president trump s decision on that may 13th day, do you remember when the meeting was with president orban? i do. it was in may. do you remember what time of day it was on the 15th? to be honest, usually these meetings are around lunch time. sometime in that time frame. in the kind of early to mid part of the day. but i can t speak for sure. i want to be very clear that i cannot speak about head of state engagements. okay. jennifer williams testified that she learned about 11:00 or 11:15 a.m. that the meeting was not scheduled until later in the afternoon. according to your schedule, it was right around 145. is not consistent with the recollection? the lunchtime time frame, yes. depending on when you want to have lunch, i guess. stick overall, given the four days notice, given secretary perry s involvement,
lutsenko. to someone who the minorities own witness acknowledges has a poor reputation as a self-servig and corrupt. and what do we see about mr. lutsenko and his predecess predecessor? what does the president have to say about one of these corrupt former prosecutors? he praises them! he says they were treated very unfairly! that is not anticorruption, that is corruption. and when ambassador sondland testified today that there was unquestionably a quid pro quo and everybody knew it, conditioning a white house meeting that ukraine desperately wanted to show, his friend and foe that had support of the new
our colleagues from ukraine. it s completely inappropriate for us to be flushing this out in front of them. he agreed and we asked our ukrainian colleagues to move into the corridor outside the room, and i explained this in the deposition. which is also externally awkward, because they shouldn t have been standing around in a corridor in the west wing at this particular juncture. that s when i push back on ambassador sondland said, look, there are differences about when we should have this meeting. we are trying to figure out whether we should have after the ukrainian parliamentary elections, the rada elections, which at that point have been set for july 21st. it must have been, because this was july 10th at this point. and ambassador bolton would have liked to wait after that to basically see whether president zelensky gets the majority in the parliament, which would enable him to form a cabinet and then we could move forward. and esther someone said fair enough, he would be able to
left. that was a very nice coffee, so perhaps he conflated those two meetings together. the meeting he was referring to, he had come in to meet with our director for the european union. this was in my last week in the office. as i was in the office at the same time for a brief period before going into another meeting, and it was my last week in the office, we agreed to sit down with the director of the european union, colonel vindman, and the assistance that ambassador sondland had brought with him from the state department. so they were actually four of us in that meeting. unfortunately it was not over coffee. he went on to indicate that you were upset, you are upset with i can t do math, sorry. fair enough. he indicated you were upset with ambassador bolton, upset with the way things are going. i believe your counsel so that was an outright fabrication? you might recall in my
could be implemented, and proffered that perhaps a reprogramming action would be the way to do this. but that more research would need to be done. so then after that discussion, we had a lower level discussion at my level on the 31st of july. let me ask you about the jul. based on your conversations with colleagues at the dod. at the july 31st interagency meeting, did you share your understanding of a legal mechanisms that were available at that time? yes, sir. what were they? i expressed that it was my understanding that there were two ways that we would be able to implement presidential guidance to stop obligating the ukraine security assistance initiative. in the first option would be for the president to do a rescission. the second is a reprogramming action that the department of defense would do. both of those would require congressional notice? yes. there would be an extra step