, Democrats leading the investigation have a difficult choice to make about how they want to deal with Sondland’s particular contribution of implicating genuinelyRepublicans have remained in total unity behind the president, citing the witnesses’ inability, so far, to say that Trump personally told them that security assistance needed to be linked to investigations.
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