i did not, no. mr. custer? dr., he told us during your deposition that, indeed, there are perceived conflicts do not conflict of interest troubles when the child of a government official is involved with something that government official has official policy role in, correct? i think any family member of any member of the u.s. government congress or the senate is open to all kinds of questions about optics and out flick if they take part in any activity that could be misconstrued as related to their parent of the family members work. so matter of course, yes, i do think that s the case. back to ambassador sondland, you said that every now and then he made a habit of name dropping his interactions with the president? that s correct. i believe you also told us there were instances where you would run into him on the campus and he would say, i m here to
bolton s office, ambassador sondland said, let s regroup for a quick huddle and next steps. to be honest, that s quite unusual. you don t usually huddle in a room and the white house, to discuss next steps with foreign delegations. we took it to be next steps on setting up the meeting, which already, as i ve said, ambassador bolton was not prepared to do. when ambassador bolton came back into the office, that s when he gave me the very strong instruction to go on downstairs, front it was going on, and come back and reported to him. as i came into the boardroom, alex vindman, colonel vindman, and ambassador sondland were in an exchange pair that s when i noticed colonel vindman looked quite alarmed. i know ambassador sondland was asked yesterday because i watched all of his testimony and i watched it very carefully that there were some questions about yelling and shouting. i certainly never said that, and there was no yelling and shouting. that s some embellishment that
of july 19th, they hadn t even engage with rudy giuliani yet. i don t believe that happened until a little bit later. so you believe that by july 19th they were already engaged in those types of activities can back we had already had a discussion with kurt volker, it was his assistant who indicated he had met with rudy giuliani at this point. in the vestry sondland made comments about meeting with giuliani. and as we know, in the may 23rd meeting, they have been instructed to meet with giuliani. they give us every impression that they were meeting with rudy giuliani at this point, and rudy giuliani said on the television, and has said subsequently, he was closely correlating with the state department. so it s my belief that they were meeting with him. okay. there is some ambiguity in the direction to recruit through giuliani. ambassador volker said the president dismissed ukraine and said, if you work don might want to talk on it, go to talk
he said the president specifically gave him that role, and he indicated that his authority was coming at least a little bit more from the secretary of state. at any point in time was that related to you? at different points you mention talking directly to the chief of staff mulvaney, and he also talked about secretary pompeo. in fact, there were other people in the room in the meeting in which he asserted this to me, that it was the president who had put him in charge of this. were you encouraged, as of your last day in the office, but u.s. policy toward the ukraine was headed in the right direction? i was not. and why was that? well, i was concerned about two things in particular. one was, again, the removal of our ambassador. again, i will say for the record that the president has a perfect right to remove any ambassador at any time for any reason. but i was very concerned about the circumstances in which her
reputation had been maligned repeatedly, on television and in all kinds of exchanges. i felt that was completely unnecessary. the president wanted to remove and ambassador, which he did quite treacly there were a number who were removed to or not political but career officials. that was done, but without these kinds of interventions. i wondered what message was being sent. on the second front, it was very clear at this point that there was, let s just say, a different channel in operation in relation to ukraine. when that was domestic and political in nature, and it was very different from the channel or the loop, however you like it, that i and my colleagues were in. we were focused on bilateral relations and u.s. foreign policy toward ukraine. these two things had diverged at this point. in the run-up to ambassador yovanovitch separation from post, did you have any communich officials that the state department about your concerns? i did. who did you relate those concerns to?