of this scheme to condition official acts, a white house meeting and $400 million in security assistance to an ally at war with russia was conditioned on political favors the president wanted for his re-election. so i think a very important moment in the history of this inquiry. . this is a moment that, of course, a lot of us anticipated getting the advance copy of ambassador sondland s statement, but i can t emphasize how explosive this is right now. i wonder what you think? i think it was a huge inflexion point. we were speculating between 7:00 andt:00 a.m., what would sondland say. someone said a good lawyer might tell his client in this position, don t testify at all. take the fifth amendment. we d be in a very position talking about the nature of
is no doubt that the president orchestrated and ordered all of this. let me play a few of the clips. a little mashup of what we heard from the ambassador. i worked with mr. guiliani on ukraine matters at the express direction of the president of the united states. so we followed the president s orders. i followed the direction of the president. because the president directed us to do so. president trump directed us to quote talk with rudy. the president keeps saying no quid pro quo. no quid pro quo. he specifically says, yes, in dealing with ukraine, if the ukrainian president wants a meeting with the president if the ukrainians want the military assistance to go forward, they ve got to look into burisma, the bidens. they ve got to look at the 2016 u.s. presidential election and at least make a public statement that they were doing so. right. and what mr. goldman pointed out
did the president ever tell you personally about any pre conditions for anything? no. okay. so the president never told you about any pre conditions for aid to be released? no the president 97 tonever you about pre conditions for a white house meeting? . personally, no. you said you didn t have your records or documents in the state department, but if you did, there wouldn t be any document or record that ties president trump personally to any of this. correct? i don t want to speculate what would be your documents or records? i don t recall anything like that. . no. good heavens. okay. you testified mr. guiliani s requests for a quid pro quo for the white house meeting, and you indicated that you believe that was, he was advancing president trump s interests, correct? my contact with mr. guiliani began as i said very late in the process after august 1st, when i
that sondland believed that, as you noted that everybody in government knew there was no secret to this. so that standard has been met. the other thing i would note is to jeffrey s point, you know, laying bear what happened here. he was challenged. sondland was challenged on david holmes charactervation with the president. sondland saying the president doesn t i ll institute dam since my kids home from school might be watching. he doesn t care about ukraine, he may be worried about himself. hold on a second, the chairman is speaking to reporters. i think today s testimony is among the most significant evidence to date and what we have just heard from ambassador sondland is that the knowledge of this scheme, this conditioning of the white house meeting of the security assistance to get the deliver the president wanted these two political conditions would help his campaign was a bake quid pro
investigations that president trump cared about in order to get both the white house meeting and to release the security assistance, is that correct? i believe that is correct. mr. chairman, i yield back. that concludes our 45 minutes. i now recognize mr. nunes. okay. okay. io don t we take five or ten-minute break? thank you. all right so that was explosive testimony there that we just heard from ambassador gordon sondland, the u.s. ambassador to the european union, who now has confirmed publicly that everything they were doing was authorized by the president of the united states, the direction to rudy guiliani, to go ahead and basically take charge of u.s.-ukrainian policy. this is, gloria, we got the advanced copy of his statement. he delivered it and then he answered a whole bunch of questions basically saying there