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Bloomberg
After weeks of Republican complaints that the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry relied on secondhand information, the centerpiece of the public hearings is testimony from a man with a direct line to President Donald Trump.
The political peril for Trump, who was dealt a series of setbacks, will be heightened as the House investigation accelerates with three days of public hearings starting on Tuesday.
No witness is more central than Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union, a Trump donor and a confederate with Rudy Giuliani in back-channel diplomatic
efforts for the president in Ukraine.
Sondland, scheduled to testify on Wednesday, has already amended his previous closed-door testimony once because of discrepancies with other witnesses. And now there will be new questions for him to answer about Trump’s pressure on the government in Kyiv to launch a probe entangling former Vice President Joe Biden and other political foes of the president.
Testimony from Tuesday through Thursday will come from a disparate cast of witnesses, some of whom could prove pivotal to the impeachment inquiry, including officials from the State Department, the White House national security teams, and Vice President Mike Pence’s office.
The hearings follow a rough week for Trump. Three career diplomats offered accounts that portrayed him as fixated on squeezing a political favour from Ukraine. Meanwhile, one-time confidant Roger Stone was convicted of lying to Congress and new details emerged about a federal investigation of Giuliani. Trump has lashed out at some of the witnesses, which Democrats said amounted to witness intimidation. Through it all, however, Republican lawmakers stood firmly behind the president.
Having already amended his recollection of events, Sondland could prove unpredictable, for Trump and for Democrats.
A wealthy hotel chain owner and major inauguration donor, Sondland was an outsider to the diplomatic corps when Trump nominated him as ambassador to the European Union.
Democrats are certain to press him on Wednesday about his role as one of the “three amigos†who worked on the shadow Ukraine policy — along with then-special Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker and Energy Secretary Rick Perry — and especially his interactions with Trump.
Republicans may attempt to undercut him by noting that he’s been inconsistent: first testifying he never thought there were any conditions on delivering aid to Ukraine and then revising that later.
Democrats will focus on potential contradictions between his earlier testimony and statements by others. Sondland previously said he didn’t realise that Biden’s son, Hunter, was on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings and that a Trump demand for the company to be investigated might have political ramifications.