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The joint House panel investigating the impeachment of President Donald Trump today released the entire 375-page transcript of U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland's Oct. 17 testimony, including a four-page, supplemental statement Sondland filed with the committee on Nov. 4.
Sondland said that reading the written testimony of two former colleagues, William Taylor and Tim Morrison had "refreshed my recollection."
He wrote that he now recalled conditioning the release of U.S. military aid to a public commitment from Ukrainian officials that they would announce an investigation into the business dealings of former Vice President's son, Hunter.
Here is a link from the entire testimony, including the four pages added Nov. 4, which can be read separately here.
And here are 11 pages of the committee's selected "key excepts" from Sondland's testimony.
The upshot of today's release is that Sondland, the founder and former CEO of Portland-based Provenance Hotels, now acknowledges there was a quid pro quo linking U.S. military aid to an investigation that could damage the reputation of Biden, Trump's top rival in the 2020 presidential election.
"I always believed that suspending aid to Ukraine was ill-advised, although I did not know (and still do not know) when, why or by whom the aid was suspended," Sondland wrote in his Nov. 4 supplemental testimony. "However by the beginning of September 2019, and in the absence of any credible explanation for the suspension of aid, I presumed that the aid suspension had become linked to the proposed anti-corruption statement."
Part of the issue for Sondland is that the career diplomats who testified before and after him provided the House panel with detailed chronologies and specific references to conversations based on notes and documents that were far more specific than Sondland's live testimony, which is replete with "I don't recalls" and far less detail than his colleagues' testimony.
"Ambassador Taylor recalls that I told Mr. Morrison in early September 2019 that the resumption of U.S. aid to Ukraine had become tied to a public statement to be issue by Ukraine agreeing to investigate Burisma," Sondland wrote in his Nov. 4 testimony. "I do now recall a conversation on Sep. 1, 2019 in Warsaw with Mr. Yermak…where I said that resumption of U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the anti-corruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks."