President Trump lifted a hold on security assistance for Ukraine after President Volodymyr Zelensky promised to announce investigations into the 2016 presidential election and former Vice President Joe Biden, according to a U.S. diplomat.
William Taylor, the top American diplomat in Ukraine, described that sequence of events in his opening statement in the Democrat-led House impeachment inquiry. He rooted that account in his conversations with Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union. Taylor’s testimony echoed allegations that Trump tried to use security assistance as leverage to press Zelensky to open the politically explosive investigations. But it also suggests that Zelensky had agreed to acquiesce to Trump’s demands only to have the deal killed by Taylor himself.
“President Trump was adamant that President Zelensky, himself, had to ‘clear things up and do it in public,’” Taylor said in a prepared statement during his closed-door deposition, paraphrasing Sondland’s Sept. 8 account of a conversation with the president.
Sondland told Taylor a week earlier that the president wanted Zelensky to announce that he would launch two investigations. The first investigation was to center on whether Ukrainian officials worked with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign to embarrass a Trump campaign adviser. The second was to focus on Burisma, a company that in 2014 hired then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. Sondland told another U.S. official, according to Taylor, that Trump wanted an investigation into Biden specifically, and this was communicated to Zelenksy and his aide, Andrey Yermak.
“Ambassador Sondland said that he had talked to President Zelensky and Mr. Yermak and told them that, although this was not a quid pro quo, if President Zelensky did not ‘clear things up’ in public, we would be at a ‘stalemate,’” Taylor testified. “I understood ‘stalemate’ to mean that Ukraine would not receive the much-needed military assistance. Ambassador Sondland said that this conversation concluded with President Zelensky agreeing to make a public statement in an interview with CNN.”
Sondland described that conversation with Zelensky to Taylor on Sept. 8, during the same phone call in which he told Taylor that Trump was taking a business-like approach to the situation: “When a businessman is about to sign a check to someone who owes him something, [Sondland] said, the businessman asks that person to pay up before signing the check.”
Taylor learned three days later that the security assistance had been released, although Zelensky had not yet fulfilled his promise to make a public statement to CNN. The diplomat, who was appointed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to lead the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine after the unorthodox removal of the previous ambassador, told lawmakers that he moved immediately to inform Ukrainian officials that the aid had been approved and to make sure that Zelensky did not issue the statement Trump had requested.
“My fear at the time was that since Ambassador Sondland had told me President Zelensky already agreed to do a CNN interview, President Zelensky would make a statement regarding ‘investigations’ that would have played into domestic U.S. politics,” Taylor said in his statement.
Taylor explained that he had learned to think of “investigations” as a short-hand term used by Sondland and Ambassador Kurt Volker, the State Department’s point man for the war in Ukraine, “to mean matters related to the 2016 elections, and to investigations into Burisma and the Bidens.”
U.S. officials involved in Ukraine policy long have regarded bipartisan support of the former Soviet satellite state as an essential component of Western efforts to help Kyiv repel Russian aggression. Taylor emphasized “the high strategic value of bipartisan support” in a conversation with Yermak, Zelensky’s adviser. He testified that Ukrainian Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko assured him on Sept. 12 that the CNN interview would not take place.
Zelensky might have been considering going through with the interview anyway, Taylor implied, as the U.S. diplomat raised the subject again the following day.
“I noticed during a meeting on the morning of Sept. 13 at President Zelensky’s office that Mr. Yermak looked uncomfortable in response to the question,” Taylor said. “Again, I asked Mr. Danyliuk to confirm that there would be no CNN interview, which he did.”
